By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 July 2026

Gerd Heidemann was a prominent West German “investigative journalist” until the 1980s. Like so many who self-describe this way, he was a highly political and deeply strange character.

Heidemann certainly did journalism: he “amassed a vast collection of material on the Nazis”. This project was, however, accompanied by persistent accusations, all through his career, that he was a Nazi sympathiser. He always denied this, and (see below) might well have been telling the truth, but Heidemann did have a habit of getting rather too close to his subject, notably in buying Hermann Göring’s yacht and then having an affair with Göring’s daughter, Edda.

Heidemann is perhaps best-known as “the middleman who promoted the ‘Hitler Diaries’” in 1983, which the London Times notes were “an elaborate forgery that deceived a number of news outlets, including The Sunday Times and Stern, a leading West German magazine that was Heidemann’s employer”. Curiously, the Times omits the most famous victim of the deception, Hugh Trevor-Roper, perhaps the most prominent English-language historian of Nazi Germany at the time, who said he would stake his reputation on the Diaries’ authenticity and got what he asked for. “The ensuing scandal [over the ‘Hitler Diaries’] … destroyed Heidemann’s career”, the Times writes, and the penalty for Heidemann was not just reputational.

The fabricator of the “Hitler Diaries”, Konrad Kujau, whose parents were devoted Nazis long after 1945, told Heidemann he was acquiring the manuscript piecemeal from his brother, an East German General. (This was a lie, though Kujau did have family in the DDR.) Heidemann extracted 9.3 million Deutsche marks from Stern to acquire the Diaries from an “East German source”, telling them he could reveal no more lest he endanger the man, and Heidemann skimmed off at least 4.4 million marks for himself. Kujau received about 2.5 million marks.

In the end, Kujau was furious at Heidemann for “stealing” money that would otherwise have come to him, and Heidemann was ostensibly enraged at being duped, doubly so when Kujau started accusing Heidemann of knowing the Diaries were fake all along. The West German State—which could do without Hitler-centric scandals at the best of times—threw the book at both of them, sentencing them in 1985 to nearly five years each in prison for fraud.

Stern was not blameless in the fiasco. The magazine should have realised something was wrong when, for instance, in the lead-up to the publication of the “Hitler Diaries”, Heidemann started saying he could show that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and possibly the most powerful man other than the Führer in the Reich by the end, was still alive, despite the West Germans having conclusively demonstrated a decade earlier that Bormann died in 1945. Some thought the issue was Heidemann’s “mental health”, but another explanation for Heidemann’s behaviour suggested itself after the wall came down and the East German archives were opened.

It transpired Heidemann had been a well-paid Stasi spy under the codename GERHAD between 1953 and 1986. This could be taken to demonstrate that Heidemann was a secret Communist, and thus at least acquit him of the charge of being a secret Nazi. Heidemann, however, rejected this line of defence, insisting he had been a double agent, only pretending to be recruited by the DDR while working for Bonn and handing his pay from the Stasi over to West German counter-intelligence.

The Stasi documents, unsurprisingly, provide no evidence for Heidemann’s claim—if it was true, the Stasi would not have known about it—but the Stasi files do contain a suggestive note that Heidemann is at least telling the truth about not being a believing Communist. “The money issue for [Heidemann] always plays the leading role”, one of his Stasi handlers wrote.

Whether Heidemann was a true believer or not, the revelation does leave open the possibility that the “Hitler Diaries” hoax, which had impacts matching Soviet strategic aims, was a Soviet provocation through Moscow’s most loyal and dependent KGB clone in the Captive Nations.

Associating West Germany with Nazism was a high priority in Soviet active measures, and the scandal created an international conversation centred on West Germany’s Nazi past. Discrediting Western institutions and sowing informational chaos was a standing Soviet design. Stern never recovered its status as a leading outlet, and The Sunday Times likewise sustained lasting damage, with ramifications for Rupert Murdoch’s broader media empire. The immolation of the reputation of Trevor-Roper, a devoted anti-Communist, was certainly a welcome development for Moscow.

It has to be said, too, that the subsequent revelations about, for instance, the Baader-Meinhof Gang being launched by a Stasi provocation and sustained with Soviet funds and weapons all through its reign of terror—facts regarded as “conspiracy theories” right down to the end of the Cold War—add to the suspicion of a Soviet hand behind the “Hitler Diaries” fiasco. However, there is at present simply insufficient evidence to have any firm view of the Soviet role.