Selling Hitler

In 1983, the German magazine Stern thought it had the ‘scoop of the century’. One of its journalists had discovered Adolf Hitler’s diaries. The magazine spent 9.3 million deutschmarks to acquire them and set about selling serialisation rights wherever it could. (One of the buyers was the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times.) 

And then, as the story broke and the first issue went on sale, the diaries turned out to be complete fakes. The journalist and the forger went to jail. Several editors lost their jobs. Murdoch sailed on, unconcerned that he’d been duped and just happy to have picked up an extra 20,000 readers.

If you want to know how this could all have happened, everything is here in this exhaustively researched account. The only people Robert Harris appears not to have talked to are Stern office cleaners and a man who happened to be passing by the offices of the Sunday Times the day the story broke.

There is so much painstaking detail in this book that it times it gets hard to remember just who is who and what they said and did. But it’s all here: the events of 1945 that led the journalist to believe Hitler had written diaries; the reason why he began tracking them down so relentlessly – for one thing, he needed money to restore a yacht previously owned by Goering; the initial sloppy, hasty, insufficient testing of the diaries’ authenticity…

You can see why it all happened, understand why it all happened, and then wince at the wool everyone involved pulled over their eyes when cracks in the story began to emerge… because by then they’d invested so much money in the story being true that they couldn’t afford to believe it wasn’t true.

Ho hum.