| Hitler Diaries |
Article Index for Hitler |
Website Links For Hitler |
Information AboutHitler Diaries |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT HITLER DIARIES | |
| diaries | |
| political forgery | |
| adolf hitler | |
| literary hoaxes | |
| literary forgeries | |
| fraud | |
| journalistic hoaxes | |
|
Journalist Gerd Heidemann claimed to have discovered them, and submitted them to be reviewed by a number of experts in WWII history, notably the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Gerhard Weinberg . At a press conference on April 25 , 1983 , the diaries were declared by these experts to be authentic. Even though they had not yet been properly examined by scientists, Trevor-Roper endorsed the diaries thus: "I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler's writing habits, of his personality and, even, perhaps, of some public events, may in consequence have to be revised" Trevor-Roper was at that time a director of Times Newspapers, and although he denied acting dishonestly, there was a clear conflict of interests, because '' The Sunday Times '' had already paid a substantial sum for the rights to serialise the diaries in the UK. Heidemann claimed to have received the diaries from East Germany , smuggled out by a Dr. Fischer. The diaries were claimed to be part of a consignment of documents recovered from an aircraft crash in Börnersdorf near Dresden in April 1945 . However within two weeks the Hitler Diaries were revealed as being "grotesquely superficial fakes" made on modern paper using modern ink and full of historical inaccuracies, the most obvious of which might have been the fact that the monogram on the title page read 'FH' instead of 'AH' (for Adolf Hitler) - even though in the old German typeface those letters looked strikingly similar. The content had been largely copied from a book of Hitler's speeches with additional 'personal' comments. As a reaction, ''Stern'' editors Peter Koch and Felix Schmidt declared the end of their work with the magazine and Heidemann was arrested for Fraud . The diaries were actually written by Konrad Kujau , a notorious Stuttgart forger of Hitler's works. Both he and Heidemann went to trial in 1985 and were each sentenced to 42 months in prison. In 1991 a television mini-series based on the Robert Harris book of the affair called ''Selling Hitler'' was produced for the British television channel ITV . A 1992 Film by German director Helmut Dietl called '' Schtonk! '' with fictional characters mirrored many of the events. EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|