Editor took fall over ‘Hitler Diaries’
As journalistic fiascos go, it was one of the most sensational.
In 1983, the Sunday Times of London claimed to have Adolf Hitler’s diaries, scribbled in the Fuehrer’s own hand. A renowned historian had authenticated them.
What it actually had were forgeries. The newspaper’s top editors discovered the truth at the last minute and tried to stop their publication. But the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, dismissed their concerns and ordered that the presses roll, leaving the Sunday Times, one of the world’s great news organizations, with serious egg on its face.
The editor of the paper, the mild-mannered, urbane Frank Giles, took the fall and was fired, bringing a distinguished career to an abrupt and ignominious end. He died Oct. 30 at 100, the Sunday Times reported.
Giles had been editor of the paper for just two years when the German magazine Der Stern said it was in possession of Hitler’s diaries and offered the British serialization rights to the Sunday Times.
Giles called on Hugh Trevor-Roper, the eminent British historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on Hitler, to authenticate the volumes. After examining them in a vault in Zurich, he pronounced them legitimate.
Some at the paper were skeptical and urged further investigation; they remembered when the Sunday Times had almost been taken in years before by fake diaries purported to have been written by Mussolini. But Giles put his faith in Trevor-Roper and, according to another editor, once Trevor-Roper had given his seal of approval, Murdoch ordered the diaries published without any further inquiry.
The world was bracing for blockbuster revelations. Newsweek magazine, which had bought the American rights, boasted in advance advertisements, “These controversial papers could rewrite the history of the Third Reich from Hitler’s rise to power to his suicide in the ruins of Berlin.”
On Saturday, April 24, 1983, the presses at The Sunday Times began to roll. Unknown to the newspaper’s editors, Trevor-Roper had started to doubt the diaries’ validity. He said later that he had “misunderstood the nature of their procurement.”
But he did not alert Giles. Instead, he sent word to Charles Douglas-Home, the editor of the Times of London, the sister paper of the Sunday Times. Douglas-Home thought Trevor-Roper was probably mistaken and said nothing to Giles.
That night, Giles was in his office with other senior editors celebrating their scoop. They called Trevor-Roper to share their joy, unaware of his second thoughts.
What ensued was a heartstopping telephone conversation between Giles and Trevor-Roper. According to others in the room, Giles’s side of the conversation went like this:
“Well, naturally, Hugh, one has doubts. There are no certainties in this life. But these doubts aren’t strong enough to make you do a complete 180degree turn on that?
“Oh, I see. You are doing a 180degree turn.”
The editors called Murdoch with the dire news, but he was said to have dismissed Trevor-Roper’s concerns with a vulgarity and ordered publication to proceed.
The paper sold well. But the diaries’ unmasking was already in the works. On Monday, Trevor-Roper made his doubts public, and the whole enterprise quickly unravelled, proven to be a hoax perpetrated by a prolific German forger, Konrad
Kujau. Forensics showed that the paper, ink and bindings of the supposed diaries were of recent vintage.
But it didn’t take a scientist to suspect fakery. Hitler would have had a hard time writing the later entries, when his writing arm had been injured. The entries were riddled with factual errors, and some seemed incongruously flip, given the gravity of the circumstances. “That Goebbels, what a pain in the neck,” read one. “Must do something about the way Goering is throwing his weight around.”
The Sunday Times, Der Stern and Newsweek became the butt of jokes.
Shortly thereafter, The Sunday Times apologized to its readers, though the apology itself also came in for ridicule. “Serious journalism is a highrisk enterprise,” it began, but critics suggested that this was not an instance of serious journalism, which is better researched and documented.
Trevor-Roper apologized to Giles. Murdoch, by all accounts, apologized to no one and ousted Giles as editor, giving him the nonjob of editor emeritus to serve out the final two years of his contract.
Years later, in 2012, when Murdoch, then 81, was testifying at an unrelated inquiry into wrongdoing in his newsrooms, he finally admitted he had erred in publishing the diaries.
After he left the Sunday Times, Giles turned to writing books. In “The Locust Years” (1994), he wrote about the return to power of Charles de Gaulle. He also wrote a biography of Napoleon and an autobiography, “Sundry Times” (1986).