Selling Hitler Read online

  According to Stiefel, Heidemann handed him a visiting card and introduced himself as a reporter from Stern. ‘He said that the reason for his visit was that he wanted to ask me if I was interested in buying the table silver from his yacht, the Carin II.’ Stiefel invited him in. Like some medieval pardoner peddling holy relics, Heidemann then laid out his wares. ‘There was a small silver sugar bowl, a silver water goblet and a gold coloured match-holder,’ recalled Stiefel. ‘The Goering family crest was engraved on all the objects.’ This trinketry appealed to Stiefel and he promptly bought it. ‘I can’t say exactly how much I paid for these objects,’ he claimed subsequently, with an unconvincing show of vagueness. ‘It was certainly over 1000 marks.’ Heidemann tried to tempt his customer into buying a couple of larger items. Stiefel was interested in the reporter’s expensive set of Goering table silver, but decided against taking it after consulting his wife. Nor did he want Goering’s ceremonial uniform which Heidemann also produced for his inspection.

  Returning to Hamburg, impressed by Stiefel’s interest and by his obvious wealth, Heidemann telephoned Tiefenthaeler and suggested a new scheme: in return for an investment of 250,000 marks they should offer to make Stiefel a partner in the yacht. Tiefenthaeler promised to speak to Stiefel and shortly afterwards, towards the end of 1979, he rang Heidemann back. He was in a state of some excitement, having just been shown round Stiefel’s collection of Nazi mementoes; among them, he told the reporter, was a Hitler diary.

  SEVEN

  ON 6 JANUARY 1980, a few days after David Irving had passed on Martin Gilbert’s judgement that the Churchill–Mussolini correspondence was faked, Heidemann returned to Waiblingen to see Fritz Stiefel.

  Heidemann opened the conversation by outlining his proposal that Stiefel should become part-owner of Carin II. In his quiet, urgent voice he conjured up a glowing vision of the future: the yacht, fully restored to her former splendour, would be permanently moored off the coast of ‘an island in the Atlantic’ (Heidemann’s suggestion was Jersey); it would be ‘a floating museum’ full of Nazi memorabilia, dedicated to the memory of Hermann Goering. Stiefel was unimpressed. ‘I turned him down flat,’ he said.

  Disappointed in one fantasy, Heidemann grasped at another. Was there, he asked Stiefel, any truth in the rumour that he had a Hitler diary? The businessman, according to Heidemann, was ‘startled’ but after some hesitation agreed to show it to him.

  Stiefel led Heidemann to an armoured steel door upon which was a large sign: ‘BEWARE. HIGH VOLTAGE. DANGER TO LIFE.’ Stiefel unlocked it, swung it open, and the two men stepped over the threshold.

  Heidemann was later to tell colleagues of his astonishment at what he saw. The room was large and windowless. On display, in beautifully lit cabinets, was a staggering assortment of souvenirs from the Third Reich. There were Swastika flags, Nazi uniforms, photographs, paintings, drawings, books. In one corner was an exhibition of porcelain made by concentration camp inmates; in another, a collection of military decorations, including a Pour le Mérite. It had to rank as one of the largest private collections of its kind in Germany.

  Stiefel handed Heidemann a slim, A4-sized book, with hard black covers and gothic initials in the bottom right-hand corner which Heidemann took to be ‘AH’. Stiefel allowed him to hold it briefly. He flicked through it. It covered the period from January to June 1935. There were a hundred or more lined pages; some were half full, some blank; some written in pencil, others in ink. Many of the pages bore Hitler’s signature. The writing itself was virtually indecipherable. After a few moments, Stiefel took it back and locked it up.

  Heidemann began asking questions. Where did the book come from? Stiefel said it was salvaged by local peasants from a plane crash at the end of the war. Who gave it to him? A man in Stuttgart, replied Stiefel, who had relatives in senior positions in East Germany – no, he wouldn’t reveal his name. Were there more diaries? Stiefel said he understood there might be another twenty-six, each of them, like the one in his possession, covering a six-month period. That was all he could say.

  Heidemann returned to Hamburg in a state of great excitement. In the Stern offices he described how he had actually held in his hands Hitler’s secret diary. He had managed to memorize a few sentences about Eva Braun and her two pet dogs which he recited endlessly.

  Any journalist claiming to have stumbled upon such a scoop would have expected to face a certain amount of scepticism. Heidemann was greeted by an almost universal incredulity, bordering on derision. This was, after all, the man who had had two SS generals officiating at his wedding, who had spent his honeymoon looking for war criminals, who had claimed to have a recent photograph of Martin Bormann and who had thought he could prove the existence of secret dealing between Churchill and Mussolini. When Heidemann broke the news of the Hitler diary to Henri Nannen in the Stern canteen, the response was frankly insulting. According to Nannen: ‘My word-for-word answer was: “Spare me all that Nazi shit. I don’t want to hear about it and I don’t want to read about it.”’ Heidemann fared no better with Peter Koch, the magazine’s aggressive deputy editor, who treated him as if he were mentally deranged. ‘Keep away from me,’ he shouted, ‘with your damned Nazi tic.’ He warned Heidemann to stay off subjects connected with the Third Reich and added, ominously, that ‘he’d better produce something soon’. ‘The trouble with Stern’, complained Heidemann bitterly, ‘is they don’t want to hear about history any more.’

  Only one man seemed to take Heidemann seriously. He was Thomas Walde, an earnest and sober character in his late thirties whose chief distinguishing feature was a large brown moustache. Walde had joined Stern in 1971 as an editorial assistant and had risen to become news editor. When, at the beginning of 1980, Stern had established a new department specifically to deal with historical stories, Walde had been put in charge of it. He had been in his office little more than a week when Heidemann turned up asking if he could come and work for him. Leo Pesch, Walde’s young assistant, recalled how Heidemann told them ‘he had seen a Hitler diary in the possession of a South German collector’. He would not stop talking about it. One evening in April, he threw a party for the history department on board Carin II. ‘The idea,’ said Walde, ‘was to meet outside the context of the normal office routine. We wanted to get to know the boat. And we wanted to discuss future projects.’ Among those ‘future projects’ was the Hitler diary.

  Walde was interested in Heidemann’s tale. The problem was that almost nobody else was. ‘Heidemann and Koch didn’t get on,’ he recalled, ‘and Koch opposed Heidemann’s request to research Nazi topics.’ Walde therefore decided to embark on what was to prove a disastrous strategy. Without telling Koch and the other editors he went behind their backs and commissioned Heidemann to search for the Hitler diaries. ‘I didn’t believe in their existence,’ he claimed later. ‘I just hoped Heidemann would do enough research to kill the subject once and for all.’

  The most obvious course was to try to discover the identity of the man who had supplied the diary to Stiefel; once he had his name, Heidemann reasoned, he could approach him directly. Stiefel, however, flatly refused to cooperate. Therefore, in the summer of 1980, Heidemann once again turned to the man from whom he had first learned of the diary’s existence, Jakob Tiefenthaeler. Tiefenthaeler, who had by now given up his attempts to sell Carin II, told Heidemann that he understood the supplier was an antique dealer in Stuttgart named Fischer. Armed with this information, Heidemann and Walde waited one night until everyone had gone home and then began combing through every Fischer in the Stuttgart telephone directory: a task – given the commonness of the name Fischer in Germany – not unlike searching an English phone book for a particular Smith. When this yielded nothing, Walde asked Stern’s correspondent in Stuttgart to make discreet inquiries around the city about this mysterious dealer; again, there was no trace.

  With this line of inquiry temporarily at an end, Heidemann adopted a fresh tactic. He knew from Stiefel that the diary supposedly cam
e from a plane crash. From O’Donnell’s book, Die Katacombe, and Baur’s, Hitler’s Pilot, he knew of the mysterious documents shipped out of the bunker whose loss had so distressed Hitler. He was convinced that this must be where Stiefel’s diary originated. If he could substantiate the story of the plane crash by pinpointing its location it would be a strong argument in favour of the diary’s authenticity. On Monday, 13 October 1980, he rang the Wehrmacht information bureau, the Wehrmachtsauskunftstelle, in Berlin to inquire if they had any information about the pilot of the missing plane, Major Friedrich Gundlfinger. He was not hopeful. Given the chaos in Germany in those closing days of the war it was asking a great deal to discover the fate of a single aircraft after an interval of thirty-five years. Heidemann was therefore surprised when, after a pause, a voice at the other end of the line replied that the bureau did indeed have records relating to Major Gundlfinger: he had died in a plane crash on 21 April, close to the little village of Boernersdorf near Dresden in East Germany on 21 April 1945; he was buried close to the crash site; his death certificate in the local register was 16/45.

  From this moment, Heidemann and Walde were hooked and the tempo of their search quickened. Two days after Heidemann’s discovery of the location of the crash site, on Wednesday 15 October, Walde travelled to East Berlin. Through a contact in the East German security service he arranged a visit to the Dresden area to be undertaken in one month’s time. The cover story was that Heidemann was a relative of one of the victims of the plane crash. On Monday 27 October, Heidemann went to see Hans Baur in Herrsching, who once again confirmed the details of Gundlfinger’s last flight.

  Heidemann’s unexpected success left Thomas Walde with a problem and in the last week of October, while Heidemann was talking with Hans Baur, he took the opportunity of a vacation to think things over.

  For the past three years he and a close friend, Wilfried Sorge, had left their wives and families and gone on an annual walking holiday together. The two men, almost the same age (Sorge was three years younger than Walde), had known one another for the best part of twenty years. They had both attended the same school in the small town of Uelzen, not far from Hamburg. Now they both worked for the same company: Walde as a Stern journalist, Sorge as a junior executive with Stern’s owners, Gruner and Jahr. They kept few secrets from one another.

  Accordingly, when they were safely alone in the middle of a Bavarian forest, Walde told Sorge of his involvement with the Hitler diaries and of the difficulties he was now in. The trouble, said Walde, was that Peter Koch, who was likely to take over from Henri Nannen in the New Year as editor-in-chief, had expressly ordered Heidemann ‘not to pursue any further researches into the Nazis’; Walde had disobeyed him. Meanwhile, Heidemann’s tale about Hitler’s diaries, far from being ‘killed’ by further investigation, was beginning to look as if it might be true. To compound his problems, Walde was about to undertake what he described as a ‘risky journey’ to East Germany, unable to tell his superiors about it because he had been deceiving them for the past six months. ‘Herr Sorge advised me to take the chance,’ recalled Walde.

  Agreeing to keep the conversation confidential, they continued their walk.

  But the sudden spectre of Hitler had clearly infected the holiday mood. Nursing their secret, the two men crossed over the border into Austria. They inspected Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, and the town of Leonding, near Linz, where the Führer had spent part of his youth, before returning to Hamburg on 31 October.

  On 15 November 1980, Heidemann and Walde drove through one of the checkpoints from West to East Berlin, picked up Walde’s contact who had arranged the trip, and travelled 120 miles south to Dresden. Another hour’s drive brought them to a tiny cluster of farmhouses and barns, nestling amid hilly fields and gentle woods three miles from the Czech border, in a region known as ‘Saxon Switzerland’. With its tiny kindergarten and scattered population of 550, it was difficult to imagine a sleepier village than Boernersdorf.

  The Stern men parked their car on the side of the main road outside Boernersdorf’s small church. Behind it, in the cemetery overlooking the village, in the south-eastern corner, half hidden amongst the weeds and the long grass, they found eight weather-beaten wooden crosses. Attached to each one was a small white tile giving the name of the person buried there, the date of their birth and the day of their death: 21.4.45. They found Gundlfinger’s grave and Wilhelm Arndt’s; two graves were simply marked ‘unknown man’ and ‘unknown woman’. This physical evidence of the plane crash thirty-five years earlier made a profound impression on the two men. ‘The discovery of the graves’, said Walde, ‘was like another stone in the mosaic.’

  Anxious to avoid drawing attention to themselves, Heidemann and Walde did not stay for long. They made notes of the names on the crosses and took some photographs. Half an hour later they returned to their car and drove back to Berlin.

  Heidemann and Walde now sensed they were close to a breakthrough. On their return from East Germany, Walde informed Wilfried Sorge of the success of their visit.

  The story as they had pieced it together seemed simple and credible. Papers of great value to Hitler undoubtedly had been loaded on to a plane in Berlin; that plane undoubtedly had crashed in East Germany; part of its cargo, a diary, had surfaced in the West. The remaining task was to find the link between the wrecked aircraft and Fritz Stiefel – and to find him before anyone else did.

  A few days after their arrival back in Hamburg, Heidemann and Walde renewed their contact with Jakob Tiefenthaeler. They asked him to pass on to the mysterious ‘antiques dealer’ an offer generous enough to tempt him out of his seclusion. They were prepared, they told Tiefenthaeler, to guarantee a payment of 2 million marks in return for the complete set of Hitler’s diaries; this sum could be paid, according to his preference, in either cash or gold. If necessary, they would be prepared to accept photocopies of the diaries rather than the originals. The whole matter would be dealt with in the strictest confidence: even if the West German government tried to force Stern to disclose the identity of the supplier, they would stand by the traditional prerogative of a newspaper to protect the anonymity of its informants. It was a remarkable offer, all the more so considering it was made without the knowledge of the magazine’s editors. It showed the extent to which Heidemann and Walde had already convinced themselves that the diary held by Stiefel must be genuine.

  While they waited for Tiefenthaeler to bring them the supplier’s response, Heidemann, using the notes he had made from the graves in Boernersdorf, set about tracing the victims’ relatives. On 1 December, in the Ruhr steel town of Sollingen, he found Frau Leni Fiebes, the widow of Max Fiebes, one of Hitler’s bodyguards who had been among the passengers. She had been notified of her husband’s death in 1948. She showed Heidemann the official report which had been forwarded to her, recording the discovery of:

  a male corpse with the remains of a grey-green uniform with two stars on the collar, a wallet containing a number of passport photographs, and the name Max Fiebes, Oberscharführer of the SS, born 27 March 1910 in Sollingen. No personal property could be found as it had been completely burnt.

  This was of interest to Heidemann only in so far as it showed that oddments of paper could have survived the crash. But Frau Fiebes was at least able to give him the name of the plane’s rear gunner, Franz Westermeier, and on 10 December, the indefatigable reporter tracked down his family in Haag in Upper Bavaria. Westermeier, he learned to his surprise, had actually survived the crash, thrown clear of the burning wreck on impact, together with an SS guard, Gerhard Becker. Becker had died of his injuries two days later, but Westermeier had lived on into old age, dying in April 1980 of a kidney tumour: Heidemann had arrived just eight months too late.

  Another trail seemed to have gone cold, leaving them no further forward. All Heidemann and Walde could do now was hope that the offer being relayed by Tiefenthaeler would flush out their prey.

  EIGHT

  THE NEW YEAR arriv
ed, cold and bleak, with a symbolic reminder of Germany’s Nazi past and the conflicting emotions it aroused.

  On 6 January 1981, a crowd of about 5000 German naval veterans and right wingers gathered in the snow at Aumuehle near Hamburg for the funeral of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s successor as leader of the Third Reich. Doenitz, who had died on Christmas Eve at the age of 89, had been a devoted Nazi and the West German government announced that it would be boycotting the ceremony. ‘But in buses, cars and trains,’ reported The Times, ‘mourners came to his funeral, many of them old men with an upright military bearing, Iron Crosses glinting on their breasts and evident nostalgia for what Doenitz stood for.’ Rudolf Hess sent a wreath from his cell in Spandau. Serving naval officers – some in uniform, despite an official ban – formed an honour guard around the grave. As the coffin, draped in the red, black and gold flag of the Federal Republic and bearing Doenitz’s service dagger, was lowered into the frozen ground, the mourners broke into the militaristic first verse of ‘Deutschland über Alles’. At a rally afterwards, speakers from the extreme right were applauded as they denounced the craven behaviour of the republic’s politicians. It was an ugly start to the year and the ensuing political row lasted several weeks.

  SS General Wilhelm Mohnke, who lived close to Aumuehle, marked Doenitz’s passing by arranging a small reception at his house on the day of the funeral. Otto Guensche and Richard Schulze-Kossens, two of Hitler’s SS adjutants, attended; so too did Gerd Heidemann. They all met at the graveside and then went back to Mohnke’s for his little party. ‘It was on this occasion,’ remembered Mohnke, ‘that Herr Heidemann told us for the first time that there were supposed to be Hitler diaries.’ Heidemann described the story of the plane crash and revealed that he had discovered its location in Boernersdorf. When he insisted that a set of Hitler’s diaries had survived, the three old SS men were sceptical. ‘That was thought by the people there to be impossible,’ declared Mohnke. Schulze-Kossens, who had helped found Hitler’s SS honour bodyguard in 1938 and who had often been in the Führer’s company, doubted if Hitler had had the time to write a diary. Heidemann was undeterred. Nothing could now shake his conviction that somewhere out there were Hitler’s diaries.