Word: stern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...addition, three historians claimed last week that they had been shown, months or years ago, apparently spurious Hitler-related items that they now contend came from Stern's supposedly top-secret discovery. Joachim Fest, writer of book and film biographies of Hitler and a co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says, "A not insignificant part of what I was shown was convincing, but doubt won out." Irving said he had seen what he calls a forged letter, supposedly written to Hitler by his Deputy Chancellor Rudolf Hess. Professor Eberhard Jäckel of Stuttgart University lost interest...
...Stern Editor Koch, who flew to the U.S. to defend the Hitler diaries' authenticity, waved aside all objections to what he called "the journalistic scoop of the post-World War II period." But he admitted that his magazine had relied for verification almost entirely on the assertions of Reporter Gerd Heidemann, 51, a 31-year veteran of Stern who claims he uncovered the diaries after a four-year search through East and West Germany, Spain and South America...
From that point, however, Heidemann's story becomes murky. He will not say where or when he located the documents, how he obtained them, who had harbored them and where, or how he proved to himself that they were genuine. In a video documentary that Stern showed at its press conference, Heidemann made a strange error: he said he went to South America at the beginning of the 1980s, among other reasons, to look for Hitler's former secretary Martin Bormann. But Bormann had been declared dead in 1973 after his remains were found in West Berlin...
Heidemann joined Stern in 1951, just three years after it was founded. A photographer turned self-styled investigative reporter, Heidemann found the reclusive mystery writer B. Traven (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) in Mexico and former Gestapo Official Klaus Barbie in Bolivia. But he is far from a star in Hamburg, West Germany's de facto journalistic capital. Says one fellow reporter: "He is a perfectly ordinary reporter, perhaps a little gullible but otherwise bland." Heidemann has one colorful trait: a passion for Nazi memorabilia. He sold his house in Hamburg a decade ago to buy a yacht...
...theory, voiced by Jäckel and Historian Werner Maser: the diaries may have been produced in an alleged Nazi memorabilia "forgery factory" in Potsdam, East Germany, for cash and for advancement of Soviet political aims. The two major "revelations" in the first installment of the diaries published by Stern are that Hitler approved Deputy Chancellor Hess's 1941 trip to Britain to propose a treaty and that he let the British escape at Dunkirk in hopes of persuading them to make a separate peace. Both claims have been forcefully challenged by historians, who noted that on the very...