In his review of the book, H. Keith Thompson makes the
following point: “The quantities of Third-Reich-related forgeries in
circulation can generally be divided into two categories. First, there are the
forgeries made by the World War II Allies, and by various international
pressure groups, for propaganda purposes, such as the masses of faked material
introduced by the Allies at their various postwar “trials” of defeated Axis
adherents, e.g., the Russian “evidence” concerning the Katyn Massacre. Most
forgeries in the second category (documents, uniforms, medals, weapons and other
memorabilia) are merely attempts to make money.”[1]
The Hitler Diaries scandal was perhaps the most stupid blunder
by a media outlet. In 1983, the German magazine Stern paid 9 million Deutsche
Marks for the "discovery," only for forensic tests on the ink and
paper to reveal they contained chemicals not available during WWII. The
so-called handwriting experts brought in to validate the diaries were nothing
of the sort. As Harris relates, “Hilton's report, couched in five pages of
professional gobbledy-gook, was conclusive. But, based as it was on the
assumption that all the documents he had been given for comparison were
authentic, it was also completely wrong…they were all forged by Kujau.”
The book details how the small-time forger, Konrad Kujau,
managed to create and sell over 50 fake diaries to a gullible German
journalist, Gerd Heidemann, of the magazine Stern. The story reached global
headlines in April 1983 when Stern offered to sell the diaries for a substantial
sum (around $4 million at the time), and major publications, including The
Sunday Times and Newsweek, became embroiled in authenticating and publishing
excerpts.
The scam successfully fooled many reputable historians and
media executives, who were blinded by the prospect of fame, money, and a
historical scoop that could alter perceptions of the Third Reich. The hoax was
exposed just a week later when forensic tests proved the diaries were crude
forgeries, written on modern paper and with ink that glowed under ultraviolet
light.
Harris, while having a journalistic flair and his book reads
like a novel, has only a limited understanding of the class interests involved
in the story. How did cultural authority, market pressures and political
currents combine to produce credence for a lie?. The forgery should be placed
in the wider history of political myth-making about Nazism, the post-war
rehabilitation of German militarism, and the role of intellectuals in
legitimising reactionary narratives.
Enter Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), who was described as
the historian who caused the most trouble. Roper was an Englishman who had
built a career on his book, The Last Days of Hitler, but who was in fact a
specialist in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Harris notes: “He was not a German scholar. He was not
fluent in the language and had admitted as much in a review of Mein Kampf
published a decade earlier: “I do not read German,” he confessed, “with great
ease or pleasure.” Written in an archaic script, impenetrable to most Germans,
the diaries might as well have been composed of Egyptian hieroglyphics for all
the sense Trevor-Roper could make of them. He had to rely on the Stern men for
translation. The conversation was entirely in English”.
Hugh Trevor‑Roper was one of the most prominent English
historians of the mid-20th century. He rose to public prominence through
scholarly work on early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, serving as Regius
Professor of Modern History at Oxford and as a public intellectual whose
judgments carried great weight in the bourgeois media and academic
establishment. His career—most famously marked by the episode of the forged
“Hitler Diaries” in 1983—illustrates key lessons about the social basis of
historical authority, the limits of individualist scholarship under capitalism,
and the political stakes of historiography.
Trevor‑Roper’s name became synonymous with the controversy
when he initially authenticated material presented as Hitler’s diaries, a
judgment later shown to be wrong when forensic evidence proved the texts to be
modern forgeries. That mistake was not merely a personal lapse, for it
reflected the institutional pressures and prestige relations in which a
bourgeois historian operates. The eagerness of major newspapers and magazines
to publish sensational claims, and the weight accorded to a single eminent
expert’s word, produced a social environment in which haste could substitute
for collective, methodical verification.
The unchecked authority given to persons like Trevor‑Roper
often rests as much on social position and institutional prestige as on
methodical, collective inquiry. The careers of such figures illustrate how
bourgeois historiography can serve ideological functions, to legitimate
national myths, to placate ruling‑class anxieties, or to manage memories of
criminal regimes in ways compatible with present political needs.
Trevor‑Roper’s mistake thus demonstrates a dialectical
relation: individual fallibility and institutional tendencies interpenetrate.
The scandal exposed contradictions—authority versus truth, spectacle versus
method—that are inherent in bourgeois cultural life.
Trevor Roper’s scholarship indeed made significant historiographical
contributions; his errors do not nullify all of his work. But a historical
materialist appraisal must treat individual scholars as social products: their
interpretations reflect the material and institutional contexts in which they
live and work. The proper response to episodes like the Hitler Diaries is not
merely to censure but to insist on strengthening collective, methodical
historical practice grounded in material evidence and social analysis.
In sum, the Hugh Trevor-Roper affair is a cautionary tale:
under capitalism, historiography is vulnerable to commodification, to authority
concentrated among social elites, and to ideological manipulation. The remedy
is not reliance on isolated historians but the development of democratic,
scientifically disciplined historical practice.
[1]
Selling Hitler-A Review By H. Keith Thompson ∙ December 1, 1986-codoh.com/library/document/selling-hitler/
