Reporter’s ‘exclusive’ Hitler diaries turned out to be clumsy fakes

GERD HEIDEMANN: 1931- 2024

Gerd Heidemann, who has died aged 93, astounded the world in 1983 when he claimed to have uncovered the diaries of Adolf Hitler.

Heidemann was a Nazi-obsessed reporter on the German magazine Stern – modelled on Life in America – when he told his bosses that he had traced a trove of Hitler’s personal diaries to an unidentified source in East Germany. Stern trumpeted the acquisition under the headline “Scoop of the Century”, proclaiming that the history of the Third Reich would have to be rewritten.

But the 60 volumes Heidemann acquired for $5 million on behalf of Stern turned out to be clumsy fakes. Even so, they fooled eminent historians, notably Hugh Trevor-Roper, who as a young British intelligence officer had been sent to Berlin in June 1945 to investigate Hitler’s disappearance; he declared the Hitler diaries authentic, before tests showed that the paper on which they had been written was too recent.

Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann.Credit: United Archives via Getty Images

For The Sunday Times, which had bought the British serialisation rights, it was a humiliation; for Stern it was a disaster. Not only had the magazine lost a lot of money, it had also apparently been deceived by one of its own journalists.

Protesting that he was the scapegoat for the fiasco, Heidemann was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to four years and eight months in jail, two months more than the term meted out to Konrad “Connie” Kujau, the small-time antiques dealer, painter and crook who had forged the diaries.

The front page from The Sunday Times which serialised what were purported to be Hitler’s Diaries on April 24, 1983.

An emigrant from East Germany, Kujau had established himself in Stuttgart selling Nazi mementoes during the 1970s but had started to supplement genuine artefacts with fakes, often supplying his own authentications. He was a skilled imitator of other people’s handwriting.

Wolf Rudiger Hess, son of Hitler’s former deputy Rudolf Hess, is pictured with Gerd Heidemann (right) when visiting the editorial office of Stern to check Hitler’s diaries, 1983.Credit: AP Wirephoto

In the late 1970s, Heidemann heard that Kujau had offered to supply a customer with a diary written by Hitler. This diary, according to Kujau, was one of a hoard recovered from the wreckage of an aircraft that had crashed in April 1945 near Dresden, hidden by local peasants and later passed to a relative of Kujau’s, a general in the East German army, and smuggled across the border in grand pianos.

Heidemann was in deep financial trouble at the time and felt that here at last was the scoop that would make his name. Having confirmed the facts about the air crash, he had no difficulty in believing Kujau’s story that more volumes existed.

Kujau set to work forging volume after volume of the diaries using an old steel pen and staining the pages with tea to make them look faded. Over a period of two years, Stern paid £3.3 million to a mysterious “Dr Fischer” through Heidemann, who travelled to Germany with bags of cash from his bosses at the magazine, living in expensive hotels and dining at fancy restaurants.

A page from the forged diaries.Credit: Getty Images

Later it transpired that the reporter had skimmed at least 4.4 million Deutschmarks into his own bank accounts. He said Fischer was having the diaries smuggled in from a secret location in East Germany.

But in reality Heidemann was in cahoots with Kujau, who made basic mistakes such as writing Hitler’s supposed words in diaries made with materials not manufactured before 1950. The ink was also modern and the extracts were laced with modern-day phrases. For two years Heidemann desperately tried to shield Kujau’s identity, eventually panicking when Stern bosses suddenly brought forward publication of the diaries while Kujau was still forging some of the later volumes in the series.

While Heidemann continued to insist that all was well, Trevor-Roper, who had been asked to authenticate the diaries for Times Newspapers, was having doubts. Serialisation began in The Sunday Times on April 24 1983 under the headline WORLD EXCLUSIVE.

When Trevor-Roper, a former interrogator of Nazi war criminals, grilled Heidemann one-to-one in a Hamburg hotel room that afternoon, all doubts evaporated after the reporter showed him the volume covering the Rudolf Hess affair, when Hitler’s deputy parachuted into Scotland to sue for peace. It was so laughably superficial that Trevor-Roper declared it an unmistakable forgery.

After the hoax was discovered, Heidemann claimed he had been the victim of a swindle, though it later emerged that he had kept much of the money for himself. Kujau confessed after a police search of his home revealed forgeries of art works by Durer, Rembrandt and Goya.

Heidemann’s claim to have found diaries of which there had been no previous record should have immediately sounded alarm bells inside Stern magazine. One of the editors later admitted that the prospect of such a sensational scoop had infected them with so much collective insanity that when Heidemann produced the first half-dozen black notebooks allegedly belonging to Hitler, nobody noticed that they were labelled FH instead of AH, one of Kujau’s many blunders.

The air crash may have been verified, but the rest of Heidemann’s story was fantasy. He had taken possession of the diaries, he said, when they were thrown from a speeding car through the open window of his Mercedes after he had tossed across bundles of banknotes to pay for them. He refused to reveal the name of his East German source, claiming that doing so would put the supplier in mortal danger.

Gerd Heidemann was born on December 4, 1931 in Hamburg. When his single mother married a police officer, Rolf Heidemann, he took his stepfather’s name, and as a teenager joined the Hitler Youth, leaving school at the age of 17 to become an apprentice electrician. He hankered to be a photographer and freelanced for a local picture agency before joining the staff of Stern magazine as a photographer and reporter in 1955.

Tall, quiet, keen on chess and collecting model soldiers, Heidemann earned a reputation as a lone wolf, disappearing from the newsroom for weeks on end without telling anyone where he was going. At the same time he was considered one of the magazine’s most dogged investigative reporters, earning the nickname “der Spurhund”, the bloodhound.

In 1973, short of money and ignorant of sailing, Heidemann bought Carin II, a dilapidated yacht formerly owned by Hitler’s deputy Hermann Goering, and for five years conducted an affair with Goering’s daughter Edda. When they entertained aboard, their guests included two Second World War generals, Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke.

Having got wind of the alleged existence of Hitler’s diaries, Heidemann spent a year tracking down the source and in January 1981, on the instructions of Stern’s publishers, flew to Stuttgart with a suitcase stuffed with 200,000 marks, to clinch a deal with “Fischer”. Every few weeks for the next two years, Heidemann would collect a suitcase full of cash and disappear, re-emerging with a couple of newly-forged diaries.

The press conference at which the diaries were unveiled.Credit: Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In April 1982 Heidemann told Stern that there were more than the 27 diaries he had originally claimed, and that the price had gone up. In all the magazine’s publisher spent 9.3 million marks to acquire some 60 volumes. Although Heidemann said he handed all the money over to Kujau, he pocketed nearly two million marks for himself, buying houses in Spain, a smart new flat and Nazi memorabilia, including (he claimed) the pistol with which Hitler shot himself.

By early 1983 the publishers were offering syndication rights to other news outlets, among them Newsweek, Paris Match and The Times, who flew Hugh Trevor-Roper (by then Lord Dacre of Glanton) to Switzerland where the diaries were locked in a bank. He and other eminent historians declared them authentic, and on April 25 Stern held a news conference to announce their sensational scoop.

But the vetting process had been flawed, largely because of the need to keep the news from leaking. When the German Federal Archives produced their own findings, exposing the diaries as clumsy fakes, Heidemann, hauled back from Munich at 5am, named his source as Konrad Fischer. Within three hours, Stern had ascertained that “Fischer” was Konrad Kujau, and both Kujau and Heidemann were arrested. The magazine’s top brass resigned, one senior editor later admitting that he had been shocked by the “delusional secrecy” with which the affair had been conducted.

Looking pale and broken, Heidemann was tried and sentenced to four and a half years in prison for fraud. With Stern’s money, he had been renting expensive residences, buying new cars and jewellery and buying more Nazi memorabilia.

In 2002 Heidemann was exposed as a spy working for the Stasi, the East German security service, but six years later vehemently denied this in the BBC Radio 4 programme The Reunion, claiming he had been a double agent.

Gerd Heidemann was four times married but to three women, having remarried his first wife after divorcing her in 1955. His third wife, Gina, left him in 1986 while he was in prison. His son from his first marriage, Ronald, died of Aids, and a daughter, Susanne, emigrated to Australia.

The Telegraph, London.