Citation Needed - The Hitler Diaries

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

The Hitler Diaries (German: Hitler-Tagebücher) were a series of sixty volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler, but forged by Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. The diaries were purchased in 1983 for 9.3 million Deutsche Marks (£2.33 million or $3.7 million) by the West German news magazine Stern, which sold serialisation rights to several news organisations. One of the publications involved was The Sunday Times, who asked their independent director, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, to authenticate the diaries; he did so, pronouncing them genuine. At the press conference to announce the publication, Trevor-Roper announced that on reflection he had changed his mind, and other historians also raised questions concerning their validity. Rigorous forensic analysis, which had not been performed previously, quickly confirmed that the diaries were fakes.

It's not though, it's one, two, three, shoot. No, it's not, it's you go on three, it's go on three. No, no one goes on three, you go after three. What are you, high, of course you, yet well yes, but you still go after three. I don't know, you don't. Oh man, did I just score or what? Oh, hey Tom, you seem excited.

Oh man, I am so happy. My Joseph Gerbill's original diary just arrived from eBay. Boom. Man, that's disgusting. Yeah, who buys things on eBay? What the fuck? Not what I was talking about. Okay, this is great though.

Hell of an artist, you wouldn't the hell of an artist. Let me see this. These are all hand turkeys. What now? Hand turkeys, look. You trace your hand, then you draw a beak on your thumb, and then your fingers are the tail feathers. Right.

Let me see this thing. Wait. Tom, this is a book of kids aren't called the Adventures of Joey Gobbles. Admittedly, Joey Gobbles is a pretty cute name. Yeah, well, you do not want to see them round enough to finger rabbits on page four. Okay.

All right. You guys tell me this book is worthless because I didn't pay worthless money. I mean, you could hang the pictures on your fridge. Oh, I'd take down my Laura Ingram Mac. No, absolutely not. Hello and welcome! Citation needed! Podcasts where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Heath and I'll be your host tonight and joining me to learn about what Hitler really thought when nobody's listening is the usual panel of Union experts first up. We have an Italian guy and a Jewish guy. Make sure we have a nice balanced perspective. Cecilini La.

My rapper name is Vanilla Mussolini. Yeah. And like all Jews, my rapper name is Produced by him. And also joining me, we have Gimli and his Squire, Tom and I. Hey, what the fuck? And, Tom, dammit, it's ridiculous. I'm at least inch and a quarter taller than Gimli. I can see almost past your knees.

He's outrageous. I gotta sit being in his squire. It's like being a caddy, but with turkey legs, he's got a golf club, huge pain in the ass. And you still have me the wrong one. You don't wanna go with the ham. Never. You don't wanna go with the ham, never do you. You don't wanna go with the ham, the leg of ham.

All right, so tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? Are we gonna be talking about today? Well, in these distressingly polarized times, I guess we're gonna be talking about the Hitler diaries. So thanks, patron Sakashite Fukusimi. And Noah, you were looking at World War II diaries and, and Franks didn't quite make it to the top of the list for you. Are you ready to tell us about the

ones that ranked higher in your mind? Well, this is because Anne Frank didn't turn out to be a middle aged fat guy trying to make a buck heath, right? Got it. Go with what sells. Mandy for tankin. So what were the Hitler diaries? They were a series of 60 journals handwritten by Adolf Hitler that were purchased by the West German news magazine Stern in the early 1980s for the princely sum of 9.3 million

Deutschmarks or $3.7 million then or $11 million in today's money. That would be a pretty good deal on a priceless historical treasure trove if they weren't all the bunch of half-assed forgeries. Yeah, that's an awkward moment when you find out they're forgeries. Somebody was like, fuck, these aren't really the inner thoughts of Adolf Hitler. Okay, I felt weird when I said it. I heard. I heard. Okay. Do we even need Hitler's private thoughts? Was there something we suspect maybe he was holding back like his na, don't say that. Zaptiz a bridge to a far ahead.

Yes, she's like a guy who just put it all on the sleeve. Yeah, exactly. All right. So let's start with the curtula truth here. The date is April 20th of 1945. Hitler is 56th birthday and also his last thunder lightning. What? No, I'm with you.

So this was 10 days before he would commit suicide. His suicide note just read, worst surprise birthday party ever. No, I'm with you. No, no, no. So this was 10 days before he would commit suicide. No, just read, worst surprise birthday party ever. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Soviet troops were on the verge of taking Berlin, the Western allies were, you know, closing in from the other direction. So Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bournemann, posed the trigger on Operation Ciroglio. That's a plan meant to safeguard key members of Hitler's entourage and some of his personal effects by flying them the fuck out of the bunker that Hitler was holed up in. Seems like a weird sell to Hitler though, right? Right.

Right. And so you guys are just leaving? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just figure probably a bit our idea for us to meet you after the war, like after. Sure, sure. Plus, I'm a super light sleeper and the shelling has been super bad for my sleep, so.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's no good. So, question, why are you guys also taking my stuff, so? Oh, yeah, yeah, we're going to wash this for you, keep it safe, wash it. You're going to wash my chair, my mittles. Ja? Ja? Alright, you guys are the best, thanks. Do you want this gun with one bullet or...

Ooooooh, no! You can hold on to that. Oh, yeah. Alright, so after a conversation very much like that, 10 planes took off from Gastau Airfield that day. The last piloted by the fantastically named Friedrich Gundolfinger. On board the plane, where 10 heavy war chests started, a personal supervision of Hitler's ballet, Sergeant Wilhelm Art. Sorry, Wikipedia includes everybody's goddamn name.

Anyway, this particular plane never made it to the Alpine command center it was headed for and instead crashed in the Heidenholds forest near the Czech border. And before the SS could make it to the crash site, locals had already stripped the plane of some of its more useful parts. No sign of the chest was seen. All right. So when he learned about the crash, Hitler was pissed. He was aggrieved at the loss of a superchummy valet, but of the 10 heavy chess, he said, quote, I untrusted him, the valet with extremely valuable documents, which would show posterity, the truth of my actions, end quote. Now, this single quote is all that history knows about what was in

those boxes. So of course, in the following decades, the crash became a ready source for myth and legend and stories of the cash of Hitler's private papers having survived that crash become commonplace. Okay, the truth of his actions. The fuck does that mean like math? This final solution QED circled the bottom of his mind. In conclusion, I really did all of this because everyone was mean to me about not voting for Hillary Clinton. Make sure nobody ever repeats that mistake. I am Adolf Hitler. Alright, so among the people who had no doubt heard these tall tales of the law-settler papers was one Conrad Kooja, the forger at the center of the story and a man sentenced to forever look like walla shaw and fucked rob riner.

And like everyone involved in this story, he's a terrible, terrible piece of shit. He was born in 1938 and what would become East Germany after the war, uh, he grew up idolizing Hitler, which is something you could forgive in a kid who grew up under Nazi propaganda, uh, or at least the Vatican sure the fuck Hope she can but this guy never stopped Idolizing Hitler so feel free to hate the fuck out of him all you want now Kujo grew up in postwar East Germany, but in 1957 He fled to West Germany after a warrant was issued for his arrest and connection with the petty theft

I worked a few menial jobs mismanaged a nightclub for a bit, but in 1963, he turned to the vocation of forgery. And like everything else he'd done in his life to that point, he sucked at it. He forged 27 Deutschmarchs worth of lunch vouchers, got caught and spent five days in prison for it. That was in 1963. Five years later, he was caught using a forged document in a routine government checkpoint and was sent to prison for a lengthier term.

Yeah, but when you see this guy, you can definitely tell he forged more than $27 with the bullfuck and lunch voucher. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like a like a taster for the lollipop guild. Like he was in charge. Speaking of sucking at it, how do you think this was going to work? He's like, well, such a bad forger. I couldn't get a lunch out of the fucking. You know, I should probably up the ante to checkpoint papers and post war Germany.

Yeah. Right. No, you would think this story would be so much shorter than it is. Well, so why so why not dinner vouchers? Just go all out. Right. That's weird. All right.

So in 1970, Kujau would make a discovery that would change his fortunes. Despite laws to the contrary, a lot of people that he knew in East Germany collected Nazi memorabilia. And because people are shit, there was quite a bit of demand for that stuff in both West Germany and the rest of the world. So Kuchau set himself up in the elicit artifacts trade. All right, so he could get Nazi memorabilia relatively cheap on one side of the Berlin wall and sell it at a handsome profit on the other side. All he had to do was break the laws that forbade possession of Nazi memorabilia as well as the ones that forbade the export of items of cultural heritage.

There were other laws he broke no doubt. As some of the memorabilia he was selling included functional firearms. Now of course it was inevitable that his two illegal vocations would come together and eventually he realized that he could inflate the shit out of the value of his memorabilia by adding a little touch of forgery. So for example, he had a genuine First World War helmet, which wouldn't normally have gotten him a few marks, but he added a forage note of authenticity claiming that the helmet had been worn by Hitler at Ibrahim in 1914. And suddenly it was worth a small fucking fortune. Right, so his success with shit like this eventually led him to start producing handwritten

notes that he purported to be from Rudolph Pess, Heinrich Himmler, Herman Goring, Joseph Curbels. Apparently he did like an okay job on the handwriting, but according to experts that have examined his work, he fucked up pretty much everything else you could fuck up. He used modern paper, modern ink, he misspelled shit. The Wikipedia article, this is great. It quotes a copy of the Munich agreement that he'd forged in English. A language apparently he didn't speak. And it's filled with all these weird Eli-esque misspellings like a silent E at the end of again.

Again, have you seen this guy? Maybe fat fingered that. You know, Kujo was also like Hitler, an amateur artist. So in addition to all the documents, he started painting and claiming that those paintings were Hitler originals. And the Wiki article, by the way, suggested he wasn't super discreet about the bullshit on this. Like if he was trying to sell somebody some fake landscape, he claimed was from Hitler

and the dude was like, oh, no, not this, but boy, I'll tell you, if you can find me at cartoon, that Hitler group. And KUJA would show up like two days later Just try to anything go hey, how about this Hitler cartoon Check this out. I got a Charlie Brown shirt Highly coyote Uber genius buyers just like okay, but do you have anyone really evil? Like a Thomas Concade? Or an original Bill Burton maybe?

Pat. Pat. Pat. Now, the article is a bunch of different fakes that he did, but one worth noting was the behemoth task of producing a handwritten version of both volumes of mine comp, which he passed off as hitlers original version

even though the book was originally written on a typewriter you also produce a series of war poems that he said were hitlers original work and even kooja later admitted that a fourteen-year-old collector would recognize those as forgeries i see uh... loose baffling over all these handwritten Hitler man loose pants. But let's say I sweetens a deal with these hand drawn lottery tickets. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm guessing there's not a whole lot of authentic Hitler poetry like roses are red,

violets are blue, you're in trouble. If you're a Jew, just like Jesus Christ. All right, now quick before Tom does more Hitler for the other guy we need to meet here is one girl, the Heideman, who somehow manages to be both less likable and more corrupt than Kujo, even though he's technically Kujo's victim in this whole thing. So he too grew up in Germany during the Second World War. His parents were apolitical during Hitler's rise to power. See how that doesn't make them sound better people who refused to vote for Hillary? It's accelerationism.

No, if you accelerate the process, yeah, the Holocaust happens, but then a Nazi is and goes away forever. Okay, I know what either of you are talking about because I've never seen a statue of Hitler. So, but Gurd was an enthusiastic member of the Hitler youth and remained a big Hitler fan for the rest of his life. Jesus fucking Christ, who are these people? He's the most evil dictator in like all of it.

He's not an indie band. Well, not just in Hitler's early work, but I really like all of it. He's not an indie band. Right? Well, not much in Hitler's early work, but I really like his solo stuff. You know what I'm like? The fuck is wrong with these people? Yeah, who the fuck is a political about Hitler? Yes.

This isn't like farm subsidies. Like, hey, how do you feel about Hitler? That has an answer. Well, it did pre-2020. Yeah. So when he grows up, little Gerdy gets a job as a photographer and reporter for Stern. And at one point, the newspaper sends him out

to photograph this yacht that used to belong to Goring. Now, this yacht is fucking fallen apart. It's crazy expensive to maintain, but it's for sale and item and wanted it. So he took out an extra mortgage on his home to buy the motherfucker. And while he's researching the history of the yacht, he meets goreng's daughter and has an affair with her. Between his relationship with her and his ownership of the yacht, he becomes something of a who's who in ex-Nazi circles and starts hosting parties on his boat where surviving

SS generals were guests of honor. He even took the boat to South America and met real wanted war criminals. Also, before you get to wrapped up in the mystery of this international boat romance, go ahead and Google Goring's daughter. He might as well have been fucking the life of the earth first. All right. So as much as he loved the yacht and the way it made him the life of the Nazi party, uh, he couldn't afford it. Trying to maintain it and made a pop around him. He borrowed heavily from the parent company of Stern under the promise of a book that he

was going to write about all the conversations he was having with these old SS officers. Uh, but when that book turned out to be boring and unverifiable, he was just left with a ton of debt. So he set out to find a buyer for his yacht. This put him in touch with a bunch of notch remembrabilia people, and it was through this unsuccessful effort that he became aware of Kujas latest work of forgery, the first of his Hitler diaries. All right.

Well, that is quite a cliffhanger. Will the Nazi party planner be able to keep up the payments on the SS? SS? How do you know that? After some obnoxious stuff. Psst! Stay! You won, Jyvin' Oven? Yes, that's me. What's the password?

Minderstung binhafen. You got the stuff? I sure do. Hitler's favourite hat. Amazing. But it's not just that. This was Hitler's Game Boy. Wait, wait. Didn't the Game Boy come out like in 1990?

Hitler got an early copy. Right. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, yeah, he was Hitler. So he was Hitler, exactly. He was Hitler. Okay, but come on, where's the good stuff? Like, it's really good stuff. Ah, fine collector, I see.

Well, I wasn't gonna show you this, but since you asked, this is, it's Hitler's Donzberry cartoon. It of Hitler drew a Donzberry cartoon. Donzberry cartoon, exactly, yes, he certainly did. She says a reference to Nixon in it. He's very ahead of his time, Hitler of us. Okay, let me ask you a question, Mr. Shavin Hoeven. Just how dumb do you think I am? Dumb enough to sink Hitler was cool, so...

You're damn right. He called of it. Nice. See, Israelis are going to come to my house and murder me in the late 70s. What? I asked if you wanted to bag at seven cents. And we're back. When we left off, Gurd Heideman was trying to sell a yacht to some Nazi sympathizers,

also known as selling a yacht. What happens next? Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! All right, so there are conflicting accounts about when Kujau wrote his first Hitler diary. Fritz Steifel, the guy who bought Kucho's mind comp transcript and his war poems,

says Kucho loaned him the first diary in 1975, but that fucker doesn't know what he's talking about. An associate of Steifel said it was in 76, Kucho himself said he began working on him in 1978. But regardless of when it happened, Kucho eventually set out to create his masterwork. He spent a month practicing the Gothic script that Hitler wrote in and got a book that was supposed to detail all of Hitler's movements day to day through his rise to power and through the war. And so he would just, you know, copy shit out of that book in the first person and occasionally add little personal touches like saw a cute poodle today or something like that. Okay. Okay. Hitler's life wasn't so fucking whimsical. What is happening? You're diary, saw puppy.

Yeah, I didn't want to buy the owners, but you know, they made eye contact so I got to bat him in school. Cool, he fat, he bare. Tested Cyclone B and I rode a high coup. So, I still saturday and eventually, the fuck's happening. Side note, I googled Hitler's handwriting,

and I no longer feel bad for making fun of Goth kids in high school. It is obvious to me now that I just prevented all of them from becoming Hitler. So, you're welcome. All right, so Koojao makes his first diary, doesn't go out looking for a buyer for it. Instead, he loans it to Steifl, a well-known dealer and Nazi memorabilia, and lets news

of the diary's existence filter through the community of collectors. And that's exactly what happened. Eventually, Heidman hears about it to a mutual friend, and the Nazi asshole in him is super excited, but the reporter in him is over the fucking moon. He knows a scoop when he hears one, so he gets with Steve one eventually to Kujo. Alright, so Kujo, of course, has a whole story set up in terms of how he got these. So he spins this yarn about a crooked museum curator at a Nazi general in hiding, but he assures hide him into the diaries authentic. And what's more, there are 26 other volumes as well as an unpublished third volume of mine. Conf, numerous letters and unpublished papers, several paintings and an opera written

by young Adolf, violin to the back of the blacksmith. The moment he heard it was about a blacksmith, he should have suspected that it was forged. Oh, I missed you Cecil,. The wrong cast member became a father. Because of my puns or no, because of my mental illness. Yeah. I was. So this is the part of the story where the journalism culture of the 80s starts working in Kooja's favorite pretty heavily. See what height and wood need in order to authenticate these diaries would be a consensus of experts in several different fields, but the last thing Heidman wanted to do was let a bunch of experts in a bunch of different fields know about their existence.

News stop being news once enough people knew about it. And Heidman was so secretive about this acquisition that even most of the management at his newspaper would only learn about this shit when they were about to go to print with it. In fact, Hydeman eventually agreed to, I shit you not, for-go verification of the diaries until they had all been purchased so that the experts in the know couldn't threaten Koo Chow's imaginary source in East Germany or Heidman's scoop. Okay, pro tip, don't buy Hitler stuff like you're buying Molly at a rave. I just feel like that's bad. I feel weird. I gave notes about that and I said pro tip.

It's so weird. Still. So to be clear, the deal was you can check if these things are real, but only after I sell them On the premise that they are in fact real I thought myself rooting for the Nazi art forger. What is he that 2020 is weird. There's so nobody to room for in this fucking story All right, so ultimately hide them and somehow manages to sell this deal to his company. He delivers them with perspectives that outlines the cost of acquisition and includes a failed threat

to take this to a ready buyer in the US if Stern isn't willing to pony up the dough. After a two hour meeting that includes no experts, no historians, nobody who knows what the fuck they're talking about, the company approved the purchase and gave Hydeman minute 200,000 mark deposit to secure his deal with Kooja. Guys, these things are flying off these shelves.

Act now. You can't, you're not. To buy these dire. You are noticed this Hitler painting can turn a penny into a corkscrew. So this is... So... How about that?

All right, and so sorry, I have to add this even though it doesn't fucking matter and one of my favorite turns in this entire goddamn story when the two men settle on it on a mount and they do the whole agreement and everything, Koojao gives Hydeam an original painting by Hitler as a thank you gift. Hydeam and gives Koojao a Nazi uniform

that once belonged to Goring. Both items were fakes. Goring's name tag just had a silent e at the end. There's like a weird Nazi gift to the Maggi element of a story. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So it's at this point in the story, by the way, that the shitty war poems that Kujo sold

to Steve will show back up. A couple of experts have determined that these are definitely fucking fake. And even those turns parent company heard about this fact kujo's assurance that those Hitler poems were from a different source was enough to lay their peers. All right, so at this point kujo had written a total of three diaries. He sold those to Heidman in February of 1981, and then he got serious about his forging. His goal was to produce three a month until he had the promise 27 written.

But once he saw how little work they were doing, authenticating these fuckers, he spent the process up a bit. According to his later testimony, he once wrote three diaries in three days. And the quickest he ever knocked one out was in three hours. Hey, man. Okay, it says, dear diary, Laura Mipsum. I guess a classic. They're always being cryptic. I know. That's cool. All right. I would like a bunch more of these. All right. So if you'll recall, hide him and enter this story because he was saddled with a money pit. Yacht, he was

trying to get rid of, but at this point, you know, he starts buying nice cars, written extra apartments, dining at the finest establishments, because Kujo is only getting about half the money that Stern is paying for these diaries. Heidman is literally just pocketing half the fucking money, and he's apparently not trying all that hard to hide it. As a result of his profligate lifestyle, the prices of the diary just keep going up, even though Ku Joe's take isn't getting any bigger.

Okay, but there is a kind of flick here for, for Heidman because one half of him is a reporter that wants to keep this scoop under wraps at all costs, right? But another half of him is a Nazi sympathizing fuck who collects boats that Herman Gurring used to own and fucks that dude's daughter who wants to show off to all his Nazi buddies that he literally has the diaries of the eight off Hitler in his possession. So at one point he can't help himself. He breaks his own rules.

He calls this ex-Nazi general that he's buddies with. And he's like, hey man, I gotta read you this passage from the Hitler diaries because it pertains to your old unit. The general doesn't hesitate to tell Heidman that every fucking detail is wrong. His fucking unit wasn't even in that place that day. And rather than take this as a red flag that it was all bullshit, Heidman rationalizes this way and says it's probably because Hitler was writing about what he intended to do that day, not what he actually did. What? Right, yeah. So according to Richard Harris, the journalist what he actually did. What? Right, yeah.

So according to Richard Harris, the journalist who literally wrote the book on this subject, that proves Heidman had quote, long sea stopper rating on a rational wavelength about the diaries end quote, but like, this motherfucker was also getting filthy rich off the deal too. So there are other possible explanations. I will moody as Anne Standard and Pores

gave this deal an A plus. It's gonna be fun. That's gonna be right. Right. Right. Right. All right. So eventually, of course, they do get around to trying to authenticate this stuff, but even then they fuck it all up. They don't give anybody even one full diary. They give experts a page. So all they know is that this one page was supposed to have been written by Hitler. They don't give them all the context that they would need to come to a rational conclusion. What's more, they offer their experts a sample of Hitler's actual handwriting to compare the diary to, but the sample comes from Hydemann's personal collection and is also one of Kooja's forgeries. So like, they just keep going back and they're like, yeah, these were definitely written

by the same guy and the editors and Sterner like, chitching motherfucker. I knew this was a good investment. You hear how moody's and standard and pores rated it. Okay, Noah. I'm not an expert in authenticating documents, but nobody else in this story is either. So no, well, okay, we finally get one eventually. The first actual historian that sees the whole trove of stuff is a guy named Hugh Trevor Roper. And at first he was dubious, but then they shown this huge stack of fucking papers. And his first thought is like, okay,

there's no fucking way, somebody forced all of this. Right, in the end, the promised 27 diaries somehow expanded to 60 volumes, plus there were personal letters and shit. The idea that any person could have forged that much stuff was harder for him to believe than the official story. Plus, he had been told that the paper was tested and shown to be of the proper age, which was not true.

So, based on that and a cursory examination, he tentatively told the paper that he believed the documents were authentic. Yeah, see, this was printed on an inkjet and the Nazis were working on jet technology. So, that's how it works. Right? All right, so this is where the bidding war starts. Stern has planned to publish all this shit in German, of course, but they're willing to contract out international rights and basically every news corporation in the world wants

in on these rights. And apparently because he felt bad for not making it into a story with this many terrible human beings yet, the guy who secured the rights pretty much across the board was Rupert fucking Murdoch. Fantastic. Fox News, Fiora and Balanced Journalism. Fantastic. During his interview Roger Ailes had Tucker Carlson stripped down and put on Hitler's leader posted. It's been around for him. All right.

So on April 22nd of 1983, Stern issues of press release announcing the existence of the diaries. They've got all of them now and they announced their forthcoming publication and pretty much immediately every expert in the world stands up and says, yeah, I doubt that very much. Fucking Trevor Roper, the guy whose verification, all this shit was resting on sees some of the arguments against the diaries. And he's like, yeah, no, you guys are probably right. Whoops.

So he calls the editor of several newspapers to tell them that he got it wrong, but somehow that message never makes it to stern or the fucking Sunday times or anybody. It does make it to Rupert Murdoch though, and he said to have replied, fuck that guy. And that by the way is basically a direct fucking quote. He called them Doc Ray because apparently Trevor Roper was the baron of Doc Ray, whatever the fuck that means. But according to two sources on the Wikipedia article, Murdoch's exact words were quote, fuck Doc Ray publish and quits. Okay, I got it. exact words were quote, fuck Doc Ray Publish and quotes.

Okay, I got it. Publish no problem, Rupert. A quick thing, just for optics, maybe stop using playful, friendly nicknames for barons who work with Nazis. I don't know. Yeah. Okay, this essay has officially convinced me that Spotlight could have been a comedy.

You just wanted this shouldn could have been a comedy. You just wanted this should have been a comedy. No, the bottom line of this paragraph seems to suggest that Rupert Murdock is less interested in the truth than making a buck. Why, heavens, that's slandest, sir. That's slandest. Should I bring out your fainting couch, Tom? Are you going to need a place man here? I can't believe it.

All right, so facing this huge backlash and having yet to hear about Trevor Roper's change of heart, Stern calls the motherfucker up and they're like, hey, could you write us a piece on how legit you think all of our diaries already says sure can they're like, oh fuck. Because and consider this all right, not only did they pay the equivalent of $11 million for these fucking things, but they could also be facing charges of disseminating Nazi propaganda if the courts were in a shitty enough mood about this thing. The diaries were forged by a Nazi sympathizer who went way out of his way to paint Hitler

in the best possible light, right? The fucking diaries suggested that he wasn't aware of the Holocaust. What? Yeah, diary. Remind me to follow up with gobers about my free summer camp idea for Jews. Jesus Christ. What happened with that? The BNBs, I think they're going right people saying weird things they can they report it back. We're in back to me. All right. So eventually, of course, they released the full diaries to experts and while the experts didn't return a verdict immediately, that's because they had to stop laughing first. These diaries were not good for trees.

They were so bad. In fact, it's fucking ridiculous. The first error appears before you open them because and I am not making this shit up. Who Joe got Hitler's initials wrong? Okay. Okay. He bought these gold calligraphy letters. And he thought that the F was an A because it kind of looked like that. So all the diaries had F H stamped across. You might have thought Hitler's first name was Fiora though. That's a possibility.

That would have been less dumb than the real answer. Also, by the way, the fucking paper was modern. The bindings had polyester in them, which wasn't used in book bindings until the 50s. The ink was less than two years old.

And Koojao had made the books look old by dumping Tiam and smacking them against his desk. That was, no, that was the extent of his artificial aging process. All right, so eventually Koojao is arrested for this, and it's only when he sees the news reports and finds out how much of the fucking money hide him and had been pocketing the whole time that he really loses his shit.

He tells the cops hide him and knew they were fakes all along. So hide him and also gets arrested. And by the way, I don't have time to go into the details about this, but even the fucking trial was a farce in this story. Hide him in and coup chagas screams in each other constantly. Fucking one magistrate was removed for falling asleep during the trial to make the exhibits was apparently a frame pair of idiom means under pants nice which item and kept like hanging on his wallet home. I did like I said this could be a really

long essay. Okay, not an appallot over the dick hole. That's crazy. Both men ultimately served five years in prison and were ordered to pay back significantly less than all of the money they stole, apparently. Kujo got out of prison in 1987 and opened a store selling genuine forgeries, like you would like forge famous paintings, but he would sign his name to him and tell us for a trace. Don't worry, eventually he died a throat cancer so that I wouldn't have to give him a happy ending. Hydemen got out of prison and spent the rest of his life bitching to everyone he could

hold still about how unfairly he had been treated in the whole deal. Then he died a piece of shit Nazi, remembered for being stupid and broke. One day we'll say the same thing about Hannity. Here's how. And if you have to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? A good Heidman was a piece of shit Nazi remember for being stupid and broke. All right. And are you ready for the quiz? That I am. All right. Noah, what was Heidman's defense at his trial? Hey, he swore that he did not see those fortress be he did his best to be a

swastikler on the price he says a baby recently He was uncomfortable and scared for a refund. Oh, Jesus Christ. He was sure this story was gonna be a Hitler. What? Jesus. It's a very homicompanion. I'm gonna go with secret answer E Shit tits

I'll tell you you wake up every two hours for the last month. You'll love that one That's a spicy meat the ball All right Noah selling fake Nazi shit to real Nazi sympathizers and draining their bank accounts and pursuit of worthless forged evil is wrong because, A, sometimes they're check spouts. Okay. I'm gonna go with B, because you two in this story are a fucking Nazi sympathizer

who's begging you to write up with the money. No good people. No, there are none. I know. What's the best thing a Nazi can collect? A, long knives, B, Valkart, C, concentration stamps,

D, anything on vinyl solutions, or E, she's just punches to the face. Oh, it's very unsmissly. E-Think we're making that one easy. Obviously, it's nice. It was. It was. Alright, well done. No, you're the winner. Alright, awesome. Well, I'll tell you what, I've been dying for a Tom assay for like minutes now. So we'll make Tom-

Yeah. Alright, well for Tom. No, Cecil now so we'll make Tom. Alright well for Tom. Noah, Cecil and Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then you can hear Tom and Cecil on cognitive dissonance and you can hear Eli knowing myself. I'm God off the movies, The Skating Atheist, The Skeptocrat and D&D Monest.

And if you'd like to stop being the tragic part of the tragedy of the commons, you can make a purpose of the nation. Patreon.com slash citation pod. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, or take a look at the show notes, you should check out citation pod.com. Okay, so I've got the Hitler's PlayStation, Napoleon's Nintendo Switch, and the Baba Baba painted by Moses from the Bible. Like, they're going to come to my house and they're going to shoot me in the face and they're

not even going to say they didn't do it. They're just going to deny it. I'm gonna deny it.