The Hitler Diaries with Adrian Daub

What happens when you’re just a little too good at forging the diaries of Adolf Hitler? And why did so many people want to read them? In 1983, the West German news magazine Stern bought sixty volumes of forged journals and held a press conference to announce their publication. This week, Adrian Daub of podcasts In Bed With the Right and The Feminist Present is here to tell us all about what would be the publishing hoax to end all hoaxes…if only the book in question wasn’t so boring. More about Adrian Daub:https://www.adriandaub.com/ More about the Hitler Diaries (German language podcast): https://www.stern.de/faking-hitler/ Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know if there should be that kind of money involved in the truth, you know?

• 0:16Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and this week we are talking about one of our favorite topics, a publishing hoax. And we were talking about it with one of our beloved friends of the show, Adrian Daub. We talked with Adrian in a couple of bonus episodes recently about Christiana F., the German version of Go Ask Alice, where in this case, it did really happen, and about Mazes and Monsters, one of my favorite little fear mongering TV movies of the Satanic panic that also happens to star Tom Hanks. This is an episode about not just any publishing hoax,

• 0:55Sarah Marshall?

  but about the fake Hitler diaries, which, for a moment, captivated a vast incredulous public. And this brings up many questions. How do you go about fabricating fake diaries? How do you do them for Hitler? And why would you? What need would this serve for the writer, for the people who need to keep the hoax going, and for the public who briefly bought it? I love a forgery story, and I love a story about the way people tell a lie, revealing the truth that they don't quite know about themselves. And this one is both. And I was so happy to have Adrian with us to talk about it.

• 1:38Sarah Marshall?

  Over in our bonus episodes, we have a fun new one for you about Pike Bracken's I Hate to Housekeep book, part of a series with our episode on the I Hate to Cook book, a couple of months ago with Sarah Archer. And this time, I get to talk about it with You're Wrong About editor Miranda Zickler, who knows all about how to keep your house clean. We're going to talk about some practical tips. And we also have a poem I wrote in the style of Sylvia Plath at Waffle House. And I promise it all fits together.

• 2:12Sarah Marshall?

  And that's about it. Here is your episode. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for braving the summer. Stay cool.

• 2:27Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we just love to talk about a hoax, and especially a publishing hoax. And today, we are talking about the Hitler Diaries with our friend Adrian Daub.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 2:43Sarah Marshall?

  Adrian, hello. I'm struck, as I always am, by the feeling that I just said your last name wrong.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  No, that's perfectly fine. There's no more right way to say my name. I have

• 2:53Speaker 01

  any pronunciation of my last name is correct.

• 2:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 2:58Sarah Marshall?

  I definitely did.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  No, no, no, you're great.

• 3:02Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. So you brought this up to me, I don't know, at some point, because we did a bonus episode on Christiana F., the real, real Go Ask Alice.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:14Sarah Marshall?

  So in classic function of kind of growing up, and I guess as a millennial, before we had the internet, I love how today, young adults are like, what did people do before the internet? And it's like, it is hard to imagine. But let me tell you, one of the big ways that information traveled was in bathroom readers. Remember these? I mean, they still exist.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:35Sarah Marshall?

  They're still around and they still work. They're like, you know, there's like the Uncle John's bathroom reader that has like 800 volumes. But I remember reading a little squib about like, you know, one time, there was someone had this hoax where they were like, hey, I discovered the Diaries of Adolf Hitler. And it was like this huge thing. And everyone was so excited. And then it turned out to not be real. And I remember thinking back on it, this feeling of like relief, because I think I was very big on Indiana Jones and or just on the Raiders of the Lost Ark specifically.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:06Sarah Marshall?

  It's called Raiders of the Lost Ark. Once you get over 35, you can't name a movie correctly to save your life. It's a disease, really. And I had this feeling that just like, if we actually published the actual Diaries of Hitler, that would be too creepy to withstand. And so it was just like, oh, thank God, it was just some guy just made them up. But then, in the way of facts you encounter in a pre-internet world, you have no way of following through on it. And so you just kind of Never follow through on it. So I'm really excited to get the story about it from you because I'm very curious, like, who did this? Why did they do this? How much money can you make doing this?

• 4:48Sarah Marshall?

  In what year? And like, what, you know, what are the motivations? And how does this compare also to the fake trauma memoir, which is kind of what we've mostly talked about on the show to this point?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are all great questions. It turns out, I mean, just a spoiler alert, you can make a ton of money on it. And you can then have that money never be found.

• 5:07Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no, just like D.B. Cooper.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  There is, yes, there is a, an element of an enduring mystery here.

• 5:13Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no, wait, we famously did find his money. Well, you know.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just didn't find him.

• 5:18Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly. Yes, exactly.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:21Sarah Marshall?

  So when, where are you taking us to in terms of place and time? Where are we?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the whole story will occupy basically the second half of the 1970s.

• 5:31Sarah Marshall?

  Alrighty, it's a good half.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  And then a beginning of, the beginning of the 1980s. The Hitler diaries have a long prehistory, which is part of how the hoax kind of didn't get discovered right away. But, you know, average consumers and the writers of the bathroom book that you read would have likely become aware of this in April, 1983, when the German magazine Der Stern, which is the same magazine, by the way, that broke the Christiana F. story, you know, just three years prior.

• 6:05Sarah Marshall?

  Uh huh. They're doing good work, I guess.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  They do a lot of good work. And they're, they're huge into these kind of investigative pieces. And they announced that they were in possession of Hitler's secret diaries. And they have this massive press conference, April 25th, 1983.

• 6:20Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  With this massive stack of newly discovered.

• 6:24Sarah Marshall?

  They're like, look at this. It's a massive stack.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:26Sarah Marshall?

  It can't be fake if it's a lot of papers.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  This, this is a theme that will come back up that people basically will be like, well, there's a lot, the mass quantity will sort of be why this got as far as it did in the first place, in the sense that like, no one read the damn things all the way through.

• 6:43Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah. Like the Pentagon Papers.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And well, also it's not typed, right? It's in this like very inscrutable script.

• 6:51Sarah Marshall?

  Like Hitler dots his eyes with little hearts. I would never have thought that.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Who knew? Yeah. And then the other thing is that, that, that basically the idea that like someone would be maniacal enough to fake what I think in the end amounted to 62 volumes just seemed like a lot, you know?

• 7:09Sarah Marshall?

  That is often the argument made against something being fake. And there's like a new YouTube channel that I love so much called Torres Cabinet of Curiosities, where it's like sort of investigating a lot of different stories like this, where there's like just an incredibly large document where you're like, well, how could this be just one person's obsession? You know, and the host, a couple of times, I think, has been like, well, you know, autistic people really like to write hundreds and hundreds of pages about things sometimes. I'm like, not saying that that's the case here, but I think one of the interesting things about these stories

• 7:52Sarah Marshall?

  is that people, to quote Eve Kososki Seguik, are different from each other. One of the great

• 7:58Speaker 01

  It's a great line.

• 7:59Sarah Marshall?

  Products of academia, that line.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Axiomatic. Yes.

• 8:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And we have different motives when we go about creating our hoaxes. So I think looking at, at a story like this, or any kind of story really, and being like, well, I don't understand the human motives that would cause someone to do this, or I would never write something that long. So it has to be real. It's like, well, you wouldn't, but somebody would.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's interesting that you bring up autism, because I think in, in the end, it's a little hard to know why anyone in this story does anything. But my read, after having spent quite a lot of time with both the hoaxer and the hoaxies over the last couple of weeks, my sense was something different, which is that it is the most 1980s thing imaginable. It is someone who has overpromised and then now has to deliver and wants more money and therefore ends up being like, fuck, I gotta write another one of these things.

• 8:55Sarah Marshall?

  I guess it's better than Jeanne Bons.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:57Sarah Marshall?

  Only in some senses.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Well, yes, it's, I mean, in some way, they are exactly that, right? It's, it's for me as a literary scholar, it's hard not to think that the extremely overworked and exhausted Hitler we meet in the diaries might be a self-portrait of the man who, as you say, comes home from the pub and has to like, fuck, I gotta do another one of these, you know?

• 9:19Sarah Marshall?

  Another Hitler diaries, yeah. And it's, I, I mean.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm very excited to learn about this person and like what the original goal was and if, if it perhaps got away from its creator at a certain point. This also reminds me, the sort of American corollary I can think of to this is Clifford Irving and the fake Howard Hughes memoir.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yes, Howard Hughes, that's right.

• 9:42Sarah Marshall?

  Is an incredibly ballsy one because in this case, I think it was going towards publication while Howard Hughes was alive.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:49Sarah Marshall?

  And then he was like, excuse me, I didn't write a memoir. It's like, what were you, were you assuming that Howard Hughes just like won't hear about it if you publish a memoir posing as him? All right. I mean, look, he's, he's got his feet in tissue boxes, but he can still watch TV.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He's like, I, it juke me right out of my Kleenex boxes, you guys.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Even though there is no Howard Hughes here to, could have been like, point of order, I did not write this. The, the, the actual hoax basically runs for a best two weeks.

• 10:28Sarah Marshall?

  That's still pretty good, honestly.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  On April 28th, 1983, we get the first issue of Deschamps, publishing the diaries with selections and starting like this bidding war.

• 10:39Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  All these various companies. So there's gonna be, you know, Newsweek wants it, the London Times, Rupert Murdoch's huge into it, uh, French papers, Spanish papers.

• 10:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Which, by the way, is what, is what you did at the time, if you were positioning something to be a bestseller often, or a publisher would, would sometimes work with it. Well, in this case, they were, um, it was being shopped, but sometimes a publisher, I think, would also place excerpts with a newspaper and you would serialize a, a big upcoming nonfiction book so people would get a little taste of it, which I think is a very smart model.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, with this one, I think the, the idea was also. It really was.

• 11:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, like an absolute bombshell.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Well, that but also like, a lot of the diary ends up being just like extremely pedantic and pedestrian stuff.

• 11:26Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, fun. Okay.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  And so my sense is that they never thought, hey, we can just sell this as a book. It would always have to be excerpt.

• 11:33Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Right. Like, a lot of it is just like, mind-numbingly boring, which was by design.

• 11:40Sarah Marshall?

  I love the idea of readers being like, Hitler is so dull.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:44Sarah Marshall?

  Because, as you know, probably, one of my least favorite things is this idea that there's a mystique around evil, or that the ability to destroy human life makes people more powerful or exciting. And it's like, no, they're like, not only does it not do any of that, but also like, some of the most destructive people in history are just like, really embarrassing.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so by May 6, 1983, news breaks that the diaries are fake. Basically, the competition to their stand had immediately sort of clocked, like, this is weird. This is hinky. And the magazine's publisher said, like, well, obviously, we'll have this submitted to various archives to get the binding and the paper analyzed. And the verdict comes back and they're like, yeah, that's modern paper. That binding isn't right. And the whole thing falls apart.

• 12:33Sarah Marshall?

  Turns out you should try harder when you do that type of thing.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  And then, of course, everyone sort of starts looking for who did this. And maybe I'll, just in setting the scene for you, in Germany in 1983, there is a very, there's a very funny reason why the hoaxer didn't necessarily think this was gonna happen, right? Which is, he thought, well, gee, where am I gonna find, the best hoax, the best fakes, right, are done using real materials, right?

• 13:01Sarah Marshall?

  Right. We know this from art forgery.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? Where you go into a, let's say, a nice library with old holdings, and you cut out the empty pages and then fill them. That's sort of like, that's the hardest stuff.

• 13:13Sarah Marshall?

  That's clever. Don't do that, kids.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yes, don't do it.

• 13:15Sarah Marshall?

  But you know, if you need to make a quick few million dollars, I don't know, maybe, you know, think about it.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  But you can't do that for 62 volumes of a diary.

• 13:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's a lot of paper.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  So he's like, huh, I wonder, so I can't use modern paper. Where could I go for pre-modern paper and binding?

• 13:32Sarah Marshall?

  I have no idea. Where can he go?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  The communist block.

• 13:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, of course. And is, and is he correct in assuming that their paper is older?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 13:44Sarah Marshall?

  All right. Why, why does he think that?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I think it's because generally the vibe.

• 13:49Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, everything here looks kind of dingy. So I bet your paper is from

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:53Sarah Marshall?

  40 years ago.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. The whole thing has a vibe of like the 1950s never ended.

• 13:59Sarah Marshall?

  All right.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Um, and, and so fair enough, but

• 14:02Sarah Marshall?

  Based on your fashions. Sorry, ladies.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  But yeah, then, then it emerges like, no, of course, like they're like, they're like, we have paper. We're not, we're not, you know, uncontacted tribe over here. What the fuck? Uh, and so

• 14:16Sarah Marshall?

  Big slam on East German paper supplies.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Turns out there is, there are, um, brightening agents in it that sort of were only designed in the, that were only sort of invented in the 50s. The binding is from the 60s. Uh, and so, yeah, the whole thing just falls apart immediately.

• 14:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I gotta say, I love this type of thing.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  It's great. And then, uh, so, so basically the, the verdict is such that it's not like there is like a big debate. And then like eventually people come around to the idea that this is fake. Like from one moment, like the, the press conference by, I think the National Archives in, in Koblenz in Germany is basically, this is a fake. They're not like, there are, here are some reasons we have to believe that this might not be authentic. They're like, oh, it's a fake. So like this goes from a hundred to zero in the space of, you know, this basically makes it across Germany at the speed of like, uh, wire services. People like being like, oh shit, this is not real.

• 15:13Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel like there are cases in which people would be less quick to test it.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:17Sarah Marshall?

  You know, but in this case, it's like, it feels like there's a lot, there's just more writing on its authenticity than on any, anything else like that.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  That's right. The publisher, you know, which again is one of Germany's premier magazines. Had done some due diligence and they'd had consulted experts to determine whether the handwriting was really Hitler's. And these experts had looked at, including really reputable historians of the of the Third Reich, had said that, yes, in comparing the diaries to other known documents having been written by Hitler, they appear to be by the same hand.

• 15:55Sarah Marshall?

  This is like worthy of its own episode, but I get the sense that handwriting identification is a lot more wishy washy as a forensic science than a lot of us would like.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Well, in hindsight, these people were correct.

• 16:05Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, really?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  It's just that they were not.

• 16:08Sarah Marshall?

  Did he like cut out a bunch of letters and photocopy them?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  No, that would have been too much work. They were comparing the Hitler diaries to other forgeries by the same guy.

• 16:19Sarah Marshall?

  It's affinity fraud, kind of. I love it.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  It was just very, very funny. So they were not wrong. They were like, well, this is the same, the same handwriting as this. And that was true. It was just not Hitler's.

• 16:30Sarah Marshall?

  Was it just that it was internally consistent? Or were there other samples that he'd forged somehow?

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yes. So that's part of what what let this hoax attain this kind of scale that it did. The publication of the Hitler diaries was in some way an accident of a con that was not run on this magazine or on the broader public at all, but on basically people who traded and collected Nazi memorabilia, right?

• 16:57Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I'm a fan of that con because God knows that's, you know.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:04Sarah Marshall?

  You know, yeah, I want to, I want to con those people too.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, basically, the forger, who we will now meet, Konrad Kuyal.

• 17:14Sarah Marshall?

  Hello, I'm going to call you Connie.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Connie, that is exactly what his contact at Der Stehen would call him, Connie. And Connie had been flooding the zone with Nazi related shit since the early 70s, meaning that like he had really contaminated the the kind of historical document base.

• 17:37Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Nice. It's like that kid who wrote the Scots Wikipedia page.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let me tell you a little bit about Konakuya Konny. So born in 1938. Well, so I was gonna tell you about his childhood. I was gonna tell you about his life, except that a lot of what we know about his life appears to be made up too. So hard to tell. But what we do know is born somewhere around Dresden. He claims to have grown up in an orphanage after having been separated from his family during the bombing of Dresden. So basically, I think there's some suggestion that that's probably not true.

• 18:14Sarah Marshall?

  Because again, it's like, bad things happen to kids all the time. And sometimes they even happen during historically significant events. But like, you know, if someone has already made up a lot of other stuff, you're like, was it a historically significant event that hurt you this time as well?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So this tendency to, like, he clearly had a traumatic childhood and traumatic life in the first part of it. And the ability or the willingness to attach that to world historic events sort of runs through it as a through line. Yeah.

• 18:46Sarah Marshall?

  And I guess that by living through a period when those events are happening, your life is inevitably shaped by them, but maybe not as directly as you feel like would explain the way that you are sometimes.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, think about the fact that, right, like, born 1938, he was seven years old when the Second World War ended, right? Like, that's a particular generational experience of a world that is completely going to shit, right? Everything is, you know, the cities become unrecognizable during, you know, the first years where you really sort of perceive the world around you. He's too young to have been really socialized into the Nazi state. I mean, he would have done maybe like one year of schooling before, before the Allies conquered Berlin, right? So really, someone who sort of watched a world disappear without really having that world, seen that world for himself, right?

• 19:40Sarah Marshall?

  And who was born into that world, interestingly, yeah, at a time when it was projected to last forever.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we should say, so Hitler, for him, for instance, would have been a figure. That by the time he really could sort of engage with him was no longer around.

• 19:59Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  But who had clearly shaped pretty much as much as a person can shape the world in which you grow up, right? In, you know, what is, what is, you know, Eastern Germany in, in the late 30s, early 40s, Dresden is in East Germany. So he, he grew up in East Germany, fled to the West in the 50s, probably after a first arrest for some kind of forgery. As a teenager, he seems to have created phony autographs for various East German politicians and sold them.

• 20:29Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, anyone dorky enough to buy an autograph from an East German politician, probably, I, I'm a, whatever.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, victimless crime, victimless crime.

• 20:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then he settles in southwest Germany, the area near the Black Forest.

• 20:46Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Where the cakes are farmed.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

• 20:50Sarah Marshall?

  Gonna lasso me up a cake. That was such a silly joke. Thank you for seeing that through with me.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  It's good. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Sort of runs an art gallery and starts dealing in, yeah, these memorabilia's and.

• 21:05Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, what do you want? Judy Garland? Yeah, I can get that by Thursday.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it, it, it ends up not being East German politicians or Judy Garland. It really ends up being Nazi stuff.

• 21:16Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. And so, and he's, is he selling this like, I primarily like to a domestic market, right? People who just are like, hey, get me some Nazi stuff. I miss that.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  I would be shocked if there weren't some weird American billionaires in the, in this as well.

• 21:31Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, of course. Cause how did Lemmy get all his stuff otherwise?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  That's right. Um, but, um, yeah, he, he ripped off these rich memorabilia collectors with, let's say, a certain nostalgia for the Third Reich and its trappings, right? Like.

• 21:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Which of course a part of me is like, how could anyone ever be nostalgia? Like, I'm like, oh, my soul recoils at the very thought. It's unimaginable and surreal. And then the other part of me is like, Sarah. Plantation weddings were considered generally okay by mainstream white people in America until 2020. Like, that's how Blake Lively got married. Blake Lively.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we're importing Afrikaners. I think that plantation weddings are doing just fine in the year of the Lord 2025.

• 22:22Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, it's an excellent point. Yeah. But now you might get slightly embarrassed on TikTok and get negative Yelp reviews at your Mercedes dealership that you run. So when you think about it, the hasn't woke culture destroyed democracy? This has been my TED Talk.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically, he, he, so he's running in these kind of circles that are never officially sort of far right, but that's certainly seem to harbor fascinations verging on sympathy for, for the Nazis. And it is for them that he starts creating the very first fake diary in 1975.

• 23:04Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  And according to everyone, including himself, it was supposed to be a one-off. He sells it to a German industrialist.

• 23:11Sarah Marshall?

  Is it in the spirit of like, I'll make you fuckers a whole fucking Hitler diary, you fucks?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's hard to tell. There's a museum of all his fakes now in his hometown, which, which does very, very good work, but I haven't been in a while. My impression is that in the beginning, it was really about Hitler paintings.

• 23:31Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of fake nudes of Eva Braun that is actually Kuya's then, I think, wife.

• 23:38Sarah Marshall?

  That's a weird, do you think that he was, okay, do you think he was like, honey, I want to paint a nude of you just for fun? Or do you think he was like, listen, babe?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  I think she was in on it.

• 23:51Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, I like that. That's more fun.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  She, she may have helped him disappear a bunch of the money. So like, we, it's hard to prove any of this because like, people were aware when, when the, when this whole thing blew up, that they, you know, that they needed to say certain things to stay out of, or not out of prison, but to shorten their stay at the Who's Gao. But I think that she must have known. I mean, she would have recognized herself for one thing.

• 24:15Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's, it's a good point. I mean, in seriousness, I feel like, I, you know, I get giggly when I'm talking about anything gory or uncomfortable. And to me, this is like, A, genuinely funny, but B, uncomfortable in the sense of like,

• 24:32Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like it's good to bilk people who want Nazi memorabilia because they deserve it. But also, like, I suppose there is an argument to be made that, like, any fun at the expense of Hitler is wrong. Like, I disagree, but I don't know. What do you, what do you think?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  I mean, it does feel like you're ripping off some of the most deserving people on the planet. I think the problem becomes that this stuff starts shaping how people look back at that period. And the diaries are in some way far worse than like a nude, a fake nude of Eva Braun.

• 25:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's just kind of funny.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Like, on the one hand, I don't think there's any mystery about the political persuasion of the people he's ripping off. At the same time, the fact that basically they're purchasing, like, porn from him, like, it's probably not an accident either. Their fascination with, you know, the Nazis is essentially pornographic. They are, and the diaries will have a lot of that, too. Like, there'll just be a lot about, like, Hitler's indigestion and, like, yeah, like, how he had a fight with Eva, whatever. It's this kind of voyeuristic fascination.

• 25:37Sarah Marshall?

  I hope there's hemorrhoid stuff.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know if there is. They are now all digitized. I could have read them all, but I was like, I don't have time for this.

• 25:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, you know, I wouldn't inflict that on you, to be honest.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  I read a bunch, but not enough to, no hemorrhoids where I, where I read, I have to admit.

• 25:53Sarah Marshall?

  But you can't swear that there's not a hemorrhoid in the whole thing.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:58Sarah Marshall?

  It's promising.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Selling fakes to these people turns out to be extremely easy, but there are a couple of surprising challenges that emerge when you do that. So just if anyone here is looking to break into that market, be warned.

• 26:12Sarah Marshall?

  Alrighty.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  One is, right, that, like, in some way, provenance is the name of the game. You have to figure out, like, a plausible way of explaining how you got this thing, right? Like, why did no one else have this?

• 26:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that is a big one.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  The other thing is that, of course, the number one source for shit like this were the, either the old Nazis themselves, or their next of kin, right? Like, someone like Göring or Himmler had, were dead, but like, their, you know, their wives, their, you know, their widows and their-

• 26:43Sarah Marshall?

  You're like, "Well, I was visiting a charming country estate in Argentina, and I happened to open the nightstand drawer."

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so you have to figure out a way why the Hitler diaries wouldn't have gone through those people, right? And we have diaries, genuine diaries, for some of the big Nazis. They had entered sort of the scholarship and the, and the broader public domain a lot earlier, right? Goebbels's diary, for instance. Yeah, which are horrible, but like, but Kuyao is coming to the party a little late.

• 27:14Sarah Marshall?

  Like, everything has been discovered by now, is the sense?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so the, but he keeps being able to like, connect with, with these amazing shadowy collectors who've been holding on forever. But with the diary, he decides to go a different direction, which is important. What he claims is that, that he got them from a place that, again, for West Germans in the 1970s, seemed like a time machine, namely East Germany, right? Where he was from. And he said, "I have..." So, in 1945, the story goes, a single plane took over from, took off from the Reich Chancellery in Berlin to try and stash a bunch of important Nazi shit somewhere in the Czech Republic, what is today the Czech Republic.

• 27:58Sarah Marshall?

  They're like, "We've got Hitler's diary here, and it's only got one of those flimsy little locks that anyone can break open."

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And so, that flight crashed somewhere in, you know, rural East Germany.

• 28:10Sarah Marshall?

  Of course.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  That, that appears to be real.

• 28:12Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, that's pretty cool.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  It could have been anything, right?

• 28:15Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I mean, I'm sure it's, yeah, some, just some boring junk, but-

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe it was even money or something like that.

• 28:22Sarah Marshall?

  But you never know. Let's make Harrison Ford's reanimated carcass do another Indiana Jones movie about it.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, but, but Kuyao's idea is, you know, what if that had a bunch of cool stuff on it?

• 28:36Sarah Marshall?

  He could have just invented Indiana Jones. He came so close.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, picked it clean. They picked it clean.

• 28:42Sarah Marshall?

  Of course they did.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  And then it sort of circulates in East Germany. The idea really is that like, yeah, there is a, it's sort of, it's been around in East Germany, but that's why West Germans haven't heard of it. It's behind the iron curtain.

• 28:55Sarah Marshall?

  Of course. They're like, ah, where all the good stuff is, of course.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  But Kuyao has a brother in East Germany. That this part is true. And he's a high ranking East German general. That part is not true. His brother works like for the railroad or something. He's gonna smuggle this shit out. He's gonna collect it over there and then smuggle it out across the iron curtain. And, and then his brother is gonna sell it all, right? So that's just cloak and dagger enough, you know, to kind of give these things both kind of degree of plausibility and to give them kind of an exciting legend, right? Like, not only are these exciting objects, forbidden objects, but like the way you're getting them is like clandestine and kind of cool.

• 29:35Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. Is there a sense of contentiousness between East and West Germany about who sort of brings forth the deepest truth about the past or something like that?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, there definitely is.

• 29:50Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Both German states after the war present themselves as having dealt with the Nazi past better than the other. That is how they legitimate themselves. The others are basically continuing the mistakes of the Nazi years. In the case of West Germany, this is done by talking about totalitarianism, right? To say, look, you guys were Nazis, then you went out and became communists. So you're still totalitarians, right? You still wear funny uniforms and march in lockstep. Not sure how much you've really changed. It also was done by blaming Prussia basically for German militarism, which is something that the Western Allies did very, very early on, because Prussia was in East Germany, basically.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  So to sort of be like, well, the real root of Nazism is over there on the other side of the iron curtain. And the East German government sort of said like, well, no, the Nazis are in the West on the mere technicality that a bunch of West German politicians were former Nazis, right? Whereas the East Germans had pretty, at least at the higher, at the upper echelons of power, pretty radically solved their Nazi problem. Let's put it that way. This was during the height of Stalinism. So if you wanted to get rid of people, pretty easy, right? In Germany, you had all these people who like, all these industrialists, right? Who had made tons of money through the Nazis,

• 31:15Speaker 01

  were now still very rich and very powerful. You had all these politicians who sort of would mumble, mumble through their, through their Nazi past. There are statistics about what percentage of judges and university professors by like the 1960s, early 1970s, had had the exact same job under Nazism. Think of all the policemen and that kind of thing, right? Like, was this person guarding trains to the camps like 20 years ago? And now he's like writing me a fucking traffic ticket? It's kind of crazy to think about. So that was the East German case for why the West Germans were actually just a continuation of Nazism by other means. So this is very, very contentious. And the idea that

• 31:59Speaker 01

  these diaries might not see the light of day in East Germany didn't seem totally far fetched.

• 32:04Sarah Marshall?

  And I, and I get this because I think that this is how kind of the rest of the United States uses the American South is like, well, we're not that bad. And it's like, no, I think we are that bad. We just have distributed it differently.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so Kuya's grift, he makes a wonderful living, busy grifting these fasch curious, in whatever, however you want to nuance that curiosity, it's unclear, right? Like, do they want Hitler back? Or do they just like the greatness? Like, I always think of that, I always like, I always think of that scene in Succession with that weird far-right politician that they're auditioning for president. Remember this?

• 32:40Sarah Marshall?

  I don't think I got that far, but tell me about it.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And, and basically, Tom Wamsgans is like, well, did you ever read Mein Kampf? A couple of times. And, and he's like, well,

• 32:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's right. Yes, I remember that.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Any, were there like some Easter eggs you didn't pick up on the first time?

• 32:57Sarah Marshall?

  That was really kind of a pretty great moment for Tom.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's great. And, and this is sort of like these, these guys are like, oh, the grandeur of the period. Uh, okay. Say more about that. I'd rather not.

• 33:08Sarah Marshall?

  And it's like, no, really? Say, say so much more. And I don't, I guess, and I don't believe that, by the way, when people like, you know, the, the, from an aesthetic perspective, and it's like, dude, there are, go watch Spartacus. There are so many, so many aesthetics through time that don't involve genocide, you know?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so it's through this group of wealthy collectors, basically, Ku Yau cat is the, becomes the dog that catches the car.

• 33:42Sarah Marshall?

  And it feels like the dog is always like, I, I, I never planned for it to happen. And now that it has happened, I wish it hadn't.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I'm sure that that's how he felt about it, looking back. I, I think he had a wonderful grift going. But then one of the targets of his grift does the worst possible thing and puts him in touch with the media. What had happened is the following. We now meet our second protagonist. Ged Hydaman is this Uber journalist, uh, working for Deshdown.

• 34:10Sarah Marshall?

  He rollerblades to work every morning to get in more time for journalism.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Oh, no, he's, he, this guy goes hard. I mean, it's just,

• 34:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  He, he, he's this kind of like macho journalist, kind of war reporter slash investigative kind of gumshoe. Right? He's their kind of bloodhound. He, he does, he runs down every single.

• 34:34Sarah Marshall?

  That is a great type of journalist.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:36Sarah Marshall?

  You know, more needed now than ever. Be sexy. Be a journalist.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so this guy really, he's, he's well known and he's, he's highly respected by his, uh, by his colleagues and in, the editor, among the editorial staff, among the publishing, uh, publishers of this magazine. He both appears to have been a pretty good reporter and he definitely played a really good reporter on TV, right? Like, he just looks the part.

• 35:02Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Like, there's a, there's an incident, when is this? In 1970, Black September, where like, the PLO tried to take over power in Jordan and a bunch of people sort of are taken hostage or sort of like get caught in between the fighting. And this guy sort of like gets a bunch of hostages out of one of the hotels and out of Jordan and stuff like that. Like, he's,

• 35:22Sarah Marshall?

  Like real old school journalism hostage.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:28Sarah Marshall?

  Hostic related stuff.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's the kind of thing, it's also the kind of thing that today you wouldn't have money for anymore. I feel like he, I think he spent like a year just traveling South America, being like, hey, have you guys ever heard of this guy, Dr. Mengele? Anyone?

• 35:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, I was, I was listening to the audiobook of It as I do in the springtime sometimes, you know? And then it opens with, well, it opens several times, but one of its openings is about a character named Adrian Mellon, who's come to the cursed town of Derry to write about the canal for New England Byways Magazine, who financed for like weeks and weeks of him researching a canal in a small town in New England. And it's like, the weirdest part of this is that it's true. Like, this is the single most unbelievable part of this whole book, probably, to like a 20 year olds reading it today. Like, because if I were in college now, I think I, because I think I was young at the very sort of tail end of this type of thing. But like, you know, they don't have

• 36:27Sarah Marshall?

  in-flight magazines anymore. You just have to sit there reading the safety instructions. If you didn't bring anything, they're like, no, fuck you.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or the in-flight catalog or something. Yeah.

• 36:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But yeah, I guess the sort of print, not just print journalism, any type of journalism takes a lot of resources to be able to do this type of thing. And the fact that people aren't up to sort of, you know, daring do journalism today, maybe as much as it seems like they used to be, isn't because people have gotten any less gritty, but because we don't pay for them to do this type of thing.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of Heidemann's obsessions becomes kind of tackling Nazi stories.

• 37:04Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  He becomes kind of a collector of Nazi things himself, in a really weird way.

• 37:09Sarah Marshall?

  Is he like a custodian of this stuff?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  So in 1973, Heidemann, who is, the standard is based in Hamburg, so this is by the sea, had decided to buy Hermann Göring's motor yacht, Karen II. Yeah, for 160,000 Deutschmark, which is quite a bit of money.

• 37:26Sarah Marshall?

  You didn't say Karen, did you? The Karen too?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, C A R I N. Yeah, that's, that is his wi- that was his wife, I believe.

• 37:34Sarah Marshall?

  It's, you know what? It's still Karen. It's still the Karen too.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's like she, this yacht would like to speak with the manager, please. Um, yeah. And basically, um, it proved ruinously expensive. Uh, it would have taken a quarter of a million marks to get it refurbished.

• 37:49Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  In terms of collections, by the way, Heidemann was also dating Göring's daughter, Eda, at the time. So like, he's like collecting people and stuff?

• 37:59Sarah Marshall?

  See, that's, that's weird, you know, where you're like-

• 38:02Speaker 01

  It's weird.

• 38:03Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, and I get that like a lot of people are walking around who just happen to be the children of prominent Nazis at this point, to be honest. And you end up, but it's like, you, you gotta have a work-life balance. You gotta not date into your work-life, ideally. That's weird. I feel weird. I feel weird.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  It's really, I mean, I don't know how she would have felt. I gotta, I gotta be honest.

• 38:27Sarah Marshall?

  I'm uncomfortable.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  It's like, are you just dating because of my dad?

• 38:31Sarah Marshall?

  You know, as surely so many women were thinking at this time and place, are you just dating me to get my Nazi memorabilia?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  That's right. But anyway, so he, he completely was over his head financially with this stupid yacht. And anyway, so like then, as you might have predicted, he tries to unload it.

• 38:49Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  With the same industrialist that, that Kujao has been-

• 38:53Sarah Marshall?

  Charming yacht. Historic previous owner.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Well, no, he needs to basically deal with the same set of weird-

• 39:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  -collectors as Kujao.

• 39:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Okay. Oh, this is a meet cute for the ages, huh?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  That's right. It's to them that they're like, yeah, we'll look into the boat, but hey, have you seen these Hitler diaries?

• 39:13Sarah Marshall?

  And he's like, I am not letting my boat be upstaged.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  So a little bit more about, about Heidemann. So Heidemann is about six, is I think six years older than Kujao. So mid, mid 50s, mid 50s at the time, right? When the diaries come out, but kind of same generation, but same historic frame of reference when it came to the Nazis is Kuia, right? They'd been kids, they'd lived with images, but most of their socialization was post-war, right? So Hitler is this kind of image for them, one that dominated their childhoods, but one that was kind of mythical already by the time they were even sort of young adults.

• 39:50Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  But through his former girlfriend, of course, Heidemann, was connected to people who were either flesh and blood real Nazis, or neo-Nazis, or related to either of those two things, right? Ed Agüing, for instance, was apparently a pretty frequent guest in Bayreuth. That's the home of the Wagner clan. So Richard Wagner, the composer, and I'll make a quick plug if you want to hear more about about Richard Wagner and his weird clan of fascist weebs. You can check out an episode that Maureen Donigan and I did over on In Bed With The Right.

• 40:27Sarah Marshall?

  Wonderful show, wonderful co-host of yours.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  She is amazing. And Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifred, may or may not have been Hitler's lover. So like, you know, there's a lot, a lot of connections there. And would have met, I know, God, would have met there with sort of Ilse Hess, who's Rudolf Hess's widow. So Rudolf Hess was Hitler's second-in-command, who, under mysterious circumstances, like parachuted into England for some reason.

• 40:53Sarah Marshall?

  All right.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, she, she knew sort of the widows of various other Nazi grandees, but she also like would have known the head of the post-war Nazi party and Oswald Mosley.

• 41:05Sarah Marshall?

  Do you think someday there'll be like a market for like, this is the bra that Marjorie Taylor Greene wore when she shouted that time?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Oh, God. I mean, I'm afraid so, right? I mean, like, it's just.

• 41:21Sarah Marshall?

  Wait, and I interrupted you. There was another, another person, right?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Oh, and they also, she also would have rubbed shoulders with this, with the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Basically, Heidemann collected things and people connected to the Nazis, right?

• 41:34Sarah Marshall?

  Is it worth it?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And he did this kind of blockbuster, almost adventure journalism, I would say, right? Where he gives kind of where the performance of it.

• 41:43Sarah Marshall?

  Where he goes to cocktail parties with a bunch of old Nazis.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he became the personal secretary to some high ranking SS general who was writing his memoir. And so they would like visit like various absolute war criminals to like interview them to for these memoirs. But then Heidemann also seems to have collected information for the Mossad during the same thing. Like it's unclear whether he was undercover or not, but like it's this very strange thing where like on the one hand, the fascination appears to be real, but it also it does have a have an oppositional side to it. Right? Like.

• 42:22Sarah Marshall?

  Was he ever like, hey, that guy you're looking for, I'm actually having lunch with him.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Well, he definitely tried. I mean, that's clearly why he was looking for Mengela. He was not looking, he was looking to get an interview and then he was likely going to turn him in. Right? Like it's, it's, it's a weird mixture. Yeah.

• 42:39Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Ideally, you do the, you do a heat where you sit down for lunch and you get your interview and then you, and then you turn him in.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so basically through this industrialist, he gets the first volume of these diaries and he decides he needs to meet the dealer that this guy got it from. He wants to find these. And to my mind, this is where things start going off the rails. Because two things happen. One, Kuyao eventually agrees to meet with him and to sort of say like, yes, I have more, I can probably get more. But it's difficult enough to find this guy that basically the, again, the bloodhound dynamics, the bloodhound dimension of, of Heidemann's personality sort of gets activated.

• 43:29Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  He's like, the fact that it is so difficult to find is exciting to him. Like he's in it for the hunt now. And, and so he kind of doesn't do his due diligence when he actually starts ending up with these books. And, and Kuyao is very, very good at stringing him along.

• 43:43Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Now, in a bizarre twist, and I should plug this very quickly here, these two men's phone conversations were recorded.

• 43:51Sarah Marshall?

  What?

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Heidemann is a full on, full blooded reporter. So he records a lot of these conversations. And the magazine ended up with most of these tapes. There's a German language podcast about this in which you can listen to them.

• 44:06Sarah Marshall?

  I can't believe I forgot to learn German.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  The impression you get is like, honestly, of an addict and his dealer.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Right? This is a guy who is addicted to the chase, to the thrill of getting more of this. And then you get this guy who very, very deliberately feeds him only what he needs to, right? And it's stuff like, you know, he'll call him up and be like, hi Connie, like, do we know anything more about the new volume? And he said, and Kuya will say, oh, you know, so I, I got the signal from my brother, but I think the truck didn't come. Or I think they were too scared and then they drove off again. It's supposed to be hidden in like, I think, um, the like underneath pianos and then like someone at the.

• 44:50Sarah Marshall?

  This is like how romance scams work, you know, where you're like, well, I can't, I tried to visit you, but I got stuck.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:57Sarah Marshall?

  And Heathrow and my ankle sprained and I have to go check in on my weasel farm. So could you send me another $7,000?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so basically it is a, it is a kind of homo social romance, right? He, as he, as, as you did, Heidemann starts calling Kuya Connie, although he doesn't know his real name. He thinks his name is Conrad Fisher, um, but still he calls him Connie. And, and basically there's just this constant back and forth of frustration and discovery. Right? Cause Kuya does deliver.

• 45:32Sarah Marshall?

  And is he like purchasing them as he's getting each volume or how is this working?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Well, no, I mean, Kuya has to write every single one of these. Some of this is very, very clearly a clever grifter, as you say, running kind of a Romeo scam, right? Like, oh, not today, honey, but, you know, but on the other hand, it's also that the poor man now has to fucking write all these things.

• 45:55Sarah Marshall?

  Makes Gone Girl look like amateur hour.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, like the, the amount of black tea he has to use to stain all the pages is like insane. He must've gone through just like box after box of Darjeeling or something. He's in over his head. He, this guy is kinda gonna suck him dry.

• 46:11Sarah Marshall?

  Well, why does he keep saying he's found more Hitler diaries? Can't he be like, nope, that's it. Hitler diary train is leaving the station. Qiu qiu.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Well, because he keeps getting paid more and more money.

• 46:23Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  So initially, I think Buys the first volume for himself.

• 46:28Sarah Marshall?

  Just like Amadeus.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then it's exactly like that. He, and then he, and then eventually he cuts in the higher ups at the magazine. The higher ups at the magazine are like, get this for us. This is the scoop of the century. We trust you. And again, partly based on the fact that like, historians say, well, everything in this diary checks out. That's because Ku Yau was using a chronicle of the Nazi years in order to write it.

• 46:55Sarah Marshall?

  There you go.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  And so even though there are some real red flags, basically the, the stand can't stop giving this guy money. And, and he's basically, well, my brother's out now. And then two weeks later, he'll be like, oh, my brother found another person who apparently was able to get a couple of additional volumes of the diary, but he wants more money. And so then they're gonna give him more money for those. And they're like, well, you promised us four, but there's only two here. He's like, oh yeah, no, you know, and like, he sounds like genuinely.

• 47:25Sarah Marshall?

  Got stuck in customs, man.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he sounds genuinely tired on the phone. You're like, well, I bet. I'm sure you were up all night making this thing.

• 47:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. God. And it's like, you know, you could, I don't know, find someone else to help you, like hire a grad student or something.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it becomes, but it is this thing where like the difficulty and the frustration of getting these things becomes kind of a story in itself, right? This is, remember, this is a journalist who kind of loves watching himself journalist, basically, right? Like, there's a kind of setting yourself, like staging, there's a, there's a certain degree of self staging in his sort of, in his journalism. Like you want to be seen doing these things. And so he just loves the story. He loves the fact that like, it's being smuggled across the iron curtain. He loves that like, it went down in a plane. It's that he's getting From a high ranking general of the right like

• 48:19Sarah Marshall?

  Because you're like the story of how I'm getting this story is such a great story that I am the star of.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so eventually the stand will fork over 9.6 million marks for these things.

• 48:30Sarah Marshall?

  What's the, what's the dollar equivalent of that?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  I'd have to look it up, but it's something like five to six million dollars at the time, I think.

• 48:37Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my God. Why do they have that kind of money?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  It's really intense. Uh, I mean, basically, uh, the, the big publishing house that owns them will like be left holding the bag.

• 48:48Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know if there should be that kind of money involved in the truth, you know?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  I know. So the other que, the other interesting thing is remember that, that Hydaman had serious money troubles on account of the boat purchase that went.

• 49:03Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yes, that's right. The, the money pit, if you will.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  After this whole thing blows up, both Kuyao and Hydaman will go to jail. And the reason Hydaman will go to jail is that there is a pretty strong suspicion on the part of the magazine that he skimmed off the top.

• 49:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  There is a lot of suggestion that he, or there, there's a lot of suspicion after this whole thing breaks that part of why he keeps it going is that with each transaction, he skims off the top.

• 49:28Sarah Marshall?

  That makes sense.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  That's never proven, but like where this money goes.

• 49:32Sarah Marshall?

  This is more like casino than I expected when I made that reference.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but also like the, the question of where the money is at the end is a really, really good one. And it's never found.

• 49:44Sarah Marshall?

  No. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's on that plane.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It crashed in the South American jungle or something like that.

• 49:53Sarah Marshall?

  It's buried next to the axe from the Hinterkaifac murders.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there is this kind of addiction thing going on where he really sort of needs this to be, this is his fix at this point.

• 50:04Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And he's also just literally addicted to money because he's bought a yacht. It's all, it's like, what happened with that? You know, is your wife like, honey, did you go overboard at the auction today? You're like, well.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  And so they're keeping this all very, very mum as well. They don't want anyone to know that they have this. But there were reasons to think that these were fake, right? Like it's not, Kuia is not actually that great at this.

• 50:36Sarah Marshall?

  Such as?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  The very famous example is that once the Hitler diaries are presented, anyone, they're like, it clearly is supposed to say AH on the front, but it does say FH, which in German, in sort of Gothic script can look a little similar, but it's very clearly an F.

• 50:52Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. I love that kind of thing.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  And so like, the question is like, they're like, what the fuck does that mean? Like, the true story appears to be that Kuia couldn't find the right, what do you call that? The right?

• 51:06Sarah Marshall?

  Like stencil or whatever?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Stencil for it.

• 51:09Sarah Marshall?

  He was like, I don't think anyone will notice this. It's only on the cover page.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Well, again, like if you're selling it to some weird industrialist who's only going to show it to like his dumb fascio friends, like no problem. But yes, putting that on a fucking cover story that's going to be bought 2 million times and sold to Rupert Murdoch.

• 51:26Sarah Marshall?

  Wait, Rupert Murdoch?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's gonna be sold to Rupert Murdoch.

• 51:30Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Oh, God. Oh, that's good.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  No, just the, just the story, not the, not the diaries themselves. Yeah.

• 51:36Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, that's better. I was thinking for a second that one of the most cursed men in America had one of the most cursed objects in Europe.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  No, that'd be fun. But no, unfortunately, no.

• 51:47Sarah Marshall?

  But it, but yeah, in the spirit of a lot of great hoaxes, it feels like this is done in the spirit of like, well, I'm not trying to fool that many people. And then it gets out of hand and you're like, oh God, now I do have to fool that many people. And if I'd known I'd had to do that, I would have tried a little harder.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  And, and the other important thing to note is that like Kuia's fakes had been discovered before. No one knew who he was. No one knew where this came from, but people knew that there were fakes in circulation.

• 52:14Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, I like that.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  In 1980, two very important German historians of the Nazi period wrote this academic book about Hitler's early writings. And they relied heavily on things that they had found in private collections.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Which turned out to be more than the FDA recommended amount of kuyao.

• 52:37Sarah Marshall?

  Is technically a diary loaf.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a and and a new, the moment that was that sort of hit the popular press. Again, this down Heidemann's paper published an excerpt, including a poem that Hitler was supposed to have written in during the First World War. And then a different academic pointed out that that poem was in fact plagiarized from a 1936 poem of some other Nazi poet. So this is actually a Nazi poem that was attributed to Hitler, you know, 20 years before the beginning of the Nazi period. Right? So there were there were signs that this that that's that there was there was there were there was a bunch of bullshit in circulation.

• 53:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's amateur hour, you know, if I'm going to have the extremely famous political figure who I'm pretending to be writing as plagiarizing a poem, I would at least make it something that they would know about. Yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right. Notice also, of course, that like in the world in which Heidemann was circulating, there were a bunch of, he was friends with people who had been there. Been there for the period. And very early on, some of them were like, that doesn't really square with how I remember this. Right? But of course, everyone's also constantly lying about their role in the Nazi years. So it's like a little hard to take that seriously. Everyone's constantly whitewashing their own role in what had happened. And so basically, like, I guess people don't take it all that seriously, but there are, you know, you do not, under any circumstances, have have to hand it to SS generals. But a bunch of SS generals saying like, hey, I don't, I don't think this is right. You know, like, and and basic things where they're like, that's not how the command structure worked, you know, like, that's.

• 54:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Which is like such a such a strange situation for people. I mean, it's kind of like interesting in that sort of process that I, you know, I think Americans have to really. Think about more and more of like, how does a country recover from being overtaken by fascism? And this moment of like, people having

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:41Sarah Marshall?

  Being forced, in a sense, by this developing story to, to some extent be like, I actually did this for a living at one time. And this was not what it looked like.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, except that they are so, I mean, it's also about the epistemic collapse that goes along with, you know, something as, you know, what Hannah Arendt called the, you know, the breach in civilization with the fact that like, you didn't want to take an SS General's word for it, right? Cause like every word out of their mouth was a lie. But like, in this case, they were, they were accurately describing what had, what had, um, what had, how things worked back then, right? But normally when they're like, oh, this is how it worked back then, it would be followed by like, and that's why I didn't know anything. And I was just following orders, right?

• 55:23Sarah Marshall?

  Like the testimony at Nuremberg where you're like, wow, it's interesting how none of you.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 55:29Sarah Marshall?

  Independently conceived of a single idea, or even told other people to do stuff. Incredible.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Which is ironically exactly what Kuiper did to Hitler. I imagine this is just like, he's in a hell of his own making, right? He has to make up entry after entry after entry. And there has to be some plausibility to it. So he has to research and he has to come up with stories about, you know, Gubels and women, Eva being mad, how Hitler reacts to various important things. And one of the things that really comes through in the eventual diaries, if you click through them today online, i- is that Kuiper's Hitler is essentially two things. Everything good, he originates. He's completely in charge. He's the leader. He's completely like, he's king shit.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Anything bad, you might associate with the historic personality of Adolf Hitler, he kind of didn't know about, right?

• 56:28Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, really? All right. Well, I mean, to be fair, I feel like that was kind of his entire area. So what are we supposed to associate him with? Nice, you know, getting a large group of people in a public space without any trampling or what?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  It's bizarre, right? He, he, he's, I mean, I, I'm making it maybe I'm overstating it slightly, but you know, like the famous pogroms in 1938, like he's like, I can't believe this is happening. Like, I have to find out who's responsible. I mean, honestly.

• 56:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God. And then again, I'm like, well, Sarah, think about the way boomers post about, you know, these thirst trap TikToks about Trump, you know, where he's like an AI holding a baby.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:09Sarah Marshall?

  And you're just like, what, what is, what is with this sexualizing of, you know, the, the boringest devil?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I believe this, I, I looked yesterday at the entry for the start of World War II, where the implication very clearly is that the fake incursions by the Polish army, the Nazis basically made up this attack on a.

• 57:32Sarah Marshall?

  I didn't know that.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  On, on a radio tower in Lviv to sort of say like, now we're fighting back. We're shooting back is the famous line from, from Hitler's radio announcement.

• 57:41Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, great. Okay.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Like, this was completely, it was barely even, like, it was completely half-assed. But in the Hitler diaries.

• 57:48Sarah Marshall?

  Familiar.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Hitler we meet there, Kuyas Hitler, basically is like, I can't believe the Poles would do this to me. Basically, so he, he is just like the most.

• 57:56Sarah Marshall?

  He's just, he's just very passive and he's just, he's literally just a girl, I guess, in this depiction.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a child who wanders into the middle of a movie. Yeah.

• 58:06Sarah Marshall?

  And what is that, what is he supposed to want in this narrative? You know, why is he here? Running Germany.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a really, so there's a really interesting duality of a guy who like, is about, who knows everything and then knows nothing, right? Perfectly responsible, perfectly in charge, uh, and perfectly innocent.

• 58:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Again, this is why I harped on the fact that like, for Kuyao and for Heinemann, Hitler is this kind of like image, right? Like this isn't a flesh and blood person they're interacting with anymore. This is an image that they know from their childhood. And I think there's something infantile in the way Kuyao imagines this guy. There's also kind of a.

• 58:45Sarah Marshall?

  And the image of like Big Daddy, who I assume there were like giant posters of and, and things like that, you know?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, at least in the beginning of, of their, and their, in their early childhoods, sure.

• 58:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think there's definitely an, an element here of like. Men will fake 62 volumes of Hitler diary rather than going to therapy.

• 59:07Sarah Marshall?

  They will. They literally will. Come on now, you know?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  So this is how this conceit kind of spirals more and more out of control.

• 59:15Sarah Marshall?

  I guess I do love that, like, that's the kind of thing that brings this down, right? Because I feel like if it's in the arena of like, what was Hitler like? My fantasy of Hitler is that he was like this. Then it's like, people will debate it forever because it gets into the realm of just like people's projections onto the past and whatever baggage they're dealing with by idolizing murderers.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  So history's greatest monster? Yeah.

• 59:41Sarah Marshall?

  That, you know, that the truth comes out in these little things and in things that can be substantiated, you know, and in negatives that can't actually be proven, such as it is impossible that Hitler was writing on this paper because we are able to date it and it is from after his death.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. There are a couple of failures on the part of the publishing house. Because they still treat it as a scoop and not as a historical document, they sort of bring in, they do bring in important historians, Hugh Trevor Roper, people like that, really are kind of like the specialists on the period, but they will only ever parcel out like little drips and drabs.

• 1:00:22Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  And everyone's always like, yeah, it seems plausible enough.

• 1:00:24Sarah Marshall?

  Because if the truth is proprietary, then, you know, things get weird.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. And like, the problem arrives only once people really are able to take in the thing as, once people sort of are able to take in this whole thing in its totality. And the other thing that they do that's a real kind of problem is they sort of push it through over the objection of the actual journalists. So like, essentially, the publishing house takes over and is like, well, we're already, as you say, we're already marketing this as a book as a thing that we can, we can push on.

• 1:00:54Sarah Marshall?

  Which is also a theme in these stories, right? That often in-house journalists and editors are like, hey, I don't think we should do this. And they get overridden if it's like too big a story to question too hard.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then this is why it collapses in this absolutely spectacular fashion. Like there are two issues of the magazine that come out with excerpts before the before the report comes out saying like this, the press conference starts and says like, this is absolutely not genuine. And it's this bizarre thing where like, um, there's this phone call that the podcast, the German podcast about this starts every episode with, which is Heidemann calling Kujo, be like, what the fuck happened here? Right? And it's the, it's the weirdest conversation. It's the most uncomfortable conversation. This is a guy who for three years has been buying this guy's stuff, who's struck up a friendship

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  with this guy. They've bonded over how hard it is to get these diaries out of East Germany, which in fact, one of them has been creating in his, in his, you know, house this entire time.

• 1:02:01Sarah Marshall?

  It's a little bit like the journalist and the murderer, you know, where you have the true crime writer who's writing to this guy throughout his trial, being like, oh, man, it's so terrible. I can't believe anyone could ever accuse you of murdering your family. And then he's going home every night to be like, and then the evil, evil man sure did murder his whole family. And I guess that's sort of like, of course, a classic tale of homosociality involves someone lying the whole time.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Basically, in that phone call, you can tell that Heidemann is desperately, he's still completely hooked. Doesn't mean that he didn't possibly steal the money, but like.

• 1:02:39Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, I don't, I don't even care about the truth anymore. Just give me another fix of Hitler diaries, man.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  So he's like, well, Connie, what, what happened? What happened? And Kujo sort of is like, is genuinely like, seems genuinely to care about his friend, even though that man's predicament is fully due to his own actions. And so he has this very slow way of talking and he's just like, oh, I'm so sorry. I can't believe what you're going through. And basically you can tell that Heidemann still seems to think, is my read of their conversation, that they got snowed by the East Germans.

• 1:03:14Sarah Marshall?

  We're all trying to find the guy that did this.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're both wearing their, their hot dog costumes and they're, and they're both trying to find the guys who did this. Problem is, you know, uh, there is no, uh, East German connection. This stuff didn't come from East Germany. It came from Kuya's own hand.

• 1:03:33Sarah Marshall?

  It's an interesting culprit. I mean, given everything else you've said so far.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  One group that you would suspect of being maniacal enough to fake 62 volumes of Hitler diaries just to make the West German press look bad, you might think of the Stasi in East Germany, right?

• 1:03:51Sarah Marshall?

  Right. You might think surely something organized is behind this instead of just one incredibly and confusingly motivated guy and one other guy who got in the hole after buying a big Nazi yacht.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  And capitalism.

• 1:04:04Sarah Marshall?

  That would be weird.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. There is a kind of system confusion here where they kind of are unable to grapple with the weirdness that capitalism is allowed to. Is, is able to unleash in everyday people and Heidemann is sort of like, oh, wow, where we, it must be aspiring. It must be, uh, these, uh, it must be these nefarious East German generals. And, you know, basically all of East Germany is like, don't, don't look at us. I don't think we were involved in this at all. Anyway, so the whole thing blows up terribly. The magazine is badly tarnished. And these two men go to jail for quite some time, four years, I believe, which the German standard is substantial for what amounts to financial crimes.

• 1:04:47Sarah Marshall?

  Here too, for that matter.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:04:49Sarah Marshall?

  The one time there's an overlap.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  And yeah, and so that's, that's the story of the, of the Hitler diaries.

• 1:04:56Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Kuya doesn't maintain his innocence. He basically was like, yeah, I did this. And then once he left prison, started marketing his own fakes. So like, he'll be like, this is a genuine Kuya.

• 1:05:07Sarah Marshall?

  This is an authentic fake.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  This is an authentic fake, which then leads to the absurd situation that people are faking Kuya.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  So he has to fight, he has to fight these art forgers that are like painting, faking in his style. He's like, hey, I'm faking here.

• 1:05:27Sarah Marshall?

  It is really interesting that there's like, and this is, I think, probably truer of Americans than in other countries, but it seems pretty true of humans in a general way, like such an allure of the con artist where we want to be close to con artists and we will buy a fake fake in that way. And like, and then you end up with like,

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am.

• 1:05:46Sarah Marshall?

  fake con artists, you know, like apparently the guy whose story was the basis of Catch Me If You Can.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  That's right. Frank Apnagel.

• 1:05:56Sarah Marshall?

  Who, you know, arguably, I think there's like quite a lot of evidence, quite a lot of evidence suggesting that he didn't pull off, you know, most of the more ambitious scams that he wrote about later, and very little evidence supporting the idea that he did.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:11Sarah Marshall?

  Again, like, everything I know is very like US centric, but here I think it's like, we recognize on some level that the American character is the con artist, you know, and that like, how do you

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Sarah Marshall?

  end up in charge of a country that doesn't belong to you. It's like, well, you, you make up a great story about it, Sonny Boy, and then you get people to buy into it. And then if you want somebody's stuff, you say, hey, stop attacking me. And then you, you kill them.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, and I think there's a version of this here too, where in some way, the diaries speak to the kind of desire to be able to deal with the Nazi past in a way that feels objective and non-neurotic.

• 1:06:58Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  But what comes out in the story is that everyone is out of their fucking mind.

• 1:07:04Sarah Marshall?

  What happens to Heidemann after prison?

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Well, so he is just kind of embittered.

• 1:07:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Thinks he was railroaded.

• 1:07:11Sarah Marshall?

  Don't even ask him about that, yad.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  He participates in various sort of retrospectives on it. He briefly appears in a movie that was made of this story called Stank. He, and then basically, I think it's a consultant for, there's another British show where Jonathan Pryce plays, I believe, Kuya. And, and so I think he's a consultant on that, but maintains basically.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  He was, he was railroaded and that he really didn't do anything wrong and that he, that he ended up sort of holding the bag for people at the top of his, of his magazine who were just embarrassed and had egg on their face and needed to find a bad guy. And he dies in 2024. He died last December.

• 1:07:58Sarah Marshall?

  And I mean, did people have a sense of like outrage about these being fake? Was it more of an alleged comedy story when the truth came out? Like, how did the public feel about this? Did they feel like they had been conned in a way that really hurt?

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  So I think there's just so much whiplash about the, whoa, there's Hitler Diaries. We'd never heard about this. Whoa, now they're fake, right?

• 1:08:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I mean, if you had like an especially busy couple of weeks, you would never have noticed.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. You're like, what did, what did I miss? I was in the jungle, looking for Mengele.

• 1:08:29Sarah Marshall?

  I'm a medical student. What, what, what's this I hear?

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So I mean, one, one thing we know is that like basically, um, a lot of other media people were furious with the magazine for doing this and saying like, this is really the kind of journalism and a kind of research into the Nazi period that really.

• 1:08:48Sarah Marshall?

  It's journalism as memorabilia hunting, I guess, really. Yeah. Which.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:08:53Sarah Marshall?

  Then, and then of course, there's, you know, the pretty obvious ethical question of like, you know, if you drive up the street value of Nazi goods, then like, who ultimately benefits? The old Nazis.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. So because the moment this was, these were revealed as fakes, their Stahn obviously stopped publishing them and locked away the actual diaries, which still exist in their vault. They then, they then allowed them to be digitized, I think in the 21st century, when basically everyone who had egg on their face had basically retired or died. And so basically for a long time, I think people didn't entirely understand to what extent. What Kuyah had written was this kind of whitewashing of Hitler and really amounted almost to Holocaust, right? And so in the 21st century, people have kind of been pushing, asking like, well, why were people so taken in by this? And being like, well, there might

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  have been content reasons too. It was not just about the thrill of the hunt. It was not just about about the scoop. It was about this image of Hitler that clearly was Kuyah's own, probably.

• 1:10:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  That was definitely one that appealed to the weirdos he tended to rip off, but that also appealed to a guy who was supposed to be, you know, a pretty neutral reporter and journalist, right? And to his left of center, decidedly left of center magazine that he was writing for. The reckoning with this, this farce sort of happened in stages and, you know, inverting the inverting the famous Marx dictum, rather than being tragedy repeated as farce, it was farce kind of repeated as tragedy. And sort of being people being like, really, there's something about the process of of coming to terms with the Nazi past where this diary

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  really marks kind of a wound or a moment where like, we can tell that this is that this project has stalled or failed or is a lot more, a lot stranger than than

• 1:10:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  than sort of 1980s West Germans sort of tended to want themselves to believe.

• 1:11:01Sarah Marshall?

  And it's interesting that it seems like with the content of the journals coming out, that was, if I'm understanding it correctly, kind of the first moment when the public was able to be like, oh, I guess it looks like actually this was a lie, or this was a hoax that was so valuable, not just for its historical significance, or just because at a certain point, there was so much money on the line that nobody wanted to look into it too closely, but also because it allowed people to be Hitler apologists.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, there's just two things, right? There's the there's the apologia. And then there is the fact that like, I mean, this is, this is a hard thing to kind of talk about, but post-war Germany has made memory culture a big part of its justification, its sort of self justification, right? We are not like them. That's why you should let us back into NATO. This is why you should let us into the EU. This is why you shouldn't be freaked out if we vacation near you or by the auto plant near you or whatever, right? The problem is that, that also, that memory culture also made Nazi atrocities into an export item.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Der Stern was almost certainly thinking of this as like, wow, we are gonna get rich from all these Americans, Brits, Australians, Spaniards, French people.

• 1:12:23Sarah Marshall?

  Right. All these lovely, sunburned, white supremacists will come flocking to our shores.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  It's hard to disentangle a genuine desire to work through the Nazi past from the fact that you get noticed as a German magazine or publication or historian, or whatever it is, when you talk about that period. Until very recently, the way to get nominated for a foreign film Oscar for a German production was obviously to talk about the Nazi years, right? Like, it's not to say that some of these aren't good movies. It's not to say that there aren't, that, that some of them aren't artistically significant, but it does mean that there's this very tricky kind of undecided ability between commercialism and, I think, genuine attempt to kind of meet history,

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  to sort of like meet historical responsibilities and not to sort of kind of close your eyes to it.

• 1:13:20Sarah Marshall?

  Do you find yourself thinking about these topics, just kind of looking around today? And do you find yourself sort of thinking about at all the trajectory of, you know, just what Americans, especially young Americans, I'm kind of thinking are gonna go through? Because it's, because you know, you work in academia and so there is this, which is A, weird, because it's a place that the rest of the country is baselessly speculating about a lot of the time. But B, where it's like, I would imagine the question of what it's going to be like to continue to grow up for people who can't remember the world being any different than what it is now, perhaps comes up a lot.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. At the same time, your listeners may not know this about me, but I wrote a book on cancel culture anecdotes.

• 1:14:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Recently, there you can sort of tell that fake stories or folkloric stories about language wars, about easily triggered college sophomores can be absolutely untrue, but travel extremely widely and be extremely effective. So honestly, I'm not particularly shocked by my students' ability or inability to deal with facts and history. I think that there are, there are some methods that are easier for them than others. There's sometimes a readiness to believe things that they shouldn't. But I think it's far more interesting

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  that people who put great, a great degree of, of faith in legacy media and, you know, your local news and, you know, news magazines with glossy covers on them can be fed a bunch of bullshit too, right? And, and so in some way, to me, the Hitler diaries are kind of emblematic of that part of it. The fact that like, there's a lot of disinformation on the internet. The internet has, has led to really epidemic collapse on, on several issues. That having been said, it is interesting that we cannot therefore, we can't draw from that the conclusion that somehow, print journalism is immune from that.

• 1:15:30Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  Not that many people are saying that, but there are, but in some way, people who take themselves to be immune are at our most at risk.

• 1:15:37Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  From being sold a load of goods, right?

• 1:15:40Sarah Marshall?

  But it's like, if Hearst could have used AI, he would have. But instead, he just had to use honestly, the better technology of having people draw something that hadn't happened.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  The technology of lying.

• 1:15:53Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. Yeah, I feel mixed on this, right? Because you look at social media and I look at my relationship with social media. And like probably adults our age all know that we're like, you know, we've just become lab rats and all this. And we have such a hard time putting down our phones. And then we're like, the kids, the kids won't put down their phones. And it's like, we're the ones who won't put down our phones. And also restaurants make you order on your phone, which I understand probably helps in this time of even more brutal margins than usual. But God, I love menus.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Sarah Marshall?

  And sometimes it's nice to go to a restaurant without your phone, you know? But anyway, I swear to God, I'm not auditioning for a segment on 60 Minutes.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, you do make a do an amazing Andy Rooney.

• 1:16:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  But at the same time, you are correct that I think that this is, this is the thing, right? Like with the diaries too, there is this idea like, oh, the young are losing their connection to this history. But then the people who have the connection with that history can be

• 1:16:53Sarah Marshall?

  Are insane.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Are insane and can be completely snowed by this stuff where it's like, well, shouldn't his initials at least be right on the cover, right? Like someone could have looked at the cover and been like, huh.

• 1:17:04Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, why did he want this to be true? What's wrong with you?

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right? And so in some way, the projection onto the young often hides our own insecurities. And I think some of that is true too, right? This, the eighties were a time when like this historic memory was receding. And, you know, where the people who had made the decision were starting to die off. There is an anxiety here about, well, we have to make sure that the historical record gets transmitted. Well, maybe not like this, right? It also, that desire, while laudable, can also make you extremely susceptible to disinformation, to lies, to hoaxing, and to just, yeah, just whack ass shit. I mean, it's not like this is, the, the, the, the diaries are the tip of an iceberg of forgery, right?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Like this, the, the, the, Kuyao sold people a, a world, a, a kind of rose colored Nazi version that these people, these men really went for. And some of them were like, were died in the wool, like neo Nazis. Some of them, like Haidaman, were not, right? And yet they, there was something there that they, they desired, right? And in some way, I, I think that That is something that that story is all about, about these projections about about these secret desires and and and what they do with people.

• 1:18:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and also how, you know, mediums or media, I guess, change the way we we receive information, but also that none of them are intrinsically more virtuous or more fake proof than any others, I would argue. And I feel like we're arguing. And again, it's like it comes down to incentives, really. I think the number of incentives at play and the level of resistance that exists in the the delivery system for facts. Yeah, I guess it's a one thing that's nice about today is that we have all spent so much time forced to hear the inner thoughts of Trump that the street value of more of them would be like one penny.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Sarah Marshall?

  Right? If you think about like a secret Trump diary, I don't know about you, but I'm like, Oh, my God, no, thank you. I've already read several Trump diaries, and that wasn't even on purpose.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, we exactly, we just look at it as truth social, right?

• 1:19:25Sarah Marshall?

  Like when he was mad at Kristen Stewart. I mean, I really like this story because I feel like it's just messy. It's just like people behaving in ways that like, no matter how fake the actual artifact is, are betraying the truth the entire time and the truth about their their innermost desires, it seems like.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  It for a story about a hoax, it is the most guileless story imaginable. Everyone is super genuine while also lying their asses off and probably skimming money.

• 1:19:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And everyone is revealing so much about what they actually think and feel and like the and the ugliness and the messiness of that. And

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:03Sarah Marshall?

  When I think about like, why would someone, what are people trying to keep if they try and keep Hitler as somebody who didn't know about it? Because that's kind of like saying that Ted Bundy didn't kill anyone. And it's like, well, then he's just Guy from Tacoma who took a really long time to finish college and why would we even be talking about him, you know, but I feel like as with Trump, it's, you know, who's the fascist who I know most intimately from my day to day life, but like, maybe the appeal comes from the fact that there is, I will grant a form of charisma from being in the presence of somebody who has to keep selling themselves to you and selling you this idea of like, believe in me and

• 1:20:43Sarah Marshall?

  love me and I will protect you from whatever you want to be afraid of. And that, that, the feeling that we get from that, that some people seem to have genuine addictions to is something that maybe we want to say like, it's, it's fine to want that. It's, it's okay. A person can offer that and it not be at anyone's expense. And it's like, no, it is because you only get that feeling from choosing a victim to then have everybody decide to scapegoat and kill. You know, that's how that works. And I think that's, you know, I'm no political scientist, but I'm pretty sure that's how fascism works. Are they any good to read? Like, what was it like reading the Hitler Diaries?

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  No, they are not.

• 1:21:26Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  I mean, again, you see what, you understand why they've been, why they were so heavily accepted. There's just so much stuff that's just like, oh my God, this is so boring.

• 1:21:37Sarah Marshall?

  What a strange journey this has been. Yeah. Thank you for telling me this tale and taking me by the hand through 62 volumes of Hook's Diary. It is, you know, say what you will. It's an impressive number of volumes of anything to fake. And boy, did his hand probably hurt.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:21:59Sarah Marshall?

  And no matter how ridiculous of a situation you found yourself caught up in, it's probably less embarrassing than this.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yep. Think so. I never have to wake up, be like, wait, I did fucking what? I got super high and did what?

• 1:22:13Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly. A high person could simply, simply cannot write 62 forged diaries. And that's reassuring.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:22:21Sarah Marshall?

  Adrian, thank you so much for coming and for telling me this story. And where can we find you and more of your work? And what are you, what have you been up to?

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Well, you can always find me on my podcast, In Bed With The Right, with the wonderful Maura Donigan, who's been a frequent guest on this podcast as well. You can find my writing on Substack, where I talk about a lot of German stuff, but not just, also just a lot of American things these days. And that's adrianddauw.substack.com. And yeah, and otherwise I'm in various, you know, media when they'll have me. Nothing big to preview right now, but yeah, in general, that is, that is where I am.

• 1:22:59Sarah Marshall?

  Fantastic. Yeah. And just, and thank you for getting together to talk about history. I always love it and I always love getting into these strange little corners with you. And you did a bonus episode too, on this show, I think last year, on Mazes and Monsters, the fear mongering Dungeons and Dragons novel. And that was so fun. And the movie with starring Tom Hanks.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, thank you for having me. I do think it's a cool story and it's a, it's a, it really, yeah, it's one of those, it's cra- hard to believe, but then once you look into it, you're like, it really feels like, it's a stronger portrait of a particular time and in a particular place than if those diaries had turned out to be genuine.

• 1:23:41Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I love about these hoax stories. Everyone in there is telling the truth much more genuinely than they do at any other time in their life sometimes.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think that's right.

• 1:24:01Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you to Adrian Daub for being our amazing guest. Adrian, please come back anytime you like. Thank you to Corinne Ruff for editing. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. We'll see you next time.