Video

In April 1983, the German magazine Stern and Britain's Sunday Times sent shockwaves across the historical world when they announced the imminent publication of extracts from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's lost personal diaries. The newly discovered diaries, which were said to encompass 60 volumes and cover the entire 12-year history of the Third Reich, had been apparently spirited out of Berlin in one of the last flights out of the encircled city in April 1945. They were then said to have spent some four decades in a barn loft in East Germany before being smuggled to the West and acquired by Stern researcher Gerd Heidemann in 1981. The eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler, vouched to their authenticity, and publication of the diaries began in the Sunday Times on April 23, 1983. The ink had scarcely dried on the newspaper when historians, former aides of Hitler, and handwriting experts lined up to express strong skepticism over the authenticity of the purported diaries. A formal investigation by the West German Federal Archives on May 6 pronounced the diaries to be a crude forgery, made with postwar ink, paper, glue, and even binding. The text itself, often copied wholesale from Hitler speeches and papers, was said by the archive specialists to be ''badly compiled, by someone of limited intelligence.'' Gerd Heidemann was arrested and charged with fraud as was Konrad Kujau, the real writer of the ''diaries.'' Kujau, an expert forger, had earlier made a living selling fake Hitler paintings and openly expressed Nazi sympathies.