German Yearbook of Contemporary History

In the Light of Fiction—in the Shadow of Scholarship

The story of the fake Hitler diaries has been told many times. Between 1978 and 1983 the forger Konrad Kujau copied Adolf Hitler's handwriting to create sixty-two notebooks supposedly containing Hitler's diary entries. The reporter Gerd Heidemann then purchased these on behalf of Stern magazine for 9.3 million deutsche marks. Thanks in part to Helmut Dietl's 1992 feature film Schtonk!, even Germans with little interest in history have a vivid image of this episode.¹ To date, however, there has been no comprehensive account that meets historiographical standards and is based on a broad range of sources. The 1986 study by the British journalist Robert Harris is regarded as germane,² but history scholars have been slow to examine the affair and have taken up some aspects only recently.³

Yet the historians and institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany, one of them the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ—Institute for Contemporary History), were among the protagonists of the Hitler diaries affair.⁴ The documents from the IfZ archives presented in the appendix below shed light on the institute's role, which was largely bound up with the IfZ's contacts with [End Page 213] collectors of Nazi memorabilia and with journalists. The IfZ and its staff had been aware for some time of the existence of forged documents, many of them related to Nazi leaders and even Hitler himself, but its involvement in events surrounding the fake diaries came relatively late. The documents show that in the early 1980s the IfZ was an important, if not the central, point of contact for historians (Eberhard Jäckel) as well as authors already regarded as dubious even at the time (David Irving), archivists (Josef Henke), collectors (August Priesack), and German and foreign journalists (Evgueni Silianoff, indirectly also Gerd Heidemann) who worked with real or fake documents supposedly deriving from the inner circles of high Nazi functionaries. After the diaries were published and before they were exposed as forgeries, the IfZ's director, Martin Broszat, ensured that his institute played a prominent role in scrutinizing this sensational find, thereby highlighting the IfZ's importance for research on contemporary history in the Federal Republic. In the end, though, it was the Federal Archives that uncovered the forgery.

The insights that a history of the fake Hitler diaries might yield lie less in the diaries themselves than in the conditions and contexts that led to their creation. Why were the diaries produced and published in this specific period of West German history? The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time of increased media interest in the past, in particular the Nazi era.⁵ Thanks to a wave of "nostalgia," the past was being viewed more positively and there were emerging tendencies toward an ex post idealization.⁶ At the same time the memory of National Socialism was shifting, with the victims of persecution and the process that led to the Holocaust moving to the forefront of public consciousness.⁷ In the political sphere, meanwhile, disputes about Geschichtspolitik (the politics of history), largely centering on the relationship between history and identity, were starting to simmer. Finally, history scholars were being confronted in these years with the question of how to appropriately historicize National Socialism. Intradisciplinary conflicts that would later erupt in the Historikerstreit (historians' debate) were already on the horizon.⁸ The fake Hitler diaries affair thus occurred at a time when the relationship between history, the public, and scholarship was undergoing profound changes.

Studies in art history, in particular, have shown that research into the genesis and impact of forgeries yields benefits for numerous disciplines.⁹ Forged historical material is still being produced, sold, and instrumentalized today, and so research into the conditions under which historical fakes were created has contemporary relevance.¹⁰ Viewed from this perspective, the fake Hitler diaries affair is more than just a grotesque farce. It can also be seen as a phenomenon [End Page 214] typical of its time, as a probe with which to investigate questions of media, political, social, and scholarly history.

The Protagonists

The key players in the affair are emblematic of the developments shaping the time. Throughout his working life the reporter Gerd Heidemann was known for his aptitude for fostering relationships with people and organizations that preferred to remain out of the public eye. A photographer by profession, Heidemann had been recruited by the GDR's Ministry for State Security (MfS) in 1953, when he was still freelancing for Stern. As a result, he was able to take pictures of the 1953 World Youth Games in Bucharest and sell them in the West. The file kept on Heidemann by the MfS was maintained until 1986 and thus included his time investigating the Hitler diaries.¹¹ In 1965 Heidemann won the World Press Photo Award for a picture he took of the war in Congo, where he tracked down the German mercenary Siegfried Müller and helped the latter achieve dubious fame as "Congo Müller."¹² Later in his career, too, Heidemann had few qualms about consorting with military officers, terrorists, and people with a shady past. In 1979 Wilhelm Höttl—who prior to 1945 had worked for the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD) and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, RSHA), as well as serving as Ernst Kaltenbrunner's adjutant—put Heidemann on the trail of fugitive Nazi functionaries in South America. There, while searching for Josef Mengele and Martin Bormann, Heidemann met and interviewed Klaus Barbie. Heidemann was very well connected with prominent former Nazis. Karl Wolff, Heinrich Himmler's chief of staff, was best man at Heidemann's wedding, for example. But Heidemann was more than a journalist. From at least 1973 he was also a passionate collector of Nazi memorabilia and militaria. He became involved with the collecting scene when he purchased Carin II, a yacht that had been commissioned by Hermann Göring in 1936 and was briefly owned by the British crown after 1945, before being purchased by a German businessman.¹³ It was in his role as reporter that Heidemann first met Konrad Kujau, however; when he initially contacted Kujau, it was primarily to research the story of the Hitler diaries for Stern.

Kujau was well known on the collecting scene, generally under the alias Dr. Fischer, as a dealer of Nazi memorabilia of varying value. He had fled the GDR in 1957 to dodge an impending conviction for theft and dealing in stolen goods. A short time later he arrived in southwest Germany via Berlin. After several [End Page 215] failed attempts to establish himself as an employee and entrepreneur, he opened an antique store in Stuttgart's Aspergerstrasse in 1974. He soon became known to police as a petty criminal in West Germany too; he was arrested on multiple occasions and convicted of embezzlement, fraud, and using false identities. Nevertheless, by the time Kujau met Heidemann in 1981, his antique business was well established. He had made a name for himself by pretending to smuggle valuable pieces from East Germany into West Germany.¹⁴ These pieces were in fact forgeries, which Kujau, who was a talented painter and draftsman, sold to his customers for large sums. To this day, the close relationship that quickly developed between Heidemann and Kujau raises the question of whether the reporter was an accomplice who knew that the diaries were forgeries. Although the friendship is well documented, this question remains open.¹⁵

History as a Field of Cooperation and Conflict

Most accounts of the fake Hitler diaries affair concentrate on the relationship between Heidemann and Kujau,¹⁶ a focus that is reductive and simplistic. As mentioned above, these events took place at a time when the public's engagement with history, in particular National Socialism, was undergoing a variety of developments in both Western Europe and the US. It is therefore important to examine public awareness of history in the 1970s and early 1980s from multiple perspectives, thereby putting a spotlight on groups that have been little discussed to date. Collectors of Nazi memorabilia, in particular, have been largely ignored by historians.¹⁷ Yet an exploration of this group of protagonists, who interacted intensively with journalists and historians in those two decades, promises valuable insights.

"After the boom,"¹⁸ trade and interest in antiques and historical objects and documents of all kinds surged. Collecting became a popular hobby—and for some even a profession. For people who felt that they were living in a time of eroding social certainties, antiques represented a seemingly simpler past.¹⁹ Lurking in the shadows of this trend was a rapidly growing number of Nazi memorabilia collectors. Such collectors had been around long before the 1970s; in fact, the hunt for relics of the "Thousand-Year Reich" began in the final days of the war.²⁰ Allied soldiers, in particular, sent uniforms, medals, and guns home as trophies. Wealthy collectors in the US and Israel were—and continue to be—major players on the market.²¹ In 1974, when the Free State of Bavaria first auctioned off items from Hermann Göring's private collection, many of them ended up in the hands of rich collectors,²² arousing the interest of unscrupulous but talented forgers like Kujau. It was probably in 1976 that [End Page 216] Kujau first sold forgeries in the US via his agent Wolfgang Schulz.²³ Major collectors in the Federal Republic often had Nazi pasts themselves or shared National Socialist ideology. They collected less because they were fascinated by evil than because of nostalgia and an old sense of affinity.

One of these collectors was August Priesack. Born in 1908, Priesack worked until 1939 in the Nazi Party's main archives, where he was tasked by the party to track down real and forged Hitler documents and, even more importantly, pictures of Hitler. His job was to destroy the forgeries and take the originals out of circulation.²⁴ After the war Priesack became a high-school teacher, holding the title of "Gymnasium professor." He was known to the police in Munich as an unreconstructed Nazi who made no secret of his political outlook.²⁵ He never completely abandoned his former occupation, continuing to collect all manner of official documents from the Nazi period along with countless inconsequential newspaper articles and copies of documents. In building up a substantial archive, he gained a reputation as an authority on Nazi documents and Hitler's handwriting. In 1973, in the history journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, he detailed the reading errors that the historian and nonfiction author Werner Maser had made in his edition of Hitler's manuscripts.²⁶ As an arbiter of the authenticity of documents, Priesack was regularly mentioned in the catalogs of the well-known Munich auction house Graf Klenau.

Other collectors thus became aware of Priesack's expertise, as did historians such as Eberhard Jäckel, a Stuttgart-based scholar of contemporary history.²⁷ While working on his edition of Hitler's manuscripts from 1905 to 1924, Jäckel enlisted Priesack to help him transcribe the texts.²⁸ In 1978 Fritz Stiefel, a Swabian businessman, hired Priesack to provide an expert report on his collection of Nazi documents and artifacts. Stiefel had purchased most of these items from Kujau in Stuttgart. But instead of exposing the forgeries, Priesack regarded them as genuine, thus giving them the nimbus of authenticity and providing a decisive incentive for Kujau to forge the Hitler diaries. Long before Heidemann became aware of the diary notebooks, a first volume, which Priesack believed to be genuine (a half-year volume for 1935), was circulating among collectors.²⁹

Priesack belonged to the generation of Germans who were teenagers or young adults during the Nazi era and were now looking for mementos and memorabilia from that period. In many cases their occupations between 1933 and 1945 made them sought-after postwar experts on the authenticity of such items. Heidemann was in contact with many such individuals.³⁰ But his interest in Nazi memorabilia and his connections with the scene do not fully explain how the forged Hitler diaries affair came about. [End Page 217]

Heidemann and his magazine were not the only ones interested in Hitler and National Socialism. In the 1970s the leading protagonists of the Nazi period became an increasingly prominent subject in the mass media. The publication of Joachim Fest's biography of Hitler marked the start of an international "Hitler wave."³¹ The topic of National Socialism was popularized by feature films, magazines, and television documentaries, and the interest in history generated by the media in turn prompted publishing houses to come up with new offerings for a growing audience. Stern published excerpts from Fest's biography of Hitler in 1973³² and established a contemporary history desk five years later. Between 1966 and 1967 Heinz Höhne published a twenty-one-part series on the history of the SS in Der Spiegel.³³ Much of the coverage of the Nazi past was characterized by a sensationalistic presentation and highly trivializing tone. Sources offering supposedly spectacular revelations about the Third Reich were continually being discovered. Even marginal and improbable aspects, such as Hitler's alleged paternity,³⁴ became the subject of intense discussion, not only in the Federal Republic, but also internationally. This was reflected in the 1974 appointment of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper as editor of The Times. Trevor-Roper, who in 1947 had published a widely acclaimed book on Hitler's last days, wrote about history in his newspaper,³⁵ which until 1980 devoted an increasing number of column inches to the German dictator.³⁶ This trend continued after Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation took over the newspaper in 1981. Hitler and National Socialism were also on the agenda of the print media in France (in Paris Match and L'Express) and in the US (in Newsweek).³⁷

Television played an important role too.³⁸ Shows about National Socialism could trigger heated public debates, as demonstrated by the series Holocaust, which was broadcast in the Federal Republic in 1979.³⁹ Nazi themes were guaranteed to garner a great deal of attention and became a major selling point.⁴⁰ The international mass media's interest in the "Führer" and his entourage over the preceding years ensured that the forged Hitler diaries affair became a huge scandal. When Heidemann set out on the trail of the diaries in 1980, there was a strong commercial interest in them on the part of the publishing house Gruner+Jahr, which was counting on immense public interest. International publishers and broadcasters bought rights on the assumption that the diary story would be highly marketable.

Meanwhile in the political sphere, attempts were being made to co-opt history. Questions about Geschichtspolitik—in particular how the Third Reich and its place in German history should be dealt with—became the subject of sometimes fierce debate. The conflicts in this debate mostly ran along party [End Page 218] lines. After the social-liberal coalition was replaced in October 1982 by an alliance of the CDU/CSU and the FDP under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, there was a growing insistence that German history not be reduced to the Third Reich. Instead, it was argued, the focus should be shifted to themes such as Prussia or the 1848 Revolution in order to create lines of tradition that would help foster identity in the Federal Republic.⁴¹ This was an attempt to replace the Federal Republic's admission of guilt for war and genocide with a positive founding narrative that, during the years of entrenched dual statehood, would exonerate the provisional West German state.

Such initiatives met with fierce criticism.⁴² The chief objection was simply that they were revisionist, their purpose being to deny responsibility for the Shoah and to draw a line under that particular aspect of the German past. These debates were of considerable political significance, as demonstrated in German-American relations of the time, which were repeatedly burdened by the question of how to deal appropriately with the Nazi era.⁴³ When they erupted into interpretive battles in the early 1980s, the Hitler diaries seemed to open the possibility of renegotiating central developments and events such as the outbreak of World War II and the murder of Europe's Jews. In his forgeries Kujau painted a picture that largely absolved Hitler of responsibility, leading readers to believe that he had been coerced into war by his generals and had known nothing about the extermination camps. In Kujau's reimagining the dictator had even sent Rudolf Hess to Britain on a secret peace mission.⁴⁴ Placing most of the blame at the doors of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the forged source thus provided arguments for exonerating Hitler and downplaying his responsibility for war and genocide.

Within their own discipline, contemporary historians generally opposed this political co-opting of the past. Martin Broszat, who had been director of the IfZ since 1972, also expressed skepticism, warning that such a shift in the culture of remembrance ran the risk of trivializing Nazi crimes.⁴⁵ But the question of how scholars should interpret the Nazi past was hotly disputed in the 1970s and 1980s. The disagreement between intentionalists and functionalists or structuralists, both in scholarly publications and among the general public, was particularly bitter. Whereas Broszat and Hans Mommsen emphasized the radicalizing effect of the Nazi state's polycratic power structures, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Saul Friedländer, and Eberhard Jäckel saw an intentional line of continuity stretching from Hitler's political beginnings to the extermination policy of the years 1938 to 1945.⁴⁶ Adherents of this latter view were often particularly keen to find sources from Hitler or his inner circle supporting the thesis that the dictator himself had given the order to murder Europe's Jews. Many of [End Page 219] the archives were on the other side of the Iron Curtain and therefore impossible to access, which made it all the more important for these historians to sift through and secure all available holdings, even if this involved sitting down with dubious collectors and Nazi nostalgists.

When it was first founded, one of the chief responsibilities of the Deutsches Institut für Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit (German Institute for the History of the National Socialist Era), as the IfZ was called until 1952, was to identify sources from the Nazi era and make these accessible to researchers.⁴⁷ Thus, the institute was in regular contact with witnesses of all kinds, with former Nazi functionaries, and with collectors of Nazi-related written material.⁴⁸ The latter offered the IfZ "Table Talk from the Führer's Headquarters";⁴⁹ the Federal Archives repeatedly received offers of this nature too.⁵⁰ Some historians, wishing to speed things up, aggressively pursued contact with collectors and witnesses. In 1973 Jäckel even placed a notice in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte and advertisements in newspapers appealing for sources on Nazi history that were in private possession.⁵¹ He began work that year on his volume of Hitler's early manuscripts, a project that would eventually lead him to Kujau and Priesack. Since sources tended to be scarce, historians and archivists tried their luck with texts of dubious origin, thereby opening up opportunities for forgers. The demand for rare personal documents from Nazi leaders was particularly high, and the hope of gaining spectacular new insights led some to neglect principles of academic rigor when evaluating their sources. Hitler and National Socialism offered historians in the media-saturated society of the 1970s and 1980s the opportunity to become well known beyond the confines of academia. In 1980, in advance of the publication of Jäckel's volume, Stern published excerpts containing not only falsely attributed texts but also forgeries penned by Kujau.⁵² Well-known authors such as Joachim Fest and Sebastian Haffner also played a role in maintaining media interest in contemporary German history, while new television formats were reaching an increasing number of people.

It was no coincidence that, in late 1982, rumors first began spreading at the IfZ that Hitler's diaries were circulating in collector circles. In the ten years that had passed since Broszat became director, the institute had grown not only in prominence, but also in staff numbers and financial resources. This growth was accompanied by a change in profile. Until the mid-1960s the IfZ had focused entirely on its remit as an authority on questions relating to Nazi rule. This led to the production of lengthy expert reports such as that presented by Broszat at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which opened in 1963.⁵³ In the years that followed, as demand for expert reports in criminal trials and reparations [End Page 220] proceedings declined, the IfZ concentrated more on compiling large volumes of primary sources and conducting research projects such as "Resistance and Persecution in Bavaria, 1933–1945"; the latter resulted in six volumes published between 1977 and 1983 under the series title "Bavaria in the Nazi Era," which attracted attention beyond academia.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, the IfZ did not have the internal and external significance it has today; notably, it had comparatively little media exposure. A simple term-frequency analysis of "Institut* für Zeitgeschichte" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung shows that the IfZ was referred to with declining frequency over the course of the 1970s, a decline that may have been related to the conclusion of the major Nazi trials.⁵⁵ In the 1980s the term increased in frequency again, reflecting the growing prominence of contemporary history in the media from the turn of the decade.

Although Broszat had long striven to raise public awareness and the prominence of his institute, it was only from the mid-1980s that he achieved real success in this regard. The forged Hitler diaries affair, coinciding as it did with a period of increasing public interest in contemporary history, offered him an opportunity to boost the IfZ's profile.

The IfZ and the Forged Hitler Diaries

The IfZ archives were also adapting to the new challenges. In the early days the institute's few staff members had focused on archiving and indexing Nazi-era documents that had been provided by the US occupation authorities. These comprised state documents, files of the Nazi Party and its branches, and documents from the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Zeugenschrifttum (witness testimonies) and private papers came later, occupying a growing place in the archives in the 1970s and 1980s. The personal papers of Nazi functionaries and Wehrmacht generals were of particular interest, and as a result it became increasingly important to build links with collectors as well as with former representatives of the regime and the armed forces.⁵⁶ Such contacts enabled IfZ staff to track down previously undiscovered documents and establish close working relationships that could bear fruit when material was donated or estates bequeathed. Thus, the IfZ archives quickly built up an international reputation as an excellent point of contact for researchers, journalists, and laypeople, but also for some Nazi nostalgists.

The IfZ had encountered forgeries from collectors before the Hitler diaries. In the late 1970s Anton Hoch, head of the IfZ archives from their beginnings until 1978, had identified some forged Hitler documents by comparing handwriting. He alerted Eberhard Jäckel,⁵⁷ yet the latter, for reasons that remain [End Page 221] unclear, nonetheless included them in his volume. Subsequently, Jäckel had to announce in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte that seventy-five of the documents were forgeries.⁵⁸ These, too, had been penned by Kujau. Hermann Weiß, deputy head of the IfZ archives, was aware that Jäckel knew the collector Fritz Stiefel, who was said to be in possession of the Hitler diaries.⁵⁹ Heidemann's name also became known at the IfZ in late 1982/early 1983. In an indirect way, the IfZ had heard of Kujau too, because Weiß had learned from David Irving, the bestselling author and Holocaust denier,⁶⁰ that a certain Mr. Fischer had been involved in procuring the diaries—and, as mentioned above, "Fischer" was one of Kujau's aliases.

By the end of 1982, rumors about the discovery of Hitler's diaries had reached the top level of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The IfZ's academic advisory board became aware of the rumors in February 1983, thanks to letters to the editor written by Irving to several German daily newspapers.⁶¹ In these letters Irving claimed that twenty-seven half-year volumes of the dictator's diaries had survived.⁶² The Federal Ministry of the Interior asked the Federal Archives to comment on Irving's claims. This task fell to Josef Henke, head of the department responsible for the Nazi Party's written and printed material, which was located in Koblenz. But Henke and his colleague Klaus Oldenhage were also the Federal Archives contacts for Heidemann and Stern's head of contemporary history, Thomas Walde. Since 1981 Heidemann and Walde had been giving pages from the Hitler diaries to the Federal Archives for examination, but never an entire diary, in order to prevent the sensational find from being revealed prematurely.⁶³ As a result Henke and Oldenhage were unable to ascertain exactly what they were dealing with, and up until shortly before the diaries were published, examinations by the Federal Archives and others indicated that the material was authentic.⁶⁴

At any rate, Henke did not connect the pages he had received from Heidemann and Walde with the inquiry he received from the Federal Ministry of the Interior about the Hitler diaries rumors. He therefore asked the IfZ what it knew and received an answer from Hermann Weiß.⁶⁵ Even for Henke, an established expert on sources on Nazi history, the IfZ—whose deputy director for archives was regarded as possibly the best authority on the subject—was the first port of call. To Weiß it was clear that the diaries had to be forgeries. He confirmed that rumors were going around, but given that they were being peddled by Irving and Priesack, he believed them to have little foundation.⁶⁶ At one meeting at the IfZ in late 1982, Priesack had told Weiß about the alleged existence of the diaries.⁶⁷ Heidemann's colleague Michael Hepp had visited Weiß back in May 1981 to research background information on the [End Page 222] alleged diaries and other matters related to Nazi history—but of course Hepp was careful to keep his cards close to his chest at that point.⁶⁸

Thus, many strands of the Hitler diaries affair came together at the IfZ at an early stage, and when Stern finally went public with its sensational alleged find, Broszat emerged as a key opponent of the Hamburg-based magazine.⁶⁹ Combining his position as IfZ director with his reputation as a historian, he assertively demanded that historical scholarship have the final say in the emerging debate about the authenticity and value of the diaries. In an open letter addressed to Henri Nannen, the publisher of Stern, one day after the magazine's official press conference of April 25, 1983, Broszat called for the establishment of an international commission of experts to examine the authenticity of the diaries. The reviews carried out by Stern had been inadequate, Broszat wrote; therefore—and here he implicitly brought the expertise of the IfZ into play—further examinations would have to follow. After all, it was not only the public that had a right to "the fastest possible and most comprehensive clarification," but also and "most importantly" professional historians.⁷⁰ Broszat was in fact outraged by the downplaying of Hitler and his crimes in Stern's coverage, but he did not mention this in his letter.⁷¹

Nannen countered with a robust response, asserting that "everything that can be done to verify the diaries has been done." Further examinations were thus unnecessary, he insisted;⁷² after all, no historian (or "pseudo-historian") would be able to find out anything more than a shrewd journalist. Moreover, a lengthy inspection of all the documents would run counter to Stern's interests, since the "exclusivity" of the material "would no longer be assured."⁷³ Only after it became undeniable that the Hitler diaries were forgeries did Nannen admit that it had been a mistake to forgo a comprehensive examination. And he gave due credit to Broszat: "Respect to the head of Munich's Institute for Contemporary History, Professor Martin Broszat."⁷⁴

While Nannen and Stern rebuffed the expertise of the IfZ, others were keen to avail themselves of it. Paris Match had bought some of the French publishing rights to the diaries from Gruner+Jahr. With all kinds of rumors already circulating, the reporter Evgueni Silianoff was tasked with verifying the authenticity of the diaries.⁷⁵ Broszat and Hellmuth Auerbach, a longtime staff historian at the IfZ, shared their skepticism with Silianoff. In return, the IfZ received detailed information on the licensing negotiations between Stern and Paris Match.

Broszat, for his part, was working on winning over the president of the Federal Archives to his position. The Federal Archives had been commissioned by Stern to conduct another examination of the Hitler diaries, but this time of [End Page 223] some complete notebooks rather than just individual pages. Broszat registered his dissatisfaction about this with Hans Booms, who headed the Federal Archives and was related to Broszat by marriage. Broszat reiterated the demand he had already made to Nannen for an international commission of experts. Examining just a few selected volumes would not suffice, Broszat insisted, especially under such time pressure. He feared that it would serve primarily to "provide Stern with a most welcome alibi."⁷⁶ Broszat's concern proved unnecessary, because just a day after his letter to Booms, the president of the Federal Archives announced that the diaries were a "clumsy […] forgery."⁷⁷

This meant that the IfZ would no longer be involved in verification processes. Nevertheless, it had played a significant role in the Hitler diaries affair. The institute and its archives served as a major port of call for collectors, historians, journalists, and other archivists when it came to questions about the authenticity and historical significance of Nazi documents. This was because over the years the IfZ had built up an excellent reputation as a research institution, and its staff had become known, both nationally and internationally, as leading experts on Nazi documents. The institute's strong links with collectors and memorabilia hunters meant that its researchers and archivists were aware at an early stage of the Hitler diary rumors. Right from the start, they were extremely skeptical. Broszat expressed this skepticism publicly and insisted on the primacy of scholarship—and he was proven right.

The originals of the documents presented below are stored in the ID (Internal Documents) 104 record group of the IfZ archives.⁷⁸ In some cases newspaper cuttings or book excerpts that are relevant to the content were attached to the documents; these cuttings and excerpts are described in my analysis and commentary in the footnotes. The presentation of the sources here—with the exception of some careful standardizations and corrections—follows the originals as far as possible; only obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected without comment. The document headers have been altered to omit information such as addresses and file numbers. [End Page 224]