Burdens of Bad Judgment

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Condemnation and a new suspect in the Hitler diary fraud

Doubts about authenticity are over, but debate about how and why the faked Adolf Hitler diaries came to be published has grown ever more bitter. Two top editors have resigned from Stem, the West German photo weekly that purveyed the forgeries; the reporter who acquired the 62 volumes for the magazine was dismissed and sued for fraud; the Nazi memento dealer who allegedly supplied the diaries and who was suspected of fabricating them surrendered to police in Hamburg. After devoting 80 pages in two previous issues to Hitler, Stern offered a one-page apology to readers. On the cover of the magazine was a cherubic infant. Yet if the picture subliminally hinted at a rebirth of the magazine's self-respect, the image was premature.

Journalistic and ethical standards at Stern and other publications that ballyhooed the Hitler diaries were denounced with new force last week on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps nowhere more fiercely than within Stern itself. Much of the 210-member editorial staff was obsessed with investigating the diaries fiasco. Others sought only to place the embarrassment behind them. Many called for the resignation of Henri Nannen, 69, who has been Stern's publisher since the magazine was founded in 1948. Others hinted that blame extends high into Stern's parent corporation, Gruner & Jahr, and even into the holding company, Bertelsmann AG, a publishing conglomerate (1982 sales: $2.4 billion) that includes Bantam Books in the U.S.

To deflect the discontent, Nannen named two outsiders, Business Journalist Johannes Gross and Television Executive Peter Scholl-Latour, as co-publishers and editors in chief. The magazine's management also returned $200,000 that had been paid by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for British and Commonwealth publication rights. The placatory efforts backfired. In a statement, some 200 editorial employees labeled the episode "a severe blow against 35 years of Stern credibility." About 100 staffers staged a sit-in at Stern's offices to protest the hiring of Gross and Scholl-Latour because their jobs would merge business and editorial control and because they supposedly would not sustain the magazine's liberal tradition.

In West Germany, leading journalists belittled Stern. Said Lothar Loewe, director of West Berlin's TV station SFB: "The whole affair is the result of checkbook journalism, of which Stern is the worst offender." In a front-page editorial in Hamburg's prestigious weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Editor Theo Sommer said, "When lightweights are combined with heavy money, the controlling responsibilities in journalism are easily lost."

Criticism also hit, with less force, at publications that obtained rights to the diaries, including the London Sunday Times and the magazines Paris Match in France and Panorama in Italy, or that proclaimed the volumes a historic find, as Newsweek did in a May 2 cover story ("Hitler's Secret Diaries").

In the U.S., Newsweek was raked by Columnist Anthony Lewis of the New York Times and by Ombudsman Robert McCloskey at Newsweek's sister publication, the Washington Post. Lewis said Newsweek had been either "gullible" or "shameless." He wrote: "The cover story raised the possibility of fraud. But it went on for pages about the historical significance of it all. And it said: 'Genuine or not, it almost doesn't matter in the end.' It matters a lot." McCloskey argued: "The impression created [by Newsweek] with the aid of provocative newspaper and television advertising was that the entire story was authentic." He accused Newsweek, in its second U.S. cover story on the subject, of a "disingenuous" attempt to claim credit for uncovering the hoax, and said of the reporting in last week's issue: "Nowhere is there any acknowledgment that the weight of previous coverage could have misled readers." Newsweek Editor in Chief William Broyles defended the stories: "I am very proud of what appeared in the magazine. I have no regrets."

Perhaps most chastening for all the publications was evidence that the forgeries were almost certainly perpetrated not by a cunning political conspiracy of Nazis or East German Communists but by a pedestrian 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.

Fischer, who hired lawyers and yielded voluntarily to an arrest warrant at week's end, denied that he had forged the diaries. He called the charge "absurd," adding: "I can neither read the Gothic handwriting [used by Hitler] nor write it." That was an odd claim for one who deals in documents of the Nazi period. Fischer insisted that the volumes actually were written by the Fuehrer.

Still, there was circumstantial evidence that Fischer had penned the diaries. A companion, Edith Lieblang, had complained to friends that he was working "day and night" on a book about Hitler for Stern. In recent years, friends had noticed Fischer on a spending spree, buying, among other items, a house for 700,000 marks ($287,000) in cash.

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 ($600,000).

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 repeatedly emphasized his editors' carelessness. Said he: "I only delivered the diaries. What the publishers and the editorial board do with them is not my business."

The 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 of commercial competition."

--By William A. Henry III. Reported by Gary Lee/Bonn

With reporting by Gary Lee This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.