Springtime for Hitlermania : Fuehrer’s Forged Diaries Focus of British TV Series

LONDON —  The discovery and worldwide publication of Adolf Hitler’s “diaries” in 1983 was not only the greatest literary fraud of all time, but also a grand-prize example of journalistic buffoonery.

Immediately after portions of the diaries were published in the United States, Germany and Great Britain, the German government conducted simple forensic tests that revealed them as forgeries of the crudest order. Just for starters, as it turned out, the material used to make the diaries--the paper, the binding, the glue and the thread--were all manufactured after World War II.

But somehow--succumbing to greed, the Hitler name and lust for a scoop--several of the biggest, most respected entities in the news business blundered their way into publishing history.

Stern, the weekly German magazine, Newsweek in America and the Sunday Times of London under the direct guidance of proprietor Rupert Murdoch, along with an assortment of businessmen and authoritative historians, all came out looking very foolish.

Just how foolish is something that British television viewers are learning week by week, thanks to a hysterical new five-part series called “Selling Hitler.”

The program, which stars Tony Award-winning Jonathan Pryce (“Miss Saigon”) as Gerd Heidemann, the Stern reporter at the center of the fiasco, offers an improbable but true account of Hitlermania.

“Everyone wanted to believe in the diaries for different reasons,” says Howard Schuman, who wrote the script.

The series is based on the 1986 book of the same name by British journalist Robert Harris. But where Harris’ thoroughly researched work tells the story in a straight news style, the TV series provides a more theatrical interpretation.

Also appearing in the series are Barry Humphries as Rupert Murdoch, Alison Doody as Heidemann’s girlfriend Gina, Alexei Sayle as diary forger Konrad (or Conny, as he’s appropriately known) Kujau and Alison Steadman as Hermann Goering’s daughter, Edda.

Although the series has received critical raves in Britain, with Pryce getting special acclaim, it has not been sold in the United States. “Hitler” producer Andrew Brown recalled that he was puzzled when an executive from a major American cable company dismissed the series as “gloomy.”

Gloomy seems to be the last thing anyone would say about it.

While the series never diverts from the facts, Schuman has taken dramatic license in two specific areas.

First of all, dialogue has been written for the secret conversations between reporter Heidemann and Kujau, who wrote Hitler’s diaries on notebooks purchased at the German equivalent of Woolworth’s.

After reading Harris’ book, Schumann recalls, “I felt it had the feeling of fiction. I thought it would be important to have the freedom to venture and speculate.” He discussed with Harris his interest in writing dialogue for “these two grand comic characters” and Harris told him he could “be speculative because they’re both such liars, nobody really knows what happened.”

Schumann also took the liberty of creating his own Hitler opera. Historians say that a youthful Hitler co-authored an opera that was based on the Nordic myth of Weiland the Blacksmith, but it has never been found. Kujau had promised Heidemann that, in addition to obtaining the diaries from his secret source in East Germany, he could also secure a wide range of other Hitler memorabilia, including the opera.

Kujau never did produce the musical work, however. Although he proved talented at forging Hitler writings and paintings, “the one thing he couldn’t do was write music,” says Schumann. “So I just took it a few stages logically.”

As a result, brief sequences from the Wagneresque “Weiland the Blacksmith” appear throughout the TV series, with Heidemann in the starring role. Whenever the Stern reporter finds himself in trouble, says Schumann, “he imagines himself as this heroic figure.”

Although Heidemann ultimately was convicted of fraud for embezzling a percentage of the money Stern was paying for the diaries, it is generally accepted that he always believed the diaries were real. Although not taken with Nazi ideology, the Stern reporter was obsessed with Nazi memorabilia, going so far as to purchase the yacht that once belonged to Gestapo organizer and Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering.

(The yacht was impounded and given to the British Royal Family at the end of the war and renamed the Prince Charles following the birth of the British heir to the throne. But in 1960, for reasons that have never been explained, Queen Elizabeth II gave the yacht back to Goering’s widow.)

Heidemann heard about the existence of Hitler’s diaries through his network of Nazi sources. Skeptical at first, he became convinced that the diaries existed when he learned that trunkloads of Hitler’s personal effects were flown from the Nazi leader’s Berlin bunker near the end of the war, but were never recovered after the plane carrying them crashed in eastern Germany.

The reporter eventually persuaded his editors, who, in ultra-secrecy, began turning over suitcases of cash for Heidemann to pass along to his contact, Kujau. Promised astronomical sums by Heidemann, Kujau churned out dozens of the largely banal and unenlightening diaries, staining the pages with tea to make them look aged.

Although the forgery was clumsy at best, the Stern editors never submitted the books for proper testing because they were afraid word of the diaries would leak out prematurely. Handwriting experts, who never were told exactly what they were examining, declared that Hitler’s hand had, indeed, written the diaries. But neither the experts, nor anyone else, realized that the Hitler handwriting samples that were compared to the diaries also had been forged by Kujau.

Convinced of the diaries’ authenticity, the Stern officials conceived a plan to make millions through the worldwide sale of syndication rights, with Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch as their No. 1 sales target.

“Murdoch was the big fish they were after,” says series producer Brown.

Before the time the entire affair collapsed in a ridiculous heap, Stern had Murdoch and Newsweek bidding millions of dollars against each other for rights.

Murdoch became personally involved after the eminent British historian and world-renowned Hitler expert Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also sat as an independent director of Murdoch’s Times Newspapers, declared the diaries authentic.

“Everyone was behaving in the most outrageous and idiotic way,” says Brown.

Newsweek eventually dropped out of the bidding, but ran a cover story on the diaries anyway, publishing snatches of Hitler’s writings that it had obtained during the negotiations. The news weekly launched an advertising blitzkrieg to promote the issue, taking heavy flak for its actions.

“The impression created with the aid of provocative newspaper and television advertising,” said Washington Post ombudsman Robert J. McCloskey, as quoted in the book “Selling Hitler,” “was that the entire story was authentic.”

Newsweek also took a pounding for the strange comment in its first story, “genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end. . . .”

Meanwhile, just before the Sunday Times was about to go to press with special Hitler diary coverage, Murdoch was informed that historian Trevor-Roper had changed his mind and was having strong doubts about authenticity. Murdoch decided to publish anyway, without mention of Trevor-Roper’s concerns.

Predictably, the Times’ circulation soared. What’s more, Murdoch knew that under terms of his contract with Stern, he would be given a full refund if the diaries were not genuine.

Although the story of the Hitler diaries is largely comical, producer Brown stresses that there is “an extremely dark side” as well: The swindle could never have happened except for the fact that the most vile and evil man of the 20th Century is also one of the hottest commercial properties of all time. There remains a seemingly unquenchable public thirst for any material connected with Hitler, be it books and films about him, or objects connected with him in some way.

“That’s what got Conny started,” says Brown.