Hitler Diaries hoax

On April 25, 1983, the West German news magazine Stern held a press conference to announce the discovery of Hitler's diaries, more than sixty handwritten volumes said to have been rescued from a plane that crashed in eastern Germany in April 1945. Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann had obtained them over two years from a Stuttgart dealer in Nazi memorabilia, and the magazine had paid about 9.3 million German marks. Britain's Sunday Times bought serialization rights, and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, after a brief inspection, declared them genuine before voicing doubts on the eve of publication.¹²³

On May 6 the West German Federal Archives announced that the diaries were obvious fakes: the paper, binding, glue and thread contained materials not produced until after the war, and the text was full of errors copied from published sources. The forger was the dealer Konrad Kujau, who had written them himself. In 1985 Kujau and Heidemann were convicted of fraud, Kujau for forgery and Heidemann for keeping much of the money, and sentenced to more than four years each. Stern's editors resigned, and Trevor-Roper's reputation never fully recovered.¹²³