German Konrad Kujau has always felt out of place in his era. He was born in 1938, so he did not catch Hitler's rise to power, and the war was remembered by the fact that he lost his parents in the bombing of Dresden and ended up in an orphanage for 6 years. However, the Führer's fiery speeches on the radio and torchlight processions made a deep impression on little Konrad. In his youth, Kujau admired Hitler and wished he had been born earlier. He invented a false biography and always added a few years to his life, thus getting closer to his favorite era.
Consciously or subconsciously, Kujau tried to repeat the path of his idol. He was fond of drawing and even entered the art academy in Stuttgart. True, after two years, Konrad left the academy, apparently in memory of the Fuhrer. The young artist's career began with forging autographs of GDR politicians. In 1961, Kujau was sentenced to 9 months in prison for theft. In an amazing coincidence, Hitler was also imprisoned for 9 months in 1924. The Fuhrer wrote Mein Kampf while in prison, and Kuyau came up with the idea to forge the manuscript of Mein Kampf and sell it profitably. Or maybe he didn't come up with it in prison at all. Since Kuyau often changed his biography, it is unlikely that there is a high percentage of truth in it, but, it must be admitted, he could invent. In any case, Kuyau had been in jail more than once or twice, so he had enough time to develop illegal schemes to enrich himself.
In the mid-1970s, Kujau began work on his life's work, The Hitler Diaries. In 1980, he found the perfect buyer - Gerd Heidemann, a journalist for the German magazine Stern. Heidemann, like Kujau, was an admirer of all things Nazi, owned a pre-Göring yacht and cohabited with Göring's daughter Edda. The legend about the origin of the documents was as follows: In 1945, an airplane with the Fuhrer's personal belongings crashed near Dresden. Among the wreckage, local farmers found dozens of volumes with the Gothic initials AH on the cover (on the books Kujau mistakenly wrote FH, simply because written in Gothic script F looks like A) and gave them to the preservation of an officer. Now that officer wants to sell the diaries. Heidemann bought a couple of volumes to try. The transfer of the relic took place according to the laws of a spy action movie. The officer's car pulled up alongside Heidemann's Mercedes at full speed, the windows rolled down, Heidemann threw a bag of money, and the notebooks flew back at him.
Heidemann showed the diaries to the editorial office, which was interested in the purchase and gave the Führer's scribblings for inspection. For several years, the magazine bought diaries from Kuyau. In total, Stern spent 9.3 million marks on this waste paper. Almost half of this sum ended up in Heidemann's pockets. Curiously, Heidemann used the money Heidemann undercharged Kujau to buy Nazi relics made by Kujau in addition to cars and jewelry.
Kujau was terribly lucky, because historians undertook to check the diaries against the collection of Hitler's documents and speeches, from which Kujau had compiled the diaries. The editorial board was finally convinced of the authenticity of the documents by the conclusions of a prominent British historian and American specialists. Kuiau's forgeries penetrated so deeply into the archives that some of the American conclusions were confirmed by forgeries previously purchased from Conrad.
Smelling big money, Kuyau and Heidemann went wild. They promised a sequel to Mein Kampf, an opera written by the Führer, and even threatened to provide a live Bormann. All this ended in 1983, when the magazine, having received dozens of volumes of diaries, decided to publish them. In the diaries, by the way, the Führer appears as a vulnerable man, who was tricked and framed by his ministers. According to Kuyau's forgery, the Fuhrer did not even know about the death camps for some time. The loud scandal caused by the publication of the diaries was followed by an even bigger scandal when a couple of weeks later it was officially proven that the diaries were a forgery from beginning to end. Heidemann and Kouyau were sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for fraud.
After getting out of prison, Kujau became an expert on forgery on German TV, and his copies of paintings by the great masters sold well. In the mid-1990s, he even tried to become mayor of Stuttgart, but won a paltry number of votes in the election. In 2000 he died of cancer. And Heidemann is still alive, aged 90.
