The Hitler Diaries

In 1983 the German magazine Stern believed it held the scoop of the century. It had the private diaries of Adolf Hitler, 62 volumes of them, found by its reporter Gerd Heidemann. For them Stern paid 9.3 million Deutsche Marks. The pages were meant to show a different Hitler, a peace-loving leader troubled by stomach cramps, who never knew about the Holocaust. The diaries said the Final Solution was carried out by subordinates behind his back. That was the whole point of them, and it was a lie. They had been written only a few years earlier, in cheap modern notebooks, by a man who was no historian at all. How did a forger fool a magazine, a famous professor and a newspaper empire, and where had all that money gone?