On April 24, 2023, a large German publishing house stated that it would hand over the ‘personal diaries’ that it owns of the former German Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, to the national archives of Germany.

The reason this announcement did not become front-page news was because these diaries were proven to be fake 40 years ago. But the announcement did revive the memory of a rather embarrassing episode that severely undermined the credibility of a leading German magazine and a widely read British newspaper. It also destroyed the careers of a host of journalists and damaged the reputation of a respectable British historian.

In April 1983, the German magazine Stern ran a cover story about the ‘discovery’ of private diaries kept by Hitler. The magazine then began to publish the contents of the diaries. Stern had bought the diaries from a collector of Nazi memorabilia, Konrad Kujau, for 3.7 million dollars. Stern then sold the publishing rights of the diaries to some other magazines and newspapers as well, including Britain’s Sunday Times. The celebrated British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper endorsed the authenticity of the diaries. 

But there were also historians who refused to believe that the diaries were genuine. The content of the dairies made Hitler seem ‘normal’, praising the tenacity of his opponents (including Joseph Stalin) during the Second World War, and complaining about his ailments and effects on his body of the medicines that he had been prescribed. In one entry, ‘Hitler’ even denounces the brutal treatment of the Jews by his men. He supposedly writes, “The measures 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.”

People often seek validation for their beliefs and ideologies in the words of past leaders — even if those words are entirely fabricated

As pressure mounted on Stern to further investigate the authenticity of the dairies, the magazine protested that well-known historians and experts from the Federal Archives had confirmed their authenticity. 

Nevertheless, Stern decided to get them investigated again and, not surprisingly, they were declared to be outright forgeries. Their seller and actual writer, Konrad Kujau, turned out to be a petty criminal and master forger of Nazi memorabilia. He had claimed to have recovered the dairies from an old crash site of a plane carrying Nazis. In 1980, Kujau had agreed to work with German journalist Gerd Heidemann, who was a Nazi enthusiast as well. Heidemann became the middleman between Kujau and the publishers of Stern, but he stole large sums of the money that were supposed to be paid to Kujau.

Further investigations of the diaries showed that Hitler’s purported signature was not accurate, the paper and ink that was used had not existed till the 1950s, the bindings had been artificially aged with tea, and many entries referred to events that Hitler could not have been aware of. There was a lot more that screamed forgery. Once the hoax was blown, Kajau escaped to Austria, but then agreed to surrender. Both he and Heidemann were sent to prison. Editors whose publications had published contents from the diary were fired.

Interestingly, during the same period in 1983, the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in Pakistan announced that researchers had discovered a personal diary of the country’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. In a press release, the dictatorship claimed that, in the diary, Jinnah had highlighted the need to have a powerful head of state. Allegedly, Jinnah had also jotted down “the dangers of parliamentary democracy.” The dictatorship then concluded that ‘Jinnah’s views’ in the diary were “very close to having an Islamic system of government.”

The Urdu press gave lavish coverage to the ‘discovery’ and the state-owned PTV and Radio Pakistan aired discussions by ‘scholars’ on this breathtaking disclosure. The message was that Jinnah wanted an Islamic state headed by a pious ruler. But the fanfare was thankfully short-lived.

Two of Jinnah’s close associates, Mumtaz Daultana and KH Khurshid, rubbished Zia’s claims. They angrily stated that there was never such a diary. Then, a group of researchers from the Quaid-e-Azam Academy denied that such a diary ever existed in the Academy’s archives (from where the Zia dictatorship had claimed the diary had emerged).

Once the claims of the diary were trashed, Zia never mentioned anything about it ever again, and nor did the Urdu newspapers that had splashed the news of the dramatic discovery on their front pages. The idea to concoct a diary kept by Jinnah had clearly been inspired by the press conference that Stern had held in April 1983 to announce the discovery of the Hitler diaries. 

What was the dictatorship’s motive? In his book Pakistan Behind the Ideological Mask, the intellectual Khaled Ahmad, and the celebrated historian KK Aziz in Memories of Jinnah, believe that the claim was concocted when the Zia regime failed to find anything in Jinnah’s speeches that could be used to justify the regime’s dictatorial existence as a harbinger of an “Islamic state” in Pakistan. 

So, inspired by the ‘discovery of the Hitler diaries’ in Germany, the dictatorship produced a diary in which the otherwise liberal and Westernised founder of Pakistan desired the creation of an Islamic government headed by a pious ruler and free from the dangers of parliamentary democracy. 

And what were the motives behind publishing the fake Hitler diaries? According to the German public radio station NDR, the diaries “mirrored the fantasies of people driven by greed but (the dairies) were also created in a radical right-wing context to deny the Holocaust.” Michael Hollmann, president of Germany’s federal archives, described the diaries as, “A shameless attempt to give the brutal crimes of Nazism a human veneer, which struck a chord in 1980s’ society.” 

Harvard University’s Eric Rent­schler described the episode as “fascination of the fake.” Hitler had become such a demonic mystery to generations that came of age after his suicide in 1945, that there were many in Europe who uncritically lapped up even the most fake portrayals of Hitler that exhibited him to be more human than the racist demagogue that he really was.

In a July 11, 2022 seminar in Paris, researchers from various European universities posited that people are most susceptible to forming false memories for fake information that aligns with their beliefs. Decades after Hitler’s demise, there were many who developed a sympathetic attitude towards Nazi beliefs and were quick to embrace a set of fake diaries which made Hitler look human, normal and even likeable. 

On the other end, the Zia regime and its supporters tried to shape Jinnah in their own image. The so-called ‘Jinnah diary’ makes Jinnah sound like a latent Islamic ideologue, quite unlike the Westernised liberal that he really was.

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 7th, 2023