Читать книгу The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years - Graham Stewart - Страница 23

The Hitler Diaries; the Arts; Sport; Portfolio; The Times’s Bicentenary; Death of an Editor

I

In its one hundred and ninety-eighth year The Times made one of its most embarrassing mistakes: it announced it had bought the rights to sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries. It would prove to be the most expensive fraud in publishing history. With hindsight, the newspaper’s verification procedures appeared astonishingly nonchalant. It helped persuade its parent company, News Corp., to offer $1.2 million for diaries whose contents had been subjected to no more than the most superficial examination. Had the manuscripts been checked, it would have been quickly apparent that they contained little more than bloodless drivel lifted primarily from Max Domarus’s published book Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations. Some of the entries were positively comic: ‘Must not forget tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva’; ‘on my feet all day long’; and ‘Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and – says Eva – bad breath’. Stern magazine, from whom News Corp. bought the rights, refused to reveal its sources or to provide a convincing account of the diaries thirty-eight-year provenance. No comprehensive scientific tests had been done on the ink or the paper. These were basic procedures overlooked in the rush to claim a scoop.

Considering that The Times had been the victim of a serious hoax in the past, it should have been alive to the consequences of repeating the error. On 18 April 1887 – the first time the paper had run a story under a double-column headline – it had published a letter supposedly written by Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Nationalist leader, applauding the murder of the Chief Secretary of Ireland’s under-secretary. The letter was subsequently found to be a forgery (its real author, Richard Pigott, fled to a Madrid hotel where he shot himself in the head) and The Times was fined £200,000 – a sum so large that it did almost as much financial damage to the paper as the harm incurred to its international reputation. That misfortune was, perhaps, ancient history by 1983, but the Sunday Times had suffered at the hoaxer’s hand well within the memory of many of those at Gray’s Inn Road. In 1968, when Harold Evans was its editor, the Sunday Times’s owners, Thomson, secured for the paper thirty volumes of Mussolini’s diaries with a £100,000 advance payment on a promised £250,000. Thomson’s historical and forensic experts adjudged the diaries plausible. In reality, they were the work of two old Italian women. Thomson failed to get any of the money back.

The Hitler Diaries that came to light in 1983 were the work of Konrad Kujau, a Stuttgart con man with a number of convictions for petty crime. Had The Times been handed the volumes directly by such a shadowy figure at the back door of Gray’s Inn Road, basic steps to ensure their veracity would doubtless have been undertaken. Yet, because the newspaper was offered them by Stern, a current affairs journal with a serious reputation, it took far too much on trust in believing that Germany’s leading magazine was sufficiently professional not to deal in forged goods. The ensuing debacle would descend into an extraordinary and unedifying blame game that pitted The Times against the Sunday Times, everyone at Gray’s Inn Road against the extraordinary misjudgment of the historian Lord Dacre and every rival newspaper into paroxysms of gleeful jeering at the expense of Rupert Murdoch. But the font of woe was Stern magazine. It had paid $4.8 million (£3.5 million) for the diaries through a journalist-researcher of twenty-eight years’ standing on its payroll, Gerd Heidemann (Kujau’s intermediary), and was not afraid to cut corners in order to ensure a return on the investment.

In 1980, Gerd Heidemann had told Anthony Terry, the Sunday Times’s European editor, in confidence that he was trying to track down Adolf Hitler’s private papers which he believed had been lost in a plane crash on 21 April 1945. Little more was heard for some time although in late 1982 the far-right historian David Irving had contacted the Sunday Times with an offer to investigate reports of faked Hitler diaries and assorted memorabilia being traded between a German historian and a man in Stuttgart. Had the paper taken up Irving’s offer, a lot of bother and embarrassment might have been saved. But even though this was long before Irving was found guilty by a High Court judge in April 2000 of falsifying history in his portrayal of the Holocaust, he was already regarded as politically too dangerous to employ. Gitta Sereny was sent to investigate instead. Heidemann showed her round his personal archive in Hamburg but, before she could probe further in Stuttgart, she was ordered back to London as part of a cost-cutting exercise.[457] This proved a false economy.

The next Times Newspapers learned of the matter was when Stern’s Peter Wickman and the foreign rights salesman, Wilfried Sorge, came to visit Gray’s Inn Road. Douglas-Home was convalescing in Norfolk at the time so The Times’s two deputy editors, Colin Webb and Charles Wilson, met the Stern team. All were obliged to sign confidentiality contracts. Webb agreed with Brian MacArthur of the Sunday Times a division of spoils: The Times would break the story and the Sunday Times would serialize it. Clearly, though, they would need to be confident that the diaries were genuine and Webb suggested getting Lord Dacre to authenticate them. It was, it seemed, an inspired choice. As an independent director of Times Newspapers since 1974, Dacre could be trusted with what was a commercially sensitive matter while, in his other guise as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, he was well placed to pass a professional judgment. This agreed, Webb telephoned Douglas-Home with the news. With as much haste as he could muster, Douglas-Home returned to Gray’s Inn Road to take charge of what promised to be one of the paper’s greatest scoops.[458]

Educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper had been in British Intelligence during the war and was a member of the team that cracked the code of the Abwehr, the German secret service. At the end of the war he had been put in charge of determining the details of the Führer’s demise. This led to his acclaimed 1947 publication, The Last Days of Hitler. Another work, Hitler’s Table Talk, followed and in 1957 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. In 1978 he edited The Goebbels Diaries. The following year he took up a life peerage as Lord Dacre and in 1980 swapped Oxford for the commodious Master’s Lodge of Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse. Given this curriculum vitae and his place on the board of Times Newspapers, it would have been perverse for The Times to have commissioned anyone else to authenticate the diaries. Yet, his work on the Third Reich was but a part – and not the main part – of his broad-ranging interests. His real area of speciality was seventeenth-century cultural and ecclesiastical history. Crucially, Webb and Douglas-Home were unaware of a key failing – Dacre’s post-war researches had been facilitated by Army interpreters. He was not an especially fluent reader of German.

Douglas-Home assured Dacre that his mission to the Zurich bank vault where the diaries were being stored was merely intended to allow him to gauge in general terms the look and feel of the documents and that Times Newspapers would not require him to pronounce definitively until he had read subsequent typed transcripts of the diaries up to 1941. But, at the last moment, just as Dacre was about to catch his flight, Douglas-Home telephoned again and explained that Murdoch had now been informed and wanted to secure the serialization rights quickly. Therefore, it would be necessary for Dacre to convey his interim impressions by telephone as soon as he had visited Zurich. Reluctantly – fatally – Dacre acquiesced.

Amid great secrecy, Dacre descended into the vault of the Handelsbank in Zurich chaperoned by Wilfried Sorge, Jan Hensmann, the financial director of Stern’s parent company, and Stern’s editor, Peter Koch. Dacre had been assured that the paper of the diaries had been definitively tested and dated to the correct period. This was untrue. Furthermore, he was assured that Stern knew the identity of the Wehrmacht officer who had retrieved the diaries from the wreck of the aircraft in April 1945 and in whose possession they had been kept until offered to the magazine. In fact, Stern

457

Sunday Times, 1 May 1983; Robert Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 234–6.

458

Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.