The Hitler Diaries with Adrian Daub

I don't know if there should be that kind of money involved in the truth, you know?

Welcome to Your Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and this week we are talking about one of our favorite topics, a publishing hoax.

And we were talking about it with one of our beloved friends of the show, Adrian Dobb.

We talked with Adrian in a couple of bonus episodes recently about Christiana F, the German version of Go Ask Alice, where in this case it did really happen, and about mazes and monsters, one of my favorite little fear-mongering TV movies of the satanic panic that also happens to star Tom Hanks.

This is an episode about not just any publishing hoax, but about the fake Hitler diaries, which for a moment captivated a vast and credulous public.

And this brings up many questions.

How do you go about fabricating fake diaries?

How do you do them for Hitler?

And why would you?

What need would this serve?

For the writer, for the people who need to keep the hoax going, and for the public who briefly bought it.

I love a Foraguri story, and I love a story about the way people tell a lie, revealing the truth that they don't quite know about themselves.

And this one is both.

And I was so happy to have Adrienne with us to talk about it.

Over in our bonus episodes, we have a fun new one for you about Pike Bracken's I Hate to Housekeep book.

Part of a series with our episode on the I Hate to Cook book a couple months ago with Sarah Archer.

And this time I get to talk about it with You're Wrong About editor Miranda Zickler, who knows all about how to keep your house clean.

We're going to talk about some practical tips, and we also have a poem I wrote in the style of Sylvia Plath at Waffle House, and I promise it all fits together.

And that's about it.

Here is your episode.

Thank you for being with us.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for braving the summer.

Stay cool.

Welcome to Wrong About, the podcast where we just love to talk about a hoax and especially a publishing hoax.

And today we are talking about the Hitler Diaries with our friend Adrian Dobb.

Hi.

Adrian, hello.

I'm struck, as I always am, by the feeling that I just said your last name wrong.

No, that's perfectly fine.

There's no more right way to say my name.

I have

any pronunciation of my last name is correct.

Oh, no.

I definitely did.

No, no, no, you're great.

You're great.

Okay.

So you brought this up to me, I don't know, at some point because we did a bonus episode on Christiana F., the real, real go ask Alice.

That's right.

So in classic function of kind of growing up and I guess as a millennial, before we had the internet, I love how today young adults are like, what do people do before the internet?

And it's like, it is hard to imagine.

But let me tell you, one of the big ways that information traveled was in bathroom readers.

Remember these?

I mean, they still exist.

Yeah.

They're still around and they still work.

They're full.

They're like, you know, there's like the Uncle John's bathroom reader that has like 800 volumes.

But I remember reading a little squib about, like, you know, one time there was someone had this hoax where they were like, hey, I discovered the diaries of Adolf Hitler.

And it was like this huge thing.

And everyone was so excited.

And then it turned out to not be real.

And I remember thinking back on it, this feeling of like relief, because I think I was very big on Indiana Jones and, or just on the Raiders of the Lost Ark specifically.

Yeah.

It's called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Once you get over 35, you can't name a movie correctly to save your life.

It's a disease, really.

And I had this feeling that just like if we actually published the actual diaries of Hitler, that would be too creepy to

withstand.

And so it was just like, oh, thank God, it was because some guy just made them up.

up but then it in the way of facts you encounter in a pre-internet world you have no way of following through on it and so you just kind of never follow through on it so i'm really excited to get the story about it from you because i'm very curious like who did this why did they do this how much money can you make doing this in what year and like what you know what are the motivations and how does this compare also to the fake trauma memoir, which is kind of what we've mostly talked about on the show to this point.

Yeah, these are all great questions.

It turns out, I mean, just to spoiler alert, you can make a ton of money on it, and you can then have that money never be found.

Oh, no, just like D.B.

Cooper.

There is, yes, there is an element of an enduring mystery here.

Oh, no, wait, we famously did find his money.

Well, you know.

Yeah, we just didn't find him.

Exactly.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

So when,

where are you taking us to in terms of place and time?

Where are we?

Yeah, so the whole story will occupy basically the second half of the 1970s.

Alrighty, it's a good half.

And then

the beginning of the 1980s.

The Hitler diaries have a long prehistory, which is part of how the hoax kind of didn't get discovered right away.

But, you know, average consumers and the writers of the bathroom book that you read would have likely become aware of this in April 1983 when the German magazine Derstan, which is the the same magazine, by the way, that broke the Christiana F story, you know, just three years prior.

Aha!

They're doing good work, I guess.

They do a lot of good work

and they're huge into these kind of investigative pieces.

And they announced that they were in possession of Hitler's secret diaries.

And they have this massive press conference April 25th, 1983.

Oh, boy.

With this massive stack of newly discovered papers.

They're like, look at this.

It's a massive stack.

It can't be fake if it's a lot of papers.

This is a theme that will come back up that people basically will be like, well, there's a lot, the mass quantity will sort of be

why this got as far as it did in the first place, in the sense that no one read the damn things all the way through.

Right.

Yeah.

Like the Pentagon papers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, well, also, it's not typed, right?

It's in this like very inscrutable script.

Like Hitler dots his eyes with little hearts.

I wouldn't have thought that.

Who knew?

Yeah.

And then the other thing is that

basically the idea that like someone would be maniacal enough to fake what i think in the end amounted to 62 volumes just seemed like a lot uh you know that is often the argument made against something being fake and there's like a new youtube channel that i love so much um called tour's cabinet of curiosities where

it's like sort of investigating

a lot of different stories like this where there's like a just an incredibly large document where you're like, well, how could this be

just

one person's obsession?

You know, and the host, a couple times, I think, has been like, well,

you know, autistic people really like to write hundreds and hundreds of pages about things sometimes.

And like, not saying that that's the case here, but I think one of the interesting things about these stories is that people, to quote Yves Kosovsky-Segchewick, are different from each other.

One of the great

line products of academia, academia, that line.

Axiomatic, yes.

Yeah.

And

we have different motives when we go about creating our hoaxes.

So I think looking at a story like this or any kind of story, really, and being like, well, I don't understand the human motives that would cause someone to do this, or I would never write something that long.

So it has to be real.

It's like, well, you wouldn't, but.

Somebody would.

Yeah.

And it's interesting that you bring up autism because I think in the end, it's a little hard to know why anyone in this story does anything.

But my read after having spent quite a lot of time with both the hoaxer and the hoaxes over the last couple of weeks, my sense was something different, which is that it is the most 1980s thing imaginable.

It is someone who is overpromised and it now has to deliver.

wants more money and therefore ends up being like, fuck, I gotta write another one of these things.

I guess it's better than junk bonds

in some senses.

Well, yes.

it's, I mean, in some way they are exactly that, right?

It's, it's a little for me as a literary scholar, it's hard not to think that the extremely overworked and exhausted Hitler we meet in the diaries might be a self-portrait of the man who, as you say, comes home from the pub and has to like be like, fuck, I gotta do another one of these, you know?

Another Hitler diaries, yeah.

And it's uh, I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm very excited.

excited to learn about this person and like what the original goal was and if it perhaps got away from its creator at a certain point.

This also reminds me: the sort of American corollary I can think of to this is Clifford Irving and the fake Howard Hughes memoir.

Howard Hughes, that's right.

It's an incredibly ballsy one because, in this case, I think it was going towards publication while Howard Hughes was alive.

Exactly.

And then he was like, Excuse me, I didn't write a memoir.

And it's like, what were you?

Were you assuming that Howard Hughes just won't hear about it if you publish a memoir posing as him?

All right.

I mean, look, he's got his feet in tissue boxes, but he can still watch.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

He's like, I d it it juked me right out of my Kleenex boxes, you guys.

What was that?

Yeah,

even though there is no Howard Hughes here to could have been like, point of order, I did not write this.

The actual hoax basically runs for at best two weeks.

That's still pretty good, honestly.

On April 28th, 1983, we get the first issue of Dish Down publishing the diaries with selections and starting like this bidding war.

Oh boy.

All these various companies.

So there's going to be, you know, Newsweek wants it, the London Times, Rupert Murdoch's huge into it,

French papers, Spanish papers.

Yeah.

Which, by the way, is what you did at the time if you were positioning something to be a bestseller often, or a publisher would sometimes work with it.

Well, in this case,

it was being shopped, but sometimes a publisher, I think, would also place excerpts with a newspaper and you would serialize a big upcoming nonfiction book so people would get a little taste of it, which I think is a very smart model.

Yeah.

Well, with this one, I think the idea was also

it really was.

Yeah, like an absolute bombshell.

Well, that, but also like a lot of the diary ends up being just like extremely pedantic and pedestrian stuff.

Oh, fun.

Okay.

And so my sense is that they they never thought, hey, we can just sell this as a book.

It would always have to be excerpt.

Right.

Oh, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Right.

Like a lot of it is just like mind-numbingly boring, which was by design.

I love the idea of readers being like, Hitler's so dull.

Yeah.

Because as you know, probably one of my least favorite things is this idea that there's a mystique around evil or that the ability to destroy human life makes people more powerful or exciting.

And it's like, no, they're like, not only does it not do any of that, but also like some of the most destructive people in history are just like really embarrassing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so by May 6, 1983, news breaks that the diaries are fake.

Basically,

the competition to Dirstan had immediately sort of clocked.

Like, this is weird.

This is hinky.

And the magazine's publisher said, like, well, obviously we'll have this submitted.

to various archives to get the binding and the paper analyzed.

And the verdict comes back and they're like, yeah, that's modern paper.

That binding isn't right.

And the whole thing falls apart.

Turns out you should try harder when you do that type of thing.

And then, of course, everyone sort of starts looking for who did this.

And maybe I'll, just in setting the scene for you in Germany in 1983,

there is a very, there's a very funny reason why the hoaxer didn't necessarily think this was going to happen, right?

Which is, he thought, well, gee, where am I going to find the best hoax, the best fakes, right, are done using real materials, right?

Right.

We know this from art forgery.

Exactly, right?

Where you go into a, let's say, like a nice library with old holdings and you cut out the empty pages and then fill them.

That's sort of like, that's the hardest stuff.

That's clever.

Don't do that, kids.

Yes, don't do it.

But you know, if you need to make a quick fee million dollars, I don't know.

Maybe, you know, think about it.

Yeah, yeah.

But you can't do that for 62 volumes of a diary.

Yeah, that's a lot of paper.

So he's like, huh, I wonder.

So if I can't use modern paper, where could I go for pre-modern paper and binding?

I have no idea.

Where can he go?

The Communist Bloc.

Oh, of course.

And is he correct in assuming that their paper is older?

Not at all.

All right.

Why does he think that?

I think it's because generally the vibe.

He's like, everything here looks kind of dinghy.

So I bet your paper is from

40 years ago.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The whole thing has a vibe of like the 1950s never ended.

All right.

And so fair enough.

Actually, based on your fashions.

Sorry, ladies.

But yeah, then it emerges like, no, of course.

Like they're like, we have paper.

We're not

an uncontacted tribe over here.

What the fuck?

And so.

Big slam on East German paper supplies.

Turns out there are

brightening agents in it that sort of were only designed in the that were only sort of invented in the 50s.

The binding is from the 60s.

And so, yeah, the whole thing just falls apart immediately.

Yeah.

I got to say, I love this type of thing.

It's great.

And then, so, so, basically, the verdict is such that it's not like there is like a big debate, and then, like, eventually people come around to the idea that this is fake.

Like, from one moment, like, the press conference by, I think, the National Archives in Kublenz in Germany is basically this is a fake.

They're not like,

here are some reasons we have to believe that this might not be authentic.

They're like, oh, it's a fake.

So like this goes from 100 to zero in the space of, you know, this basically makes it across Germany at the speed of like wire services.

People are being like, oh shit, this is not real.

And I feel like there are cases in which people would be less quick to test it.

That's right.

But in this case, it's like, it feels like there's a lot, there's just more writing on its authenticity than on anything else like that.

That's right.

The publisher, you know, which again is one of Germany's premier magazines, had done some due diligence.

And they'd had, they'd consulted experts to determine whether the handwriting was really Hitler's.

And these experts had looked at, including really

reputable historians of the Third Reich, had said that, yes,

in comparing the diaries to other known documents having been written by Hitler,

they appear to be by the same hand.

This is like worthy of its own episode, but I get the sense that handwriting identification is a lot more wishy-washy as a forensic science than a lot of us would like.

Well, in hindsight, these people were correct.

Oh, really?

It's just that they were not.

Did he like cut out a bunch of letters and photocopy them?

Nope.

That would have been too much work.

They were comparing the Hitler diaries to other forgeries by the same guy.

It's affinity fraud, kind of.

I love it.

It was just very, very funny.

So they were not wrong.

They were like, well, this is the same handwriting as this.

And that was true.

It was just not Hitler's.

Was it just that it was internally consistent, or were there other samples that he'd forged somehow?

Yes, so that's part of what

let this hoax attain this kind of scale that it did.

The publication of the Hitler Diaries was in some way an accident of a con that was not run on this magazine or on the broader public at all, but on basically people who traded and collected Nazi memorabilia, right?

Well, I'm a fan of that Khan, because God knows that's, you know,

I, you know, yeah,

I want to con those people too.

And so, yeah, basically, um, the forger who we will now meet, Konrad Kuyo.

Hello.

I'm going to call you Connie.

Connie.

That is exactly what his contact at Dersh Dan would call him, Connie.

And Connie had been.

flooding the zone with Nazi-related shit since the early 70s,

meaning that he had really contaminated the kind of historical document base.

Wow.

Nice.

It's like that kid who wrote the Scots Wikipedia.

That's right.

Yeah.

So let me tell you a little bit about Conat Kuya, Connie.

So born in 1938.

Well, so I was going to tell you about his childhood.

I was going to tell you about his life, except that a lot of what we know about his life appears to be made up to.

So hard to tell.

But what we do do know is born somewhere around Dresden, he claims to have grown up in an orphanage after having been separated from his family during the bombing of Dresden.

So basically, I think there is some suggestion that that's probably not true.

Because again, it's like bad things happen to kids all the time.

And sometimes they even happen during historically significant events.

But like...

You know, if someone has already made up a lot of other stuff, you're like, was it a historically significant event that hurt you this time as well yeah exactly so this this tendency to like he clearly had a traumatic childhood and a traumatic life in the first part of it and the the

ability or the willingness to attach that to world historic events sort of runs through it as a through line yeah and i guess that by living through a period when those events are happening, your life is inevitably shaped by them, but maybe not as directly as you feel like would explain the way that you are sometimes.

Yeah.

And I mean, think about the fact that, right, like born in 1938, he was seven years old when the Second World War ended, right?

Like, that's a particular generational experience of a world that is completely going to shit, right?

Everything is, you know, the cities become unrecognizable during, you know, the first years where you really sort of perceive the world around you.

He's too young to have been really socialized into the Nazi state.

I mean, he would have done maybe like one year of schooling before

the Allies uh conquered berlin right so really someone who who sort of watched a world disappear without really having that world seen that world for himself right and who was born into that world interestingly yeah at a time when it was projected to last forever

yeah and we should say so so hitler for him for instance would have been a figure that by the time he really could sort of engage with him was no longer around, but who had clearly shaped pretty much as much as a person can shape the world in which you grow up, right?

In, you know, what is, what is, you know, Eastern Germany in the late 30s, early 40s.

Dresden is in East Germany, so he grew up in East Germany, fled to the West in the 50s, probably after a first arrest for some kind of forgery.

As a teenager, he seems to have created phony autographs for various East German politicians and sold them.

I mean,

dorky enough to buy an autograph from an East German politician, probably,

I'm whatever.

Yeah, victimless crime.

Victimless crime.

Yeah, and then he settles in southwest Germany, the area near the Black Forest, where the cakes are farmed.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gonna lasso me up a cake.

That was such a silly joke.

Thank you for seeing that through with me.

It's good.

I like it.

I like it.

Yeah.

Sort of runs an art gallery and starts dealing in, yeah, these memorabilias.

He's like, what do you want?

Judy Garland?

Yeah, I can get that by Thursday.

Yeah.

Well, I mean,

it ends up not being East German politicians or Judy Garland.

It really ends up being Nazi stuff.

Wow.

And so, and he's, is he selling this like I primarily like to a domestic market, right?

People who just are like, hey, get me some Nazi stuff.

I missed that.

I would be shocked if there weren't some weird American billionaires in the, in this as well.

Well, yeah, of course.

Cause how did Lemmy get all his stuff otherwise?

That's right.

But

yeah, he ripped off these rich memorabilia collectors with, let's say, a certain nostalgia for the Third Reich and its trappings, right?

Like, yeah, which, of course, a part of me is like, how could anyone ever be nostalgia?

Like, I'm like, ugh, my soul recoils at the very thought.

It's unimaginable and surreal.

And then the other other part of me is like, Sarah, plantation weddings were considered generally okay by mainstream white people in America until 2020.

Like, that's how Blake Lively got married.

Blake Lively.

Yeah.

I mean, we're importing Afrikaners.

I think that plantation weddings are doing just fine in the Year of the Lord 2025.

I mean, it's an excellent point.

Yeah.

But now you might get slightly embarrassed on TikTok and get negative Yelp reviews at your Mercedes dealership that you run.

So when you think about it,

hasn't woke culture, destroyed democracy.

This has been my TED Talk.

Yeah, so basically

he's running in these kind of circles that are never officially sort of far-right, but that certainly seem to harbor fascinations.

verging on sympathy for the Nazis.

And it is for them that he starts creating the very first fake diary in 1975.

Wow.

And according to everyone, including himself, it was supposed to be a one-off.

He sells it to a German industrialist.

Is it in the spirit of like, I'll make you fuckers a whole fucking Hitler diary, you fucks?

I mean, I think it's hard to tell.

There's a museum of all his fakes now

in his hometown, which does very, very good work, but I haven't been in a while.

My impression is that in the beginning, it was really about hitler painting right there's a bunch of fake nudes of eva brown that is actually kuyao's then i think wife that's a weird do you think that he was okay do you think he was like honey i want to paint a nude of you just for fun or do you think he was like listen babe

I think she was in on it.

Okay, I like that.

That's more fun.

She may have helped him disappear a bunch of the money.

So like we, it's hard to prove any of this because like people were aware

when this whole thing blew up that

they needed to say certain things to stay out of, or not out of prison, but to shorten their stay at the who's gauge.

But I think that she must have known.

I mean, she would have recognized herself for one thing.

Well, that's a good point.

I mean, in seriousness, I feel like...

I get giggly when I'm talking about anything gory or uncomfortable.

And to me, this is like, A, genuinely funny, but B, uncomfortable in the sense of like,

I feel like it's good to bilk people who want Nazi memorabilia because they deserve it.

But also, like, I suppose there is an argument to be made that, like,

any fun at the expense of Hitler is wrong.

Like, I disagree, but I don't know.

What do you think?

I mean, it does feel like you're ripping off some of the most deserving people on the planet.

I think the problem becomes that this stuff starts shaping how people look back at that period.

The diaries are in some way far worse than like a nude, a fake nude of Eva Brown.

Yeah, that's just kind of funny.

Like, on the one hand, I don't think there's any mystery about the political persuasion of the people he's ripping off.

At the same time, the fact that basically they're purchasing like porn from him, like it's probably not an accident either.

Their fascination with you know the Nazis is essentially pornographic.

They are, and the diaries will have a lot of that too.

Like, there'll just be a lot about like Hitler's indigestion and like, yeah, like how he's got, had a fight with Eva and whatever.

It's this kind of voyeuristic fascination.

I hope there's hemorrhoid stuff.

Yeah, I don't know if there is.

They are now all digitized.

I could have read them all, but I mean, it's like, oh, boy.

I don't have time for this.

Oh, you know, I wouldn't inflict that on you, to be honest.

I read a bunch, but not enough to.

No hemorrhoids where I read, I have to admit.

But you can't swear that there's not a hemorrhoid in the whole thing.

Yeah, yeah.

That's promising.

Selling fakes to these people turns out to be extremely easy, but there are a couple of surprising challenges that emerge when you do that.

So just if anyone here is looking to break into that market, be warned.

Alrighty.

One is, right, that like, in some way, provenance is the name of the game.

You have to figure out like...

a plausible way of explaining how you got this thing, right?

Like, why did no one else have this?

Yeah, that is a big one.

The other thing is that, of course, the number one source for shit like this were either the old Nazis themselves or their next of kin, right?

Like someone like Göring or Himmler had, were dead, but like their,

you know, their wives, their, you know, their widows and their...

You're like, well, I was visiting a charming country estate in Argentina and I happened to open the nightstand drawer.

Exactly.

And so you have to figure out a way why the Hitler diaries wouldn't have gone through those people.

Right.

And we have diaries, genuine diaries for some of the big Nazis.

They had entered entered sort of the scholarship and

the broader public domain a lot earlier, right?

Goebbels' diary, for instance.

Yeah, which are horrible.

But Kuyao is coming into the party a little late.

Like everything has been discovered by now, is the sense.

Exactly.

And so the, but he keeps being able to like connect with these amazing, shadowy collectors who've been holding on forever.

But with the diary, he decides to go a different direction, which is important.

What he claims is that

he got them from a place that, again, for West Germans in the 1970s, seemed like a time machine, namely East Germany, right?

Where he was from.

And he said, I have.

So

in 1945, the story goes, a single plane

took off from the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

to try and stash a bunch of important Nazi shit somewhere in the Czech Republic, what is today the Czech Republic.

They're like, we've got Hitler's diary here, and it's only got one of those flimsy little locks that anyone can break open.

And so that flight crashes somewhere in, you know, rural East Germany.

That appears to be real.

Okay, that's pretty cool.

It could have been anything, right?

Right.

I mean, I'm sure it's, yeah, some, just some boring junk, but.

Yeah, maybe it was even money or something like that.

But you never know.

Let's

make Harrison Ford's reanimated carcass.

Do another Indiana Jones movie movie about it.

Yeah, and then, but, but Kuyao's idea is, you know, what if that had a bunch of cool stuff on it?

He could have just invented Indiana Jones.

He came so close.

Yeah, picked it clean.

They picked it clean.

Of course they did.

And then it sort of circulates in East Germany.

The idea really is that, like, yeah, there is a...

It's sort of, it's been around in East Germany, but that's why West Germans haven't heard of it.

It's behind the Iron Curtain.

Of course.

They're like, ah, where all the good stuff is.

Of course.

But Kuyao has a brother in East Germany.

This part is true.

And he's a high-ranking East German general.

That part is not true.

His brother works for the railroad or something.

He's going to smuggle this shit out.

He's going to collect it over there and then smuggle it out across the iron curtain.

And then his brother is going to sell it all.

Right.

So that's just cloak and dagger enough, you know, to kind of give these things both a kind of degree of plausibility and to give them kind of an exciting legend, right?

Like not only are these exciting objects, forbidden objects, but like the way you're getting them is like clandestine and kind of cool.

I don't know.

Is there a sense of contentiousness between East and West Germany about

who sort of brings forth the deepest truth about the past or something like that?

Yes.

I mean, there definitely is.

Okay.

Both German states after the war present themselves as having dealt with the Nazi past better than the other.

That is how they legitimate themselves.

The others are basically continuing the mistakes of the Nazi years.

In the case of West Germany, this is done by talking about totalitarianism, right?

To say, look, you guys were Nazis, then you went out and became communists, so you're still totalitarians, right?

You still wear funny uniforms and march in lockstep.

Not sure how much you've really changed.

It also was done by blaming Prussia, basically, for German militarism, which is something that the Western Allies did very, very early on, because Prussia was in East Germany, basically.

So they sort of be like, well, the real root of Nazism is over there on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

And the East German government sort of said, like, well, no, the Nazis are in the West on the mere technicality.

that a bunch of West German politicians were former Nazis, right?

Whereas the East Germans had pretty, at least

at the upper echelons of power, pretty radically solved their Nazi problem.

Let's put it that way.

This was during the height of Stalinism.

So if you wanted to get rid of people, pretty easy, right?

In Germany, you had all these people who like all these industrialists, right, who had made tons of money through the Nazis were now still very rich and very powerful.

You had all these politicians who sort of would mumble, mumble through their, through their Nazi past.

There are statistics about what percentage of judges and university professors by like the 1960s, early 1970s had had the exact same job under Nazism.

Think of all the policemen and that kind of thing, right?

Like, was this person guarding trains to the camps like 20 years ago and now he's like writing me a fucking

traffic ticket?

It's kind of crazy to think about.

So that was the East German case for why the West Germans were actually just a continuation.

of

Nazism by other means.

So this is very, very contentious.

And the idea that these diaries diaries might not see the light of day in East Germany didn't seem totally far-fetched.

And I get this because I think that this is how kind of the rest of the United States uses the American South as like, well, we're not that bad.

And it's like, no, I think we are that bad.

We just have distributed it differently.

Exactly.

And so Kuyo's grift, so he makes a wonderful living, but is he grifting these fashion curious in whatever, however you want to nuance that curiosity.

It's unclear, right?

Like, do they want Hitler back or do they just like the greatness, right?

Like, I always think of that.

Um, I always like, I always think of that scene in succession with that weird far-right politician that they're auditioning for president.

Remember this?

I don't think I got that far, but tell me about it.

And basically, um, Tom Wamsgans is like, well, did you ever read Mein Kampf?

Like, a couple of times.

And he's like, well, oh, that's right.

Yes, I remember that.

Any,

were there like some Easter eggs you didn't pick up on the first time?

Right.

That was really kind of a pretty great moment for Tom.

Yeah, it's great.

And this is sort of like these, these guys are like, oh, the grandeur of the period.

Okay, say more about that.

I'd rather not.

And it's like, no, really.

Say so much more.

And I don't, I guess, and I don't believe that, by the way, when people like, you know,

from an aesthetic perspective, and it's like, dude, ignore our, go watch Spartacus.

There are so many,

so many aesthetics through time that don't involve genocide, you know.

Exactly.

And so it's through this group of wealthy collectors.

Basically, Kuyao

becomes the dog that catches the car.

And it feels like the dog is always like,

I never planned for it to happen.

And now that it has happened, I wish it hadn't.

I mean, I'm sure that that's how he felt about it looking back.

I think he had a wonderful grift going, but then one of the targets of his grift does the worst possible thing and puts him in touch with the media.

What had happened is the following.

We now meet our second protagonist.

Ged Heidemann is this Uber journalist working for Dishdown.

He rollerblades to work every morning to get in more time for journalism.

Oh no, he's this guy goes hard.

I mean, it's just, yeah,

he's this kind of like macho journalist, kind of war reporter/slash investigative kind of gumshoe, right?

He's their kind of bloodhound.

He runs down every single-that is a great type of journalist.

Yeah.

You know, more needed now than ever.

Be sexy, be a journalist.

Yeah.

And so this guy really, he's well known and he's highly respected by

his colleagues and in the editor, among the editorial staff, among the

publishers of this magazine.

He both appears to have been a pretty good reporter and he definitely played a really good reporter on TV, right?

Like he just looks the part.

Right.

Like there's a, there's an incident.

When is this in 1970, Black September, where like the PLO tried to take over power in Jordan and a bunch of people sort of are taken hostage or sort of like get caught in between the fighting.

And this guy sort of like gets a bunch of hostages out of one of the hotels and out of Jordan and stuff like that.

Like real old school journalism hostage.

Exactly.

Hostage related stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, he, I think it's the kind of thing, it's also the kind of thing that today you wouldn't have money for anymore.

I feel like he, I think he spent like a year just traveling South America being like, hey, have you guys ever heard of this guy, Dr.

Mengele?

Anyone?

Yeah.

Well, I was, I was listening to the audiobook of it as I do in the springtime sometimes, you know?

And then it opens with,

well, it opens several times, but one of its openings is about a character named Adrienne Mellon, who's come to the cursed cursed town of Derry to write about the canal for New England Byways magazine who financed for like weeks and weeks of him researching a canal in a small town in New England.

And it's like the weirdest part of this is that it's true.

Like this is the single most unbelievable part of this whole book probably to like a 20 year old reading it today.

Like because if I were in college now, I think I because I think I was young at the very sort of tail end of this type of thing.

But like, you know, they don't have in-flight magazines anymore.

You just have to sit there reading the safety instructions if you didn't bring anything.

They're like, no, fuck you.

Yeah.

Or the in-flight catalog or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, I guess the sort of

print journalism, not just print journalism, any type of journalism takes a lot of resources to be able to do this type of thing.

And the fact that people aren't up to sort of,

you know, daring do journalism today, maybe as much as it seems like they used to be, isn't because people have gotten any less gritty, but because we don't pay for them to do this type of thing.

Yeah.

One of heidemann's obsessions becomes kind of the tackling nazi stories okay he becomes kind of a collector of nazi things himself in a really weird way is he like a custodian of this stuff so in 1973 heidemann decided who is the stern is based in hamburg so this is by the sea had decided to buy herman gering's motor yacht charon 2 yeah for 160 000 deutschmark which is quite a bit of money you didn't say charon did you the charon 2 yes C-A-R-I-N.

Yeah,

that was his wife, I believe.

You know what?

It's still Karen.

It's still the Karen 2.

Yeah, yeah.

This yacht would like to speak with the manager, please.

Yeah.

And basically, it proved ruinously expensive.

It would have taken a quarter of a million marks to get it refurbished.

Wow.

In terms of collections, by the way, Heidemann was also dating Goering's daughter, Eda, at the time.

So

he's like collecting people and stuff.

See, that's, that's weird, you know, where you're like...

It's weird.

I mean, and I get that like a lot of people are walking around who just happen to be the children of prominent Nazis at this point, to be honest.

And you end up, but it's like,

you got to have a work-life balance.

You got to not date into your work-life, ideally.

That's weird.

I feel weird.

I feel weird.

It's really, I mean, I don't know how she would have felt.

I got to be honest.

I'm uncomfortable.

It's like, are you just dating because of my dad?

You know, as surely so many women were thinking at this time and place, are you just dating me to get my Nazi memorabilia?

That's right.

But anyway, so he completely was over his head financially with this stupid yacht.

And anyway, so like then, as you might have predicted, he tries to unload it

with the same industrialist that...

that Kuyao has been.

Charming yacht.

Historic previous owner.

Well, no, he needs to basically deal with the same set of weird

collectors as Kuyao.

Yeah.

Okay.

Oh, this is a meat cute for the ages, huh?

That's right.

It's through them that they're like, yeah, we'll look into the boat, but hey, have you seen these Hitler diaries?

And he's like, I am not letting my boat be upstaged.

So a little bit more about...

Heidemann.

So Heidemann is about six, is I think six years older than Kuyao, so mid when mid-50s, mid-50s at the time, right?

When the diaries come out, but kind of same generation, but same historic frame of reference when it came to the Nazis as Kuyo, right?

They'd been kids, they'd lived with images, but most of their socialization was post-war, right?

So Hitler is this kind of image for them, one that dominated their childhoods, but one that was kind of mythical already by the time they were even sort of young adults.

Right.

But through his former girlfriend, of course, Heidemann, he was connected to people who were either flesh and blood real Nazis

or neo-Nazis or related to either of those two things, right?

Eda Goering, for instance, was apparently a pretty frequent guest in Bayreuth.

That's the home of the Wagner clan.

So, Richard Wagner, the composer.

And I'll make a quick plug.

If you want to hear more about Richard Wagner and his weird clan of

fascist weebs,

you can check out an episode that Maura Donegan and I did over on In Bed with the Right.

Wonderful show, wonderful co-host of yours.

She is amazing.

And

Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifred, may or may not have been Hitler's lover.

So, like, you know, there's a lot of connections there.

And would have met, I know, God.

Would have met there with sort of Ilse Hess, who's Rudolf Hess's widow.

So, Rudolf Hess was Hitler's second-in-command, who, under mysterious circumstances, like parachuted into England for some reason.

Yeah, she knew sort of the widows of various other Nazi grandees, but she also

would have known the head of the post-war Nazi party and Oswald Mosley.

Do you think someday there will be like a market for like

this is the bra that Marjorie Taylor Greene wore when she shouted that time.

Oh, God.

I mean, I'm afraid so, right?

I mean, like, it's just.

Wait, and I interrupted you.

There was another, another person, right?

Oh, and they also, she also would have rubbed shoulders with this, with the British fascist Oswald Mosley.

Basically, Heidemann collected things and people connected to the Nazis, right?

Is it worth it?

And he did this kind of blockbuster, almost adventure journalism, I would say, right?

Where he just kind of, where the performance of it.

Where he goes to cocktail parties with a bunch of old Nazis.

Yeah.

He became the personal secretary to some high-ranking SS general.

who was writing this memoir.

And so they would like visit like various absolute war criminals to like interview them for these memoirs.

But then Heidemann

also

seems to have collected information for the Mossad during the same thing.

Like it's unclear whether he was under cover or not.

But like it's this very strange thing where like on the one hand, the fascination appears to be real, but it also does have a have an oppositional side to it, right?

Like was he ever like, hey, that guy you're looking for, I'm actually having lunch with him.

Well, he definitely tried, I mean, that's clearly why he was looking for Mengele.

He was not looking, he was looking to get an interview, and then he was likely going to turn him in, right?

Like,

it's a weird mixture.

Yeah, right.

Ideally,

you do a heat where you sit down for lunch and you get your interview, and then you, and then you turn him in.

Yeah.

And so, basically,

through this industrialist, he gets a first volume of these diaries, and he decides he needs to meet the dealer that this guy got it from.

He wants to find these.

And to my mind, this is where things start going off the rails.

Because two things happen.

One, Kuyao eventually agrees to meet with him and to sort of say like, yes, I have more.

I can probably get more.

But it's difficult enough to find this guy that basically the, again, the bloodhound.

dynamics or the bloodhound dimension of of Heidemann's personality sort of gets activated.

He's like, the fact that this is so difficult to find is exciting to him.

Like he's in it for the hunt now.

And so he kind of doesn't do his due diligence when he actually starts ending up with these books.

And Kuyao is very, very good at stringing him along.

Now, in a bizarre twist, I should plug this very quickly here.

These two men's phone conversations were recorded.

What?

Yeah.

Heidemann is a full-on, full-blooded reporter.

So he records a lot of these conversations.

And the magazine ended up with most of these tapes.

There's a German language podcast about this, in which you can listen to them.

I can't believe I forgot to learn German.

The impression you get is like, honestly, of an addict and his dealer.

Right.

This is a guy who is addicted to the chase, to the thrill of getting more of this.

And then you get this guy who very, very deliberately feeds him only what he needs to.

Right.

And it's stuff like, you know, he'll call him up and be like, Hi, Connie, like, do we know anything more about the new volume?

And he said, and Kuya will say, oh, you know, so I got the signal from my brother, but I think the truck didn't come, or I think they were too scared, and then they drove off again.

It's supposed to be hidden in, like, I think, um, the like underneath pianos.

And then, like, someone at the.

This is like how romance scams work, you know, where you're like, well, I can't, I tried to visit you, but I got stuck

in Heathrow and my ankle sprained and I have to

go

check in on my weasel farm.

So could you send me another $7,000?

Exactly.

And so basically,

it is a kind of homosocial romance, right?

As you did, Heidemann starts calling Ku Yao Connie, although he doesn't know his real name.

He thinks his name is Conrad Fisher.

But still, he calls him Connie.

And basically, there's just this constant back and forth of frustration discovery, right?

Because Kuyao does deliver.

And is he like purchasing them as he's getting each volume or how is this working?

Well, no, I mean, Kuyao has to write every single one of them.

Right.

God.

Some of this is very, very clearly a clever grifter, as you say, running kind of a Romeo scam, right?

Like, oh, not today, honey, but, you know.

But on the other hand, it's also that the poor man now has to fucking write all these things.

Makes Gone Girl look like amateur hour.

Exactly.

I mean, like, the amount of black tea he has to use to stain all the pages is like insane.

Right?

He must have gone through just like box after box of Darjeeling or something.

He's in over his head.

This guy is kind of going to suck him dry.

Well, why does he keep saying he's found more Hitler diaries?

Can't he be like, nope, that's it.

Hitler diary train is leaving the station.

Chew, chew.

Well,

because he keeps getting paid more and more money.

Well, yeah.

So initially, I think buys the first volume for himself.

Because like Amadeus.

Yeah.

And then it's exactly like that.

And then he, and then eventually cuts in the higher-ups at the magazine.

The higher-ups at the magazine are like, get this for us.

This is the scoop of the century.

We trust you.

And again, partly based on the fact that like historians say, well, everything in this diary checks out.

That's because Kuyao was using a chronicle of the Nazi years in order to write it.

There you go.

And so even though there are some real red flags, basically the Deshdan can't stop giving this guy money.

And he's basically, well, my brother's out now.

And then two weeks later, he'll be like, oh, but my brother found another person who apparently was able to get a couple of additional volumes of the diary, but he wants more money.

And so then they're going to give him more money for those.

And they're like, well, you promised us four, but there's only two here.

It's like, oh, yeah, no, you know, and like he sounds like genuinely.

Got stuck in customs, man.

Yeah.

And he sounds genuinely tired on the phone.

You're like, well, I bet.

I'm sure you were up all night making this thing.

Yeah, God.

And it's like, you know, you could, I don't know, find someone else to help you, like hire a grad student or something.

Yeah, it becomes, but it is this thing where like the difficulty and the frustration of getting these things becomes kind of a story in itself, right?

This is a, remember, this is a journalist who kind of loves watching himself journalist, basically, right?

Like, there's a kind of setting yourself,

like staging your, there's a, there's a certain degree of self-staging in his sort of, um, in his journalism.

Like, you want to be seen doing these things.

And so he just loves the story.

He loves the fact that, like, it's being smuggled across the iron curtain.

He loves that, like, it went down in a plane.

It's that he's getting it from a high-ranking general of the, right?

Like, because you're like, the story of how I'm getting this story is such a great story that I am the star of.

Yeah.

And so eventually the Stein will fork over 9.6 million marks for these things.

What's the dollar equivalent of that?

I'd have to look it up, but it's something like five to six million dollars at the time, I think.

Oh my God.

Why do they have that kind of money?

It's really intense.

I mean, basically,

the big publishing house that owns them will

be left holding the bag.

I don't know if there should be that kind of money involved in the truth, you know?

I know.

So

the other interesting thing is, remember that Heidemann had serious money troubles on account of the boat purchase that went.

Oh, yes, that's right.

The money pit, if you will.

After this whole thing blows up, both Kuyao and Heidemann will go to jail.

And the reason Heideman will go to jail is that there is a pretty strong suspicion on the part of the magazine that he

skimmed off the top.

Yeah.

There is a lot of suggestion that he, or there's a lot of suspicion after this whole thing breaks, that part of why he keeps it going is that with each transaction, he skims off the top.

That makes sense.

That's never proven, but like where this money goes.

This is more like casino than I expected when I made that reference.

Yeah, but also like the question of where the money is at the end is a really, really good one and it's never found.

No.

Oh no.

Oh no.

It's on that plane.

Yeah.

That's right.

It crashed in the South American jungle or something like that.

It's buried next to the axe from the Hinter Kaifak murders.

Yeah.

So there is this kind of addiction thing going on where he really sort of needs this to be, this is his fix at this point.

Right.

And he's also, I guess, literally addicted to money because he's bought a yacht.

It's all, it's like, what happened with that?

You know, is your wife like, honey, did you go overboard at the auction today?

You're like, well.

And so they're keeping this all very, very mum as well.

They don't want anyone to know that they have this.

But there were reasons to think

that

these were fake, right?

Like it's not, Kuyao is not actually that great at this.

Such as the very famous example is that once the Hitler diaries are presented, anyone, they're like,

it clearly is supposed to say AH on the front, but it does say FH, which in

German, in sort of Gothic script can look a little similar, but it's very clearly an F.

I love that kind of thing.

And so like the question is like,

they're like, what the fuck does that mean?

Like, the true story appears to be that Kuya couldn't find the right, what do you call that?

The right stencil or whatever.

Stencil for it.

He was like, I don't think anyone will notice this.

It's only on the cover page.

Well, again, like, if you're selling it to some weird industrialist who's only going to show it to like his dumb fascio friends, like, no problem.

But yes, putting that on a fucking cover story that's going to be bought two million times and sold to Rupert Murdoch.

Wait, Rupert Murdoch?

Yeah, it's going to be sold to Rupert Murdoch.

Okay.

Oh, God.

Oh, that's good.

No, just the story, not the diaries themselves.

Yeah.

Well, okay, that's better.

I was thinking for a second that one of the most cursed men in America had one of the most cursed objects in Europe.

No, that would be fun.

But no, unfortunately, no.

But yeah, in the spirit of a lot of great hoaxes, it feels like this is done in the spirit of like, well, I'm not trying to fool that many people.

And then it gets out of hand.

And you're like, oh, God, now I do have to fool that many people.

And if I'd known I'd had to do that, I would have tried a little harder.

And the other important

thing to note is that like Kuyau's fakes had been discovered before.

No one knew who he was.

No one knew where this came from, but people knew that there were fakes in circulation.

Okay, I like that.

In 1980, two very important German historians of the Nazi period wrote this academic book about Hitler's early writings.

And they relied heavily on things that they had found in private collections, which turned out to be more than the FDA recommended amount of kuyao.

It's technically a diary loaf.

Yeah, and they and a new

the moment that was that sort of hit the popular press, again, the Stan,

Heidemann's paper, published an excerpt, including a poem that Hitler was supposed to have written

during the First World War.

And then a different academic pointed out that that poem was, in fact, plagiarized from a 1936 poem of some other Nazi poet.

So this is actually a Nazi poem that was attributed to Hitler, you know, 20 years before the beginning of the Nazi period, right?

So

there were signs that this, that, that's, that there was, there was, there were, there was a bunch of bullshit in circulation.

Yeah, that's the amateur hour.

You know, if I'm going to have the extremely famous

political figure who I'm pretending to be writing as plagiarizing a poem, I would at least make it something that they would know about.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Notice also, of course, that like in the world in which Heidemann was circulating, there were a bunch of, he was friends with people who had been there, had been there for the period.

And very early on, some of them were like, that doesn't really square with how I remember this.

Right.

But of course, everyone's also constantly lying about their role in the Nazi years.

So it's like a little hard to take that seriously.

Everyone's constantly whitewashing their own role in what had happened.

And so basically, like, I guess people don't take it all that seriously, but there are, you know, you do not under any circumstances have to hand it to SS generals, but a bunch of SS generals saying, like, hey, I don't think this is right.

You know, like, and basic things where they're like, that's not how the command structure worked.

You know, like, that's.

Right.

Which is like such a

strange situation for people.

I mean, it's kind of like

interesting in that sort of process that I, you know, I think Americans have to really think about more and more of like, how does a country recover from being overtaken by fascism and this moment of like people having,

being forced in a sense by this developing story to to some extent be like, I actually did this for a living at one time and this was not what it looked like.

Yeah, except that they are so, I mean, it's also about the epistemic collapse that goes along with, you know, something as, you know, what Hannah Arendt called the, you know, the breach in civilization, with the fact that like

you didn't want to take an SS general's word for it, right?

Because like every word out of their mouth was a lie.

But like in this case,

they were accurately describing

how things worked back then, right?

But normally when they're like, oh, this is how it worked back then, it would be followed by like, and that's why I didn't know anything and I was just following orders, right?

Like the testimony at Nuremberg, where you're like, wow, it's interesting how none of you

independently conceived of a single idea or even told other people to do stuff.

Incredible.

Which is ironically exactly what Kuyao did to Hitler.

I imagine this is just like he's in a hell of his own making, right?

He has to make up entry after entry after entry, and there has to be some plausibility to it.

So he has to research and he has to come up with stories about, you know, Goebbels and women, Eva being mad,

how Hitler reacts to various important things.

And one of the things that really comes through in the eventual diaries, if you click through them today online, is that Kuya's Hitler is essentially two things.

Everything good,

he originates.

He's completely in charge.

He's the leader.

He's completely, like, he's kink shit.

Anything bad you might associate with the historic personality of Adolf Hitler, he kind of didn't know about, right?

Oh, really?

All right.

Well, I mean, to be fair, I feel like that was kind of his entire area.

So what are we supposed to associate him with?

Nice, you know, getting a large group of people in a public space without any trampling or what?

It's bizarre, right?

He's, I mean, I'm making it, maybe I'm overstating it slightly, but, you know, like the famous pogroms of 1938.

Like, he's like, I can't believe this is happening.

Like, I have to find out who's responsible.

I mean, it honestly.

Oh, God.

And then again, I'm like, well, Sarah, think about the way boomers post about, you know, these thirst

TikToks about Trump, you know, where he's like an AI holding a baby.

Yeah.

And you're just like,

what is with this sexualizing of, you know, the boringest devil?

Yeah.

I believe this.

I looked yesterday at the entry for the starter World War II, where the implication very clearly is that the fake incursions by the Polish army, the Nazis basically made up this attack on a

radio tower in Glivice to sort of say, like, now we're fighting back.

We're shooting back, is the famous line from Hitler's radio announcement.

Oh, great.

Okay.

Like, this was completely, it was barely even, like, it was completely half-assed.

But in the Hitler diaries,

Hitler we meet there, Kuyos Hitler, basically is like, I can't believe the Poles would do this to me.

Basically, so he, he is just like the most.

He's just very passive, and he's just, he's literally just a girl i guess in this depiction yeah he's a child who wanders into the middle of a movie yeah and what is that what is he supposed to want in this narrative you know why is he here running germany yeah there's a there's a really so there's a really interesting duality of a guy who like is about who knows everything and then knows nothing right perfectly responsible perfectly in charge uh and perfectly innocent right again this is why i harped on the fact that like for kuyao and for Heinemann, Hitler is this kind of like image, right?

Like, this isn't a flesh and blood person they're interacting with anymore.

This is an image that they know from their childhood.

And I think there's something infantile in the way Ku Yao imagines this guy.

There's also kind of a and the image of like Big Daddy, who I assume there were like giant posters of and things like that, you know?

Yeah, I mean, at least in the beginning of their

early childhoods, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's definitely an element here of like men will fake 62 volumes of a Hitler diary rather than going to therapy.

They will.

They literally will.

Come on now.

You know?

So this is how this conceit kind of spirals more and more out of control.

I guess I do love that, like, that's the kind of thing that brings this down, right?

Because I feel like if it's in the arena of like, what was Hitler like?

My fantasy of Hitler is

that he was like this.

Then it's like people will debate it forever because it gets into the realm of just like people's projections onto the past and whatever baggage they're dealing with by idolizing murderers.

So history's greatest monster, yeah.

That you know, that the truth comes out in these little things and in things that can be substantiated, you know, and in negatives that can't actually be proven, such as it is impossible that Hitler was writing on this paper because

we are able to date it and it is from after his death.

Yeah.

There are a couple of failures on the part of the publishing house.

Because they still treat it as a scoop and not as a historical document, they sort of bring in historians.

They do bring in important historians, Hugh Trevor Roper, people like that, really are kind of like the specialists on the period, but they will only ever parcel out like little drips and draps.

Right.

And everyone's always like, yeah, it seems plausible enough.

Because if the truth is proprietary, then, you know, things get weird.

Exactly.

And like the problem arrives only once people really are able to take in the thing as,

once people sort of are able to take in this whole thing in its totality.

And the other thing that they do that's a real kind of problem is they sort of push it through over the objection of the actual journalists.

So essentially the publishing house takes over and it's like, well, we're already, as you say, we're already marketing this as a book, as a thing that we can

push on.

Which is also a theme in these stories, right?

That often in-house journalists and editors are like, hey, I don't think we should do this.

And they get overridden if it's like too big a story to question too hard.

Yeah.

And then this is why it collapses in this absolutely spectacular fashion.

Like the two issues of the magazine that come out with excerpts before

the report comes out saying like this, the press conference starts and says like this is absolutely not genuine.

And it's this bizarre thing where like there's this phone call that the podcast, the German podcast about this, starts every episode with, which is Heidemann calling Kuyao and being like, what the fuck happened here?

Right.

And

it's the weirdest conversation.

It's the most uncomfortable conversation.

This is a guy who for three years has been buying this guy's stuff, who's struck up a friendship with this guy.

They've bonded over how hard it is to get these diaries out of...

East Germany, which in fact, one of them has been creating in his

house this entire time.

It's a little bit like the journalist and the murderer, where you have the true crime writer who's writing to this guy throughout his trial, being like, oh man, it's so terrible.

I can't believe anyone could ever accuse you of murdering your family.

And then he's going home every night to be like, and then the evil, evil man sure did murder his whole family.

And I guess that's sort of like, of course, a classic tale of homosexuality involves someone lying the whole time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Basically, in that phone call, you can tell that Heidemann is desperately, he's still completely hooked.

Doesn't mean that he didn't possibly steal the money, but like,

he's like, I don't, I don't even care about the truth anymore.

Just give me another fix of Hitler diaries, man.

So he's like, well, Connie, what happened?

What happened?

And Kuyao sort of is like, is genuinely, like, seems genuinely to care about his friend, even though that man's predicament is fully due to his own actions.

And so he has this very very slow way of talking.

And he's just like, oh, I'm so sorry.

I can't believe what you're going through.

And basically, you can tell that Heidemann still seems to think, is my read of their conversation, that they got snowed by the East Germans.

We're all trying to find the guy that did this.

Exactly.

They're both wearing their hot dog costumes and

they're both trying to find the guys who did this.

Problem is, you know,

there is no East German connection.

This stuff didn't come from East Germany.

It came from Kuyao's own hand.

It's an interesting culprit, I mean, given everything else you've said so far.

One group that you would suspect of being maniacal enough to fake 62 volumes of Hitler diaries just to make the West German press look bad, you might think of the Stasi in East Germany, right?

Right.

You might think, surely something organized is behind this instead of just one incredibly and confusingly motivated guy and one other guy who got in the hole after buying a big Nazi yacht.

And capitalism.

That would be weird.

Yes, exactly.

There is a kind of system confusion here where they kind of are unable to grapple with the weirdness that capitalism

is able to unleash in everyday people.

And Heidemann is sort of like, oh, wow,

it must be aspiring.

It must be these, it must be these nefarious East German generals.

And, you know, basically all of East Germany is like, don't look at us.

I don't think we were involved in this at all.

Anyway, so the whole thing blows up terribly.

The magazine is badly tarnished.

And these two men go to jail for quite some time.

Four years, I believe, which German standard is substantial for what amounts to financial crimes.

Here, too, for that matter.

Yeah, that's true.

The one time there's an overlap.

And yeah, and so that's the story of the Hitler diaries.

Wow.

Kuya doesn't maintain his innocence.

He basically was like, yeah, I did this.

And then once he left prison, started marketing his own fakes.

So like, he'll be like, this is a genuine Kuyao.

This is an authentic fake.

This is an authentic fake, which then leads to the absurd situation that people are faking Kuyaos.

So he has to fight, he has to fight these art forgers that are like faking in his style.

He's like, hey!

I'm faking here.

It is really interesting that there's like,

and this is, I think, probably truer of Americans than in other countries, but it seems pretty true of humans in a general way.

Like, such an allure of the con artist, where we want to be close to con artists, and we will buy a fake fake in that way.

And, like, and then you end up with like

fake con artists, you know, like apparently the guy whose story was the basis of Catch Me If You Can.

That's right.

Frank Apnigale.

You know, arguably, I think there's like quite a lot of evidence, quite a lot of evidence suggesting that he didn't pull off, you know, most of the more ambitious scams that he wrote about later, and very little evidence supporting the idea that he did.

Yeah, yeah.

Again, like everything I know is very like U.S.-centric, but here I think it's like we recognize on some level that the American character is the con artist, you know, and that like, how do you end up in charge of a country that doesn't belong to you?

It's like, well, you make up a great story about it, Sonny Boy, and then you get people to buy into it.

And then if you want somebody's stuff, you say, hey, stop attacking me.

And then you kill them.

Yeah, I think, and I think there's a version of this here, too, where in some way

the diaries speak to the kind of desire to be able to deal with the Nazi past in a way that feels objective and non-neurotic.

Right.

But what comes out in the story is that everyone is out of their fucking mind.

What happens to Heidemann after prison?

Well, so he is just kind of embittered,

thinks he was railroaded.

Don't even ask him about that yacht.

He participates in various sort of retrospectives on it.

He briefly appears in a movie that was made of this story called Stonk.

And basically, I think it's a consultant for there's another British show where Jonathan Price plays, I believe, Cuyo.

And so I think he's a consultant on that, but maintains basically that he was railroaded

and that he really didn't do anything wrong and that

he

ended up sort of holding the bag for people at the top of his magazine who were just embarrassed and that egg on their face and needed to find a bad guy.

And he dies in 2024.

He died last December.

And I mean, did people have a sense of like outrage about these being fake?

Was it more of an alleged comedy story when the truth came out?

Like, how did the public feel about this?

Did they feel like they had been

conned in a way that really hurt?

So I think there's just so much whiplash about the,

whoa, there's Hitler diaries.

We've never heard about this.

Whoa, now they're fake, right?

Right.

I mean, if you had like an especially busy couple weeks, you would never have noticed.

Exactly.

You're like, what did I miss?

I was in the jungle looking for mangoa.

I'm a medical student.

What's this I hear?

Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, one thing we know is that, like, basically a lot of other media people were furious with the magazine for doing this and saying, like, this is really a kind of journalism and a kind of research into the Nazi period that really...

It's journalism as memorabilia hunting, I guess, really.

Yeah, which

then, you know, and then, of course, there's, you know,

the pretty obvious ethical question of like, you know, if you drive up the street value of Nazi goods, then like, who ultimately benefits?

Old Nazis.

Exactly.

So

because the moment these were revealed as fakes, their Stan obviously stopped publishing them and locked away the actual diaries, which still exist in their vault.

They then, they then allowed them to be digitized at the end of the 21st century when basically everyone who had had egg on their face had basically retired or died.

And so basically, for a long time, I think people didn't entirely understand to what extent what Kuyao had written was this kind of whitewashing of Hitler and really amounted almost to Holocaust denial, right?

And so in the 21st century, people have kind of been pushing, asking, like, well, why were people so taken in by this?

And being like, well, there might have been content reasons too.

It was not just about the thrill of the hunt.

It was not just about

the scoop.

It was about this image of Hitler that clearly was Kuyao's Kuyao's own, probably.

That was definitely one that appealed to the weirdos he tended to rip off, but that also appealed to a guy who was supposed to be

a pretty neutral reporter and journalist, right?

And to his left of center, decidedly left of center magazine that he was writing for.

The reckoning with this

farce sort of happened in stages and you know inverting the inverting the famous Marx dictum rather than being tragedy repeated as farce, it was farce kind of repeated as tragedy.

And sort of people being like, really, there's something about the process of

coming to terms with the Nazi past where this diary really marks kind of a wound or a moment where we can tell that

this project has stalled or failed or...

is a lot more,

a lot stranger than

sort of 1980s West Germans sort of tended to want themselves to believe.

And it's interesting that it seems like with the content of the journals coming out, that was, if I'm understanding you correctly, kind of the first moment when the public was able to be like, oh, I guess it looks like actually

this was a lie or this was a hoax that was so valuable, not just...

for its historical significance or just because at a certain point there was so much money on the line that nobody wanted to look into it too closely, but also because it allowed people to be Hitler apologists.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, there's two things, right?

There's the

apologia,

and then there is the fact that, like, I mean,

this is a hard thing to kind of talk about, but post-war Germany has made memory culture a big part of its justification, its sort of self-justification, right?

We are not like them.

That's why you should let us back into NATO.

This is why you should let us into the EU.

This is why you shouldn't be freaked out if we vacation near you or buy the auto plant near you or whatever, right?

The problem is that that also, that memory culture also made

Nazi atrocities into an export item.

Der Stern was almost certainly thinking of this as like, wow, we are going to get rich from all these Americans, Brits, Australians, Spaniards, French people.

Right.

All these

lovely, sunburned white supremacists will come flocking to our shores.

It's hard to disentangle a genuine desire to work through the Nazi past from the fact that you get noticed as a German magazine or publication or historian, whatever it is, when you talk about that period.

Until very recently, the way to get nominated for a foreign film Oscar for a German production was obviously to talk about the Nazi years, right?

Like, it's not to say that some of these aren't good movies.

It's not to say that there aren't that some of them aren't artistically significant, but it does mean that there's this very

tricky kind of undecidability between commercialism and, I think, genuine attempt to kind of meet history, to sort of like meet historical responsibilities and not to sort of kind of close your eyes to it.

Do you find yourself thinking about these topics?

Because kind of looking around today, and do you find yourself sort of thinking about at all the trajectory of,

you know, just what Americans, especially young Americans,

I'm kind of thinking, are going to go through.

Because, you know, you work in academia.

And so there is this, which is A, weird because it's a place that the rest of the country is baselessly speculating about a lot of the time.

But B, where it's like, I would imagine the question of what it's going to be like to continue to grow up for people who can't remember the world being any different than what it is now perhaps comes up a lot.

Yeah, it does.

At the same time, your listeners may not know this about me, but I wrote a book on cancel culture anecdotes quite recently.

There, you can sort of tell that fake stories or folkloric stories about language wars, about easily triggered college sophomores, can be absolutely untrue, but travel extremely widely and be extremely effective.

So, honestly, I'm not particularly shocked by my students' ability or inability to deal with facts and history.

I think that there are some methods that are easier for them than others.

There's sometimes a readiness to believe things that they shouldn't.

But I think it's far more interesting that people who

put great a great degree of faith in legacy media, in

local news, in

news magazines with glossy covers on them can be fed a bunch of bullshit too right and and so in some way to me

the hitler diaries are kind of emblematic of that part of it the fact that like there's a lot of disinformation on the internet the internet has has led to really epistemic collapse on on several issues that having been said it is interesting that we cannot therefore

we can't draw from that the conclusion that somehow print journalism is immune from that.

Not that many people are saying that, but there are, but in some way, people who take themselves to be immune are most at risk

from being sold a load of goods.

But it's like if Hearst could have used AI, he would have.

But instead, he just had to use, honestly, the better technology of having people draw something that hadn't happened.

Exactly.

But the technology of lying.

Yeah, I feel mixed on this, right?

Because you look at social media and I look at my relationship with social media and like probably adults our age all know that we're like, you know, we've just become lab rats in all this, and we have such a hard time putting down our phones.

And then we're like, the kids, the kids won't put down their phones.

And it's like, we're the ones who won't put down our phones.

And also, restaurants make you order on your phone, which I understand probably helps in this time of even more brutal margins than usual.

But God, I love menus.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's nice to go to a restaurant without your phone, you know?

But anyway, I swear to God, I'm not auditioning for a segment on 60 Minutes.

I was going to say, you do make it do an amazing Andy Rooney.

Yeah.

But at the same time, you are correct that I think that this is the thing, right?

Like with the diaries too, there is this idea like, oh, the young are losing their connection to this history.

But then the people who have the connection with that history can be are insane.

Are insane and can be completely snowed by this stuff where it's like, well, shouldn't his initials at least be right on the cover, right?

Like, someone could have looked at the cover and been like, huh.

It's like, why did you want this to be true?

What's wrong with you?

Yeah.

Exactly.

Right.

And so, in some way, the projection onto the young often hides our own insecurities.

And I think some of that is true too, right?

This, the 80s were a time when, like,

this historic memory was receding

and, you know, where the people who had

made the decision were starting to die off.

So there is an anxiety here about, well, we have to make sure that the historical record gets transmitted.

Well, maybe not like this, right?

It also, that desire, while laudable, can also make you extremely susceptible to disinformation, to lies, to hoaxing, and to just, yeah, just whack-ass shit.

I mean, it's not like this is.

The diaries are the tip of an iceberg of forgery, right?

Like

Huyao sold people a

world,

a kind of rose-colored Nazi version that these people, these men, really went for.

And some of them were, like, were died-in-the-wool, like neo-Nazis.

Some of them, like Heidemann, were not, right?

And yet, there was something there that they desired, right?

And in some way, I think that

that is something that that story is all about, about these projections about these secret desires and

what they do with people.

Yeah.

And also, how mediums or media, I guess,

change the way we receive information, but also that none of them are intrinsically more virtuous or more fake-proof than any others, I would argue.

And I feel like we're arguing.

And again, it's like it comes down to incentives, really.

I think the number of incentives at play and the level of resistance that exists in the delivery system for facts.

Yeah.

I guess it's one thing that's nice about today is that we have all spent so much time forced to hear the inner thoughts of Trump that the street value of more of them would be like one penny.

Yeah.

Right.

If you think about like a secret Trump diary, I don't know about you, but I'm like, oh my God, no, thank you.

I've already read several Trump diaries and that wasn't even on purpose.

Yeah.

Well, we exactly.

We just look at his true social, right?

Like when he was mad at Kristen Stewart.

I mean, I really like this story because I feel like it's just messy.

It's just like people behaving in ways that, like, no matter how fake the actual artifact is, are betraying the truth the entire time and the truth about their innermost desires, it seems like.

For a story about a hoax, it is the most guileless story imaginable.

Everyone is super genuine while also lying their asses off and probably skimming money.

Yeah, and everyone is revealing so much about what they actually

think and feel and like the ugliness and the messiness of that.

And

when I think about like, why would someone, what are people trying to keep if they try and keep Hitler as somebody who didn't know about it?

Because that's kind of like saying that Ted Bundy didn't kill anyone.

And it's like, well, then he's just a guy from Tacoma who took a really long time to finish college.

And why would we even be talking about him?

You know, but I feel like, as with Trump, it's, you know, who's just the fascist who I know most intimately from my day-to-day life, that that like

maybe the appeal comes from the fact that there is, I will grant a form of charisma from being in the presence of somebody who has to keep selling themselves to you and selling you this idea of like, believe in me and love me, and I will protect you from whatever you want to be afraid of.

And that

the feeling that we get from that, that some people seem to have genuine addictions to

is something that maybe we want to say, like, it's, it's fine to want that.

It's, it's okay.

A person can offer that and it not be at anyone's expense.

And it's like, no, it is because you only get that feeling from choosing a victim to then have everybody decide to scapegoat and kill.

You know, that's how that works.

And I think that's, you know, I'm no political scientist, but I'm pretty sure that's how fascism works.

Are they any good to read?

Like, what was it like reading the Hitler diaries?

No, they are not.

Okay.

I mean, again, you see why you understand why they've been, why they were so heavily executed.

Yeah, there's just so much stuff that's just like, oh my God, this is so boring.

What a strange journey this has been.

Yeah.

Thank you for telling me this tale and

taking me by the hand through 62 volumes of Hooke's Diary.

It is, you know, say what you will.

It's an impressive number of volumes of anything to fake.

And boy, did his hand probably hurt.

I know.

And no matter how ridiculous of a situation you found yourself caught up in it's probably less embarrassing than this yep I think so so there you go I never have to wake up be like wait I did fucking what I got super high and did what

exactly a high person could simply simply cannot write 62 forged diaries and that's right

that's right um Adrian, thank you so much for coming and for telling me this story.

And where can we find you and more of your work?

And what are you, what have you been up to?

Well, you can always always find me on my podcast, Inbid with the Right, with the wonderful Maura Donegan, who's been a frequent guest on this podcast as well.

You can find my writing on Substack, where I talk about a lot of German stuff, but not just also just a lot of American things these days.

And that's adriandobb.substack.com.

And yeah, and otherwise I'm in various media when they'll have me.

Nothing big to preview right now, but yeah, in general,

that is where I am.

Fantastic.

Yeah, and just and thank you for getting together to talk about history.

I always love it, and I always love getting into these strange little corners with you.

And you did a bonus episode, too, on this show, I think, last year, on Mazes and Monsters, the fear-mongering Dungeons and Dragons novel.

And that was so fun.

And the movie with starring Tom Hanks.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, thank you for having me.

I do think it's a cool story, and it's a, it's an it really,

yeah, it's one of those, it's crazy, hard to believe, but then once you look into it, you're like it really feels like it's it's a stronger portrait of a particular time and in a particular place than if those diaries had turned out to be genuine.

Hmm,

yeah,

yeah, and that's what I love about these hoax stories.

Everyone in there is telling the truth much more genuinely than they do at any other time in their life, sometimes.

I think that's right.

I think that's right.

And that was our episode.

Thank you for being here with us.

Thank you to Adrienne Daub for being our amazing guest.

Adrienne, please come back anytime you like.

Thank you to Corinne Ruff for editing.

And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing.

We'll see you next time.