Word: heidemann
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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...
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...
...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...