Editing Hitler Diaries (section)

===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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