In April 1985, the German magazine ‘Stern’ announced at a press conference that it was going to publish the diaries of the dictator Adolf Hitler. In that diary, Hitler had supposedly captured his thoughts and more intimate details of his life. However, after it was learned that these diaries were false. It was one of the biggest journalistic scandals in history and, now, 40 years after the publication of this cover, those false newspapers, hidden until now, will be published.
It went from the biggest journalistic exclusive in history… to the biggest blunder. On April 22, 1983, a Friday, the German weekly reported this: “We have Hitler’s secret diaries! The papers that have never been read, the deepest secrets of the Führer… and we are going to publish them! 63 notebooks”. An exclusive that was not going to leave anyone indifferent. First they called a press conference to open the news. There they said that there were experts who had validated them… but little else.
How had they gotten them? They did not reveal their source. The journalist Gerd Heidemann was obsessed with Nazism, enough to buy a ship from a former Nazi leader. And in that obsession he met Konrad Kujau, who assures the reporter that the notebooks are indeed Hitler’s property; that his private secretary was wearing them when he had a plane crash; that they have been hidden for years; that with them a new Hitler is discovered; and that he leaves her those notebooks at a good price.
The price: five million euros from then… but what they counted was worth it: in them it is assured that Hitler seemed to know nothing of Auschwitz, nor of the extermination. He wanted safe areas for Jews, he was not racist and he did not want books to be burned… And he was so humane, according to what is recorded in the newspapers, that he even said: “Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence , and according to Eva, bad breath”. Journalist and magazine agree to the deal, and put the notebooks up for sale. At that time, the German authorities demand to see the papers while other international media, after writing a check, also publish the newspapers.
In Spain, the magazine ‘Tiempo’ paid 21 million pesetas. But what did the German authorities detect? Within 24 hours they also discovered that the paper was not vintage; that they had dipped it in coffee to yellow it; that there were plagiarisms; that “what was not a copy did not fit”. In short, it was all a scam. And what happened to the protagonists? The journalist was sentenced to four years in prison for fraud and it was discovered that of the five million euros he had kept half without telling the counterfeiter.
And what happened to the forger? He ended up being a star, forging paintings by great artists but also putting his signature. “The most authentic fake paintings“, He said.