The Hitler Diaries by Charles Hamilton

Author:Charles Hamilton [Hamilton, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813181530
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

The “Reincarnated” Forger

Forgery is the most audacious of all the arts. At its best it is an adroit meld of impertinence and skill, of daring and brilliance. For two hundred years every generation has had its spate of historical or literary forgers who created their moment of mayhem in the world of scholarship and were then forgotten. There was Baron von Gersten-bergk in Germany, who turned out hard-to-spot Schillers over a century ago; “Antique” Smith in the 1890s, whose output of Robert Burns almost doubled the known writings of the Scottish poet; Charles “The Baron” Weisberg, a master of Lincoln’s script who created rare letters that fooled, and continue to fool, unwary collectors and auctioneers; Henry Woodhouse, who had a forgery for every occasion and fabricated the handwriting of famous people he knew; Eugene Field II, who started modestly by faking his father’s manuscripts and wound up with a repertoire that included Lincoln, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frederic Remington. On and on the list of forgers goes, most of them far more prolific and certainly far more skilled than Konrad Kujau.

Nothing about forgers should really amaze us by now, yet we continue to be astonished at the alleged “fecundity” of each new master of deceit. The remarkable thing about the Hitler diaries is certainly not their length, despite the bulk of the notebooks, for Kujau’s output was modest compared with that of many other forgers, and the diaries averaged only about 850 words per volume. You could put the entire contents of the average diary volume on three double-spaced typewritten pages. No, the remarkable thing about them is that honest-to-God historians actually accepted Kujau’s adolescent entries as those of the fiery, impassioned dictator who virtually destroyed Europe with his masterful rhetoric.

Trevor-Roper, as we know, was impressed by what appeared to him a vast quantity of writing; Gerhard Weinberg commented on the “sheer scope of the record,” and Rendell decided the forgeries might be genuine because “the risk of error is so great in a forgery of that size.”

Even the forger was impressed with himself. A reporter said to Kujau: “An article in the scientific magazine Criminology, written in 1975, noted that ‘It’s unusual for a long, sustained text to be forged.’ Now, after your work, not only the history of the Third Reich must be rewritten, as Stern loudly proclaimed, but the chapter on forgeries in the history of criminology.”

Kujau said: “Yes, it must.”

The reporter continued: “Professor [Lother] Michel [of the University of Mannheim]. . . admits that your work is the longest forged text in the whole history of forgery. A place in the literature of criminology is waiting for you.”

Kujau said: “Yes, I write Hitler’s handwriting faster than my own.”1

Commenting on the length of the Hitler diaries, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in an editorial:

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