Word: fischer
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...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...
After telling contradictory stories about how he got the diaries, Heidemann admitted that his supplier was Konrad Fischer, 44, a shadowy documents dealer and calligrapher and an emigre from East Germany, who also used the alias Konrad Kujau. Heidemann said that over a period of two years he exchanged suitcases of cash totaling 9 million marks ($3.7 million) for packets of volumes. When reporters went to check on Fischer, his Stuttgart office and suburban home were apparently abandoned...
...Fischer, who hired lawyers and yielded voluntarily to an arrest warrant at week's end, denied that he had forged the diaries. He called the charge "absurd," adding: "I can neither read the Gothic handwriting [used by Hitler] nor write it." That was an odd claim for one who deals in documents of the Nazi period. Fischer insisted that the volumes actually were written by the Führer...
Still, there was circumstantial evidence that Fischer had penned the diaries. A companion, Edith Lieblang, had complained to friends that he was working "day and night" on a book about Hitler for Stern. In recent years, friends had noticed Fischer on a spending spree, buying, among other items, a house for 700,000 marks ($287,000) in cash...
...after publication to subject the documents to the routine chemical tests that proved them fakes. Stern did consult handwriting experts, but the "authentic" Hitler artifacts supplied to the analysts for crosschecking may also have been forgeries: they were obtained from Heidemann's personal collection and thus, possibly, from Fischer. In self-defense, Heidemann repeatedly emphasized his editors' carelessness. Said he: "I only delivered the diaries. What the publishers and the editorial board do with them is not my business...