How a German magazine fell for fake Hitler diaries

On April 25, 1983 at the Gruner & Jahr publishing house in Hamburg, 27 television crews and more than 200 journalists gathered for what Stern magazine was about to present. The Stern editors-in-chief appeared at the press conference carrying 12 black notebooks filled with Adolf Hitler's personal notes. Photos of Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann posing with the diaries went around the world, along with reports of the sensational find.

Three days later, Stern published a special edition with excerpts from the diaries. The magazine increased its circulation by 400,000 from the usual 1.8 million, and the special issue cost an additional 50 pfennigs (about €0,25). "The history of the Third Reich must be rewritten in large parts," said Stern editor-in-chief Peter Koch.

Flatulence and bad breath

The text, it turned out, was full of mundane personal observations. For example, Hitler's partner Eva Braun wanted free tickets to the 1936 Olympics, which annoyed the Führer. She also wanted him to see a doctor for his health: "At Eva's request, I let my doctors examine me properly. The new pills cause strong flatulence, and as Eva said, bad breath."

Historians and colleagues from other media houses were wary of the writings, and did not believe them to be genuine.

When the Federal Criminal Police Office finally presented its expert opinion, proof of the forgeries was as trivial as it was irrefutable: The notebooks were written on paper that did not exist in the Third Reich, but was developed in the 1950s.

The public prosecutor's office launched an investigation.

Reporter Gerd Heidemann and the forger, Konrad Kujau, ended up in court, and both were sentenced to prison. Kujau died of cancer in 2000; Heidemann lives in modest circumstances in Hamburg.

Stern later described the scandal as "the biggest accident in the history of the magazine" and took years to recover from the embarrassment.

How an art forger fooled everyone

In the 1970s, a talented art forger by the name of Konrad Kujau, posing as an antiques dealer, spent years supplying a businessman, Fritz Stiefel, with allegedly genuine Nazi artifacts,  including manuscripts and artworks by Hitler. He showed the collector the first forged Hitler diary. Stiefel compared the document with his other Hitler manuscripts — and the diary was declared genuine.

Stiefel showed the diary to Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann, also an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia. Heidemann had a hunch this was a sensation.

He followed up on the suggestion that diaries of Adolf Hitler had been recovered from the crash site of a Nazi plane in East Germany. He visited the site and was convinced that the books were indeed found there. He informed a few Stern colleagues, and got in touch with Kujau — who knew he had hooked the reporter. Stern offered the counterfeiter 2 million deutschmarks (about €1 million) for the notebooks. Kujau got to work.

The first three diaries were checked immediately. Renowned historians, experts from the Federal Archives and the Rhineland-Palatinate State Criminal Police Office confirmed their authenticity. No one noticed that some of the comparative writing samples submitted to the experts were also penned by Kujau.

'Führer Hitler'

Inconsistencies were brushed aside. It was a known fact that Hitler was rather lazy where writing was concerned, so it was odd that a man characterized as impatient and impulsive would fill all those notebooks in a suspiciously neat handwriting, and without mistakes.

Even the most obvious oddities didn't ring alarm bells, for instance, the letters "FH" in old-fashioned typography emblazoned on the covers of the notebooks. What did they stand for? It was agreed the initials stood for "Führer Hitler."

Now available online for everyone

The press scandal has since been adapted into various TV series and films. Helmut Dietl's 1992 satire "Schtonk!" was nominated for an Oscar. Similarly, the British also turned the story into a comedic miniseries, "Selling Hitler" (1991); it has recently inspired a German version, titled "Faking Hitler," which came out in 2021.

Now, 40 years after the scandal, all volumes of the forged diaries have been published online by German public broadcaster NDR, in a scientifically annotated online edition released in February 2023.

Hajo Funke, a historian and political scientist, put the documents in the appropriate historical context. Historical facts are meticulously compared with the Kujau texts. A timeline allows the user to click through to the individual years. A search function leads interested users directly to entries dealing with "Eva," "Goebbels," "Stalin," "Jews," "Mussolini," and even "bad breath."

Few experts had access to the forged material over the decades. Now anyone can browse the strange gibberish Kujau attributed to Hitler.

Also, up until now, the publisher had kept most of the embarrassing documents in its possession, having only submitted a dozen of the 60 notebooks to the Federal Archives for examination. On April 24, 2023, the Bertelsmann Group announced that it would finally be handing over the forged "Hitler Diaries" to the Federal Archives in the course of the year.

Hitler portrayed as 'protector of Jews'

In Kujau's fictional diaries, he turns Hitler into someone who is overwhelmed by the persecution and extermination of the Jews under his own rule.

Kujau has his version of Hitler write at the end of April 1933 that "the measures begun on the 1st against Jewish institutions are too violent for me; I immediately warned the men responsible for them. Some of them had to be expelled from the party."

Commenting on the night of the Reich pogrom on November 9, 1938, the fake Hitler condemns the acts of violence against Jews: "It is not possible that our economy is being destroyed by a few hotheads. Millions and millions in glass alone. (...) I am told of some unpleasant attacks by some people in uniform, in some places also of slain Jews and Jewish suicides. Have these people gone mad? What will foreign countries say?"

On January 20, 1942, the day of the Wannsee Conference, the diary entry reads: "I'm awaiting the reports of the conference on the Jewish question. We absolutely must find a place in the East where these Jews can make a livelihood. I demanded a quick solution from the participants of the conference. Surely there must be a spot in the East where these Jews can live."

No word about the fact that, over coffee and canapés, members of the very real conference decided on the mass murder of millions of European Jews.

Fascination with Hitler

NDR says the texts mirror the fantasies of people driven by greed but were also "created in a radical right-wing context, and deny the Holocaust."

The story about Germany's biggest press scandal is not just how an ingenious forger fooled the heads of a popular German weekly. It was also a mirror held up to Germans 40 years ago: Many had a burning interest in who Hitler was in private, and were eager to discover a man who was not portrayed as a criminal warmonger and mass murderer, but rather as a caring and responsible statesman whose thoughts did not revolve around extermination camps, but around Eva Braun's feelings, Joseph Goebbels' womanizing and his own issues with flatulence.

This article was originally written in German.

Update: The fact that the publishing group will be handing over the entire collection of notebooks to the Federal Archives was added to this article a day after its publication, on April 25, 2023.