Black Ink and Red Wax Swastikas

By Marguerite Johnson

A cache of purported Hitler diaries comes to light

When Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, he left behind few written documents about either his public or private life. The gap may now be filled. The weekly West German magazine Stern has announced that it obtained 62 volumes of personal diaries that the Fuehrer had written by hand during his dozen years in power. The new documents could prove immensely valuable to historians studying Hitler's personality and actions.

Stern (circ. 1.87 million) this week will publish the first of numerous installments from the black leather-bound diaries, which date from June 1932, seven months before Hitler became Germany's Chancellor, to mid-April 1945, just two weeks before his death and the fall of the Third Reich. Each volume contains from 75 to 100 pages, written in black ink, many bearing Hitler's signature at the bottom. Upon completion, each diary was wrapped with a thin red cord and sealed with a red wax imprint of the swastika.

According to Stern, one volume is devoted to Hitler's account of the 1941 secret mission by his deputy Rudolf Hess to Britain to try to persuade the British to sign a peace agreement. Other entries deal with the 1940 British retreat at Dunkirk and the amorous activities of Chief Propagandist Josef Goebbels.

The first batch of entries, excerpted in the London Sunday Times this week, were skimpy but they nonetheless made fascinating reading. Hitler's scribblings ranged from the commonplace ("Suffering more and more from insomnia; indigestion getting even worse," from April 1938) to the conspiratorial (on Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo: "I shall show this deceitful small animal breeder, this unfathomable little penny pincher with his lust for power, what I am really like," from Nov. 11, 1939).* At another point, the diarist related how Storm Trooper Chief Ernest Roehm "lied to me and deceived me," and then displayed his disgust with all his generals by commenting, "I absolutely need a new military command." Only one adviser seems to have earned his respect: Personal Secretary Martin Bormann. "This man Bormann has become indispensable to me," Hitler wrote on March 27, 1945. "If I had five Bormanns, I would not be sitting here now."

Yet Hitler was also capable of showing grudging admiration for some opponents. On Sept. 30, 1938, the day after Britain, France and Italy agreed to slice up Czechoslovakia at Germany's behest, Hitler wrote of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain: "He nearly outsmarted me. This smoothie Englishman ... I would have made quite different conditions for [Italy's Benito] Mussolini and [France's Edouard] Daladier, but I couldn't do so with this cunning fox Chamberlain." Hitler expressed worries about the health of "E," his mistress, Eva Braun, and curtly dismissed the unsuccessful 1944 plot by army officers to assassinate him. "Ha, ha, isn't it laughable?" he wrote in July 1944. "This scum, these loafers and good-for-nothings. These people were bunglers." The last entry in the final volume is undated, but was undoubtedly composed in the Fuehrer's bunker in mid-April 1945 as the Allies encircled Berlin: "The long-awaited offensive has begun. May the Lord God stand by us." Within two weeks, Hitler was dead and the war was over. Stern's publishers described the diaries, which are part of a cache that includes documents, drawings and other memorabilia that Hitler purportedly collected for his archives, as "a fantastic and historic find." But the publishers refused to give many details on how the items came into their possession. A magazine executive would go only so far as to say enigmatically that "it all started with a call from a public telephone booth. After that, it was just good, thorough reporting."

Stern says that the materials were put aboard a Luftwaffe transport plane a few days before Soviet troops marched into Berlin. The plane headed for a small airfield near Salzburg, from where the cargo was to be transported by truck to Hitler's Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden. A U.S. fighter, however, shot down the plane en route on the morning of April 21, 1945. It crashed near the tiny village of Bornersdorf in what is now East Germany. According to British Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, whom the magazine invited to examine the documents, an officer of the Wehrmacht retrieved the materials that had survived the crash and concealed them in a hayloft for nearly 35 years. Three years ago the former officer, then 80 years old and living in Switzerland, handed over the documents to Gert Heideman, an enterprising Hamburg journalist and lifelong collector of Nazi memorabilia. Heideman had succeeded in tracking down the Wehrmacht officer after pursuing a long trail of clues that led from Bornersdorf through Western Europe and South America.

The documents, Trevor-Roper wrote in the London Times last Saturday, were then apparently smuggled out of East Germany and stored in the vault of a Swiss bank. It is not clear how they then came into the possession of Stern. But once the magazine had acquired the diaries, it launched an extensive worldwide investigation to verify their authenticity. Stern says that members of its staff managed to interview villagers who were eyewitnesses to the crash.

According to the London Times, chemical analyses of the paper and ink were then conducted. Wrote Trevor-Roper, the author and editor of several books on Hitler: "When I had entered the back room in the Swiss bank and turned the pages of those volumes, my doubts gradually dissolved. I am now satisfied they are authentic." Trevor-Roper says that notes pasted on many of the diaries' covers state that they were the personal property of the Fuehrer and that in the event of his death, they were to be given to Julius Schaub, his longtime adjutant and friend, and passed by him to Hitler's sister Paula.

Trevor-Roper explains that he gave particular weight to a remark Hitler had made to Hans Baur, his personal pilot, who has written that Hitler became furious when he learned that the flight had crashed. "In that plane were all my private archives, what I had intended as a testimony for posterity!" Hitler shouted. "It is a catastrophe!"

According to Trevor-Roper, nearly half the paintings and drawings by Hitler have been destroyed. Among the 400 that were aboard the ill-fated Luftwaffe transport are many sketches of Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, including some nude drawings. The other finds, Trevor-Roper says, will astonish historians, and standard accounts of Hitler's writing habits, personality and even some public events may have to be revised. They include whole volumes written by Hitler on Jesus Christ, Frederick the Great and himself, as well as a third volume of Mein Kampf. Writes Trevor-Roper: "It is the other documents which convinced me of the authenticity of the diaries, for all belong to the same archive. Whereas signatures, single documents, or even groups of documents can be skillfully forged, whole coherent archives covering 35 years are far less easily manufactured."

Several West German historians, while admitting that they have not seen the documents, expressed doubts about their authenticity. Said Hitler Scholar Helmut Krausnick: "I have never heard of such Hitler diaries, and no evidence of their existence has ever been found before." Said Hamburg Professor Eberhard Jaeckel: "Hitler was a man who shied away from putting things down on paper."

Stern says it is convinced of the authenticity of the diaries. "We have been extraordinarily careful," declared an executive. "It is a matter of responsibility but also of pride. Nobody likes to be the victim of a hoax." To allay any lingering doubts, Stern announced last week that it would eventually turn the diaries over to the West German national archives, where historians will be free to examine them in detail. --By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by Bonnie Angelo/London and B. William Mader/ Hamburg

*Himmler nonetheless remained in Hitler's top command until the last days of the war.

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo/London, B. William Mader/Hamburg This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.