Selling Hitler Read online

  Wickman gave Trevor-Roper a twenty-page, typewritten document, bound in a clear plastic cover and entitled Plan 3. Based on the so-called diaries, it told the story of how Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had undertaken his abortive peace mission to Britain in May 1941. The accepted view among historians was that Hess had made his dramatic flight on his own initiative. But according to the diary entries quoted in Plan 3, Hitler knew of Hess’s intention in advance.

  On 25 June 1939, Hitler was alleged to have written in his diary:

  Hess sends me a personal note about the England problem. Would not have thought that this Hess is so sharp-witted. This note is very, very interesting.

  Other entries followed:

  28 June: Read the Hess note again. Simply fantastic and yet so simple.

  6 July: Hess should work over his thoughts which he has informed me about in his note and I anticipate seeing him for a one-to-one meeting.

  13 July: Have also talked to Hess again. As soon as he has thought everything over properly, he will call me back. I would not have thought Hess capable of this. Not Hess.

  22 July: Have Goering with me once more. I carefully inquire what range our best planes have. Hess said that one would have to build a special plane and that he was already working on the plans. What a man. He does not want any more said to Goering about his plan.

  Finally, Hitler was supposed to have outlined three contingency plans:

  1. Should the mission go well and Hess be successful, he acted in agreement with me.

  2. If Hess is arrested in England as a spy, then he informed me some time ago of his plan, but I rejected it.

  3. Should his mission fail completely, I declare Hess acted in a fit of delusion.

  When it became clear that Hess’s mission had failed, ‘Plan 3’ had duly been adopted. This, according to Stern, was the solution to one of the great mysteries of the Second World War, proof that six weeks before the invasion of Russia, Hitler had made a genuine attempt to negotiate peace with Britain.

  Even as he took detailed notes from the document, suspicions began to accumulate in Trevor-Roper’s mind. Stern’s version of the Hess story was in conflict with all the available evidence. Albert Speer, for example, had been outside Hitler’s study door at the precise moment that the Führer had learned of Hess’s flight to Britain. ‘I suddenly heard’, Speer recalled, ‘an inarticulate, almost animal outcry.’ Trevor-Roper had been told the story by Speer in person. He had subsequently described in his own book, The Last Days of Hitler, how the Nazi leadership had been hastily summoned to the Berghof to discuss the damage Hess had done: hardly the behaviour one would have expected if Hitler had known of Hess’s intention in advance. He told Wickman immediately that he thought the Stern story was rubbish and Wickman, who had long nursed his own private doubts, agreed.

  By the time the plane landed in Zurich, Trevor-Roper was finding it difficult to keep an open mind about the diaries. He was almost certain it was a wasted journey, but having come so far he thought he might as well at least see them. The two men took a taxi into town, dropped off their luggage at the Hotel Baur au Lac, and while Trevor-Roper waited, Wickman telephoned ahead to the bank where the diaries were being kept. The Stern people were already waiting. Wickman told them that he and the historian were on their way over.

  Shortly after 3 p.m., Trevor-Roper was ushered into a ground floor room of Zurich’s Handelsbank. At the end of a long table, three men rose to meet him. One was Wilfried Sorge, the salesman who had flown round the world alerting newspapers in America, Japan, Italy, Spain and Britain to the existence of the diaries. Another was Dr Jan Hensmann, the financial director of Stern’s parent company, Gruner and Jahr. The third German was Stern’s bullet-headed editor-in-chief, Peter Koch.

  When the introductions had been completed, Koch gestured towards a side table. On it were fifty-eight volumes of diaries, carefully piled up in a stack more than two feet high. Another set of documents was in a metal safety deposit box. There was a bound volume of original drawings and paintings. There was even a First World War helmet, allegedly Hitler’s. This was no mere handful of notes. It was, as Trevor-Roper later described it, ‘a whole coherent archive covering 35 years’. He was staggered by its scale.

  He picked up a couple of the books. They were A4-sized, with stiff black covers. Some bore red wax seals in the form of a German eagle. Others were decorated with initials in gothic script. Most carried typewritten labels declaring them to be the property of the Führer and signed by Martin Bormann. The pages inside were lined, some densely filled with old Germanic script, some bearing only a couple of sentences, some completely blank. At the foot of each page was Hitler’s signature – a jagged oscillation in black ink, like a seismographic record of some distant earthquake.

  The Stern men met Trevor-Roper’s queries point by point. They produced three separate reports from handwriting experts authenticating the documents. They described how the diaries had come into their hands. They confirmed that the magazine knew the identity of the supplier. It was enough.

  When I entered the back room in the Swiss bank [wrote Trevor-Roper in The Times], and turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality, and even, perhaps, some public events may, in consequence, have to be revised.

  Twenty-four hours later Rupert Murdoch was sitting in the same bank vault leafing through the diaries with the former head of Reuters at his side translating their contents. By mid-afternoon on 9 April he had offered the delighted Germans $3 million for the world rights.

  What happened next is described in detail later in this book: how Murdoch and the Newsweek company fell into an ill-tempered auction which at one stage pushed the price of the diaries up to $3.75 million, until Stern’s greed and Newsweek’s alleged unscrupulousness punctured the whole deal; how Stern nevertheless managed to sell subsidiary rights in the diaries to newspapers and magazines in America, Britain, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Holland and Belgium – a contract carefully calculated to squeeze the last marketable drop out of Adolf Hitler, dividing the diaries into twenty-eight separate extracts whose publication would have spanned more than eighteen months; how news of the diaries’ discovery was rushed into print despite growing evidence that some of the material was of post-war origin; and finally how this elaborate but increasingly shaky pyramid of subsidiary deals and serial rights was sent crashing two weeks later by a short laboratory report from the Federal police.

  The diaries, announced the West German state archives on 6 May, were not merely fakes: they were ‘eine plumpe Fdlschung’, a crude forgery, the grotesquely superficial (‘grotesk oberflächlich’) concoction of a copyist endowed with a ‘limited intellectual capacity’. The paper, the binding, the glue, the thread were all found to be of post-war manufacture. By the time this was disclosed, the management of Stern, in the course of more than two years, had handed over twenty-seven suitcases full of money to enable their star reporter, Gerd Heidemann, to obtain the diaries. $4 million had disappeared, making the Hitler diaries the most expensive and far-reaching fraud in publishing history, easily dwarfing the $650,000 handed over by McGraw-Hill for the faked autobiography of Howard Hughes. Scores of reputations apart from Trevor-Roper’s were damaged by the diaries fiasco. At least four editors in three different countries lost their jobs as a result.

  The affair was a reminder of Adolf Hitler’s continuing hold on the world’s imagination. News of the discovery of the diaries made headlines in every nation; it ran on the front page of the New York Times for five consecutive days. Shrewd businessmen showed themselves willing to pay enormous sums for material of which they had read only a fraction. It did not matter that the diaries’ content was perfunctory and tedious: it was sufficient that it had been written by him. The diaries briefly put Hitler back in the arena of i
nternational diplomacy, a weapon in the Cold War which his career had done so much to create. Radio Moscow alleged that ‘the affair of the Hitler diaries clearly reveals the CIA style’. America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, suspected the communists of producing the diaries ‘to sow distrust between the United States and its German friends’. In the middle of the furore, the East German leader, Erich Hoenecker, cancelled his planned trip to Bonn complaining of a hostile Western press campaign: repeated allegations that the diaries originated in an East German ‘forgery factory’ were bitterly resented in Berlin. When the real forger, Konrad Kujau, confessed to the police on 26 May, it was difficult to believe that so much international confusion could have resulted from the work of this jaunty and farcical figure.

  How did it happen? How did a hard-headed German publishing company come to spend so much money on such palpable fakes, and persuade almost a dozen foreign partners to invest in the project? To answer that question, we have to go back more than forty years: back through the expanding market in Hitler memorabilia, back through the activities of the surviving members of the Führer’s inner circle, right back to the figure of Hitler himself, malevolent to the last, but no longer confident of his destiny, preparing for death in his bunker in the spring of 1945.

  Part One

  ‘For mythopoeia is a far more common characteristic of the human race (and perhaps especially of the German race) than veracity….’

  Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler

  ONE

  ON 20 APRIL 1945, Adolf Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth and final birthday. Russian artillery shells were falling on the centre of Berlin and 6000 Soviet tanks were moving into the outskirts of the capital. Bremen and Hamburg in the north were about to fall to the British; Stuttgart, in the south, to the French. The Americans had captured Nuremberg and the Stars and Stripes was being unfurled over the podium from which Hitler had once addressed the annual Nazi Party rally. To escape the constant Allied air attacks, the Führer and his staff were now forced to live cooped-up in a bunker fifty-five feet beneath the Reich Chancellery. ‘It was not’, observed Martin Bormann in his diary, ‘exactly a birthday situation.’

  At 2 p.m. Hitler shuffled out of his bedroom exhausted from lack of sleep. His doctors gave him three injections, including one of glucose. His valet administered eyedrops. He wrapped himself in a heavy grey overcoat, turned up the collar, and slowly climbed the spiral staircase out of the bunker and into the Chancellery garden to inspect a waiting contingent of Hitler Youth. Their leader, Arthur Axmann, was shocked by his appearance: ‘He walked with a stoop. His hands trembled.’ He passed along the short line of boys and patted a couple of them on the cheek. He uttered a few hoarse and scarcely audible words about his faith in an ultimate victory, turned, and retreated back underground to preside over the day’s main war conference.

  That same afternoon, while Hitler and his generals were surveying what remained of the German armed forces, Sergeant Rochus Misch, the bunker’s switchboard operator, took the opportunity to slip upstairs into the fresh air for a cigarette. He was standing smoking amid the rubble of the Ehrenhof, the Chancellery’s Court of Honour, when two men appeared. One was Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt, a wounded veteran of twenty, who acted as one of Hitler’s personal servants. The other was a young soldier-valet named Fehrs. Between them they were dragging a large metal trunk. Misch offered to help.

  There were approximately ten trunks which had to be loaded on to the back of an antiquated, three-wheeled delivery truck parked in the courtyard. It was heavy work. Misch reckoned that each of the metal containers weighed over one hundred pounds. To heave one on to the back of the truck took two men. Misch did not ask what was in them and Arndt did not tell him. ‘It was only’, he recalled, ‘when Arndt, now in full field uniform and armed with a machine pistol, clambered on top of the chests, that I realized it must be a mission with a one-man escort.’ The truck drove out of the courtyard. Misch watched it disappear. ‘Poor Arndt,’ he reflected years afterwards. ‘At the time we all thought he was the lucky one, escaping embattled Berlin and heading for the mountains.’

  Arndt was taking part in a mission known as Operation Seraglio: the evacuation from the Berlin bunker of about eighty members of Hitler’s entourage, together with a mass of official government papers, personal property and valuables. Their destination was the so-called ‘Alpine Redoubt’ in the south of Germany, near Berchtesgaden, where the Nazis had a half-formulated plan to establish a new centre of command in the event of the capture of Berlin. The evacuation was being conducted by air. General Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, who was responsible for the provision of aircraft, had managed to muster ten planes for the operation, dispersed between four different Berlin airstrips. The lorry carrying Arndt and the metal trunks was directed towards a grass runway at Schoenwalde, about ten miles north of the city. Two planes were waiting there. One was to be piloted by a Luftwaffe flying officer named Schultze; the other by a veteran of the Russian front, Major Friedrich Gundlfinger.

  Allied aircraft had been celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday all day with an almost continuous stream of air raids on Berlin. At 10 p.m. they struck again. Arndt and the other passengers heading in convoy for Schoenwalde were obliged to stop and seek shelter. The raid lasted four hours. At the airfield, Schultze and Gundlfinger were growing increasingly anxious. Time was running short. They had to take off under cover of darkness to avoid the Allied fighters which now had command of Germany’s skies during the day. The two pilots discussed tactics. Schultze favoured flying high to make use of every available scrap of cloud cover. Gundlfinger preferred hedgehopping at low altitude.

  The passengers finally began struggling on to the airfield shortly before dawn. Arndt attended to the stowing of the trunks in Gundlfinger’s plane, then clambered in after them. He was one of sixteen passengers. Schultze took off first. Gundlfinger followed a few minutes later, at about 5 a.m. on the morning of 21 April. His destination lay 350 miles to the south: Ainring, near Salzburg, the airfield closest to Berchtesgaden.

  In the event, Gundlfinger completed less than one-third of the journey. He had been in the air for little more than half an hour and had just passed what was left of the city of Dresden when something went wrong. Possibly the plane was shot up by a patrolling American fighter; possibly it was hit by fire from a German anti-aircraft battery which mistook it for an enemy plane. At any rate, it was next seen shortly before 6 a.m. skimming the treetops in flames before crashing into the Heidenholz forest close to the Czech border. Villagers from the nearby hamlet of Boernersdorf ran to the scene. The plane – a large Junkers 352 transport aircraft – had ploughed nose-first into the ground and was burning fiercely. Trapped in the wreckage, a figure writhed and screamed at the onlookers for help. But the intense heat and the ricochets of exploding ammunition made rescue impossible. The aircraft had to be left to burn itself out.

  Schultze, meanwhile, had also run into trouble. Shortly after taking off he had discovered that one of his fuel pipes was fractured. He was forced to divert to Prague, then still in German hands, to refuel. It was 8.30 a.m. when he finally landed at Salzburg, expecting to find Gundlfinger waiting for him. All the other eight planes were there. But of the major and his aircraft there was no sign. This information was relayed to General Baur in Berlin and he, in turn, broke the news to Hitler that one of the planes involved in Operation Seraglio was missing. Hitler, he recalled, ‘became very pale’ and asked which one. Baur said it was the one with Arndt on board, at which Hitler appeared ‘very upset’. According to Baur, he then uttered the words which were to cause so much mischief almost forty years later. ‘In that plane,’ he exclaimed, ‘were all my private archives, that I had intended as a testament to posterity. It is a catastrophe!’

  ‘After I’d seen how much that affected the Führer,’ said Baur, ‘I tried to calm him and explain that Gundlfinger was an old fox from the First World War, that the Americans wouldn
’t have got him that easily: probably he’d made an emergency landing somewhere. But we didn’t know, and our investigations were without success.’

  On 22 April, the day after Arndt’s disappearance, with heavy fighting reported in the suburbs of Berlin and with no sign of the counter-attack he had ordered, Hitler at last admitted defeat. ‘That’s it,’ he shouted, scattering a handful of coloured pencils across the map table. ‘How am I supposed to direct the war in such circumstances? The war’s lost.’ He walked out of the military conference. At about 4 p.m. he summoned Julius Schaub, the crippled soldier who had been his secretary, bodyguard, companion, messenger boy and valet for more than twenty years. Together they opened the steel safe in Hitler’s bedroom. Four feet high and three feet wide, it was brimming with his personal papers. The material was stuffed into suitcases, carried up into the Chancellery garden, tipped into a bomb crater and set on fire. Hitler stood for a while in the fading light, watching as this record of his private affairs went up in smoke. ‘Richelieu once said, give me five lines one man has penned,’ Hitler is reported to have lamented subsequently. ‘What I have lost! My dearest memories! But what’s the point – sooner or later you’ve got to get rid of that stuff.’ To complete this task, he instructed Schaub to fly to Berchtesgaden and destroy all his remaining personal files.

  Schaub is believed to have arrived at the Berghof on his errand of destruction on the night of 26 April. Berchtesgaden, which had been subjected to a 300-bomber raid the previous day, was in a chaotic state. The homes of Bormann and Goering had been badly damaged. One wing of the Berghof was wrecked. Schaub was in an equally dilapidated condition. Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl, who met him in the Führer’s apartments, was shocked to discover him drunk and on the arm of his mistress. He had flown down bearing Hitler’s keys but whether he actually carried out his master’s instruction and destroyed everything is unclear. According to a US intelligence report, Gretl confided to an American undercover agent a few months after the war that in her view ‘Schaub probably selected the most interesting things with the help of his mistress and hid them away.’ In the 1970s, the British historian David Irving, an indefatigable hunter of original documents, received information that Schaub had ‘sold Hitler’s papers to a former magistrate now living on Lake Starnberg in Bavaria’. The magistrate, however, ‘proved unapproachable’.