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It sounds like the stuff of fiction: a man forges a dictator's diaries and passes them off as a scoop to a major magazine that, after an ensuing media frenzy, has to admit to falling for a deeply disturbing hoax.
In fact, the story is true — and as compelling as it is concerning.
The dictator was Hitler, and the so-called scoop of his diaries "revealed" that perhaps Hitler didn't actually know about the Holocaust and wasn't such a bad guy, after all.
It was all part of an infamous attempt to re-write the history of the Third Reich, that ended in a major scandal.
'One of the greatest journalistic frauds'
In 1983, the respected German current affairs magazine, Stern, published what it claimed were the lost diaries of Adolf Hitler.
It was "one of the greatest journalistic frauds of the 20th century", according to newspaper El País.
The culprit behind the fraud was Konrad Kujau, a petty criminal and forger of Nazi memorabilia.
As German broadcaster DW reports, in the fake diaries Kujau turned Hitler "into someone who is overwhelmed by the persecution and extermination of the Jews under his own rule".
As Hitler, Kujau wrote, "The measures begun on the 1st against Jewish institutions are too violent for me; I immediately warned the men responsible for them. Some of them had to be expelled from the party."
Stern magazine journalist Gerd Heidemann was happy to believe the diaries were real and took up the story.
So, too, did his editors-in-chief, who published the fake diaries and announced their "scoop" to much fanfare at a press conference on April 25, 1983.
But within two weeks of its story's publication, Stern was forced to admit that it had fallen for a hoax.
Later, both Kujau and Heidemann would receive jail time for their roles in the scandal.
How did it get so far?
Hajo Funke, a political scientist and right-wing extremism expert from the Free University of Berlin, tells ABC RN's Sunday Extra that the diary scandal shows how, four decades after Hitler's death, portions of the German population had still failed to come to terms with the Nazi regime.
"They were interested to get the scoop," he says.
"But the decisive thing is that the publisher and Kujau and Heidemann [and] the journalistic highest level of the Stern magazine were interested in the issue itself: to rewrite the history of the Third Reich."
Professor Funke says the magazine was willing to believe and propagate the diaries' fiction, namely that, "Hitler didn't know about [the Holocaust] — he was anti-Semitic, but he didn't know about the killings — and he was a fine person, to a degree … he may even [have been] a great politician if there was no Holocaust, if there was no second world war".
Even into the decade following the publication of the fake diaries, "this kind of relativisation in the public has been widespread", he argues.
In the fake diaries, Kujau writes as Hitler in 1943, ten years after the beginning of the Holocaust, and has Hitler say "nothing about killing, nothing about Auschwitz, nothing about Treblinka and the Holocaust," Professor Funke says.
"And this is the absurd, bizarre thing. Nobody [should] have believed in that.
"But 40 years ago, the famous presentation of the Stern magazine tells us, 'We have to rewrite this story'.
"So you'll see the intention of all of them who were a part of it was to relativise [Hitler's] deeds — and this is a scandal."
The truth emerges
Professor Funke has added historical context to the first complete publication of the fake Hitler diaries, which were published in full by German public broadcaster NDR this year.
The type of paper used for the diaries gave the hoax away, he explains.
"The paper on which [the fake diaries were] written was post-[19]45, and not in the lifetime of Hitler, because he died, he killed himself, at the end of April '45."
It was proof that the diaries were false — and a devastating indictment of those who'd both created and fallen for them, Professor Funke says.
He questions the extent to which Stern magazine has today accepted its culpability for the publication of the diaries.
However, after restricting access to the diaries for decades, Stern recently handed the relevant material to the well-known Munich history institute, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, to independently research and analyse them.
Professor Funke hopes there can now be a proper public conversation about the fake diaries — and the disturbing fact they were ever believed.
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