Word: heidemann
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
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...
...Heidemann denied allegations by Stern that he had "possibly enriched himself" through fraud. Said he: "I was hoodwinked." Nonetheless, he belatedly admitted that for his role the magazine had paid him 1.5 million marks...
Stern's management had accepted Heidemann's tales, and his purchases, with an amazing lack of skepticism or even normal caution. As its editors conceded last week, the magazine took possession of the first diaries more than two years ago. Yet Stern waited until 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...