New: The Hitler Diaries Scandal (from The History Podcast)

When Germany's biggest magazine Stern announced in 1983 that they'd found the long-lost diaries of Adolf Hitler, the world was poised to rewrite history. Unfortunately, they were fake. In this new series of The History Podcast, The Hitler Diaries Scandal, Andrew Hunter Murray goes back to the 1980s to uncover last century’s biggest ever publishing scandal, a forgery which rocked the world and destroyed reputations. It’s a tale of greed, obsession and mass delusion. It includes Hermann Göring’s yacht, Nazi-themed honeymoons, Idi Amin’s underpants, and more details almost too unbelievable for words. This is a teaser of episode one. If you enjoy it, you can hear the full series in The History Podcast on BBC Sounds.

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  Hi, this is Andrew Hunter-Murray here. This is not an episode of You're Dead to Me. I'm here to tell you about my latest podcast. It's called The Hitler Diaries Scandal, and you can find it in the History podcast feed. It's a story of a forger who conned the biggest publishing houses in Europe from his home in the suburbs of Stuttgart. It's about greed, vanity, and mass delusion. Would we fall for it today? You can listen in full now on BBC Sounds, and here's a taster.

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  It's 6 a.m. on the 21st of April, 1945. Villagers in the tiny hamlet of Berners-Dorf, 150 miles south of Berlin on the Czech border, are woken by the scream of a plane plummeting from the sky and onto their village. It hits the trees and ignites. It burns ferociously for hours.

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  As the flames die down, the remains become visible through the smoke. It's a German plane, a Junkers. The villagers bury the dead crew in simple graves marked by wooden crosses and salvage a few iron boxes from the twisted wreckage. The plane had been flying from the center of Berlin. What could be in those boxes?

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  A story spreads that the plane was transporting the Fuhrer's personal effects.

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  This is the story of Adolf Hitler's diary. Sixty handwritten volumes, found in a wrecked German transport plane, kept secret for nearly four decades and finally published in 1983 to worldwide sensation. Finally, the world would get answers to the great unresolved questions about the man who broke the world.

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  Unfortunately, they were fake. And not only were they fake, they were embarrassingly so. They were, as the German authorities called them, eine plumpe Felsung, a crude forgery.

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  But that did not stop a lot of people from falling for it, including Germany's biggest magazine, eminent British historian Hugh Trevor Roper, and, infamously, Rupert Murdoch's newly-acquired Sunday Times.

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  My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray. I host Radio 4's The Naked Week and write for the satirical magazine Private Eye.

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  The Hitler Diaries are a Fleet Street legend, both a salutary lesson and a huge embarrassment. It's a jaw-dropping story, featuring Nazis, neo-Nazis, dodgy memorabilia dealers, sweating hacks, dreaming spires, mortified historians, and a surprising cameo from Idi Amin. But they're more than that.

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  Because today, in an age when nothing is as it seems... Who are fake news?

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  This information. This information. AI slop.

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  What does this story tell us about our ability to separate fact from fiction, about the truths we choose to ignore and the lies we choose to believe? For Radio 4 and The History Podcast, this is The Hitler Diaries Scandal.

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  Episode One, The Crash.

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  Let's go back to April 1945, then. Berlin has been shattered by Allied bombing raids, and the Soviets are closing in. Hitler himself is in his bunker, deep beneath the Reich's Chancellery. Almost every senior Nazi has left for their mountain base, the Eagle's Nest in Ober Salzburg. The only question remaining is whether Hitler and his secret lover, Eva Braun, will join them. Heike Götermacher, historian and author, based in Berlin, takes up the story.

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  The notion was Hitler will come to the Ober Salzburg, and he will hide and fight here to the end. But Hitler didn't do this. He decided to stay in the Berlin bunker and die there.

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  At that stage, Hitler was reported as saying that he wanted all traces of his personal life destroyed. But some things were saved.

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  So-called courier planes flew out, stenographs, documents of ministries and of the government. But to this day, we don't know exactly what.

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  One of these courier planes did crash, didn't it?

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  Yes, there is evidence that one of these planes did crash. So these circumstances are mysterious.

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  But at the time, a far greater mystery was what had happened to Hitler himself.

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  This is London calling. Here is a news flash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.

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  Despite the BBC newsflash delivered on the 1st of May 1945, in the chaos of post-war Germany, rumours ran wild. He was with General Franco. He was living in a castle with Eva Braun in West Germany. He was working as a croupier in France, a shepherd in the Swiss Alps, an Italian hermit in a cave on the shores of Lake Garda, practicing Buddhism in a Tibetan monastery. The chief of British counterintelligence in Germany decided this could not go on. And into this confusion steps one young man, plucked from his studies at Oxford to pit his brains against the enemy, a historian called Hugh Trevor Roper.

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  And Dick White tells me that he had decided to settle the matter.

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  In 1995, he spoke to the BBC about his role in this mission.

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  And he said he was going to have an inquiry, and he asked if I would undertake it.

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  Trevor Roper was always destined for greatness. He'd won a scholarship to Christchurch, Oxford, and in 1937 promptly became a research fellow in history. After war broke out in 1939, he was recruited by the secret intelligence service. Then came his finest hour.

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  Everyone was desperate to establish that Adolf Hitler actually was dead, and then how he died.

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  That's Timothy Garten Ash, professor of European Studies Emeritus at Oxford. As a student, he knew Trevor Roper in the 1970s.

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  What a gift for a historian to go and try and establish the facts.

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  I reported that he was dead, that his body had been partially at least burned, that it had been buried probably in a shell hole in the garden of the Chancellery, and there was no question of his having escaped.

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  His main method was interrogation. He made brilliant use of it. And there were insights which, you know, it took years of subsequent scholarship to demonstrate, but he almost intuited it. Historical imagination.

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  These interrogations and historical imagination would form the basis of Trevor Roper's bestselling book, The Last Days of Hitler. It would make Trevor Roper's reputation and buy him a Bentley.

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  He was nicknamed the sleuth of Oxford.

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  Trevor Roper did pretty well out of the Second World War. Curiously enough, so did many former Nazis. Around this time, a trade springs up in Nazi memorabilia, I believe.

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  Nazi memorabilia was sold from day one after 1945. Because even when a dictatorship dies in the heads, the dictatorship is still alive. The structures are gone, but the people are still there.

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  Into this strange post-war world barrels another of our main characters. His name is Konrad Kuyau. Small, rotund, balding, with a drooping moustache. He enjoys drinking, women, and his reputation as a colorful rogue. But it hadn't always been this way.

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  Born into poverty near Dresden in the east of Germany in 1938, one of six children, Kuyau's early years were defined by war. His father was a committed Nazi. Amid the bombing, the fear, and the rationing, there was one thing young Konrad loved to do when he had the chance. He loved to paint.

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  In 1944, his father was killed. Crippled by poverty, his mother placed the kids in children's homes, where they quickly learned to fend for themselves. Aged 18, Kuyau was arrested for forging luncheon vouchers. He fled over the border to what was now West Germany. In and out of work and prison, living under various aliases, he sets up a window cleaning business with his girlfriend Edith. That's the official line. But he also has a lucrative side hustle, one that's not exactly legal. The whole series is available right now on BBC Sounds.

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