Editing Hitler Diaries (section)

==Background==

===Operation Seraglio===
[[File:Hans Baur.jpg|thumb|left|upright|alt=A black-and-white photograph of the head and shoulders of a man in his mid-forties, looking to the right of the viewer. He is wearing a Second World War German military uniform.|General [[Hans Baur]], Hitler's personal pilot]]
On 20 April 1945—[[Adolf Hitler]]'s 56th birthday—[[Soviet Union|Soviet]] troops were on the verge of taking Berlin and the [[Allies of World War II|Western Allies]] had already taken several German cities. Hitler's private secretary, [[Martin Bormann]], initiated Operation Seraglio, a plan to evacuate the key and favoured members of Hitler's entourage from the Berlin bunker where they were based, the ''[[Führerbunker]]'', to an Alpine command centre near [[Berchtesgaden]]—Hitler's retreat in southern Germany. Ten aeroplanes flew out from [[RAF Gatow|Gatow airfield]] under the overall command of General [[Hans Baur]], Hitler's personal pilot.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=29}}{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=29–30}} The final flight out was a [[Junkers Ju 352]] transport plane, piloted by Major Friedrich Gundlfinger—on board were ten heavy chests under the supervision of Hitler's personal valet, Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt. The aeroplane crashed into the Heidenholz Forest, near the [[Czechoslovakia|Czechoslovak]] border.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=30–31}}

Some of the more useful parts of Gundlfinger's aeroplane  were appropriated by locals before the police and [[Schutzstaffel|SS]] cordoned off the crash site.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=157}} When Baur told Hitler what had happened, the German leader expressed grief at the loss of Arndt, one of his most favoured servants, and added: "I entrusted him with extremely valuable documents which would show posterity the truth of my actions!"{{sfn|Baur|1958|pp=180–181}} Apart from this quoted sentence, there is no indication of what was in the boxes. The last of the crash's two survivors died in April 1980,{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=94}} and Bormann had died after leaving the Berlin bunker following [[Death of Adolf Hitler|Hitler's suicide]] on 30 April 1945.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=149}} In the decades following the war, the possibility of a hidden cache of private papers belonging to Hitler became, according to the journalist [[Robert Harris (novelist)|Robert Harris]], a "tantalizing state of affairs [that] was to provide the perfect scenario for forgery".{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=40}}
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===Konrad Kujau===
[[Konrad Kujau]] was born in 1938 in [[Löbau]], near [[Dresden]], in what would become [[East Germany]]. His parents, a shoemaker and his wife, had both joined the [[Nazi Party]] in 1933. The boy grew up believing in the Nazi ideals and idolising Hitler; Germany's defeat and Hitler's suicide in 1945 did not temper his enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. He held a series of menial jobs until 1957, when a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the theft of a microphone from the Löbau Youth Club. He fled to [[Stuttgart]], [[West Germany]], and soon drifted into temporary work and petty crime.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|pp=6–7}}{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=105–106}}{{efn|In 1959 he was fined 80 [[Deutsche Mark]]s for stealing tobacco; in 1960 he was sent to prison for nine months after being caught breaking into a storeroom to steal cognac; in 1961 he spent more time in prison after stealing five crates of fruit; six months later he was arrested after getting into a fight with his employer while employed as a cook in a bar.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=106}}}} After running a dance bar during the early 1960s with his girlfriend, Edith Lieblang—whom he later married—Kujau began to create a fictional background for himself. He told people that his real name was Peter Fischer, changed his date of birth by two years, and altered the story of his time in East Germany.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=107}} By 1963 the bar had begun to suffer financial difficulties, and Kujau started his career as a counterfeiter, forging 27 [[Deutsche Mark]]s' (DM) worth of [[Meal voucher|luncheon vouchers]];{{efn|In April 1983—the time when ''[[Stern (magazine)|Stern]]'' launched the diaries—UK£1 was worth 3.76&nbsp;DMs and US$1 was worth 2.44&nbsp;DMs.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=9}}}} he was caught and sentenced to five days in prison. On his release he and his wife formed the Lieblang Cleaning Company, although it provided little income for them. In March 1968, at a routine check at Kujau's lodgings, the police established he was living under a false identity and he was sent to Stuttgart's [[Stammheim Prison]].{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=8}}{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=107–108}}

[[File:180px-Kujau wiki.jpg|thumb|alt=A man in his fifties, balding and portly, is shown smiling to the left of the camera.|[[Konrad Kujau]] in 1992]]
In 1970 Kujau visited his family in East Germany and discovered that many of the locals held Nazi memorabilia, contrary to the laws of the communist government. He saw an opportunity to buy the material cheaply on the [[black market]], and make a profit in the West, where the increasing demand among Stuttgart collectors was raising memorabilia prices up to ten times the amount he would pay. The trade was illegal in East Germany, and the export of what were deemed items of cultural heritage was banned.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=9}} Among the items smuggled out of East Germany were weapons.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=110}}{{efn|Both the Kujaus were stopped crossing the border between East and West Germany, although only once each, and with no penalty but the confiscation of the contraband.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=109}}<ref name="ST: Spun web" /> Kujau would occasionally wear a pistol and had an obsession with guns. One night in February 1973, while drunk, he took a loaded machine gun to confront a man he thought had been slashing the tyres of the cleaning company van. The man ran off and Kujau chased him into the wrong doorway, where he terrified a prostitute; her screams brought the police, who arrested Kujau. When they searched his flat they found five pistols, a machine gun, a shotgun and three rifles. Kujau apologised and was given a fine.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=110}}}}

In 1974 Kujau rented a shop into which he placed his Nazi memorabilia; the outlet also became the venue for late-night drinking sessions with friends and fellow collectors, including Wolfgang Schulze, who lived in the US and became Kujau's agent there.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=110–111}} Kujau inflated the value of items in his shop by forging additional authentication details—for example a genuine [[First World War]] helmet, worth a few marks, became considerably more valuable after Kujau forged a note indicating that Hitler had worn it at [[Ypres]] in late October 1914. In addition to notes by Hitler, he produced documents supposedly handwritten by Bormann, [[Rudolf Hess]], [[Heinrich Himmler]], [[Hermann Göring]] and [[Joseph Goebbels]]. He forged passable imitations of his subjects' genuine handwriting, but the rest of the work was crude: Kujau used modern stationery such as [[Letraset]] to create letterheads, and he tried to make his products look suitably old by pouring tea over them.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=11}}{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=112}} Mistakes in spelling or grammar were relatively common, particularly when he forged in English; a supposed copy of the 1938 [[Munich Agreement]] between Hitler and [[Neville Chamberlain]] read, in part:

<blockquote>We regard the areement signet last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another againe.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=112}}</blockquote>

In the mid-to-late 1970s Kujau, an able amateur artist, turned to producing paintings which he claimed were by Hitler, who had been [[Paintings by Adolf Hitler|an amateur artist]] as a young man.{{efn|Hitler had painted during his time in the trenches of the First World War until his paints and brushes were stolen in a convalescence camp at the end of the war.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=13}}}} Having found a market for his forged works, Kujau created Hitler paintings depicting subjects his buyers expressed interest in, such as cartoons, nudes and men in action—all subjects that Hitler never painted, nor would want to paint, according to [[Charles Hamilton (handwriting expert)|Charles Hamilton]], a handwriting expert and author of books on forgery. These paintings were often accompanied by small notes, purportedly from Hitler. The paintings were profitable for Kujau. To explain his access to the memorabilia he invented several sources in East Germany, including a former Nazi general, the bribable director of a museum and his own brother, whom he re-invented as a general in the East German army.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|pp=11, 13–15}}

Having found success in passing off his forged notes as those of Hitler, Kujau grew more ambitious and copied, by hand, the text from both volumes of ''[[Mein Kampf]]'', even though the originals had been completed by typewriter. Kujau also produced an introduction to a third volume of the work. He sold these manuscripts to one of his regular customers, Fritz Stiefel, a collector of Nazi memorabilia who accepted them and many other Kujau products as genuine.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=115–116}}{{efn|According to a later investigation by the Hamburg state prosecutor, Stiefel spent 250,000 DMs buying memorabilia from Kujau. His obsession with obtaining paintings, notes, speeches, poems and letters purportedly from Hitler led to him defrauding his own company by 180,000 DMs.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=115–116}}}} Kujau also began forging a series of war poems by Hitler, which were so amateurish that Kujau later conceded that "a fourteen-year-old collector would have recognised it as a forgery".{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=17}}

===Gerd Heidemann===
[[Gerd Heidemann]] was born in [[Hamburg]] in 1931. During the rise of Hitler his parents remained apolitical, but Heidemann, like many other young boys, joined the [[Hitler Youth]]. After the war he trained as an electrician, and pursued an interest in photography. He began working in a photographic laboratory and became a freelance photographer for the [[Deutsche Presse-Agentur]] and Keystone news agencies, as well as some local Hamburg newspapers. He had his first work published in ''[[Stern (magazine)|Stern]]'' in 1951 and four years later joined the paper as a full-time member of staff.{{sfn|Hamilton|1991|p=25}}{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=59}} From 1961 he covered wars and hostilities across Africa and the Middle East;{{efn|Heidemann photographed and reported on action in the Congo, Biafra, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Uganda, Beirut and Oman.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=60}}}} he became obsessed with these conflicts and other stories on which he worked, such as the search for the identity of the German writer [[B. Traven]]. Although he was an excellent researcher—his colleagues called him {{lang|de|der Spürhund}}, the Bloodhound—he would not know when to stop investigating, which led to other writers having to finish the stories from large quantities of notes.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=60–62}}

In January 1973, on behalf of ''Stern'', Heidemann photographed the ''Carin II'', a yacht that formerly belonged to Göring.{{efn|Göring had been given the yacht in 1937 and had named it after his late wife. At the end of the war it was impounded by [[Field Marshal]] [[Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein|Bernard Montgomery]], who presented it to the British royal family. They renamed it the ''Royal Albert'', and then changed its name to the ''Prince Charles'', after his birth. In 1960 it was returned to Göring's widow.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=57}}}} The boat was in a poor state of repair and expensive to maintain, but Heidemann took a mortgage on his Hamburg flat and purchased it.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=57}} While researching the history of the yacht, Heidemann interviewed Göring's daughter, [[Edda Göring|Edda]], after which the couple began an affair. Through this relationship and his ownership of the boat he was introduced to a circle of former Nazis. He began to hold parties on the ''Carin II'', with the former [[SS]] generals [[Karl Wolff]] and [[Wilhelm Mohnke]] as the guests of honour. Wolff and Mohnke were witnesses at Heidemann's wedding to his third wife in 1979; the couple went on honeymoon to South America accompanied by Wolff, where they met more ex-Nazis, including [[Walter Rauff]] and [[Klaus Barbie]], who were both wanted in the West for [[war crime]]s.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=77–78}}

The purchase of the yacht caused Heidemann financial problems, and in 1976 he agreed terms with [[Gruner + Jahr]], ''Stern''{{'}}s parent company, to produce a book based on the conversations he was having with the former soldiers and SS men.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=64–66}} When the book went unwritten—the material provided by the former SS officers was not sufficiently interesting or verifiable for publication—Heidemann borrowed increasingly large sums from his employers to pay for the boat's upkeep. In June 1978 he advertised the boat for sale, asking 1.1&nbsp;million DMs; he received no offers.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=83–84}} Mohnke recommended that Heidemann speak to Jakob Tiefenthaeler, a Nazi memorabilia collector and a former member of the SS. Tiefenthaeler was not in a position to buy the yacht, but was happy to act as an agent; his endeavours did not produce a sale. Realising Heidemann's financial circumstances, Tiefenthaeler provided him with names of other collectors in the Stuttgart area. The journalist made a trip to the south of Germany and met Stiefel, who purchased some of Göring's effects.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=84–85}}

===''Stern'', ''The Sunday Times'' and ''Newsweek''===
[[File:Rupert Murdoch - WEF Davos 2007.jpg|upright|thumb|alt=A spectacled man in his seventies faces to the left of the viewer. His hands are in front of him, the fingers interlinked.|[[Rupert Murdoch]], the owner of ''[[The Sunday Times]]'', in 2007]]
{{lang|de|Stern}} (German for "Star"), a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg, was formed by the journalist and businessman [[Henri Nannen]] in 1948 to offer scandal, gossip and [[human interest]] stories.{{sfn|Harris|1991|pp=59–60}} It was, according to the German media experts Frank Esser and Uwe Hartung, known for its [[investigative journalism]] and was politically left-of-centre.{{sfn|Esser|Hartung|2004|p=1063}} In 1981 Nannen resigned from his position of editor of the magazine, and moved to take the role of "publisher". In his place ''Stern'' had three editors: Peter Koch, Rolf Gillhausen and Felix Schmidt, who were aided by others including the journal's head of contemporary history, Thomas Walde. Manfred Fischer was [[Chief executive officer|CEO]] of Gruner + Jahr until 1981 when he was promoted to the board of [[Bertelsmann]], their parent company; he was replaced by Gerd Schulte-Hillen. Wilfried Sorge was one of the Gruner + Jahr managers responsible for international sales.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=13}}<ref name="Zeit: Schmidt 2" />

''[[The Sunday Times]]'' is a British national [[broadsheet]] newspaper, the Sunday [[sister paper]] of ''[[The Times]]''. In 1968, under the ownership of [[Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet|Lord Thomson]], ''The Sunday Times'' had been involved in a deal to purchase the [[Mussolini diaries]] for an agreed final purchase price of £250,000, although they had only paid out an initial amount of £60,000.{{efn|£60,000 in 1968 is approximately £{{Inflation|UK|50000|1950|cursign=£|fmt=c|r=-1}} in {{Inflation/year|UK}}, according to calculations based on [[Consumer Price Index (United Kingdom)|Consumer Price Index]] measure of inflation.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Clark|first1=Gregory|title=The Annual RPI and Average Earnings for Britain, 1209 to Present (New Series)|url=https://www.measuringworth.com/ukearncpi/|access-date=22 February 2023|publisher=MeasuringWorth|date=2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230401021917/https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/ukearncpi/|archive-date=1 April 2023}}</ref>}} These turned out to be forgeries undertaken by an Italian mother and daughter, Amalia and Rosa Panvini.<ref name="Obs: Musso diares" /> In 1981 [[Rupert Murdoch]], who owned several other papers in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, purchased Times Newspapers Ltd, which owned both ''The Times'' and its Sunday sister.{{sfn|Tuccille|1989|pp=42, 81}} Murdoch appointed [[Frank Giles]] to be the editor of ''The Sunday Times''.{{sfn|Harris|1991|p=11}} The historian [[Hugh Trevor-Roper]] became an [[Non-executive director|independent national director]] of ''The Times'' in 1974. Trevor-Roper—who was created Baron Dacre of Glanton in 1979—was a specialist on Nazi Germany, who had worked for the [[MI6|British Intelligence Services]] during and after the Second World War. At the war's end he had undertaken an official investigation of Hitler's death, interviewing eyewitnesses to the [[Führer]]'s last movements.{{sfn|Davenport-Hines|2004}} In addition to the official report he filed, Trevor-Roper also published ''The Last Days of Hitler'' (1947) on the subject. He subsequently wrote about the Nazis in ''Hitler's War Directives'' (1964) and ''Hitler's Place in History'' (1965).{{sfn|Davenport-Hines|2004}}

''[[Newsweek]]'', an American weekly news magazine, was founded in 1933. In 1982 the journalist [[William Broyles, Jr.|William Broyles]] was appointed editor-in-chief, while the editor was Maynard Parker; that year the company had circulation figures of three&nbsp;million readers.{{sfn|Blanchard|2013|p=431}}{{sfn|Harless|1985|p=152}}