On the morning of April 25, 1983, the German magazine Stern unveiled sixty volumes in a Hamburg conference room, presented as Adolf Hitler's private diaries. Two historians asked to assess them, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Gerhard L. Weinberg, were already hedging before the session was over. So was Josef Henke, a department head at West Germany's Federal Archive in Koblenz, who had come not to admire the diaries but to get his hands on them.
By telephone with the archive's president, Hans Booms, Henke talked Stern's parent company into lending three volumes for independent testing. What happened over the next eleven days had nothing to do with handwriting. The previous June, two experts Stern had hired had examined ink strokes on isolated pages against comparison samples that were, without anyone saying so, forgeries by the same man, and concluded the hand was genuine. The Federal Archive took a different approach. Material samples went to the Bundesanstalt für Materialprüfung, the federal materials-testing institute, in Berlin on April 27. The volumes themselves went to the federal police in Wiesbaden the next day. Over the last weekend of April, Henke and a colleague, Klaus Oldenhage, checked the diaries' own text against the documented historical record.
They did not need long. Days earlier, a chemist checking an unrelated test document for Stern had already found an optical brightener, the fluorescent whitening agent papermakers only started adding after the war, dated to between 1949 and 1955. On the morning of May 2, the archive, the materials institute, and the federal police reached the same verdict independently: forgery. Checking four further volumes that week, six archivists found whole passages lifted from Max Domarus's published collection of Hitler's speeches: where Domarus's own book had a slip, the diary repeated it; where Domarus had a gap, the diary fell silent too. The Federal Archive's own press release, issued that Friday, put the technical finding plainly: the materials used could not have existed in the years the diaries claimed, and some dated from after the war. By three that afternoon, its press conference told the country: fake.
Two handwriting experts, examining isolated pages against comparison material that, unknown to them, was forged by the same man, concluded the hand was genuine. A government chemist, given actual fibers to test rather than photocopies to compare, found a brightening compound papermakers had not yet started using while Hitler was alive. Expertise can be flattered, briefed, and shown what it is meant to see. A paper sample has no stake in anyone's scoop.
Gruner + Jahr had paid more than nine million Deutsche marks for sixty volumes no chemist had tested. It took a Koblenz archivist one phone call, three federal agencies, and eleven days to make public what nine million marks had not.