Walter Presents library<\/a> on All 4.<\/p>\nFaking Hitler chronicles how a con man duped Stern, a prominent German magazine, into purchasing and publishing what were believed to be the personal diaries of the Nazi dictator. However, in an embarrassing public scandal, these were exposed as fakes produced by counterfeiter Konrad Kujau.<\/p>\n
Kujau was born in Germany in 1938 and raised under the Nazi regime, becoming a genuine believer in its fascist ideology. In the years after World War II, he turned to a life of petty crime, fleeing from East Germany to West when authorities issued an arrest warrant for his theft of a microphone from a youth club.<\/p>\n
From then, he developed an interest in counterfeiting, creating a new identity for himself which was ultimately detected, landing him in prison as a result. By the 1970s, Kujau was a free man once more and visiting relatives in East Germany when he discovered many of them still held Nazi memorabilia, despite this being strictly prohibited by the communist government.<\/p>
There was a more flexible policy in West Germany, where the very same items were fetching high prices among collectors. Spying a money-making opportunity, he began smuggling the memorabilia from the East to West and selling them for a profit, which was a business that put him in contact with fellow Nazi enthusiasts.<\/p>\n
Kujau inflated the value of his stock by forging documents claiming they belonged to prominent members of the Nazi regime. After years of successfully scamming collectors, he decided to escalate the con, setting about producing the long-rumoured secret diaries of Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n
Though it remains uncertain if such documents ever existed, some have speculated that they could have been aboard a downed plane that fled Berlin during Operation Seraglio. The purpose of the plan was to evacuate Hitler\u2019s most trusted allies from the frontlines as Russian forces closed in on his bunker.<\/p>\n
Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt, who served as Hitler\u2019s personal valet, was one of these individuals, whose aircraft reportedly contained documents that were \u201cextremely valuable\u201d to his boss. They were never recovered from the debris of the crash and it remains unknown to this day what they might have been.<\/p>\n
Imagining, as many others did, that they were personal diaries, Kujau set about recreating what they might have contained, learning Hitler\u2019s handwriting and attempting to line up entries with historical records. The first diary was written on a notebook that he simply attached an SS ribbon too, while he also artificially aged the pages using tea.<\/p>\n