About this episode

Andrew Hunter Murray explores the Hitler Diaries scandal, a major forgery that misled the world about Adolf Hitler's thoughts and history.

Writer and broadcaster Andrew Hunter Murray uncovers last century’s biggest ever publishing scandal, a forgery which rocked the world and destroyed reputations. When Germany’s biggest magazine Stern announced in 1983 that they’d found the long-lost diaries of Adolf Hitler, authenticated by the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the world was poised to rewrite history. Salvaged from the wreckage of a Junkers plane which had crashed escaping Hitler’s Berlin bunker in the dying days of the war, the diaries had been hidden in a hayloft in East Germany for forty years. And remarkably they had now come to light, smuggled across the border into West Germany at the height of the Cold War. One lone journalist, Gerd Heidemann, known as ‘The Bloodhound’, had tracked them down. It had taken two years of secret missions and millions of Deutschmarks to amass all sixty volumes of Hitler’s personal, handwritten journals. The world was about to find the truth of Adolf Hitler’s mind: what he knew, what motivated him, his intimate reflections as the Third Reich rose and fell. That, at least, was the story – a story which news organisations the world over, including Rupert Murdoch’s…

People in this episode

Host: Andrew Hunter Murray

Topics covered

• forgery
• publishing scandal
• Adolf Hitler
• Cold War
• historical narrative
• journalism
• World War II

Keywords

• Hitler Diaries
• forgery
• publishing scandal
• historical forgery
• Gerd Heidemann
• Hugh Trevor-Roper
• Cold War
• Nazi history
• journalism

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stern, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times

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