The press
Rupert of the Rhine
Paul Johnson
On the occasion of its 10,000th edition, the Observer received an unexpected birthday present in the total disarray of its chief competitor and rival, the Sunday Times. The latter had already printed 1,400,000 copies of its colour supplement, with Hitler on the cover and a special pull- out inside, when the news came from the official archives of the West German government that the Hitler diaries were an undoubted fake — and a pretty elementary one too. That little item will become a col- lector's piece in any archive of newspaper follies, though far more serious and embar- rassing, in my mind, was the front-page headline from a fortnight before, 'The Secrets of Hitler's War', unjustified even if the diaries had been genuine. That deserves to be ranked alongside the Chicago Tribune's notorious 'Dewey Elected' from 1948.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, whose latest average net sale is given as 1,276,000, increased this by 'bet- ween 60,000 and 80,000' in the issue im- mediately after the Saturday revelation about the existence of the diaries; and it held on to about half this extra sale the following week, when confidence in their authenticity had already evaporated. This confirms the Fleet Street maxim that Hitler, dead or alive, real or phony, still sells newspapers. If the Sunday Times hangs on to even 30,000 extra sales, the £130,000 which it has already handed over to Stern (and which the magazine now says it will pay back) will have been well spent. Indeed, reading about the hoax is much more fun than the 'diaries' themselves, evidently the work of a dull, unimaginative and quite humourless forger.
But the extra sales cannot in any way compensate for the humiliation this great newspaper has suffered. It has been a shat- tering blow to the morale of the editorial staff, which has not been in a particularly healthy state since the departure of its last and formidable editor, Harry Evans. As the crisis broke, the present editor, Frank Giles, went away on holiday; an odd time to choose, I should have thought. The more one studies the crudity and almost amateurishness of the forgery, and the ease with which it was detected immediately the experts were allowed to get their hands on the exercise books, the more amazing it is that the Sunday Times allowed itself to be taken in.
At the physical level, the evidence ac- cumulates that any one of a number of peo- ple could have cast doubt on the genuine- ness of the material simply as artifacts. For instance, Lady Olga Maitland, in the gossip column she writes in the Sunday Express, quotes Hitler's secretary, Gertrud Junge, as insisting that the exercise books could not be authentic simply because Hitler had never indented for them — all his stationery passed through her hands, and she had never seen anything like this stuff. More telling, of course, was the evidence of Dr Julius Grant, president of the Forensic Science Society, who has been in the paper industry for 54 years and is one of the world's leading authorities on the verifica- tion of suspect documents. He was belated- ly called in by the Sunday Times sixteen years ago when it began to suspect the 'Mussolini Diaries' it had bought were fake. It took Dr Grant, as the Sunday Times - pointed out this week, precisely ten minutes to prove that a portion of the diaries, sup- posedly written in 1925, was on paper manufactured at a mill which did not open until 1930. Grant, who was only called in by the paper last Friday, took a little longer with the Hitler diaries, but an ultraviolet- light examination of fibres from the paper soon detected the presence of a post-1945 chemical. It quoted him as saying: ...if The Spectator 14 May 1983 only I could have had the diaries earlier, everyone would have been saved a lot of trouble. And it was depressing when I C0111 pared this case to the Mussolini diaries to see how history repeats itself in such a ridiculously exact way'.
Again, from a historiographical view- point, it was only last week that two volumes of the text were submitted to Dr Norman Stone of Trinity College, Cam- bridge, who is probably the British historian best equipped to judge the diaries on the basis of their internal evidence. Stone has not only written a fine book 00 Hitler but is something of a phenomenon: he is at ease with more languages than anY other historian I know. In particular he learnt, from years spent in the Vienna ar- chives, to read fluently the archaic demotic script which Hitler used. Stone cluiektY detected inaccuracies and inconsistencies; but the most telling point against the text was its consistent use of old material, often copied almost word for word from such standard works as Max Domarus's edition of Hitler's speeches and proclamations. He also noted the absence of one of the few pleasing aspects of Hitler's character: his sense of humour. Naturally, it is easy to be wise after the event, but on the basis of this examination Stone could not conceivablY have authenticated the material.
This brings us to the central mysterY of the affair. Why were not experts like Drs Grant and Stone called in earlier? The answer, of course, is that the Sunday Times did not get possession of the two voluMes of diaries until last week. Throughout the negotiations, Stern had imposed the In°st absurd and frustrating conditions on those. newspapers and magazines which proposed to buy foreign rights. Stern claimed it ha° to keep physical possession of the stuff to prevent leaks of copyright material. This is a feeble argument, since the entries themselves were so banal, uninterestinge and, in news terms, old hat. So far as ono can see, there was absolutely nothing cause a sensation — that could be one reason for keeping them secret until readers had forked out their deutschemarks. In any, case, Stern itself should have carried 00.`c proper historiographical and
tests. forenst
That still leaves the question of whY_ News International allowed itself to taken in. Others were more cautious and ex- acting. The Mail demanded financial in- demnification, and broke off talks wile, this was refused. Newsweek rightly insisted on doing its own thorough tests before PO; ing up; Rupert Murdoch simply
ahead, like his famous predecessor of
, Rhine. The Daily Telegraph on SaturdaY.. felt called to observe: 'Had any senior ex- ecutive on Mr Murdoch's payroll comln.i.t, ch arge.°e ted an error of judgment of the order of all" foolish transaction, over which he Preside.th he would have been out on his ear, will, scant time to clear his desk'. True enough but his own money. reply that at least it
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