In 1983 German magazine Stern thought it had a major scoop. It turned out to be a major hoax, and revealed a disturbing willingness to fall for a revised history of Hitler.
As Hitler, Kujau wrote, "The measures begun on the 1st against Jewish institutions are too violent for me; I immediately warned the men responsible for them. Some of them had to be expelled from the party."
Stern magazine journalist Gerd Heidemann was happy to believe the diaries were real and took up the story. So, too, did his editors-in-chief, who published the fake diaries and announced their "scoop" to much fanfare at a press conference on April 25, 1983. But within two weeks of its story's publication, Stern was forced to admit that it had fallen for a hoax.A smiling Kujau presents his forged diaries in a Hamburg courtroom on August 28, 1984. Later, he would be sentenced to four years' imprisonment.Hajo Funke, a political scientist and right-wing extremism expert from the Free University of Berlin, tells
that the diary scandal shows how, four decades after Hitler's death, portions of the German population had still failed to come to terms with the Nazi regime."But the decisive thing is that the publisher and Kujau and Heidemann [and] the journalistic highest level of the Stern magazine were interested in the issue itself: to rewrite the history of the Third Reich."
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