The World's Biggest Newspapers Were Scammed | History's Greatest Hoaxes | Season 1 Episode 3

[00:00:02]It was one of the greatest discoveries of the last century.

[00:00:07]62 volumes of the handwritten personal diaries of one of the most infamous and reviled men in modern history, Adolf Hitler.

[00:00:19]The question was, were they real? Rert Murdoch paid a cool $500,000 for the rights to publish them in the Sunday [music] Times. and the so-called Hitler diaries made headline news around the world. But what was the real story?

[00:00:36]>> The Hitler Diary hoax was massive because the appetite for them [music] to exist was huge.

[00:00:43]>> The Hitler diaries hoax was without doubt the single greatest scam ever pulled on a magazine and a collection of newspapers.

[00:00:53]These diaries would have been absolutely of interest not only I think to historians and people in the military but I think to the average person.

[00:01:01]>> It really has it all. It's got Nazis.

[00:01:04]It's got press [music] barons. It's got millions and millions of pounds and money being siphoned from the accounts of major corporations. And it's all about a collection of black exercise books that supposedly contain the diaries of the most evil man of the 20th century or perhaps any century. And that of course is Adolf Hitler.

[00:01:50]In 1983, two volumes of A4-sized black leather diaries were shown to the editors of D.

[00:01:56]Stern, [music] an internationally respected German news magazine, by G Haidider, one of its journalists.

[00:02:08]He claimed that they were the authentic personal diaries of Adolf Hitler written by the Furer himself during the war.

[00:02:18]Haididerman said that they were the property of a serious collector of [music] Nazi material called Conrad Fischer.

[00:02:27]Fischer would later turn out to [music] be the notorious hoaxer Conrad Ku.

[00:02:36]According to Hydeman, he first met Kuja at Stoodgart airport in early 1981.

[00:03:17]What Ku Yao did not present Heidman with was a massive block of dozens of diaries, you know, as this massive treasure trove of the ultimate Hitler memorabilia. What he does, he presents him with one diary and Hydeman goes, "Okay, this is brilliant. This is incredible. Are there any more? Cuya says, "Yes, they're all in East Germany, and it's very difficult to get hold of them. I don't want to get them all out in one block because my contact there is very worried about being rumbled. They can only come through one at a time, every few months. This is going to involve me costly and dangerous trips across the border. They need to be smuggled out." Kuya's being very cunning here.

[00:04:02]You kind of hear Hitler diaries and you're thinking, well, you know, what what do they look like? Are they kind of covered by a sort of small self-destructing bombs? Are they kind of covered in gold and diamonds? No, it was leather bound and inside of those A4 pieces of writing that obviously looked very much like Hitler's.

[00:04:24]for next.

[00:04:48]There were almost just a little bit more than an appointment's diary with sort of a few notes or observations that seemed somewhat benile.

[00:04:57]Many of the people who actually read the supposed diary said actually these are quite boring. But it didn't matter because the fact is they were Hitler's diaries in Hitler's own hand and that was dynamite.

[00:05:11]Gerd Hydeman was a trusted and wellrespected journalist. So it was not surprising that when he showed the diaries to one of the editors [music] of D Stern, he took very little convincing.

[00:05:51]When Haidman goes to his bosses and says, "I've got access to all of Hitler's diaries." He's only really selling it on one or two copies.

[00:06:03]when Stan go yes basically here's a blank check go out and get them all Hydeman is having to you know pester a cua out come on I want these diaries saying to the management at Stan you they're coming they're coming they're coming with the green light from Dern Haidderman sat down and discussed a deal with Kujo And you know, Coochtown must be sitting there thinking, "God, I found the biggest sucker in the world." He's not dealing with just small-time collectors anymore. He's got a big time corporation he's reeled in.

[00:07:10]Stan basically said, "You've opened a bank account with millions of marks in it from which Haidman is allowed to withdraw vast piles of money in cash to pay to cuao. No receipts. It's brilliant. It's basically here's lots of free money. He gives some of it to Cuya and keeps a lot for himself."

[00:07:30]Basically wrote a couple of them speculatively cuz you know there'd be a lot of diaries. You wouldn't write them all before you knew you could sell [music] them. That would be exhausting.

[00:07:40]So he wrote two and he went, "Do you want these? Cuz I've got the rest. Trust me, I've got the rest." And they went, "Yeah, we'll have them."

[00:07:51]Hydeman argued that the existence of the diaries made perfect sense, pointing as proof to a little known Nazi plan.

[00:08:00]In April 1945, during the final days of the war, the Nazis removed valuable documents from a main Berlin bunker and stored them in bunkers in southern Germany. It was known as Operation Serlio.

[00:08:16]One of the transport planes involved was loaded up with 10 heavy chests full of Hitler's personal belongings, but the plane crashed on route coming down in the Heidenhalts forest in southeast Germany near the Czech border.

[00:08:34]Haidider claimed that in this plane were Hitler's diaries.

[00:08:47]in Bernome for the On the face of it, a very plausible story as to where the diaries had come from. In the last dying days of the Third Reich in Berlin, as it's being encircled by the Soviet army, a plane flies out of Berlin with a top secret cargo. A cargo that contains all sorts of valuables associated with Hitler, but most important of all, Hitler's personal papers.

[00:09:28]>> This becomes the idea that makes the diaries credible. He's found this plane crash and verified it. Therefore, he believes that this allows him to proceed with everything else >> because that is actually feasible to some extent, right? You know, it did really crash. It was his stuff. Then [music] the idea that these were real actually has some authority.

[00:09:55]So therefore, it seems very plausible if you ignore the fact the plane burst into flames of course and paper diaries do tend to burn in hot airplane fires.

[00:10:03]However, that was the backstory and it was to be fair believable.

[00:10:13]>> [music] >> GE Hydeman maintains an underground bunker in Hamburg in Germany where he keeps a vast library of Nazi documents, photos, and other materials.

[00:10:27][music] He also has some wreckage from Hitler's crash plane.

[00:10:35]This includes [music] two intact passenger windows which Hydeman says he bought from a [music] local farmer.

[00:11:05]When word of the existence of the diaries reached [music] Rert Murdoch, he was determined to have them.

[00:11:12]In 1983, [music] Murdoch already owned a large slice of the international media world. In the UK alone, he owned the Times, Sunday Times, [music] and Sun newspapers. His executives contacted D. Stern and told them that they wanted to buy the worldwide rights to the diaries.

[00:11:34]A senior journalist on the Sunday [music] Times at the time was Magnus Linkl.

[00:11:42]We were told that we were being offered exclusive rights to the Hitler diaries which Stern magazine had uh bought up and researched.

[00:11:57]At that stage all our instincts as an investigative newspaper were to find out what lay behind this. We were told, however, that that was not going to be possible because Rert Murdoch himself personally had arranged the deal and we were required to run the diaries unchecked.

[00:12:19]I was given 24 hours to read the first installment of the diaries and prepare it for publication.

[00:12:32]Having already put in place a deal to buy the Hitler diaries, Linkl was tasked with trying to authenticate their content and validate Murdoch's proposed purchase.

[00:12:44]We hadn't actually seen the physical diaries at all. We had seen faximiles of some of the pages. What we were given was an English translation.

[00:12:55]The more we read it, the more appalled we were. We were expecting huge revelations. Hitler, why I called off the invasion of England, my plans for the Jews, how they've been exaggerated, anything like that. We found nothing. We found dayto-day title saying Guring once again appears in an ill-fitting suit. It was pretty terrible stuff at one stage and say, "Look, maybe we just ought to have nothing to do with this, but I'm afraid we just carried on."

[00:13:35]Stern's condition of sale was that nobody from the outside should be allowed access to the diaries because otherwise they were frightened of a leak.

[00:13:46]And this of course is what tends to happen on these occasions that you are so desperate for news not to leak out that you keep it from the very people who might be able to demonstrate whether they're genuine or not.

[00:14:05]The Sunday [music] Times were still not completely sure that the diaries weren't fakes. So they asked revered [music] Cambridge historian Hugh Trevor Roer Lord Daker who was also a news [music] international director to analyze them.

[00:14:21]So Murdoch absolutely sensibly thinks I have got the best person sitting on my board to go over to Switzerland where the diaries are hidden in a vault to go and verify these diaries.

[00:14:33]The diaries are there in this vault and you can imagine the scene these big black volumes all stacked up on a table.

[00:14:38]They must have looked very impressive and one of the reasons why Trevor Roer will end up verifying them is that no one can believe who had forged so many.

[00:14:50]The other problem though with Trevor Roer is that he was the first to acknowledge that German was not a language he felt comfortable in, not a language he could read and not a language in that script from the 1930s and 40s that Germans wrote in and which Kuya was so brilliant at forging. It is not something if you look at that text it is very very hard to read.

[00:15:14]But Magnus Linkl [music] was still worried about the authenticity of the diaries and called Hugh Trevor Roer again for reassurance.

[00:15:25]So I rang Hugh Trevor Roer and I said, "I just need to ask you, are you absolutely convinced that this is authentic?"

[00:15:35]And I'll never forget his answer. He said, "Yes, of course I am." But all let us say I'm 99% convinced.

[00:15:46]And ever since then I thought 99% is never good enough.

[00:15:53]Now backed by Hugh Trevor Roer Murdoch called D. Stern to close the deal. But unknown to him the Stern executives had gone to Newsweek in America to ask them for $3.6 million.

[00:16:10]So Murdoch does a brilliant thing. He rings up Newsweek and says, "Why don't we work on this together and drop our bids? We'll have one collective bid of half a million bucks." And so obviously Stern absolutely they nowhere else to go. And Murdoch plays a complete blinder. Murdoch, like he had done so often before, had negotiated D. Stern down on the price and had won the rights to announce another big publishing deal.

[00:16:36]It was a great coup just like his victory over the print unions. [music] >> I can now formally announce to you that I have on behalf of News International, we have completed satisfactory agreements uh with all the unions involved.

[00:16:54]>> It was commercially an amazing deal and he had the reassurances from one of the world's leading historians Hugh Trevor Roer that these diaries were authentic.

[00:17:05]So in Rert Murdoch's mind that was enough.

[00:17:10][music] >> But in the weeks leading up to the publication in the Times, Hugh Trevor Roer, the man who Murdoch had chosen to validate the diaries, began to have serious doubts.

[00:17:23]>> He starts desperately trying to phone editors. He tries to say, "Listen, I'm I'm not comfortable. I want to withdraw my backing towards these. I really suspect they may be fake." And I understand that >> when Murdoch is eventually told, "Listen, Trevor Roer has got severe doubts." Murdoch's reply is, "Fuck Daker. Let's publish." And so on that Sunday morning, Sunny Times comes out, banner headlines, massive exclusive, Hitler diaries reveals everything we need to know about Hitler and more.

[00:17:54]It seems like a most incredible story, and the world kind of holds its breath.

[00:18:01]The Sunday Times gained an extra 60,000 in sales that Sunday. A huge success and reward for what seemed a great scoop, but a huge shock was just around the corner.

[00:18:17]>> I will never forget the scene in the editor's office when we were all congratulating each other on one of the great front pages that we'd ever produced. And the telephone went and we could hear the editor saying, "Uh, hello Hugh." And we realized that he was talking to Hugh Trevor.

[00:18:40]We heard this awful half end of a conversation.

[00:18:45]Don't tell me you're having second thoughts. Terrible pause.

[00:18:51]So, you are having second thoughts. And at this stage we almost literally collapsed. Some one of our members did slump to the floor because at that stage we realized that the foundation on which these diaries rested for us had simply been withdrawn and everything else collapsed.

[00:19:15]The day after the Sunday Times published, Dern magazine held its own press [music] conference at its offices in Hamburg to reveal more details about the source of the diaries.

[00:19:27]>> When Stern proudly announced to a packed news conference that they had the scoop of the century, their ACE investigative reporter Ger Haidderman had found 60 of Hitler's diaries.

[00:19:40]When Stan give a press conference and announcing the publication and saying we've tested it, we've done all the graphology a man stands up waves a piece of paper which is a photocopy from the diaries and says these diaries are absolute tosh that man is a man called David Irving.

[00:20:02]>> There's still an enormous gap between the diaries on that table and the plane crash which quite definitely happened on April the 21st 1925.

[00:20:09]He stood up and went, "These diaries are not true." And it causes an absolute bedum at the press conference.

[00:20:20]I remember being so distraught. For some reason, I rang up my friend George Steiner, a distinguished academic at Oxford, and I said to him, "What is the academic world making of this? is the Sunday Times reputation shredded forever. And he said, "Oh yes, it is a disaster for the paper. I don't know how you will ever recover."

[00:20:49]In fact, it turned out that many historians and experts, not only David Irvine, had grave doubts about the authenticity of the diaries.

[00:21:00]It's very difficult to establish whether Hitler really did or did not have a diary.

[00:21:06]Of course, it's perfectly possible that in the dead of night when he went to bed that he may have scribbled a few lines into a notebook and locked it away.

[00:21:15]However, not one of his surviving inner circle ever recalled Hitler keeping a diary, having to store a diary, anything like that at all.

[00:21:27][screaming] What's really funny is that I think people would assume these are Hitler's diaries. There's probably kind of insights into his deep dark psyche and world domination and the sadism, but not so much. Apparently, there was entries in there like, "Oops, I think Eva thinks I've got bad breath and must get tickets for the Olympics."

[00:21:48]So there was these really sort of mundane [music] everyday details and I think anybody perhaps that had actually stopped and looked at them would have thought is this genuinely true.

[00:22:03]Within days of the DNR news conference there was a dramatic twist to the story.

[00:22:10]The German Federal Archive in Berlin declared that the so-called Hitler diaries were in fact a fake.

[00:22:43]A small group of us on the Sunday Times were so distraught at the potential that we had been sold a pup that we felt we had to go and discuss it with Rbert Murdoch himself.

[00:22:56]So we went to see him in his office.

[00:22:59]We were trying to find out how we could pull back our reputation from this appalling disaster.

[00:23:08]Rford was sitting behind his desk and I looked up at one stage and he was bored.

[00:23:14]He was bored by these journalists going on winging on as he might have put it.

[00:23:22]He said at one stage, "I don't know why you lot are fussing so much. After all, we put on 64,000 extra copies last Sunday." I don't think he was too bothered by the fact that we had just perpetrated an appalling fake.

[00:23:45]As most of the newspapers do, they had it both ways. They went Hitler diaries.

[00:23:49]Here we go. We've got him. The biggest monster in history.

[00:23:54]And then a couple of weeks later, biggest fraud in history. We've got the information. And here it all is. Had it both ways.

[00:24:02]And even after the diary story ended, they still kept 20,000 of those readers.

[00:24:07]So it didn't matter to Murdo whether they were fake or not because he was still making more money.

[00:24:13]Even though these diaries ended up not being true, they sold just as many papers cuz the next headline was, "Oh my gosh, can you believe these aren't true?

[00:24:20]And can you believe that these horrible people duped us?" Win-win.

[00:24:25]The German police were now heavily involved in what was clearly a crime.

[00:24:30]Within days of the National Archives revealing that the diaries were clever forgeries, they released the name of Conrad Kuja, the forger, and explained how he'd created the fakes.

[00:24:44]>> Once these diaries were made available to the German archives, and you actually had professionals looking at them, it didn't take years or months, took a few days for them to realize that actually these were absolutely fakes.

[00:24:59]And the smoking gun was the type of paper and glue that was used in the diaries. So that you know the paper dated from I think somewhere in the 70s and likewise the glue wouldn't have been around back in the 1930s or 40s whenever they were dated from. So very quickly when someone did their job the right way and actually did their job without you know having this sort of ticking time bomb that I need to break the story that I want the story to be true did their job from a place of science from a place of objectivity. It took literally days.

[00:25:33]>> The Sunday Times itself carried out tests on one of the Hitler diaries. They too concluded that based simply on the age of the paper, the diaries were forgeries.

[00:25:46]We had actually finally managed to get hold of a copy of one of the diaries.

[00:25:53]And the first thing we did was we sent it to a leading agency which examines forensically things like binding paper, the glue.

[00:26:08]They came back and said, "By the way, this is modern paper. It's been stuck together with modern glue. If we'd had that information just 24 hours earlier, we could have pulled back from the whole thing.

[00:26:24]But there was one more crucial and incontrovertible mistake in the diaries.

[00:26:31]The most notorious mistake, very bizarre and amusing, was that on the front of each notebook he put Hitler's monograms.

[00:26:42]and they were the initials FH.

[00:26:46]Nobody stopped to think, why are the initials FH on the front of Adolf Hitler's notebooks?

[00:26:56]The reason was is because it was this fancy German script and Kucha had mistaken the F for an A.

[00:27:06]That right there, it should have clued into somebody that this doesn't look right.

[00:27:14]It was stupid. There were so many elements that should have raised alarm bells for Stern and it didn't.

[00:27:23]There is nothing in these books that says that they were contemporaneous with Adolf Hitler. They've been so comprehensively hoodwinkedked. I mean, Haididerman goes to bits and is still in denial. And of course, the only man who knows for true that these lab tests are utterly accurate is of course Ku Yao.

[00:27:46]It turned out that Kuja had a history of fraud and forgery and unbelievably selling forged diaries.

[00:27:54]His biographer is Gerard Klus.

[00:28:00]Kya wrote down all the things he got from real historic books and so all the people saw this is right that's right he was there and he did these things [music] he was so good in Hitler's handwriting that no one saw a difference between real writings from Hitler and Kuya's He was genius to do that in that way.

[00:28:39]>> Several of the forged diaries are today kept in a museum in Bon and Peter Hoffman the archivist agreed to remove one of the volumes from the archives.

[00:28:50]Here we have a copy of the Hitler diaries and this is a special volume deals with the voyage of Udolf Hess who was the deputy of the Fura to Great Britain in 1941 wanted to negotiate with Great Britain and the Western Allies to make a separate peace treaty with them.

[00:29:13]>> Does it look like the other copies of the Hidden Diaries?

[00:29:16]>> Yes, it does look like the other copies of the diaries. It is a special volume but it is the same paper. It is the same kind of writing in it. There are markings from Conrad Kuya and one marking is that means top secret and another marking is that means property of the furlo and that means keep under lock.

[00:29:46]After the press conference, there was a bit of paper taken out of this volume.

[00:29:53]This paper was sent to the Bunus Antal.

[00:29:58]This is a federal institution to prove this material. They proved the paper and they proved the glue and the sort of binding these pages together. And there's no doubt this is a fake.

[00:30:12]The president of the National Archive, Mr. Booms. He proved there's one date only could be false and there are other facts that could not be true. Another example that these diaries are well false and not wellmade.

[00:30:32]He teastained the pages. That's how he made them look old. We did teastaining in the first productions I did at at drama school. They went, "Look, if you dip paper in tea, you can make it look a bit old. Burn the edges as well and then blow it out." Look at that. That's probably from Julius Caesar's time.

[00:30:52]That's how he did it. Oh, and banged the diaries on the corner of his desk as well. Cuz what you know about Hitler is the diaries will have had deskshaped indentations. You only have to look at that famous scene from [music] Downfall to know what a temper the man had. He'd have written a bit. Dear diary, go the English. [laughter] It's so bad.

[00:31:20]Ger Haididerman still claims that he was the innocent party in the affair and that he believed the Hitler diaries were real. He says that he was duped by Ku.

[00:31:57]The big question is how much is Haidider a believer in the diaries? In some ways, the jury's out. I suspect in his heart he knew they were fakes, but he was so desperate to believe. Why? For two very important reasons. One, he was very, very short of money. He had bought Herman Guring's yacht that had cost him millions of marks to try and restore.

[00:32:22]Millions of marks he didn't have. The Hitler diaries, if true, and if published with him at the helm, would make him millions, more than enough to restore Guring's yacht.

[00:32:34]The second reason why I suspect that Hydeman was so keen to believe in these diaries was that he had an absolutely sort of maniacal desire to collect as much Nazi memorabilia as he could.

[00:32:46]Anybody who went to his flat would look at it and go, "Oh my god, it's like a sort of shrine to the Nazis." You know, around the bed of him and his wife were pictures by Hitler. And one reporter says, "How can you sleep with these sort of Hitler memorabilia around your bed?"

[00:33:01]and his wife answers, "How could you sleep without them?"

[00:33:07]>> I don't think actually you really have to choose. Was Haidman a true believer?

[00:33:12]Was he just out to make money? I think it was a combination of all those things. Maybe somewhere in the back of his mind he had suspicions, but when you're skimming off millions of marks, you just put that to the back of your mind. You don't really care about that.

[00:33:32]It's one of the wonderful bizarre things about the human mind is we can just compartmentamentalize compartmentalize away things that might challenge the bad things we're doing.

[00:33:46]>> I think what's so difficult is to unravel negligence from, you know, this intense desire to have your story of a lifetime. And I think that's what's going on in Heidman's case. Was there intent to deceive? I don't think so. I think this person had been a historian with a fascination in this area. He was coming sort of this climax in his career that could have sort of grounded him as a huge figure in history himself. So he wanted it to be true and no doubt that clouded his judgment. Now does that make him a bad person or does it make him just a weak person?

[00:34:24]I would argue probably the latter more than the former.

[00:34:31]Conrad Kuyao. He will admit to being the man who wrote the diaries and not Adolf Hitler. There is his photograph of him holding them up with a big grid on his face. He knows he'd hoodwinkedked the entire world and been the recipient of a vast amount of money.

[00:34:48]The man who goes to pieces is Geman who knows that finally his reputation is absolutely irreparably in tatters.

[00:34:57]and absolutely no one will ever take him seriously again.

[00:35:05]>> It's interesting that Hydeman was also sent a photograph of Hitler's bedroom [music] in his bunker.

[00:35:11]In the background can clearly be seen more than a dozen darkcovered books which are very similar in size and [music] make to the so-called Hitler diaries.

[00:35:22]Haididerman believes that these could be copies of the Furer's original real diaries.

[00:35:30]>> Henry Hothman sent me this picture and wrote, "Dear G, I have seen the box in Hitler's sleeping room." And this books like the diaries from Hitler. all the black books here.

[00:35:52]>> Geman was a Nazi memorabilia obsessive.

[00:35:56]Over many, many years he had spent an enormous amount of money, which he didn't have, on Nazi memorabilia and also Nazi faked memorabilia.

[00:36:06]He was willing to believe anything. He had more paintings in his flat by Hitler than Hitler probably painted in his life.

[00:36:15]He had every single supposedly important relic from Nazi Germany that you can imagine, including apparently the Walther pistol that Hitler used to shoot himself. These are obviously extraordinary things to have in your collection. And Haidderman was a very, very gullible collector.

[00:36:35]The grim walls of Hamburg City Jail. The end of the road for the scoop that never was. On the basis of Conrad Kuya's confession that he wrote the Hitler diaries, police searched Ge Heidman's home last night for 2 hours, then took him into custody to join Ku Yao, who has been under arrest for 2 weeks. The city prosecutor said today that according to the Cua confession, Hydeman knew all along that the diaries were fakes. A statement that came as quite a relief to Hydeman's former employers, Stern magazine, who are suing him for substantial damages.

[00:37:11]But for Stern, the headaches don't end here. They're still trying to track down the 22 million pounds they say they gave Hydeman to buy the diaries. If there had ever been any laughs in the story of the Hitler diaries, the last one belongs to Conrad Kuyao, the fanatical collector of Hitler memorabilia from Schutgat.

[00:37:35]Eventually, both Kuja and Hydeman were sentenced to 4 and 1/2 years [music] in prison.

[00:37:41]a relatively short sentence which surprised many people.

[00:37:47]>> It's all about intent and Kuja clearly intended to deceive. I think Haidaman I think what he was guilty of was being gullible and maybe that is professional negligence and he should have gotten I guess reprimanded for that. But the idea that they both get the same amount [music] of time I don't know [snorts] from from what we know about them I think seems a little bit unfair.

[00:38:20]the judge gave them what in the minds of many people were sentences that were really too light. They got four years even though there were millions of marks involved in this. And I think part of the reason he gave was that he looked at the management of Stern and said, "You guys were so stupid. You've got to share culpability for this." So that's part of the reason why Haidman and Kua got off slightly light.

[00:38:49]I think that Hydeman can't have been as great a fool and as easily gulled as he might like to try and make out. If I as a historian and a journalist were given a document that claimed to be a diary written by Adolf Hitler, I would in no way wish to look a fool.

[00:39:08]Why doesn't he insist that these books objected to every form of scientific analysis around? Why does he not do that? In some way, he is so willing to believe them to be true. And if you're that willing to believe these diaries to be true and you need money, it looks to me highly likely that this is a man who is complicit.

[00:39:36]In the end, the whole sorry tale was splashed across the world's media, complete with endless [music] examinations of who did what, why, and how. Meanwhile, the alleged perpetrators languished [music] behind bars.

[00:39:52]Conrad Kuo died in 2000 in Stoutgart, Germany.

[00:39:59]Kujo was imprisoned and he's now dead.

[00:40:02]Idamman is largely ruined professionally. His reputation was in tatters after this. Both the Stern and the Sunday Times are going from strength to strength. And I think that's what the media does.

[00:40:16]The appetite in Dish Stern for this to be the real thing and then the Sunday Times was vast. So it went way further than it should have done. But that's the basis of a good hoax, isn't it? You need first for there [music] to be an appetite. I could make something up right now, but unless somebody wants it to be true, it's not going to go very far.

[00:40:40]Not only had we carried a story that was patently false, also we had undermined our own reputation as a great investigative newspaper. This is what we were meant to be good at. And on the most important story that we'd almost ever handled, we'd failed by our own lights. So yeah, it was a bad time.

[00:41:05]>> It wasn't a clever forgery. You can say this because you can easily prove that the paper, the glue and all materials could not fit to the time of Adolf Hitler until the Nazi era. [music] So it yeah it was uh it was an amateur.

[00:41:23]>> It's generally accepted that the whole Hitler diary saga was one of the low points for newspaper journalism in the 1980s and that the reputation [music] of News International has never fully recovered.

[00:41:36]And although Rbert Murdoch went on over [music] the next three decades to build one of the world's largest media corporations, the career and reputation of Hugh Trevor Roer was destroyed.

[00:41:51]I honestly believe that if we had managed to come up with this concrete evidence that this was a fake demonstrably, i.e. the paper was modern, the bindings were false. I think even Rford Murdoch, committed as he was to the project, would have pulled back because after all, you know, he's a journalist in his instincts and he would have known that this was a disaster in the making.

[00:42:18]Clearly though, when you've got something this big, actually, there should be much more scientific rigor attached to literally the sheets of paper to see whether the initials actually say ah on the cover rather than FH. But there's a need to believe. And also, frankly, as Rbert Murdoch is a master of doing, is he's there to sell newspapers and entertain people. And if they're not real, he'll still keep the circulation.

[00:42:46]I think it's actually guaranteed that we're going to have the media fooled by hoaxes again and again and again.

[00:42:55]It's in the nature of the beast. They get fooled. They report it as a hoax.

[00:43:00]There's really not a lot of downside for them. Obviously, if somebody came forward with Hitler diaries today, I think they'd be checked and doublech checked and triple checked. I don't think anyone would fall for Hitler diaries again.

[00:43:17]I think Kuya's last laugh was getting the money and he was proud to faked all the people around him. That was his last laughing.

[00:43:33]This should absolutely not have gone the distance, but the newspapers wanted it to be true. I mean, fortunately, they've learned their lesson now. You know, the factchecking in modern journalism is much much better now. You'd never get anything published that isn't true now.

[00:43:51]No chance.