In April 1983, the German weekly Stern and a British daily newspaper The Sunday Times They claimed to have made one of the greatest discoveries in history. In fact, it was one of the greatest frauds of the century, and the scandal that followed cost millions and ruined numerous reputations.
A respected German magazine Stern he published on April 25, 1983, 42 years ago, what he believed to be the most spectacular historical discovery of all time: the previously unknown private diaries of Adolf Hitler.
To present this remarkable exclusive to the world press, the weekly news magazine arranged a press conference in Hamburg for the same day.
The story will indeed not break out of the world news, but not in the way the magazine had imagined.
Three days earlier, Sternov London editor Peter Wickman told BBC News that they were "absolutely convinced" they had in their hands the authentic Hitler diaries.
"We were very suspicious at first, but a graphologist studied them, we had an expert compare the paper."
"We've had historians like Professor Trevor-Rope and they're all convinced that the diaries are real."
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The handwritten diaries date from 1932 to 1945, covering the entire period of Hitler's Third Reich.
"There are 60 diaries, they look a bit like school notebooks, but with hard covers."
"They have seals on the outside with a swastika and an eagle, and inside, of course, Hitler's very illegible Gothic handwriting," Vikman told the BBC.
Stern believed that their discovery had the potential to reshape everything previously known about the Nazi leader.
And the contents of the diary were certainly illuminating, revealing the Fuhrer's little-known emotional side.
They detailed everything from Hitler's struggles with flatulence and bad breath, to his girlfriend Eva Braun's pressure to get tickets to the Olympics, to a note about sending a telegram to Stalin - "the old fox" - with a birthday greeting.
The notebooks also seemed to indicate, somewhat startlingly, that the Nazi leader was unaware that the Holocaust was being carried out in his name.
The diaries were allegedly dug up by a journalist. Stern Gerd Heidemann.
The reporter has already been in Stern was considered someone obsessed with Nazi landmarks.
In 1973, the magazine commissioned him to write an article about a dilapidated yacht that once belonged to Hitler's right-hand man, Hermann Goering.
Heidemann spent a fortune on buying that yacht and restoring it.
He also began an affair with Göring's daughter, Ed, who introduced him to a large number of former Nazis.
Through these contacts, Heidemann said, he managed to obtain Hitler's diaries.
Heidemann claimed that the plane had logs, which were salvaged after its crash and stored in a barn.
In the years that followed, the diaries found their way to an East German collector who was now offering to sell them.
The journalist was supposed to negotiate their purchase, acting as an intermediary between the East German source and Stern.
The promise of a sensational world exclusive, which would provide a previously unknown insight into the mind of the Nazi dictator, proved irresistible to the magazine.
Forwards Stern decided to maintain tight control over who knew about their discovery, so when they hired handwriting experts to authenticate the diaries, providing them with "real" Hitler documents to compare them with, they were only given a few select pages from the volumes to study.
Stern eventually paid around 9,3 million German marks (2,7 million euros) for the volumes and, having already paid that much, decided to store them in a Swiss vault for safekeeping.
The first historian to study the diaries was Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, also known as Lord Daker of Glanton.
He wrote a book in 1947 Hitler's Last Days, which brought him great academic prestige and he was considered a leading expert on the Nazi dictator.
He was also an independent director of the newspaper Times, which he had purchased two years earlier, along with its sister list, The Sunday Times, Rupert Murdoch.
Lord Daker was initially skeptical of the diaries, but flew to Switzerland to view them anyway.
He began to change his mind when he heard the story of the diary's origin and was told, incorrectly, that chemical tests showed it to be from before the war.
But what really mattered to this historian was when he saw how much material there was.
"What made the strongest impression on Hugh Trevor-Roper, and certainly astonished me as a non-expert when I saw the original material, was the sheer quantity of it all," Times editor Charles Douglas-Horn told the BBC on April 22, 1983.
"The sheer scope of that archive. There are not only nearly 60 volumes of notebooks filled with Hitler's handwriting, there are also 300 of his drawings, paintings and personal documents such as his party booklet. I remember there were drawings he submitted to the art academy when he was a young man who wanted to enter that school, and there is also a painting, an oil on canvas, and so on. A forger would have to be very good to forge such a range of things."
Lord Daker became convinced that the diaries were genuine and even wrote an article for Times guaranteeing their authenticity and stated that historical events may have to be reexamined in light of their existence.
As news of Hitler's diaries began to spread, a bidding war over the rights to publish them in feuilletons heated up, and the owner The Sunday Times Murdoch flew to Zurich to personally participate in these negotiations.
After the contract for the rights to publish the text in the feuilletons was signed, Stern hastily called a press conference to announce the publication of Hitler's diaries to the world.
But even before the grandiose presentation of the volumes, doubts were expressed about their authenticity – especially within the editorial staff. The Sunday Times, which has already been burned in the past.
Namely, in 1968, the newspaper paid an advance for diaries allegedly written by Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, for which someone also vouched, none other than his son.
"But it turned out they were fake and were created by two old women who lived in Vercelli, near Milan," journalist Philip Knightley, who worked with the research team, told the BBC in 2011. The Sunday Times.
The fraud has been exposed.
However, Murdoch was confident in the diaries and, despite the reservations of his editor Frank Giles, quickly began publishing them in installments in The Sunday Times with the title "world exclusive", the day before Stern's announcements at a press conference.
Giles called Lord Ducker seeking assurances that the story was true, only for Lord Ducker to admit that he not only had some doubts about it, but was "doing a U-turn" regarding the authenticity of the diary.
"Everyone in the room, all the executives at the paper, were falling into their chairs and putting their heads in their hands because we had just lost our chief authenticator," Knightley said.
"It was obvious that the story was absolutely untrue."
The Sunday Times could still stop the presses and change the front page.
But when Giles called the owner, "Murdoch said, 'Just because Decker's been vacillating all this time, whoever's cutting his hair, we're going to announce it,'" Knightley recalls.
Za Stern, things will only get much worse at his press conference the next day.
After editor-in-chief Peter Koch declared that he was "100 percent certain that Hitler wrote every word in these books," Lord Daker, the same historian who had vouched for their authenticity, admitted under questioning that he was changing his mind.
In front of the horrified expressions on the managers' faces Stern, Lord Ducker said he had failed to find a link between the plane crash and the alleged logs, and had been rushed into giving his judgment.
"I must say that, as a historian, I regret that normal methods of historical verification have been, perhaps necessarily, sacrificed in favor of journalistic discovery," he said.
The day after the chaotic press conference, Charles Hamilton, an American autograph dealer, told the BBC that as soon as he saw the diary pages, "he could immediately smell the unmistakable scent of forgery."
Hamilton said he knew the signature on the notebooks was inauthentic because he was constantly being brought fake Hitler documents.
"It will soon be established, without any doubt, and without any panel of experts which I think is superfluous at this point, and the whole affair will die down and it will be declared the biggest fraud in the history of mankind," he said.
And he wasn't wrong about that.
Within two weeks, rigorous forensic analysis exposed the diaries as fake.
Not only was, as Hamilton pointed out to the BBC, Hitler's alleged signature incorrect, but chemical testing showed that their paper, glue and ink were produced after World War II.
The diaries were full of errors, contemporary expressions, and historical inaccuracies, sometimes referring to information that Hitler could not possibly have known.
In light of these discoveries, The Sunday Times quickly dropped the serialization and issued an apology.
Stern also publicly apologized for falling for the scam.
Reputations are falling, circulations are growing
Under pressure, Heiderman admitted that the East German source who had given him the diaries was Konrad Kujau, a forger who turned out to be the author of the work.
Kujau was a skilled artist, but his forgeries were far from sophisticated.
Seeking inspiration, he stole large parts of Max Domarus's book Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945, and as a result copied word for word some of the chronological and factual errors from the first edition of the book.
To try to give the journalists a more intimate feel, he imagined a more prosaic side of the Führer's life, inserting details such as: "I can't even get off work to visit Eva," "I have to go to the post office to send a few telegrams," and "Eva says I have bad breath."
Kujau even struggled with the detailed Gothic initials he used on the diary covers, accidentally putting the initials FH instead of AH on them.
He then tried to "age" the notebooks by pouring tea over them and banging them on his desk.
What helped with the initial authentication of the diary was that Kujau was such a prolific forger of Nazi memorabilia that many of the "real" documents he produced were Stern given to experts to enable them to compare them with Hitler's handwriting, also made by Kujau himself.
The police arrested him and he admitted his involvement in the fraud.
He even went so far as to, in order to demonstrate his guilt, write a confession in Hitler's handwriting.
He was found guilty in 1985 of fraud and forgery and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
During further investigation, police discovered that Heidemann had also inflated the prices he claimed his source was asking for the diaries and had embezzled some of the money he had paid. Stern.
It seemed he did this so he could finance a luxurious lifestyle, the maintenance of a Nazi yacht, and a penchant for buying more and more dictatorial souvenirs (he would later claim to own Idi Amin's underwear).
He, like Kujau, was convicted in 1985 of fraud and received four years and eight months in prison.
At his own trial, Heidemann insisted that he himself had been deceived, but Kujau had always insisted that the reporter knew all along that the diaries were false.
One of the consequences of the scandal was that Lord Dacre's reputation as a historian was forever tarnished.
Koh and another editor Stern will lose his job, while Gile will be removed from his position as editor The Sunday Times.
Even Murdoch would later claim in the 2012 Leveson inquiry into media ethics that his decision to publish the story was "a huge mistake I made and I take full responsibility for it. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life."
However, his newspaper's circulation only increased due to his decision to publish a false story.
And since Murdoch insisted on the clause that Stern return all the money he paid him The Sunday Times If the diaries turn out to be fake, the media mogul has only profited from the entire scam.
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