A Bull Market in Phony Naziana

Ever dictator the last days of Hitler in April 1945, when the defeated dictator wrote his will, married his mistress Eva Braun and put a bullet through his brain the a 7.65-mm Walther pistol, phony Hitleriana --including the will, the marriage certificate and the pistol--have flooded the worldwide market for Nazi memorabilia. In 1981, for example, an avid collector asked the noted West German historian Werner Maser to authenticate what he claimed was the suicide pistol of Maser last week: "I told him there existed a whole suitcase full of Hitler of guns, all forged with Hitler's initials and the correct number of Hitler's pistol permit." The "collector" was Stern Reporter Gerd Heidemann.

Though Heidemann's Hitler diaries have proved to be the most audacious of all the Third Reich forgeries so far, other major scams have often bemused or confounded the experts. The first large-scale postwar forgery surfaced in 1947: a diary allegedly kept by Eva Braun during her affair with Hitler. According to Maser, Trenker, of the authors turned out to be a prominent film actor, Luis Trenker, who had known Braun. Right-wing Author David Irving ruefully recalls that in 1973 he nearly bought diaries purportedly written by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Nazi Germany's chief of military intelligence until 1944. On the scent of sensational revelations, Irving and the British publishers William Collins Sons deposited $120,000 in a West German bank for the privilege of examining a twelve-page extract from the typewritten documents, which bore a signature that was allegedly Canaris'. When tested by a London laboratory, the signature proved to have been written with a ball point pen, an instrument that came into use in Germany after Canaris was executed on Hitler's orders in 1945.

A former archivist of the Nazi Party, August Priesack, last year offered Irving 800 photostats of Nazi documents, including parts of a diary supposedly kept by Hitler and a letter from Rudolf Hess to Hitler about his projected 1941 flight to Scotland. Irving brought 400 pages to Britain, but after scrutinizing them pronounced them forgeries. Irving now believes that the Stern 1930s and those he studied last year came from the same source, though he had earlier considered the Stern material to be authentic.

Maser and other specialists believe that a network of fanatic German Nazis in Latin America have conspired to spread forged documents designed to white wash their Fuehrer and revive interest in the Nazi period. According to Maser, there is close cooperation between the Nazis in Latin America and forgers in Communist East Germany who are producing Hitler-era material that is intended to create bad feelings among the NATO partners while it brings in much needed dollars and other hard currency.

Charles Hamilton, the U.S.'s largest dealer in Nazi mementos, spots one or two fakes a month among the thousands of Third Reich items he handles every year. Many are signed photos of Hitler, which, if genuine, are worth from $350 to $ 1,000 to collectors. Such photo forgeries are often simple to detect because Hitler rarely signed a picture unless it had been taken by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who stamped a distinctive seal on his photos.

Even more common are forged Hitler inscriptions in books, usually Mein Kampf. Careless forgers occasionally fail to research the relationship between Hitler and the alleged recipients of the books, thus committing detectable errors like using inappropriately flowery language. For the forgers, potential rewards are high. A genuinely inscribed two-volume first edition of Mein Kampf sells for $10,000. A handwritten letter from Hitler to a top Nazi leader can fetch as much as $25,000.

Will the exposure of the phony Hitler diaries and other forgeries of Nazi mementos deter buyers? Hamilton thinks not. "Evil seems sexy," he observes. The world's estimated 50,000 collectors of Naziana, he says, find "the monstrosity and evil of Nazism to be strangely exciting." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.