The Reunion: The Hitler Diaries
BBC Radio 4
WHEN I was a boy in Bath during the Second World War, I knocked about the antique and junk shops with my dad, who was a cabinet maker, ever on the lookout for genuine Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite items. In those pre-Antiques Roadshow days, they were occasionally found. I was soon rummaging about in all the junk on my own account for military memorabilia, cigarette cards, prints and decorative weapons. I accumulated drawers full of cigarette cards, a German spiked helmet, epaulettes, badges and medals.
Bath then basked (as well as it could) in the fading sunset of the British Empire; it was full of retired army and navy top brass and administrative wallahs, often wandering the streets on foot or reclining in bathchairs and frequently taking tea and enjoying the musical trio in the Pump Room. The grim reaper’s periodic tours led to obituaries in the Daily Telegraph and yesterday’s imperial trophies turned up among other debris of the past on display for purchase.
There was a sword I constantly and hopelessly lusted after in a shop window. A cavalry sabre, labelled “Waterloo 1815”.
I went in and asked to handle it. Although
I was no means an expert, even I could see, from a very simple examination, that this was no weapon but a theatrical sword or decorative item. Its blade had never been ground or sharpened.
Sue MacGregor’s The Reunion series featured a fascinating programme on The Hitler Diaries, which detailed a similar con on a fantastic scale that apparently fooled distinguished experts such as Hugh Trevor Roper, Eberhard Jaeckel and Gerhard Weinberg. It told the story of the discovery of the alleged Hitler Diaries supposedly recovered from a plane crash near Dresden in April 1945. In April 1983, Stern magazine in Germany published extensive excerpts and these experts declared their authenticity. Trevor Roper, by then Lord Dacre, asserted: “I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic, that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality and even… of some public events may in consequence have to be revised”. A forensics expert soon simply examined the paper they were written on to reveal they’d been carefully inscribed some years after the Fuehrer had blown his brains out.
Thus a highly esteemed Oxford historian and a director of The Times, now owned by Rupert Murdoch, which had coughed up thousands to publish The Hitler Diaries in Britain, finished up with egg on his face. It was another example of the influence of market values. The correct parallel is with literary and artistic forgeries. Cometh the time, cometh the fake. Ancient Celtic Bard Ossian’s lost works and Chatterton’s Rowley Manuscripts appeared during the 18th century craze for the medieval. Ireland’s do-it-yourself Shakespeare
dramas were discovered in the early Shakespearian revival. Fine art fakers got busy as Nazi loot circulated after 1945. My Waterloo sabre was shown off as Bath filled with souvenir-hunting GIs during the D Day build-up. Money talks. But you shouldn’t always believe what it says.
Robert Giddings
