A Major Mea Culpa from Stern

Bitter staffers compel an editor's ouster and an unusual expose

The cover image was Stern at its low-down best: a man in a black gangster-style fedora aiming a gun out toward the reader. Inside the West German photoweekly was a pulse-quickening tale of intrigue: clandestine meetings of unrepentant Nazis, secret trips across a Communist border, bags of money tossed from one speeding car to another. What made Stern's investigation so notable, however, was that the magazine exposed its own management's gullibility in what it labeled "the biggest flop of German press history": the purchase, for $3.8 million, and publication of forged diaries purportedly written by Adolf Hitler.

The cover headlines read, THE FORGERY: KONRAD KUJAU, THE MAN WHO DELIVERED "HITLER'S DIARIES." The menacing photo was of Kujau, 44, an East German emigre and a Stuttgart-based dealer in documents and military memorabilia who sold the diaries to Stern and is suspected of having forged them. The story of his bizarre behavior, and of the Keystone Kops-style thriller that he enacted with the magazine's go-between, Reporter Gerd Heidemann, may have left readers asking how Heidemann, and his free-spending Stern supervisors, could have been fooled by anyone so preposterous. Kujau, who since the 1960s had used the alias Fischer, often strutted around Stuttgart in a Nazi SS officer's uniform, although he was a boy of six when Hitler's Third Reich fell in 1945. He gave lavish parties for fellow patrons of his favorite bars: Stern reported that one night he ordered 70 bottles of champagne, and that over the past two years he squandered 1.5 million marks ($600,000) on night life.

When he met Heidemann, 51, Kujau claimed to have access to 27 Hitler diaries for sale at 80,000 marks ($33,000) each; after Heidemann and Stern proved enthusiastic, Kujau upped his claim to 69 diaries and the price to 200,000 marks. To the delight of Heidemann, a lover of melodramatic quests, three batches of diaries were delivered to him inside East Germany. While driving on a highway leading to West Berlin, Heidemann would, according to his story, toss a package of marks worth more than $100,000 into a passing car; someone in that car would then throw a packet of diaries.

Stern did not name any potential accomplices to Kujau or sources for the assertions in the diaries. The magazine quietly dropped its claims that East German officials had conspired in the fakery. Kujau, who is currently jailed in Hamburg on a charge of fraud, still insists that the diaries are genuine. But Stern last week took a sample of writing by Kujau, who is a calligrapher, and a selection of the diaries to a professor who specializes in detecting forgeries; he concluded that they probably came from the same hand.

Stern's pell-mell pursuit of the Hitler "scoop" was not resoundingly justified at newsstands. The first diaries issue, April 25, though promoted as containing some of the most titillating items, sold 2 million copies, about 300,000 more than usual.

The magazine's humiliating expose was accompanied by a self-critical apology to readers from Publisher Henri Nannen, who the week before had blamed Heidemann and all but disavowed responsibility. Nannen, who founded the magazine in 1948, wrote, in the Latin once used by Roman Catholics in confessing their sins, "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa "(my fault, my grievous fault). He explained the management's collective lapse of judgment as the product of "a bunker mentality." The magazine's renewed coverage of an episode that Nannen had hoped to forget was in fact forced by embittered employees, who for six days symbolically occupied Stern's editorial offices. The protest compelled Nannen to drop a newly named co-editor from outside the magazine, Business Journalist Johannes Gross, whom staffers labeled too conservative, and to pledge that the magazine would continue in a "progressive-liberal" (actually, leftwing) tradition of journalism. Other publications hailed, as a "first in German journalistic history," the rights that Stern staffers had won. But Stern's employees declared that ending the sit-in was only a "ceasefire" in a battle to exact retribution for the diaries fiasco. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.