The Hitler Diaries — 62 forged volumes undone in two weeks by modern paper

In Hamburg on 25 April 1983, the West German weekly Stern announced and began serializing what it called the historical sensation of the century: sixty-two handwritten volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries, spanning 1932 to 1945, which it had bought for some 9.3 million Deutsche Marks. Within roughly two weeks the diaries were exposed as crude forgeries, written by the Stuttgart dealer and habitual faker Konrad Kujau (born 1938) and brokered to Stern by its own star reporter, Gerd Heidemann (born 1931), who had skimmed a large share of the money for himself. The diaries did not survive a single proper laboratory test.

The forgery was not subtle. Kujau wrote in school exercise books bound with polyester thread unavailable before the 1950s, on paper containing an optical whitener that postdated the war, with ink whose evaporation showed it had been applied recently. He even botched the cover monogram, embossing the imitation-leather notebooks with Gothic initials that read “FH” rather than “AH.” The content was largely copied and embellished from a published chronology of Hitler’s speeches and movements, reproducing the source’s own errors. What carried the fraud was not its craft but the colossal commercial and journalistic appetite for an authentic Hitler scoop, which led Stern to skip the chemical tests it later claimed to have run.

Reputable names were drawn in. Stern sold serialization rights abroad, and the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), an independent director of The Sunday Times, initially pronounced the diaries genuine — then publicly reversed himself, expressing grave doubts at the very press conference where they were unveiled. Newsweek and others examined them. The decisive verdict came from the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) and forensic analysts, who within days of receiving volumes identified the modern paper, binding and ink.

Kujau confessed. He and Heidemann were tried in Hamburg from August 1984 into 1985; Heidemann was sentenced to four years and eight months and Kujau to four years and six months for fraud and related offenses. The affair humiliated Stern, dented Trevor-Roper’s reputation, and entered journalism as the standard cautionary tale of a scoop too large to scrutinize. Kujau, briefly a celebrity forger, died of cancer in 2000.