Gerd Heidemann, a globe-trotting, high-flying German journalist who thought he had landed the scoop of the century — the private diaries of Adolf Hitler — but who came crashing back to earth after they were exposed as crude forgeries, died on Monday at a hospital in Hamburg, Germany. He was 93.
Thomas Weber, a history professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland who was in close contact with Mr. Heidemann, confirmed the death.
Mr. Heidemann was one of the highest-paid correspondents in Germany when, at a news conference in 1983, he revealed what he said were 62 notebooks in which Hitler had written his innermost thoughts. He told reporters he had bought them from a dissident East German general who had found them in a barn near Leipzig.
The notebooks, Mr. Heidemann said at the time, offered groundbreaking insights into the Nazi leader’s thinking. Among other things, they seemed to indicate that Hitler was largely unaware of the Holocaust — and also that he had bad breath, chronic flatulence and a rocky relationship with his mistress, Eva Braun.
An accompanying editorial in Stern, the magazine where Mr. Heidemann worked, declared that thanks to Mr. Heidemann, “the biography of the dictator and with it the history of the Nazi regime will be largely rewritten.”
But his story began to unravel almost immediately, revealing a long trail of deception, delusion and comic ineptitude.
Handwriting experts said that the script, while similar to Hitler’s, differed in significant details. The initials on the books’ covers were “FH,” not “AH.” And when the German authorities had a sample of the paper tested, the results showed it had been made just a few years before, not in the 1930s and ’40s.
Within days, what should have made Mr. Heidemann a global celebrity instead made him a worldwide laughingstock. He furiously backtracked.
“We all were gullible” he told reporters. “I did not think they were forgeries. The forgers must have had tremendous knowledge.”
At first, Stern accused Mr. Heidemann of forging the diaries himself; he in turn said they might have been produced by the East German government as part of a disinformation campaign. He then said that he had bought them from a dealer in Stuttgart named Konrad Fischer, but that the man had subsequently disappeared.
A few days later, though, Mr. Fischer — whose real name was Konrad Kujau — turned himself in to the authorities, having briefly fled to Austria.
Over the following months, the real story began to leak out: Mr. Kujau was a serial art forger based in Stuttgart who specialized in fabricating Nazi-era memorabilia.
Mr. Heidemann, an avid collector of Hitler-era artifacts, had first heard about the diaries in the late 1970s. He reached out to Mr. Kujau, and after several years of negotiations flew from Hamburg to Stuttgart with a briefcase full of deutschmarks.
Mr. Kujau spun his own story. Near the end of World War II, he said, German officials loaded several planes with Hitler’s personal effects and flew them to Bavaria, away from advancing Soviet forces. One plane crashed on the way.
That much was true. But Mr. Kujau claimed that the diaries were among the items recovered from the plane by a local farmer. Decades later, the farmer supposedly sold them to Mr. Kujau’s brother, who was an officer in the East German army and who in turn sent them west in batches.
Mr. Heidemann never questioned the story or sought an independent authentication of the books. Instead, with about $3.6 million provided by Stern (the equivalent of about $11.6 million today), he bought them as fast as the batches could arrive — or, in reality, as fast as Mr. Kujau could forge them.
Mr. Heidemann was not the only one embarrassed by the revelation of Mr. Kujau’s deceit. In order to preserve their scoop, his editors at Stern had not sought to verify the diaries with handwriting experts.
They did bring in the esteemed British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to examine them, in a bank vault in Zurich. He initially vouched for them, telling The Times of London, “I am now satisfied they are authentic.”
But he soon began to have doubts, and by early May had reversed himself. Still, his mistake cost his reputation dearly; when Professor Trevor-Roper died in 2003, most of his obituaries took note of it in the first paragraph.
Mr. Kujau was convicted of forgery and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Mr. Heidemann also went to prison, for a similar length of time, but for a different crime: During the investigation, it emerged that he embezzled about half the money that Stern had given him to buy the diaries.
Gerd Eiternick was born on Dec. 4, 1931, in Hamburg. His parents, Johannes Schurbohm and Martha Eiternick, were unmarried. His mother later married Rolf Heidemann, an officer in the city’s harbor police, who adopted Gerd.
Like many German boys during World War II, Gerd joined the Hitler Youth. He dropped out of high school at 17 and went to work as an electrician. He also began working as a freelance photographer, which he parlayed into a job at Stern. Within a few years he was also writing articles.
Mr. Heidemann quickly developed a reputation as a dogged investigative reporter; his editors called him the Bloodhound. He spent long stints covering post-colonial conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. In 1970, he was nearly run over by a tank while covering the Black September conflict between Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
He was married three times. His last wife, Gina, divorced him in 1986. Survivors include his daughter, Susanne Heidemann.
Mr. Heidemann grew increasingly fascinated by Nazi artifacts and kitsch. He acquired a yacht once owned by Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s top lieutenants; hoarded uniforms, medals and other trinkets; palled around with former Nazi generals; and in the late 1970s dated Göring’s daughter and only child, Edda.
For his honeymoon with Gina Heidemann, Mr. Heidemann took her and a friend, the former Nazi general Karl Wolff, to South America; there he met Klaus Barbie, who had run the Gestapo secret police in Lyon, France, before escaping capture after the war. (Barbie was eventually arrested in Bolivia and imprisoned in France, where he died in 1991.)
Mr. Heidemann was released from prison in 1987. He owed Stern several hundred thousand dollars, a debt he never managed to repay. He remained in Hamburg but withdrew from the public eye, living in a 375-square-foot apartment, made even smaller by stacks of boxes containing documents from the Hitler Diaries scandal.
His story lived on without him. In 1991, a mini-series called “Selling Hitler,” based on a book by the same title by Robert Harris, aired in Britain; a year later, a film called “Schtonk!” appeared in Germany. Both were comedies.
Perhaps the only person to ultimately benefit from the scandal was Mr. Kujau, the forger. After his release from prison, he set up shop as a forgery expert and a producer of “Kujau fakes” — meticulous copies of famous works of art, which he signed with his own name.
The post Gerd Heidemann, Journalist Duped by Fake Hitler Diaries, Dies at 93 appeared first on New York Times.
