On 25 April 1983, the West German magazine Stern held a press conference to announce that it had acquired sixty-two volumes of handwritten diaries kept by Adolf Hitler between 1932 and 1945, recovered from a plane crash in 1945 and smuggled out of East Germany. It had paid around nine million marks. Serialization began immediately, with international rights sold to the Sunday Times and others.
They had been written by Konrad Kujau, a Stuttgart dealer in militaria with a sideline in forgery, using school exercise books, modern paper, modern ink, and gothic-script initials on the covers that read FH rather than AH because he had bought the wrong letters.
Two weeks later the Bundesarchiv reported that the paper contained a whitener not manufactured before 1954, that the bindings contained polyester introduced after the war, and that the ink was recent. The forgery was not subtle, and it did not need to be.
What failed was the verification process, and it failed for reasons that are entirely institutional.
Stern restricted forensic testing in order to protect exclusivity. Full analysis would have required sharing the documents with archives and specialists, which risked leaks and rival claims. The commercial value of the scoop depended on secrecy, and secrecy was incompatible with authentication. Scarcity — the pressure of a unique, time-limited opportunity — acted here on an organization rather than on an individual, and produced the same compressed deliberation it produces in a person.
The handwriting authentication was circular in a way that should be studied by anyone who commissions expert comparison. Experts were given the diaries and asked to compare them with known Hitler documents. Several of the reference documents used were themselves Kujau forgeries, previously sold and accepted. The comparison therefore established that the diaries were written by the same hand as the reference set, which was true and useless.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Oxford historian and Sunday Times director, authenticated them on the basis of the volume of material and its physical presentation, then reversed himself the day before publication. His reversal was too late in the process to stop it, which is escalation of commitment at organizational scale: by then a great many executives had approved payments and announcements, and each one's reputation was invested in the diaries being genuine.
Kujau and Gerd Heidemann, the Stern journalist who had acquired them and who had diverted a large part of the payment to himself, were both convicted and served prison terms.
The generalizable rule is about the direction of causation between value and scrutiny. The greater the prize, the greater the incentive to shorten the check — which means that the documents most worth authenticating are the ones institutions are least willing to authenticate properly.