Editing Hitler Diaries (section)

===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}}