Forger says he was offered Hitler’s ashes

Press, 31 August 1984, Page 6

Forger says he was offered Hitler’s ashes

Konrad Kujau, a Nazi regalia dealer who has admitted forging 62 volumes of “Hitler diaries,” testified yesterday that a journalist, Gerd Heidemann, had asked him to fake additional volumes and offered to sell him Hitler’s ashes.

Heidemann, a former Stern magazine reporter asked Kujau to pen more episodes of the diaries to cover the “final phase” of World War 11, Kujau told a Hamburg court. Kujau, aged 46, said that Heidemann gave him some 35 pages of documents about the last year of the war but Kujau said they did not contain enough information to produce credible volumes.

Kujau also said Heidemann, aged 52, originally asked him to write 27 volumes but changed his mind in June 1982, saying, “If there are 50 (volumes), then no one will believe they were written after the war.”

The two men are on trial

on charges of fraud. “Stern” paid 9.34 million marks (57.09 million) for the fake diaries. The money has not been recovered.

Kujau is charged with forging the diaries and receiving 1.57 million marks (51.09 million). Heidemann is charged with convincing his publisher to purchase the bogus volumes while knowing they were fakes and pocketing at least 1.7 million marks (51.27 million). They face a maximum of 10 years in prison if convicted. The trial is expected to last months. Heidemann, who also collects Nazi artefacts, has continually denied the charges against him and says he was duped by Kujau.

Kujau continues to maintain that Heidemann knew the diaries were fakes. On Tuesday, Kujau’s first day of testimony and the second day of the trial, Kujau testified that Heidemann had even helped draft the contents of the diaries.

The former reporter also asked Kujau to forge a “secret paper,” complete with six “official” seals of the Nazi secret police, assembling details from the life of Jesus, Kujau testified yesterday. He said he did not write it.

Kujau said Heidemann had offered to sell him a container filled with the ashes of Adolf Hitler’s body, which Heidemann said had been cremated in Moscow in 1951. Heidemann said Soviet authorities offered to sell the ashes to Bonn officials, who refused, but that he somehow managed to obtain the ashes in West Germany. Hitler reportedly shot himself in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, and his bride Eva Braun took a fatal dose of poison. According to reliable historians, aides cremated the bodies that day. However, the Nazi leader’s bones were never found, leading to rumours after the war that Hitler had survived.