Konrad Kujau Hitler Diaries
Konrad Kujau was born in Germany in 1938 and he grew up impassioned by the Nazi cause. He spent his life struggling and always just on the edge of poverty which led him to always be looking for the next way to get ahead. He went from being a bar owner to owning a cleaning business. In the 1960s, he got his start forging luncheon papers and forging a new identity for himself which landed him in prison in 1968 when a routine check of his lodgings discovered the false identity.
In 1970 things changed when he visited family in East Germany. He found that even though it was against the law, many locals had Nazi memorabilia. Konrad Kujau realized that he could buy the memorabilia for cheap in East Germany and then take it across the border to the West where he could sell it at ten times the price. This was an illegal practice but Konrad was only caught once and had no penalty other than having the goods confiscated. Once he set up shop selling the goods, he realized that he could make even more money if he added prestige to the items by forging documents that claimed they belonged to someone significant. He learned to copy the handwriting of a number of Nazi officials and even started forging paintings that he claimed were Hitler’s.
Konrad Kujau found a big payday when he decided to forge a series of Hitler diaries. The forgeries were poorly done but in 1978 he sold his first forged diary. In 1980 he was contacted by a journalist named Gerd Heidemann who offered DM 2.5 million for the additional 61 volumes that Kujau had. Heidemann in turn sold the volumes for DM 9 million to his employers at Stern. Upon publication of the diaries it was finally discovered that they were fake and Kujau was arrested. He was sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison.