The Hitler Diaries

Fakes that Fooled the World

Charles Hamilton

• Editorial: The University Press of Kentucky
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813181530
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia mondiale

Now for the first time, the complete expose of the most daring and successful forgery of all time. For seven days in April 1983, the sensational discovery of Hitler's sixty-two volumes of secret diaries dominated the news headlines of the world. Scholars hailed the diaries as the greatest find of the century, a historical bonanza that would entirely alter our views of Hitler and the Third Reich. Shocked readers followed daily installments showing that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust. Then, in an abrupt reversal, the diaries were proved to be bogus!

1	The Legend of Adolf Hitler

From a distance the ancient toymaking town of Berchtesgaden on the Untersberg in the Bavarian Alps gave the impression of a pleasant medieval village basking in the July sun. To a young American naval officer, only recently discharged from the hospital, it seemed like an idyllic painting of a town; but as his jeep drew nearer, he saw what he had observed in other German cities. The old village was pockmarked and cratered like the moon’s surface. The houses were burnt and topless. There was scarcely a building into which light did not flow through innumerable bomb holes.

The twenty-seven-year-old American drove out of the town and up the winding road that led to Hitler’s villa at Berghof, the famed Eagle’s Nest. His jeep snaked through ten miles of tortuous, narrow road cut into the mountainside. He reached at last a long tunnel drilled through the rock, at the end of which an elevator lifted him to the Eagle’s Nest on the very pinnacle of a lofty mountain.

To the young officer the battered Eagle’s Nest, its splendor sprawled in ruin, was a symbol of the destruction that had engulfed the Germans. Their Teutonic warriors, led by a fiery-eyed god, a new Siegfried, had sought and almost achieved the conquest of Europe. Their steel-helmeted cohorts had proved nearly invincible. When they finally suffered total defeat, in a flaming Götterdämmerung, it seemed like the fall of some fabled Nordic realm. And, as the flames they had lit roared back upon the Germans, their Siegfried, Adolf Hitler, slew himself in a deep-delved cavern in the earth. His last order was that his body be burned on a funeral pyre in the old Viking manner.

The young American climbed the battered steps to Hitler’s summer home and contemplated the majesty of the ruins and the mountains. He stood in thought amidst the toppled eagles. He reflected upon the great nation that through its own madness and folly had followed its Fuehrer into a maelstrom of destruction. And he thought about the wild demagogue who had caused it all. Hitler was now the most hated tyrant in history, yet there was a frightening, mysterious quality to his lunacy.

What would be Hitler’s reputation when all those who knew him, those who loved him, those who hated and feared him, were dead? What would future generations think of this impassioned pagan who had come so close to destroying the world? Would historians be fascinated by him and seek to know what manner of man he was?

That night the American scrawled in his journal that he foresaw the day, not many years distant, when Hitler would cast off the aura of hatred around him and emerge as one of the most important men in world history. Although Hitler had been a menace to world peace, there was a mystery in his life and death that would survive him and continue to grow. The American wrote: “Hitler had in him the stuff from which legends are created.”¹ The American’s name was John F. Kennedy and his prophecy about Hitler is coming true.

In the beginning there was a Teutonic overlord with a comic mustache. His lieutenants included Hermann Goering, a World War I ace who designed his own uniforms and sported a chestful of medals; Heinrich Himmler, a former chicken farmer, eyes gleaming behind pince-nez, who was to become history’s greatest mass murderer; and Joseph Goebbels, creator of myths, who could turn an outrageous lie into a fact as certain as a Euclidean axiom. Other strange personalities in this Nordic court ranged from hoodlums and ex-criminals to college professors and brilliant soldiers.

Each of these unusual men was, in his way, a genius. They blended their perversions and skills to build a state based upon hatred and revenge. They implemented their dream of a German superman with Stukas and Panzers and overran most of Europe.

Forty-five years ago their goose-stepping legions were cut to pieces by the Allied and Russian armies, but in the history books they continue to march. They fascinate each new generation. They represent an army of conquering evil, of brute force, and as such they spellbind us. Their banner, a black swastika upon a circle of white against a red field, remains a symbol of terror. And their leader, the pale, frail Siegfried with a ringing voice and a will of Krupp steel, still grips us with his hypnotic eye.

Long before Hitler’s death, people were seeking for fresh tales about his life, mementos of him, any sort of object he might have seen or touched. Somewhere, I recall, there was a writer who alluded to “the banality of evil.” But there is no banality in the excitement and terror of evil. The savagery of man against man and the underlying cruelty of life forms the subject of much of literature and music and art.

The metamorphosis of Hitler into a legend got off to a good start. His friends and followers laid upon him the mantle of a god. For them he was Siegfried, a flesh-and-blood incarnation of the quintessential Teutonic hero. Biographers invented flattering tales of his intellectual and physical prowess. So idolized was the Fuehrer that in 1937 he very nearly carried off the Nobel Peace Prize.

Most Germans looked upon their leader as a superman. He never drank (or almost never), never smoked, spurned the flesh of animals, and, apparently, looked with Olympian indifference upon sexual joys. He was a fusion of the national idols envisioned by Nietzsche and Wagner. His publicist, the lame sychophant Joseph Goebbels, puffed Hitler’s greatness. From the podium he shouted with raised fist that the Fuehrer was always right and never made a mistake. He was a great star above everyone. Goebbels was mesmerized by Hitler. In his private diary he wrote that the Nazi leader was sly, clever and shrewd and averred that he was Christ.

Hitler was showered with doggerel extolling his greatness. Not a village poetaster but hallelujahed him with fulsome jingles. The Fuehrer’s mail was plumped out with scrolls engrossed in gold, conferring honorary citizenship upon him. They poured in from every burg and hamlet in Germany and Austria. Photographs portrayed Hitler as a deity. The most popular of postcards depicted him as a huge Siegfried, a Nordic superman soaring through space on his way to slay the dragon enemies of the Reich. One German writer proclaimed that Jesus was an impostor and that Hitler was the true manifestation of God. Women strewed his path with flowers and worshiped him as an Adonis. He was known as der shoene Adolf (handsome Adolf). Young girls panted with ecstasy at his mere picture and yearned to embrace him. Whenever the sun burst through the clouds it was hailed as “Fuehrer weather.”

Even after the horrors of war descended upon them, the Germans still believed in the divinity of Hitler. Goebbels continued to describe him as the symbol of victory. With their nation a mass of rubble and Berlin in flames, many Germans preserved their ardent admiration. The news of the Fuehrer’s suicide in the bunker caused a national wave of grief. His followers wept hysterically in the privacy of their bomb-blasted homes. There was a wave of empathetic suicides.

Most Germans were aware that Hitler had been a dangerous demi-god, a menace to civilization and an implacable enemy of culture, but some thought otherwise. Many of those who had been transfixed by Hitler’s hypnotic eye believed that somehow, in some phoenix-like way, he would rise from his ashes to lead Germany again. They toasted the memory of their departed Fuehrer in secret, sure that he would someday return. And finally, in a manner of speaking, he did.

For a brief period in 1983, a ten-day sojourn in the news headlines of the world, the dictator lived again. He was reborn through the efforts of a petty thief, adroit at imitating handwriting, who forged a whole series of diaries “written by Hitler” in which the Fuehrer presented himself as an amiable, peace-loving leader, misled and tricked by the associates he trusted. For those few days, millions of people, including scholars and historians, accepted as bonafide this “new Fuehrer.”

2	Birth of a Forger

“What is history but a fiction agreed upon?” said jesting Napoleon, and need not have stayed for an answer. Many historians would concur. Certainly, no one can overestimate the effect that exaggerations and outright lies have upon history. They affect events that have happened, that are happening, and that will happen. A well-told lie, as I am sure Dr. Joseph Goebbels would have attested, is worth a thousand truths.

The entire Nazi regime was built upon a foundation of lies. It hardly mattered that many of those who told the lies believed them to be truths. Lies they were, and when the Third Reich fell apart in flames, their falsity became obvious to all but the most obtuse Hitlerites. What could be more natural than that Konrad Kujau, a dealer in Third Reich relics and a professional forger, should, in the tradition of Goebbels, fabricate a series of “Hitler diaries” based upon the recipe used by all liars, the skillful blending of fact and fiction?

Until Kujau hit upon, or rather stumbled into, the scheme of forging the diaries, his life in Stuttgart was not very exciting. He added to its piquancy, however, by several rackets—smuggling and forging—hazardous occupations that could put an unwary crook behind bars. Still, who would suspect this slightly seedy, balding little man with a whimsical wit of being anything other than an honest ferret after war souvenirs?

Konrad [Paul] Kujau—who operated also under the aliases Konrad Fischer, Peter Fischer, Doctor Fischer, “The Professor,” and “The General”—was born in 1938 in Loebau, about forty miles from Dresden, the third of five children. His father, like the begetters of those other imaginative creators Christopher Marlowe and Hans Christian Andersen, was a shoemaker. Konrad (nicknamed “Conny”) may have inherited from his progenitor a knack for telling tall tales and pulling off grandiose schemes.

In 1933 the elder Kujau had succumbed to Hitler’s harangues and become a Nazi, committed body and soul to the party. His son, born five years later, mimicked his father. Conny was infatuated with the colorful martial regalia of the Nazis. Hitler was his idol. “As a young child,” Kujau recalls, “I imagined Hitler three meters [about twelve feet] tall, with the strength of a bull. I began to read everything about him.”¹ Neither the suicide of Hitler in 1945 nor the demise of the Third Reich cooled the boy’s ardor. At fourteen he painted an enormous swastika on his grandmother’s kitchen wall.

A bright, inquisitive boy, Konrad was the teacher’s pet at school and scored high marks in all subjects. His sister Doris, still a resident of Loebau, then in East Germany, remembers: “Conny was always the brightest of us all and got good marks at school.”² In chatting about his youth, Kujau recalls that he remained in school until he was eighteen, then attended the Dresden Academy of Art for two semesters. He dropped out when his father was unable to give him any more financial help. His sister, perhaps a bit envious of her notorious brother, contradicts him on both counts. Conny left school at sixteen, she says, and he never went to any art academy. Her contradictions, if true, only make Kujau more remarkable, for his knowledge of modern history is excellent, though porous in spots, and his ability as an artist reveals unusual talent.

Much of our knowledge of Kujau’s modest beginnings comes from the forger’s own meandering, often jocular, tongue-in-cheek recollections. His attorney, Kurt Groenewold, upon whom fell the task of winnowing Kujau’s statements and sifting the lies from the truth, told me: “I do not think you can call Kujau a liar, exactly. He is really more of a romantic who is not too careful to distinguish fact from fiction.”

After leaving school, Kujau perambulated from job to job for several years. By the time he was nineteen he’d worked as a locksmith’s apprentice, a laborer in a textile plant, a painter, a window washer, and, finally, as a waiter in the clubhouse of the Free German Youth in Loebau.

On June 7, 1957, Kujau boarded a train out of East Germany, apparently to elude arrest on charges of stealing a microphone from the youth club. Once away from home, he graduated into a life of sordid crime. He lived precariously in Vaihingen, a suburb of Stuttgart. In November 1959 he was caught stealing tobacco from a Sinalko cooperative store and was fined 80 marks. The following year, armed with brass knuckles and two pistols, he broke into a store and made off with four cases of Schnaps. He and a bumbling fellow burglar were so noisy that they woke up two night watchmen. They caught Kujau, and a court in Stuttgart sentenced him to nine months in prison for theft. He was out after eight months, but in August 1961 he was again picked up on charges of theft and briefly imprisoned. This time he’d filched four crates of pears and a crate of apples while working for a fruit vendor. Six months later while employed as a cook in a Stuttgart bar, he got into a brawl with his employer and was arrested.

In an attempt to earn an honest living, Kujau opened the Pelican Dance Bar about fifteen miles from Stuttgart in a town called Plochingen. At first the bar made money, but in 1963 it succumbed to financial woes, and Kujau went to work as a waiter in a Haufbrau. Here he first put his hand to the trade that would bring him fame and fortune—forgery. He counterfeited twenty-seven marks’ worth of luncheon vouchers, got caught, and was sentenced to five days behind bars.

By 1963 Kujau had acquired a common-law wife, a plump, pleasant barmaid named Edith Lieblang. He and Edith organized a new business, the Lieblang Cleaning Company. Their slogan, “Guaranteed Clean as a Housewife,” brought them a lot of business but not a lot of income. In March 1968 Kujau was arrested for giving false information on his identity. He had claimed to be Peter Fischer, a cook and a resident of Berlin. However, his papers gave his name as Konrad Fischer and his address as Stuttgart. At the police station Kujau, who often fabricated tales with no reason, continued to lie. He said his name was Peter Konrad Fischer and that he was a deserter from the East German army, in which he’d been a trainee in chemical warfare. A few hours later he thought up a better story: he’d left East Germany to escape military conscription and had got into West Germany on fake credentials, using the name Harald Fuchs. No doubt he would have continued to invent fresh versions of his life if his fingerprints had not revealed him to be Konrad Kujau, a petty thief and brawler who was wanted for failure to report to the police during a suspended sentence. This time he was briefly confined at Stanheim Prison in Stuttgart.

The cleaning plant, meanwhile, continued to struggle for existence. Kujau later described the enterprise as a great success, with thousands of German marks pouring in every week—but the duo sold out in 1977. According to Kujau, who thinks only in exalted sums that would dazzle a Rothschild, he and Edith got 800,000 marks for the business. Edith disagrees: “He’s mad. He’s simply going mad. . . . By the time we sold we had hardly any customers left, no employees. It was worth virtually nothing . . . and that’s what we got—virtually nothing.”³

There is always a faint, mocking little smile on Kujau’s lips and a barely imperceptible twinkle in his eye when he tugs on the long bow. He jokes and banters, almost ridiculing himself, and leaves it to his auditors to discover whether or not he’s telling the literal truth, the approximate truth, or a flagrant fabrication. Edith Lieblang has said of his compulsion to exaggerate: “That’s his vice. He just can’t resist it.”⁴

By 1970 Kujau had launched himself on a career of forgery that would last as long as Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich"—twelve years. This was also the year Kujau visited his family in Loebau and literally staggered back to Stuttgart laden with valuable Third Reich relics: daggers, helmets, regimental steins, paintings, uniforms, badges, medals, rare documents. Kujau had rightly surmised that there were in Communist-controlled East Germany large numbers of relics that could be bought for a fraction of their value, especially because the West German Deutschmark was worth five times as much as the East German mark. The Communists, who held war relics in contempt and had utilized historic Nazi documents in their privies, had outlawed the possession of Third Reich souvenirs, but diehard Teutons laughed at this edict and held on to their treasures. They were, however, easily seduced by bundles of West German marks. Kujau was engulfed in offers, and whatever he bought he could sell for ten times its cost to Stuttgart collectors. Relishing his new opulence, Kujau developed a swaggering air. At times he donned a tuxedo and assumed the manners of a fop. At other times he soldiered up in an SS uniform and roistered away the evening with champagne and women in the Stuttgart beer gardens.

Sometimes Kujau wore a pistol and, after swilling down a large quantity of his favorite, orange juice and vodka, would essay his marksmanship in a nearby field or even pump a few rounds into the “dead soldiers” at the bar. On February 13, 1973, he got into a brawl when he assaulted with a loaded machine gun a man he claimed had slashed the tires of one of his cleaning vans. In the confusion that followed, his victim escaped. Kujau stumbled into a doorway and terrified a prostitute. Her screams fetched a small crowd. They seized Kujau. W...