Word: heidemann
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crook. From the outset Stern editors insisted they had simply trusted a reporter who had been on the staff for 31 years. But as soon as historians and document experts started to question the authenticity of the diaries at a press conference on April 25, the Stern reporter, Gerd Heidemann, 51, dropped temporarily from sight. He was grilled privately by Stern editors, and last week he defended himself, saying that he was nothing more than a dutiful if gullible employee, not a wrongdoer...
...reputation as "gullible and morbidly interested in Nazi paraphernalia." Heidemann, Maser said, had once berated him for claiming in a book review that Hitler had been fully aware of the mass executions of Jews, and had even wanted them speeded up. Heidemann was "furious" and accused him of smearing "the Führer's" name, contends Maser...
...Heidemann, with his wife Gina at his side, was quizzed by Stern executives in one session that ended at 3:15 in the morning. Emerging, she said about the collapse of Stern's publishing plans, "It's terrible. But no matter what happens, we will always believe in the diaries." She charged that the West German officials who had declared the books fraudulent were really trying to "suppress the truth." She and her husband have friends among former Nazi officers. When they were married, two former Nazi generals served as official witnesses. "It would have been a joy to tell...
...authenticate what he claimed was the suicide pistol of Maser last week: "I told him there existed a whole suitcase full of Hitler of guns, all forged with Hitler's initials and the correct number of Hitler's pistol permit." The "collector" was Stern Reporter Gerd Heidemann...
...Though Heidemann's Hitler diaries have proved to be the most audacious of all the Third Reich forgeries so far, other major scams have often bemused or confounded the experts. The first large-scale postwar forgery surfaced in 1947: a diary allegedly kept by Eva Braun during her affair with Hitler. According to Maser, Trenker, of the authors turned out to be a prominent film actor, Luis Trenker, who had known Braun. Right-wing Author David Irving ruefully recalls that in 1973 he nearly bought diaries purportedly written by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Nazi Germany's chief of military...