Word: heidemann
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...journalistic scoop of the post- World War II era": the discovery of 62 volumes of Adolf Hitler's diaries. It soon became clear that Stern itself had been caught in a $3.8 million swindle involving Documents Dealer Konrad Kujau, 46, and Stern's veteran investigative reporter Gerd ("the Detective") Heidemann, 53. The trial of the two men has been under way in Hamburg for six months. Even so, more questions than answers about the case remain as the proceedings move toward a close...
...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...
...magazine's humiliating expose was accompanied by a self-critical apology to readers from Publisher Henri Nannen, who the week before had blamed Heidemann and all but disavowed responsibility. Nannen, who founded the magazine in 1948, wrote, in the Latin once used by Roman Catholics in confessing their sins, "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa "(my fault, my grievous fault). He explained the management's collective lapse of judgment as the product of "a bunker mentality." The magazine's renewed coverage of an episode that Nannen had hoped to forget was in fact forced by embittered employees...
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...