Telling Tales (14 page)

Since 1957, as is well known, I haven’t granted an interview or had a photograph taken . . .

The fact that I shunned publicity had a backlash. Just because I was the richest man in the world and wouldn’t give interviews . . . Every newspaper and magazine in this country has a reporter whose sole job is to snoop into my private life and the doings of my companies . . .

But now, because I’m nearing the end of my life, I want to set the record straight.

They tried to put me in an asylum. They wrote outright lies about me. The portrayal of me as an aging lunatic – I won’t have it.

I want the balance restored. I don’t want future generations to remember Howard Hughes only as an obscenely rich and weird man. There’s more to me than that . . . intend to be dead honest . . . This is the truth about my life, warts and all.

The veteran television journalist Mike Wallace interviewed Irving about his remarkable coup and, although he believed everything he said, he admitted afterwards that as soon as filming was over, his cameramen and sound technicians had all agreed there was something very suspicious about the writer. As he later recalled ‘They understood. I didn’t. He got me.’

Then, just as it seemed Irving and his accomplices would get away with it, a strung-out but lucid Howard Hughes broke his silence. In the first week of 1972 he arranged a conference call with a group of journalists he had worked with in the past. By now the news, gossip and entertainment media were baying for blood and even Irving himself must have been longing for a resolution of some kind. Television cameras were set up in the office where the journalists were to receive the call, and at the appointed time, as the world looked on, the phone rang. Hughes, sounding remote but enervated, made it clear that he had never met this Clifford Irving, knew nothing about him, and certainly had not given anyone permission to co-write his autobiography.

A less desperate hoaxer would have given himself up there and then, but Irving, from his own private hideaway in Ibiza, denounced this phone call as a fake, and then suggested that Hughes, who was obviously of unsound mind, had changed his mind and the book was to go ahead. But with McGraw-Hill now starting to worry about where their money had gone, a full investigation was launched. One of the first things it uncovered was the fact that the bank account in Switzerland into which Hughes’ portion of the advance money had been paid had only been opened recently, and by a woman calling herself Helga Hughes. This woman was quickly identified by bank staff as exactly resembling Irving’s wife, Edith. Even when Swiss police turned up at the Irvings’ home, they tried at first to deny any knowledge of a hoax – hinting merely that someone posing as Howard Hughes might perhaps have taken them in. But by the end of the month it was clear even to the eternally optimistic and ambitious Clifford Irving that the game was up, and on 28 January both he and his wife agreed to make a confession.

After the trial for fraud that followed, Irving was incarcerated for fourteen months, his accomplice Suskind for five, but Edith’s sentence was suspended. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their marriage was not to last. Hughes would not last much longer either, but he did live long enough to see Irving come out of prison a stronger, fitter man (he had given up his smoking and drinking lifestyle and turned into a gym addict). It must have irked Hughes further to see Irving not only resurrect his novel-writing career but to take it to a greater heights than he ever had before, writing several bestsellers. Finally, in 1981 (once Hughes was no longer around to spoil his fun) Irving wrote his book-length account of the hoax that made his name. And it was this that inspired the 2006 film
The Hoax
starring Richard Gere as Irving and Alfred Molina as Suskind, which ensured that a whole new generation of cinema-goers are fully conversant with the wild man of Hollywood and the daring schemer who believed he could get away with the grandest identity fraud on record.

A
SK SOMEONE TO
think of a literary hoax and the first one they will come up with is probably the Hitler Diaries. This headline-grabbing affair captured the public imagination not only because the diaries fed into the on-going fascination with the most influential villain in twentieth-century history, but because – despite being very shoddily executed – they hoodwinked some of the most prestigious newspapers and academics in Europe. They were, in the words of the autograph expert Kenneth W. Rendell, ‘bad forgeries but a great hoax’.

The story began in the early 1980s when Gerd Heidemann, a journalist for the popular German news magazine
Stern
, came to his editors with the remarkable news that he had found an antiques dealer who had dozens of notebooks in which Adolf Hitler had recorded his innermost thoughts between the years 1932 and 1945. It would be hard to imagine a more significant literary discovery. So much is known of Hitler’s public life but so frustratingly little of his inner life that something like this – a genuine insight into his character and his responses to the evils his regime committed – could well change the understanding of history.

Heidemann himself was known to nurture an unhealthy interest in the material leftovers of the Third Reich, and was a keen collector of Nazi memorabilia. His most prized possession was
Carin II
, the yacht once used by the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering, which he had bought in the mid-1970s, having saved up the money during his fifteen-year career as a reporter on
Stern
. By the early eighties the repairs on the boat were costing him so much he decided to sell, and one of the first people he approached as a likely buyer was a more wealthy memorabilia collector, Fritz Steifel. During a meeting at his house, Steifel revealed that he had in his possession a most remarkable book: a single bound leather volume of Adolf Hitler’s diaries. Heidemann was dumb-struck by this revelation. He had never heard even a rumour that such a thing existed – and quizzed Steifel as to its provenance. He was told the book – and dozens more like it, each covering a six-month period in Hitler’s life – had been found in the wreckage of a plane crash in East Germany at the end of the war and fallen into the hands of a high-ranking official who sold it for hard currency to an antique dealer in Stuttgart. That dealer had then sold it on to Steifel.

Heidemann, who was known by his colleagues to be a very enthusiastic if somewhat gullible reporter, sped back to
Stern
with the heady news. But only one of his colleagues paid his unlikely story any credence, the magazine’s historical researcher, Thomas Walde. Together, the two men decided to journey to the site of the plane crash and see for themselves what they could find. They managed to locate the crash site and although there were no remaining manuscripts to be found there, the sight of the mangled plane was enough to convince them the story was true and they assumed all the valuable loot had been taken away by local residents.

In fact, that part of the tale was true after a fashion. At the end of the war, a plane load of sensitive documents had indeed been removed from Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and flown, for safe keeping, towards Bavaria in a mission called Operation Seraglio. However, the plane had crashed and the papers were lost. After leaving the crash site, Heidemann and Walde then managed to track down the alleged antiques dealer in Stuttgart, who their contacts in the illegal world of Nazi memorabilia-trading had said was called Herr Fischer.

This Fischer turned out to be a low-rent criminal and forger whose real name was Konrad Kujau. Throughout the 1970s he had been selling phoney artefacts to collectors like Steifel, ‘authenticating’ each one with an official-looking certificate of his own fabrication. He carried on his work untroubled by fears of retribution because he knew full well that if any of his patrons suspected him of fakery, they would hardly go to the police about it. He was not making a fortune, but was doing better than his brother, who was a railway porter in East Germany. One day, on a whim, he had made a single volume of Hitler’s diaries out of an old school exercise book and offered it to Steifel, one of his best customers, but had not been planning to create any more until Heidemann came to him with an offer of 2,000,000 marks for the entire set of diaries. Obviously, Kujau was not about to turn this money down, but he knew he would need time to manufacture the other volumes he had spoken of. He decided to tell Heidemann that he would have to get the books smuggled out of East Germany one by one by his brother (who he elevated to the position of army general for the purposes of the ruse), which could of course take some months or even years. He also stipulated that he would deal with nobody apart from Heidemann himself. All this having been swiftly agreed to, the two journalists now had to persuade their bosses at the magazine to come up with the money to pay for them. When it was pointed out how much extra revenue such a scoop could garner for
Stern
, they agreed.

Over the next few years, as the diaries were ‘smuggled’ out of East Germany (in reality they were hastily put together by Kujau), Heidemann would regularly make the trip to Kujau’s office with a suitcase full of cash to pay for each new instalment. But whereas he told the magazine each one cost 200,000 marks, he was actually only paying Kujau 85,000. The huge commission he was dishonestly skimming off Kujau’s fee, in addition to the massive new contract he had negotiated with
Stern
in return for his work on the diaries, was making him a very rich man.

By the beginning of 1983
Stern
had enough of the small black leather-bound volumes to unleash the scoop of the century on its readers. The diaries may not have contained the extended passages of psychological insight into the Führer’s mind that they had hoped for, but along with accounts of all the meetings and official engagements that he attended, there were glimpses into his private life with Eva Braun and his personal problems with ill-health which would nonetheless make them highly sought after. The magazine began to negotiate syndication rights to other newspapers and media groups, one of which was News Corp, who proposed to buy the British rights to the story and splash it across the
Sunday Times
. At this point,
Stern
’s editors also sought independent verification for the manuscripts from a small handful of handwriting experts. Had they been less worried about keeping their scoop a secret, they might have contacted some of the country’s many highly regarded war historians and Hitler experts, but instead they only went to graphologists – and what’s more, the examples of Hitler’s ‘real’ handwriting they produced to compare the diaries to had themselves been faked. By Kujau. A police forensics officer was casually contacted for advice, but by the time his report (which was inconclusive) came through, they had already gone to press.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the parent company of the
Sunday Times
, however, was going to take no chances if it was going to stake a huge amount of its financial and reputational capital on bringing the documents to a British audience, so on 8 April 1983, just before publication, it sent the world-famous Hitler historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (by now Lord Dacre) to authenticate the diaries. Although initially sceptical, when he saw the sheer mass of information in the collection, Trevor-Roper became convinced it was all genuine, and wrote as much in a sensational article for the Sunday paper, in which he expressed the opinion that while it was easy to fake the odd note or memo, creating thousands of pages of seemingly accurate material and presenting it in a consistent style could not be the work of a petty forger. Readers familiar with his exposé of
The Hermit of Peking
, aka Sir Edmund Backhouse (see p. 70) might have disagreed.

Stern
was of course delighted with Trevor-Roper’s support, and with that of the American magazine
Newsweek’
s hired expert who had travelled to Germany at the same time, and on Monday 25 April the magazine ran its first special edition devoted to their amazing discovery. That very day they held a press conference with Trevor-Roper and others to consolidate the magnitude of their discovery and display the diaries for the first time; but unbeknownst to them, the famous English historian had, in the days after first seeing the manuscripts, become increasingly doubtful over them. The press conference proved to be nothing like the triumphant
Stern
-fest the magazine had hoped for, and jaws dropped when a red-faced Trevor-Roper made his uncomfortable announcement: ‘As a historian, I regret that the, er, normal method of historical verification, er, has, perhaps necessarily, been to some extent sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.’

The conference was brought to a hasty conclusion and panicked
Stern
executives decided they must now – as they should have done before – go to the highest archival authorities in Germany to get the diaries certified one way or the other. The books were duly sent off to Hans Booms of the Bundesarchiv and in the first week of May they were denounced emphatically as fakes. The main clue to their inauthenticity was that the factual content of each entry had been lifted – mistakes and all – from a book (well-thumbed in Kujau’s library, as it turned out) called
Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations
. There were other giveaways as well: rudimentary errors, such as Hitler’s initials being inscribed wrongly on a title page, as well as the cheeky personal entries which verged on schoolboy larkishness. We have Hitler complaining of his terrible flatulence and bad breath, and Eva Braun giving him hell about it; December 1938’s unlikely ‘Now a year is nearly over. Have I achieved my goals for the Reich? Save for a few small details, yes!’; and notes to self such as ‘Must get tickets for the Olympic games for Eva’.

With the hoax now undeniable, the fall-out for the newspapers who had been taken in was massive. Both
Stern
and the News Corp group had to issue shamefaced apologies to their readers. (Murdoch-haters in the UK had particular fun with the
Sunday Times
, even though they had only run an article by Trevor-Roper and not the extracts themselves by the time of the debunking.) In the midst of this flurry of admissions, recriminations and jibes from rival papers, Konrad Kujau fled his home for Austria, terrified he would be incarcerated for the rest of his life if the police came looking for him. They did, of course, but in the end he gave himself up before they found him, writing out a full confession in Hitler’s handwriting as a final flourish to the long saga of his deception. The reason for his sudden admission of guilt? He had learnt from newspaper reports the full amount of money
Stern
had been giving Heidemann to pass on to him, and when he realized how badly he had been fleeced, he decided to incriminate the journalist by telling all.