The Hitler Diaries - How History's Greatest Find Was Exposed As The World’s Biggest Fraud
Forget fake news, the fabrication of the Fuhrer's innermost thoughts was a whole different level of hoax.
Some scoops can be weeks, months, even years in the making. It can take a long, long time for a reporter to finally bring their story into the public domain, for all the world to digest. Such is the case with the ‘Hitler Diaries’ affair. The publication of the Fuhrer’s personal journals, apparently discovered decades after they were lost in a plane crash in the final days of the Second World War, was one of the biggest global news stories of 1983. Indeed, it was outdone only by the revelation that the diaries were as much a work of fiction as the Chronicles Of Narnia.
But the fateful moment that led to those tumultuous events came two years earlier during a discrete meeting between two decidedly peculiar individuals.
It was in Stuttgart that Gerd Heidemann, the obsessed journalist whose name and infamy will forever be linked to the scandal, was introduced to a man calling himself Konrad Fischer (pictured), a shopkeeper and collector of militaria who proceeded to recount the story of how he had come into possession of the previously-unknown diaries kept by the Fuhrer throughout the war.
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