Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though word of the story had spread for several days, the blood-red banner headline was startling. Proclaimed West Germany's raffish picture magazine Stern: HITLER'S DIARIES DISCOVERED. To trumpet its acquisition of 62 volumes dated from 1932 to 1945, the entire span of Hitler's Third Reich, Stern (circ. 1.87 million) summoned more than 200 print and television reporters from around the world to its art deco headquarters in Hamburg. There, at a self-congratulatory three-hour press conference, Editor in Chief Peter Koch announced: "I am 100% convinced that Hitler wrote every single word...
Almost from the moment the press conference began, however, Stern's claim of authenticity for the diaries was questioned by historians and derided by the press, most notably in Britain. The London Standard said that it had acquired "exclusive rights to the diaries of Genghis Khan," while the Daily Mirror gibed, "The secret diaries of Hitler's secret lover, Eva Braun, have been found in a secret compartment of her secret handbag." Joshed the New York Times in a gently doubting editorial: "We would not be a bit surprised to pass a bookstand one day soon...
Aggravating the controversy was Stern's angry charge that Newsweek, after withdrawing a bid to publish the diaries, had unethically broken an agreement to keep secret the material that had been shown to Parker and a paid historical consultant in a Zurich bank vault. The major leak: the content of passages about Hitler's attitude toward Jews and the Holocaust, which Newsweek assessed, but which Stern had not planned to publish until next year. Said Stern's Koch: "That was a nice dirty trick. We would like to sue. We were cheated, and I guarantee Newsweek will...
...turbulent week for Stern and the diaries began with a scuffle at the Hamburg press conference: idiosyncratic British Historian David Irving asked a "question" in which he labeled the diaries "pure fabrications" and charged that the diaries' ink had not been subjected to chemical tests. As photographers jostled each other to get pictures of Irving, who started his own miniconference, Stern security aides led him away while he shouted, "Ink! Ink! Ink!" Irving, a Hitler biographer with professed "ultrarightist" political views, conceded he had been hired as a consultant by another publication, Bild am Sonntag (circ. 2.6 million...
...more damaging to Stern than Irving's melodramatic outburst were the quieter disclaimers made by two historians who had been invited to the conference to authenticate the diaries. Weinberg, though he had tentatively judged the documents to be real, called on Stern to bring in handwriting analysts and teams of scholars to check the diaries page by page. Cambridge Don Trevor-Roper, who was sent to Berlin by the British government in 1945 to verify the circumstances of Hitler's death and who wrote the definitive account of the Führer's final days, retreated, more...