The History Podcast - BBC Radio 4

Writer and broadcaster Andrew Hunter Murray uncovers last century’s biggest ever publishing scandal, a forgery which rocked the world and destroyed reputations.

When Germany’s biggest magazine Stern announced in 1983 that they’d found the long-lost diaries of Adolf Hitler, authenticated by the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the world was poised to rewrite history.

Salvaged from the wreckage of a Junkers plane which had crashed escaping Hitler’s Berlin bunker in the dying days of the war, the diaries had been hidden in a hayloft in East Germany for forty years. And remarkably they had now come to light, smuggled across the border into West Germany at the height of the Cold War. One lone journalist, Gerd Heidemann, known as ‘The Bloodhound’, had tracked them down. It had taken two years of secret missions and millions of Deutschmarks to amass all sixty volumes of Hitler’s personal, handwritten journals. The world was about to find the truth of Adolf Hitler’s mind: what he knew, what motivated him, his intimate reflections as the Third Reich rose and fell.

That, at least, was the story – a story which news organisations the world over, including Rupert Murdoch’s newly-acquired Sunday Times, believed. This would be a sensation – assuming, of course, that it was true.

It’s a tale of greed, obsession and mass delusion. It includes Hermann Göring’s yacht, Nazi-themed honeymoons, Idi Amin’s underpants, and more details almost too unbelievable for words. Murray interviews the people who were there as the diaries were announced to the world, and as the story fell apart: the archivist tasked with authenticating the diaries in Germany, the TV producer led around the homes of retired Nazis to film a promotional doc for the scoop, and the Fleet Street editor given 24 hours to create a world-beating story based on fraudulent material.

Murray’s mission is to track down the actual books which caused all this chaos, and to get as close as he can to the truth. In our own time of AI, fake news and disinformation, are there any lessons we can take from the greatest hoax of the last fifty years?

A Whistledown Production for BBC Sounds and Radio 4

Presenter: Andrew Hunter Murray

Producer: Ruth Abrahams