Word: stern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cover image was Stern at its low-down best: a man in a black gangster-style fedora aiming a gun out toward the reader. Inside the West German photoweekly was a pulse-quickening tale of intrigue: clandestine meetings of unrepentant Nazis, secret trips across a Communist border, bags of money tossed from one speeding car to another. What made Stern's investigation so notable, however, was that the magazine exposed its own management's gullibility in what it labeled "the biggest flop of German press history": the purchase, for $3.8 million, and publication of forged diaries purportedly written...
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...
...affair of the faked diaries has raised grave questions of journalistic duty. Stern's staff concluded, in a dictum that had unique emotional force in West Germany, though less practical application elsewhere: "Even if the diaries were genuine, publication in Stern should have been forbidden in consideration of the victims of Nazi power." In the U.S., historians and social scientists labeled the diaries legitimate news, if authentic, but condemned some coverage as sensational. Concluded Yale University Psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton: "In the melodrama unfolding before us, responsibility to history or to profound moral questions was lost in the intensity...
...entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction," the stern speaker warned his hushed audience. "We can only reach with determination for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away . .. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide...