The Hitler Diaries with Adrian Daub

Summary

You're Wrong About Episode: The Hitler Diaries with Adrian Daub Release Date: June 11, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of You're Wrong About, host Sarah Marshall delves into one of the most infamous publishing hoaxes in history: the Hitler Diaries. Joined by Adrian Dob and Miranda Zickler, the episode explores the intricate details of how the fake diaries were created, the motivations behind the deception, and the profound impact it had on the public and the legacy of journalism.

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Setting the Stage: The Hoax Unveiled

The conversation begins with Sarah Marshall introducing the topic of the Hitler Diaries hoax, highlighting its capacity to captivate a credulous public momentarily. She poses critical questions about the fabrication process, the motivations of the hoaxer, and the public's susceptibility to such deception.

Sarah Marshall [00:16]:
"This is an episode about not just any publishing hoax, but about the fake Hitler Diaries, which for a moment captivated a vast and credulous public."

Adrian Dob recalls encountering the hoax in pre-internet times, noting his initial relief when the diaries were debunked, aligning with his fascination with adventure genres like Indiana Jones.

Adrian Dob [03:35]:
"They're full. They're like, you know, there's like the Uncle John's Bathroom reader that has like 800 volumes."

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Origins of the Hoax: Conrad Kuyao’s Scheme

Miranda Zickler introduces Conrad Kuyao, the mastermind behind the Hitler Diaries hoax. Born in 1938, Kuyao's background is shrouded in mystery, with many aspects of his life possibly fabricated. His trajectory from dealing in Nazi memorabilia to orchestrating an elaborate diary scam is meticulously unpacked.

Miranda Zickler [17:08]:
"These are both revealing the truth that they don't quite know about themselves. And this one is both."

Kuyao capitalized on the clandestine fascination surrounding Nazi artifacts, initially faking Hitler paintings and later expanding into diaries. His operations were primarily directed at a niche market of Nazi memorabilia collectors, both in Germany and internationally.

Miranda Zickler [21:46]:
"These guys are like, oh, the grandeur of the period. Okay, say more about that... These guys are like fascinations verging on sympathy for the Nazis."

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The Publication and Rise of the Diaries

In April 1983, the German magazine Der Stern announced possession of Hitler’s secret diaries, igniting a bidding war among major publications. The sheer volume—62 fake volumes—lent an aura of authenticity, convincing many that they were genuine.

Miranda Zickler [06:29]:
"The idea that someone would be maniacal enough to fake... seemed like a lot."

However, initial acceptance was swiftly overturned when forensic analysis revealed discrepancies in the paper and binding, confirming the diaries were modern fakes.

Miranda Zickler [06:43]:
"The mass quantity... no one read the damn things all the way through."

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The Motives Behind the Hoax

The discussion pivots to understanding why Kuyao perpetrated such an elaborate fraud. Miranda suggests it was a quintessentially 1980s endeavor driven by overpromising and the relentless pursuit of profit.

Miranda Zickler [08:22]:
"It is someone who has over promised and then now has to deliver and wants more money and therefore ends up being like, fuck, I gotta write another one of these things."

The comparison to Clifford Irving’s hoax with Howard Hughes underscores the audacity and risks involved in such deceptions.

Adrian Dob [09:40]:
"Howard Hughes. That's right."

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The Downfall: Unraveling the Hoax

By May 1983, the authenticity of the Hitler Diaries was publicly debunked. The forensic evidence was irrefutable, leading to an abrupt collapse of the hoax. The swift exposure was facilitated by the meticulousness of the investigative journalists and the pre-existing skepticism among experts due to prior forgeries in circulation.

Miranda Zickler [14:33]:
"Turns out there is a... an enduring mystery here."

However, the damage to Der Stern and the involved individuals was immense. Both Kuyao and journalist Gerd Heidemann, who had been instrumental in promoting the diaries, faced legal repercussions.

Adrian Dob [15:24]:
"That's why it collapses in this absolutely spectacular fashion."

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Psychological and Cultural Implications

The episode delves into the psychological motivations of both Kuyao and Heidemann, exploring themes of obsession, addiction to deceit, and the allure of being at the center of a groundbreaking story. Miranda Zickler emphasizes the duality of their personas: genuinely passionate yet deceitfully self-serving.

Miranda Zickler [45:27]:
"It's honestly the most guileless story imaginable. Everyone is super genuine while also lying their asses off."

The hoax also reflects broader cultural issues, such as society’s struggle to reconcile with its Nazi past and the ethical pitfalls of legacy media’s commercialism.

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Legacy and Lessons Learned

Miranda Zickler discusses the long-term ramifications of the Hitler Diaries hoax on journalistic integrity and public trust. She asserts that the event serves as a cautionary tale about the vulnerabilities of even reputable publications to deception when financial incentives overshadow ethical standards.

Miranda Zickler [72:23]:
"It's far more interesting that people who put a great degree of faith in legacy media... can be fed a bunch of bullshit, too."

The hoax underscores the importance of thorough vetting processes and the need for skepticism, especially when extraordinary claims are involved.

Sarah Marshall [84:01]:
"That's what I love about these hoax stories. Everyone in there is telling the truth much more genuinely than they do at any other time in their life sometimes."

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Conclusion

The episode concludes by reflecting on the messy interplay between truth and deception, and how the Hitler Diaries hoax remains a stark reminder of the fragile line between credible journalism and elaborate fraud. Miranda Zickler's insights illuminate the complex motivations and cultural contexts that allow such hoaxes to not only exist but momentarily thrive.

Adrian Dob [83:42]:
"Everyone is revealing so much about what they actually think and feel and the ugliness and the messiness of that."

Sarah Marshall (Closing) [82:12]:
"Thank you for being here with us. Thank you to Adrian Daub for being our amazing guest."

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Notable Quotes

• Sarah Marshall [00:16]:
  "This is an episode about not just any publishing hoax, but about the fake Hitler Diaries, which for a moment captivated a vast and credulous public."

• Miranda Zickler [08:22]:
  "It is someone who has over promised and then now has to deliver and wants more money and therefore ends up being like, fuck, I gotta write another one of these things."

• Miranda Zickler [21:46]:
  "These guys are like, oh, the grandeur of the period. Okay, say more about that... These guys are like fascinations verging on sympathy for the Nazis."

• Miranda Zickler [72:23]:
  "It's far more interesting that people who put a great degree of faith in legacy media... can be fed a bunch of bullshit, too."

• Adrian Dob [83:42]:
  "Everyone is revealing so much about what they actually think and feel and the ugliness and the messiness of that."

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Further Listening

For those interested in exploring more about this story, Miranda Zickler recommends checking out the German podcast that delves deeper into the Hitler Diaries hoax, as well as her own work on Substack, where she discusses various topics related to German history and contemporary issues.

Miranda Zickler [82:20]:
"You can find my writing on Substack where I talk about a lot of German stuff, but not just. Also just a lot of American things these days."

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Thank you for listening!

Thank you to Adrian Dob and Miranda Zickler for their insightful contributions, and to Corinne Ruff and Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. Join us next week as we continue to reconsider another misunderstood person or event from the past.

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Transcript

[Adrian Dob]

I don't know if there should be that kind of money involved in the truth, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Welcome to youo Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and this week we are talking about one of our favorite topics, a publishing hoax. And we were talking about it with one of our beloved friends of the show, Adrian Dob. We talked with Adrian in a couple of bonus episodes recently about Christiana F, the German version of Go Ask Alice where in this case it did really happen. And about mazes and monsters, one of my favorite little fear mongering TV movies of the satanic panic that also happens to star Tom Hanks. This is an episode about not just any publishing hoax, but about the fake Hitler Diaries, which for a moment captivated a vast and credulous public. And this brings up many questions. How do you go about fabricating fake diaries? How do you do them for Hitler? And why would you. What need would this serve for the writer, for the people who need to keep the hoax going, and for the public who briefly bought it? I love a Ford Curie story. And I love a story about the way people tell a lie, revealing the truth that they don't quite know about themselves. And this one is both. And I was so happy to have Adrian with us to talk about it over. In our bonus episodes, we have a fun new one for you about Pike Bracken's I Hate to Housekeep book, part of a series with our episode on the I Hate to Cook book a couple months ago with Sarah Archer. And this time I get to talk about it with your Wrong about editor, Miranda Zickler, who knows all about how to keep your house clean. We're going to talk about some practical tips. And we also have a poem I wrote in the style of Sylvia Plath at Waffle House. And I promise it all fits together.

[Adrian Dob]

And that's about it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Here is your episode. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for braving the summer. Stay cool.

[Adrian Dob]

Welcome to Wrong about the Podcast, where we just love to talk about a hoax and especially a publishing hoax. And today we are talking about the Hitler Diaries with our friend Adrian Dob. Hi, Adrian. Hello. I'm struck, as I always am, by the feeling that I just said your last name wrote.

[Miranda Zickler]

No, that's perfectly fine. There's no more right way to say my name. Any pronunciation of my last name is correct.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, no, I definitely did.

[Miranda Zickler]

No, no, no, you're great. You're great.

[Adrian Dob]

Okay, so you brought this up to me. I don't know at some point because we Did a bonus episode on Christiana F. The Real Real. Go ask Alice.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right.

[Adrian Dob]

So in classic function of kind of growing up, I guess, as a millennial, before we had the Internet. I love how today young adults are like, what do people do before the Internet? And it's like, it is hard to imagine. But let me tell you, one of the void big ways that information traveled was in bathroom readers. Remember these? I mean, they still exist.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

They're still around and they still work. They're full. They're like, you know, there's like the Uncle John's Bathroom reader that has like 800 volumes. But I remember reading a little squib about, like, you know, one time there was someone had this hoax where they were like, hey, I discovered the diaries of Adolf Hitler. And it was like this huge thing, and everyone was so excited. And then it turned out to not be real. And I remember thinking back on it, this feeling of, like, relief, because I think I was very big on Indiana Jones and. Or just on the Raiders of the Lost Ark, specifically. Yeah, it's called Raiders of the Lost Ark. Once you get over 35, you can't name a movie correctly to save your life. It's a disease, really. And I had this feeling that just like, if we actually publish the actual diaries of Hitler, that would be too creepy to withstand. And so it was just like, oh, thank God. It was just some guy just made them up. But then in the way of facts you encounter in a pre Internet world, you have no way of following through on it. And so you just kind of never follow through on it. So I'm really excited to get the story about it from you because I'm very curious, like, who did this? Why did they do this? How much money can you make doing this in what year? And what are the motivations? And how does this compare also to the fake trauma memoir, which is kind of what we've mostly talked about on the show to this point.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, these are all great questions, it turns out. I mean, just a spoiler alert. You can make a ton of money on it, and you can then have that money never be found.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, no. Just like DB Cooper.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yes, there is an element of an enduring mystery here.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, no, wait. We famously did find his money. Well, you know.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, we just didn't find him.

[Adrian Dob]

Exactly. Yes, exactly.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

So when. Where are you taking us to in terms of place and time? Where are we?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. So the whole story will occupy basically the second half of the 1970s.

[Adrian Dob]

All righty. It's a Good half.

[Miranda Zickler]

And then the beginning of the 1980s. The Hitler Diaries have a long prehistory, which is part of how the hoax kind of didn't get discovered right away. But average consumers and the writers of the bathroom book that you read would have likely become aware of this in April 1983, when the German magazine Der Stern, which is the same magazine, by the way, that broke the Christiane F. Story just three years prior.

[Adrian Dob]

Aha. They're doing good work, I guess they.

[Miranda Zickler]

Do a lot of good work. And they're huge into these kind of investigative pieces. And they announced that they were in possession of Hitler's secret diaries. And they have this massive press conference, April 25, 1983, with this massive stack of newly discovered.

[Adrian Dob]

They're like, look at this. It's a massive stack. It can't be fake if it's a lot of papers.

[Miranda Zickler]

This is a theme that will come back up, that people basically will be like, well, there's a lot. The mass quantity will sort of be why this got as far as it did in the first place, in the sense that, like, no one read the damn things all the way through.

[Adrian Dob]

Right? Yeah. Like the Pentagon Papers.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, yeah. And, well, also, it's not typed. Right. It's in this, like, very inscrutable script.

[Adrian Dob]

They're like Hitler dots his eyes with little hearts. I thought that.

[Miranda Zickler]

Who knew? Yeah. And then the other thing is that. That. That basically the idea that, like, someone would be maniacal enough to fake what I think in the end amounted to 62 volumes just seemed like a lot.

[Adrian Dob]

You know, that is often the argument made against something being fake. And there's, like, a new YouTube channel that I love so much called Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities, where it's, like, sort of investigating a lot of different stories like this, where there's, like, just an incredibly large document where you're like, well, how could this be just one person's obsession? You know? And the host a couple times I think, has been like, well, you know, autistic people really like to write hundreds and hundreds of pages about things sometimes. And, like, not saying that that's the case here, but I think one of the interesting things about these stories is that people, to quote Eve Kasofsky, Seguig, are different from each other. One of the great.

[Miranda Zickler]

It's a great line.

[Adrian Dob]

Products of academia, that line.

[Miranda Zickler]

Axiomatic. Yes.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. And we have different motives when we go about creating our hoaxes. So I think looking at a story like this, or any kind of story, really, and being like, well, I don't understand the human motives that would cause someone to do this, or I would never write something that long, so it has to be real. It's like, well, you wouldn't, but somebody would.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And it's interesting that you bring up autism because I think in the end, it's a little hard to know why anyone in this story does anything. But my read, after having spent quite a lot of time with both the hoaxer and the hoaxies over the last couple of weeks, my sense was something different, which is that it is the most 1980s thing imaginable. It is someone who has over promised and then now has to deliver and wants more money and therefore ends up being like, fuck, I gotta write another one of these things.

[Adrian Dob]

I guess it's better than junk bonds. Yeah, in some senses. Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, yes. I mean, in some way they are exactly that. Right. For me, as a literary scholar, it's hard not to think that the extremely overworked and exhausted Hitler we meet in the diaries might be a self portrait of the man who, as you say, comes home from the pub and has to like, be like, fuck, I gotta do another one of these, you know, another Hitler diaries.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. And it's. I mean, yeah, yeah. I'm very excited to learn about this person and, like, what the original goal was and if. If it perhaps got away from its creator at a certain point. This also reminds me the sort of American corollary I can think of to this is Clifford Irving and the fake Howard Hughes memoir.

[Miranda Zickler]

Howard Hughes. That's right.

[Adrian Dob]

Is an incredibly ballsy one because in this case, I think it was going towards publication while Howard Hughes was alive.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly.

[Adrian Dob]

And then he was like, excuse me, I didn't write a memoir. And it's like, were you assuming that Howard Hughes just, like, won't hear about it if you publish a memoir posing as him? All right, I mean, look, he's. He's got his feet and tissue boxes, but he can still watch tv.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right. Yeah, exactly. He's like, I. It juked me right out of my Kleenex boxes, you guys. What was that? Yeah. Even though there is no Howard Hughes here to could have been like, point of order, I did not write this. The actual hoax basically runs for, at best, two weeks.

[Adrian Dob]

That's still pretty good, honestly.

[Miranda Zickler]

On April 28, 1983, we get the first issue of Deftern publishing the diaries with selections and starting like, this bidding war, all these various companies. So there's going to be, you know, Newsweek wants it, the London Times. Rupert Murdoch's huge into it. French papers, Spanish papers.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. Which, by the way, is what. Is what you did at the time if you were positioning something to be a bestseller often. Or a publisher would. Would sometimes work. Well, in this case, it was being shopped. But sometimes a publisher, I think, would also place excerpts with a newspaper. And you would serialize a big upcoming nonfiction book. So people would get a little taste of it, which I think is a very smart model.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. Well, with this one, I think the idea was also. It really was.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. Like an absolute bombshell.

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, that. But also, like, a lot of the diary ends up being just, like, extremely pedantic and pedestrian stuff.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, fun. Okay.

[Miranda Zickler]

And so my sense sense is that they never thought, hey, we can just sell this as a book. It would always have to be excerpt.

[Adrian Dob]

Right. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

Right. Like, a lot of it is just, like, mind numbingly boring, which was by design.

[Adrian Dob]

I love the idea of readers being like, hitler's so dull.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

Because, as you know, probably one of my least favorite things is this idea that there's a mystique around evil or that the ability to destroy human life makes people more powerful or exciting. And it's like, no. They're like, not only does it not do any of that, but also some of the most destructive people in history are just really embarrassing.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And so by May 6, 1983, news breaks that the diaries are fake. Basically, the competition to Dirstein had immediately sort of clocked. Like, this is weird. This is hinky. And the magazine's publisher said, well, obviously, we'll have this submitted to various archives to get the binding and the paper analyzed. And the verdict comes back, and they're like, yeah, that's modern paper. That binding isn't right. And the whole thing falls apart.

[Adrian Dob]

Turns out you should try harder when you do that type of thing.

[Miranda Zickler]

And then, of course, everyone sort of starts looking for who did this. And maybe I'll just. In setting the scene for you in Germany in 1983. There is a very. There's a very funny reason why the hoaxer didn't necessarily think this was going to happen. Right. Which is he thought, well, gee, where am I gonna find the best hoax? The best fakes. Right. Are done using real materials. Right?

[Adrian Dob]

Right. We know this from art forgery.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. Right. Where you go into a. Let's say a nice library with old holdings, and you cut out the empty pages and then fill them. That's sort of like. That's the hardest stuff.

[Adrian Dob]

That's clever. Don't do that, kids.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yes. Don't do it.

[Adrian Dob]

You know, if you need to make a quick few million dollars. I don't know, maybe, you know, think about it.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, yeah, but you can't do that for 62 volumes of a diary.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, it's a lot of paper.

[Miranda Zickler]

So he's like, huh, I wonder. So if I can't use modern paper, where could I go for pre modern paper and binding?

[Adrian Dob]

I have no idea. Where can he go?

[Miranda Zickler]

The communist block.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, of course. And is. And is he correct in assuming that their paper is older?

[Miranda Zickler]

Not at all.

[Adrian Dob]

All right. Why does he think that?

[Miranda Zickler]

I think it's because generally the vibe.

[Adrian Dob]

He'S like, everything here looks kind of ding. So I bet your paper is from exactly 40 years ago.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. Yeah. The whole thing has a vibe of like the 1950s never ended. All right, and. And so fair enough.

[Adrian Dob]

But based on your fashions. Sorry, ladies.

[Miranda Zickler]

But yeah, Then, then it emerges like, no, of course. Like they, like, they're like, we have paper. We're not. We're not, you know, uncontacted tribe over here. What the fuck?

[Adrian Dob]

And so big slam on East Kerman paper supplies.

[Miranda Zickler]

Turns out there is. There are brightening agents in it that sort of were only designed in the. That were only sort of invented in the 50s. The binding is from the 60s. And so, yeah, the whole thing just falls apart immediately.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. I gotta say, I love this type of thing.

[Miranda Zickler]

It's great. So basically the verdict is such that it's not like there is like a big debate and then like, eventually people come around to the idea that this is fake. Like from one moment, like the press conference by, I think the National Archives in Koblenz in Germany is basically. This is a fake. They're not. Like, here are some reasons we have to believe that this might not be authentic. They're like, oh, it's a fake. So like, this goes from 100 to 0 in the space of, you know, this basically makes it across Germany at the speed of like, wire services. People like, being like, oh, shit, this is not real.

[Adrian Dob]

And I feel like there are cases in which people would be less quick to test it.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right.

[Adrian Dob]

But in this case, it's like, it feels like there's a lot. There's just more writing on its authenticity than on any. Anything else like that.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right. The publisher, you know, which again, is one of Germany's premier magazines, had done some due diligence and they'd had. They'd consulted experts to determine whether the handwriting was really Hitler. And these experts had looked at, including really reputable historians of the, of the Third Reich had said that, yes, in comparing the diaries to other known documents having been written by Hitler, they appear to be by the same hand.

[Adrian Dob]

This is like worthy of its own episode. But I get the sense that handwriting identification is a lot more wishy washy as a forensic science than a lot of us would like.

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, in hindsight, these people were correct.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh really?

[Miranda Zickler]

It's just that they were not.

[Adrian Dob]

Did he like cut out a bunch of letters and photocopy them?

[Miranda Zickler]

No, that would have been too much work. They were comparing the Hitler diaries to other forgeries by the same guy.

[Adrian Dob]

It's affinity fraud.

[Miranda Zickler]

Kind of I love was just very, very funny. So they were not wrong. They were like, well this is the same handwriting as this and that was true, it was just not Hitler's.

[Adrian Dob]

Was it just that it was internally consistent or were there other samples that he'd forged somehow?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yes. So that's part of what, what let this hoax attain this kind of scale that it did. The publication of the Hitler diaries was in some way an accident of a con that was not run on this magazine or on the broader public at all, but on basically people who traded and collected Nazi memorabilia. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Well, I'm a fan of that con because God knows that's, you know. Yeah, I, you know, yeah, I want to, I want to con those people too.

[Miranda Zickler]

And so yeah, basically the forger who we will now meet, Conrad Kuya.

[Adrian Dob]

Hello. I'm going to call you Connie.

[Miranda Zickler]

Connie. That is exactly what his contact at their stand would call. Connie and Connie had been flooding the zone with Nazi related shit since the early 70s, meaning that he had really contaminated the kind of historical document base.

[Adrian Dob]

Wow, nice. It's like that kid who wrote the Scots Wikipedia.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. So let me tell you a little bit about Conrad Kuya. Koni. So born in 1938. Well, so I was going to tell you about his childhood, I was going to tell you about his life. Except that a lot of what we know about his life appears to be made up to so hard to tell. But what we do know is born somewhere around Dresden, he claims to have grown up in an orphanage after having been separated from his family during the bombing of Dresden. So basically I think there's some suggestion that that's probably not true because again.

[Adrian Dob]

It'S like bad things happen to kids all the time and sometimes they even happen during historically significant events. But like, you know, if someone has, has already made up a lot of other stuff, you're like, was it a historically significant event that hurt you this time as well?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, exactly. So this tendency to, like, he clearly had a traumatic childhood and traumatic life, first part of it, and the ability or the willingness to attach that to world historic events sort of runs through it as a through line. Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

And I guess that by living through a period when those events are happening, your life is inevitably shaped by them, but maybe not as directly as you feel like. Would explain the way that you are sometimes.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And I mean, think about the fact that. Right. Like, born in 1938, he was seven years old when the Second World War ended. Right. Like, that's a particular generational experience of a world that is completely going to. Right. Everything is. You know, the cities become unrecognizable during, you know, the first years where you really sort of perceive the world around you. He's too young to have been really socialized into the Nazi state. I mean, he would have done maybe, like, one year of schooling before. Before the Allies conquered Berlin. Right. So really someone who sort of watched a world disappear without really having that world, seen that world for himself. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

And who was born into that world, interestingly. Exactly. At a time when it was projected to last forever.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And we should say so Hitler, for him, for instance, would have been a figure that by the time he really could sort of engage with him, was no longer around, but who had clearly shaped pretty much as much as a person can shape the world in which you grow up in what is eastern Germany in the late 30s, early 40s. Dresden is in East Germany. So he grew up in East Germany, fled to the west in the 50s, probably after a first arrest for some kind of forgery. As a teenager, he seems to have created phony autographs for various East German politicians and sold them.

[Adrian Dob]

I mean, anyone dorky enough to buy an autograph from an East German politician, probably. I. Whatever.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. Victimless crime. Victimless crime.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And then he settles in southwest Germany, the area near the Black Forest, where.

[Adrian Dob]

The cakes are farmed.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

Gonna lasso me up a cake. That was such a silly joke. Thank you for seeing that through with me.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's good. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Sort of runs an art gallery and starts dealing in these memorabilias.

[Adrian Dob]

And he's like, what do you want? Judy Garland? Yeah, I can get that by Thursday.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. Well, I mean, it ends up not being East German politicians or Judy Garland. It really ends up being Nazi. Nazi stuff.

[Adrian Dob]

Wow. And so. And he's. Is he selling this, like, I primarily like to a domestic market. Right. People who just are like, hey, get me some Nazi stuff. I missed that.

[Miranda Zickler]

I would be shocked if there weren't some weird American billionaires in the. In this as well.

[Adrian Dob]

Well, yeah, of course. Because how did Lemmy get all his stuff otherwise?

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right. But yeah, he. He ripped off these rich memorabilia collectors with, let's say, a certain nostalgia for the Third Reich and its trappings. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Like, yeah. Which of course, a part of me is like, how could anyone ever be nostalgia? Like, I'm like, ugh. My soul recoils at the very thought. It's unimaginable and surreal. And then the other part of me is like, Sarah. Plantation weddings were considered generally okay by mainstream white people in America until 2020. Like, that's how Blake Lively got married. Blake Lively.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. I mean, we're importing Africaners. I think that plantation weddings are doing just fine in the year of the Lord 2025.

[Adrian Dob]

I mean, it's an excellent point. Yeah. But now you might get slightly embarrassed on TikTok and get negative Yelp reviews at your Mercedes dealership that you run. So when you think about it, the hasn't woke culture, destroyed democracy. This has been my TED Talk.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. So basically, he's running in these kind of circles that are never officially sort of far right, but that certainly seem to harbor fascinations verging on sympathy for the Nazis. And it is for them that he starts creating the very first fake diary in 1975.

[Adrian Dob]

Wow.

[Miranda Zickler]

And according to everyone, including himself, it was a. Supposed to be a one off. He sells it to a German industrialist.

[Adrian Dob]

Is it in the spirit of, like, I'll make you fuckers a whole fucking Hitler diary, you fucks?

[Miranda Zickler]

I mean, I think it's hard to tell. There's a museum of all his fakes now.

[Adrian Dob]

Wow.

[Miranda Zickler]

In his hometown, which does very, very good work. But I haven't been in a while. My impression is that in the beginning it was really about Hitler paintings.

[Adrian Dob]

Right.

[Miranda Zickler]

There's a bunch of fake nudes of Eva Brown that is actually Kuya's. Then I think wife.

[Adrian Dob]

That's a weird. Do you think that he was. Okay. Do you think he was like, honey, I want to paint a nude of you just for fun? Or do you think he was like, listen, babe, I think she was in on it. Okay. I like that. That's more fun.

[Miranda Zickler]

She. She may have helped him disappear a bunch of the money. So, like, we.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

It's hard to prove any of this because, like, people were aware when when the. When this whole thing blew up that, you know, that they needed to say certain things to stay out of or not out of prison, but to shorten their stay at the who's Gal. But I think that she must have known. I mean, she would have recognized herself, for one thing.

[Adrian Dob]

Well, that's. It's a good point. I mean, in seriousness, I feel like, you know, I get giggly when I'm talking about anything gory or uncomfortable. And to me, this is like a very genuinely funny. But be uncomfortable in the sense of, like, I feel like it's good to bilk people who want Nazi memorabilia because they deserve it. But also, like, I. I suppose there is an argument to be made that, like, any fun at the expense of Hitler is wrong. Like, I disagree, but I don't know. What. What do you. What do you think?

[Miranda Zickler]

I mean, it. It does feel like you're ripping off some of the most deserving people on the planet. I think the problem becomes that this stuff starts shaping how people look back at that period. The diaries are in some way far worse than a fake nude of Eva Brown.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, that's just kind of funny.

[Miranda Zickler]

On the one hand, I don't think there's any mystery about the political persuasion of the people he's ripping off. At the same time, the fact that basically they're purchasing porn from him. It's probably not an accident either. Their fascination with, you know, the Nazis is essentially pornographic. They are. And. And the diaries will have a lot of that too. Like, there'll just be a lot about, like, Hitler's indigestion and, like. Yeah, like, how he's got. Had a fight with Eva and whatever. It's this kind of voyeuristic fascination.

[Adrian Dob]

I hope there's hemorrhoid stuff.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, I don't know if there is. They are now all digitized. I could have read them all, but I was like, oh, boy, I don't have time for this.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, you know, I wouldn't inflict that on you, to be honest.

[Miranda Zickler]

I read a bunch, but not. Not enough to. No hemorrhoids where I. Where I read, I have to admit.

[Adrian Dob]

But you can't swear that there's not. Not a hemorrhoid in the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, that's promising.

[Miranda Zickler]

Selling fakes to these people turns out to be extremely easy, but there are a couple of surprising challenges that emerge when you do that. So just if anyone here is looking to break into that market, be warned.

[Adrian Dob]

Alrighty.

[Miranda Zickler]

One is right that, like, in some way, provenance is the name of the game. You have to figure out, like, a plausible way of explaining how you got this thing. Right. Like, why did no one else have this?

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, that is a big one.

[Miranda Zickler]

The other thing is that, of course, the number one source for shit like this were the. Either the old Nazis themselves or their next of kin. Right. Like someone like Goering or Himmler were dead, but like they're, you know, their wives, their widows and their.

[Adrian Dob]

You're like, well, I was visiting a charming country estate in Argentina and I happened to open the nightstand drawer.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. And so you have to figure out a way why the Hitler diaries wouldn't have gone through those people. Right. And we have diaries, genuine diaries, for some of the big Nazis. They had entered sort of the scholarship and the broader public domain a lot earlier. Right. Goebbels diary, for instance. Yeah. Which are horrible, but. But Kuyao is coming to the party a little late.

[Adrian Dob]

Everything has been discovered by now, is the sense.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. But he keeps being able to connect with these amazing shadowy collectors who've been holding on forever. But with the diary, he decides to go a different direction, which is important. What he claims is that he got them from a place that, again, for West Germans in the 1970s, seemed like a time machine, namely East Germany. Right. Where he was from. And he said, I have. So in 1945, the story goes, a single plane took over from. Took off from the Reich Chancellery in Berlin to try and stash a bunch of important Nazi shit somewhere in the Czech Republic. What is today the Czech Republic?

[Adrian Dob]

They're like, we've got Hitler's diary here, and it's only got one of those flimsy little locks that anyone can break open.

[Miranda Zickler]

And so that flight crashes somewhere in, you know, rural East Germany. That appears to be real.

[Adrian Dob]

Okay. That's pretty cool.

[Miranda Zickler]

It could have been anything. Right?

[Adrian Dob]

Right. I mean, I'm sure it's. Yeah, some. Just some boring junk. But.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, maybe it was even money or.

[Adrian Dob]

Something like that, but you never know. Let's make Harrison Ford's reanimated carcass do another Indiana Jones movie about it.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

And then.

[Miranda Zickler]

But. But Kuya's idea is, you know, what? If that had a bunch of cool.

[Adrian Dob]

Stuff on it, he could have just invented Indiana Jones. He came so close.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. Picked it clean. They picked it clean.

[Adrian Dob]

Of course they did.

[Miranda Zickler]

And then it sort of circulates in East Germany. The idea really is that, like, yeah, there is a. It's sort of. It's been around in East Germany, but that's why West Germans haven't heard of it.

[Adrian Dob]

It's behind the Iron Curtain of course. They're like ah, where all the good stuff is, of course.

[Miranda Zickler]

But Kuyao has a brother in East Germany, this part is true. And he's a high ranking East German general. That part is not true. His brother works for the railroad or something. He's going to smuggle this shit out, he's going to collect it over there and then smuggle it out across the Iron Curtain and then his brother is going to sell it all. So that's just cloak and dagger enough to give these things both kind of degree of plausibility and to give them kind of an exciting legend. Not only are these exciting objects forbidden objects, but the way you're getting them is clandestine and kind of cool.

[Adrian Dob]

I don't know. Is there a sense of contentiousness between east and West Germany about who sort of brings forth the deepest truth about the past or something like that?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yes, I mean there definitely is. Both German states after the war present themselves as having dealt with the Nazi past better than the other. That is how they legitimate themselves. The others are basically continuing the mistakes of the Nazi years. In the case of West Germany, this is done by talking about totalitarianism to say, look, you guys were Nazis then you went out and became communists, so you're still totalitarians. You still wear funny uniforms and march in lockstep. Not sure how much you've really changed. It also was done by blaming Prussia basically for German militarism, which is something that the Western Allies did very, very early on because Prussia was in East Germany basically. So you sort of be like, well the real root of Nazism is over there on the other side of the Iron Curtain. And the East German government sort of said like, well no, the Nazis are in the west on the mere technicality that a bunch of West German politicians were former Nazis, right? Whereas the East Germans had pretty, at least at the upper echelons of power, pretty radically solved their Nazi problem, let's put it that way. This was during the height of Stalinism. So if you wanted to get rid of people pretty easy, right? In Germany you had all these people who like all these industrialists who had made tons of money through the Nazis were now still very rich and very powerful. Yet all these politicians who sort of would mumble, mumble through their Nazi past. There are statistics about what percentage of judges and university professors By like the 1960s, early 1970s had had the exact same job under Nazism. Think of all the policemen and that kind of thing. Right. Like, was this person guarding trains to the camps like 20 years ago, and now he's like writing me a fucking traffic ticket. It's kind of crazy to think about. So that was the East German case for why the West Germans were actually just a continuation of Nazism by other means. So this is very, very contentious. And the idea that these diaries might not see the light of day in East Germany didn't seem totally far fetched.

[Adrian Dob]

And I, and I get this because I think that this is how kind of the rest of the United States uses the American south is like, well, we're not that bad. And it's like, no, I think we are. That we just have distributed it differently.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. And so Kuya's grift, so he makes a wonderful living basically grifting these fash, curious in whatever, however you want to nuance that curiosity. It's unclear, right? Like, do they want Hitler back or do they just, like the greatness? Right. Like, I always think of that. I always, like, I always think of that scene in succession with that weird far right politician that they're auditioning for president. Remember this?

[Adrian Dob]

I don't think I got that far, but tell me about it.

[Miranda Zickler]

And basically, Tom Wambsgans is like, well, did you ever read Mein Kampf? A couple of times? And he's like, well, oh, that's right.

[Adrian Dob]

Yes, I remember that.

[Miranda Zickler]

Were there some Easter eggs you didn't pick up on the first time?

[Adrian Dob]

That was really kind of a pretty great moment for Tom.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, it's great. And this is sort of like, these guys are like, oh, the grandeur of the period. Okay, say more about that. I'd rather not.

[Adrian Dob]

And it's like, no, really? Say so much more. And I don't, I guess. And I don't believe that, by the way, when people like, you know, the, the from an aesthetic perspective, and it's like, dude, I know, go watch Spartacus. There are so many, so many aesthetics through time that don't involve genocide, you know?

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. And so it's through this group of wealthy collectors. Basically, Kuyao cat is the. Becomes the dog that catches the car.

[Adrian Dob]

And it feels like the dog is always like, I never planned for it to happen. And now that it has happened, I wish it hadn't.

[Miranda Zickler]

I mean, I'm sure that that's how he felt about it. Looking back, I think he had a wonderful grift going. But then one of the targets of his grift does the worst possible thing and puts him in touch with the Media. What had happened is the following. We now meet our second protagonist. Protagonist Gerd Heidemann is this uber journalist working for Dish Down.

[Adrian Dob]

He rollerblades to work every morning to get in more time for journalism.

[Miranda Zickler]

Oh, no, he's. This guy goes hard. I mean, it's just. Yeah, he, he, he's this kind of like macho journalist, kind of war reporter slash investigative kind of gumshoe. Right. He's their kind of bloodhound. He, he does, he runs down every single.

[Adrian Dob]

That is a great type of journalist.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

You know, more needed now than ever. Be sexy. Be a journalist.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And so this guy, really, he's well known and he's highly respected by his, by his colleagues and in the editor among the editorial staff, among the publishers of this magazine. He both appears to have been a pretty good reporter and he definitely played a really good reporter on tv. Right. Like he just looks the part, right. Like there's a, there's an incident. When is this? In 1970, Black September, where like the PLO tried to take over power in Jordan and a bunch of people sort of are taken hostage or sort of like get caught in between the fighting and this guy sort of like gets a bunch of hostages out of one of the hotels and out of Jordan and stuff like that.

[Adrian Dob]

Like, he's like real old school journalism. Hostage.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly.

[Adrian Dob]

Hostage related stuff.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the kind of thing. It's also the kind of thing that today you wouldn't have money for anymore. I feel like, I think he spent like a year just traveling South America being like, hey, have you guys ever heard of this guy? Dr. Mengele, anyone?

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, well, I was listening to the audiobook of it as I do in the springtime sometimes, you know. And then it opens with. Well, it opens several times, but one of its openings is about a character named Adrian Mellon, who's come to the cursed town of Derry to write about the canal for New England Byways magazine, who financed for like weeks and weeks of him researching a canal in a small town in New England. And it's like the weirdest part of this is that it's true. Like, this is the single most unbelievable part of this whole book, probably to like a 20 year old reading it today. Because if I were in college now, I think I. Because I think I was young at the very sort of tail end of this type of thing. But like, you know, they don't have in flight magazines anymore. You just have to sit there reading the safety instructions. If you didn't bring Anything. They're like, no. You.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. Or. Or the Inside Catalog or something. Yeah, yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

But, yeah, I guess the sort of print journal, not just print journalism, any type of journalism, takes a lot of resources to be able to. To do this type of thing. And the fact that people aren't up to sort of, you know, daring do journalism today, maybe as much as it seems like they used to be, isn't because people have gotten any less gritty, but because we don't pay for them to do this type of thing.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. One of Heidemann's obsessions becomes kind of the tackling Nazi stories.

[Adrian Dob]

Okay.

[Miranda Zickler]

He becomes kind of a collector of Nazi things himself in a really weird way.

[Adrian Dob]

Is he like a custodian of this stuff?

[Miranda Zickler]

So in 1973, Heidemann. The stern is based in Hamburg, so this is by the sea. Had decided to buy Hermann goering's motor yacht Carron 2. Yeah. For 160,000 Deutschmark, which is quite a bit of money.

[Adrian Dob]

You didn't say Karen, did you? The Karen too?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yes. C A R I N. And yeah, that's. That is his wife. That was his wife, I believe.

[Adrian Dob]

You know what? It's still Karen. It's still the Karen too.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, yeah. Like she. This yacht. Would like to speak with the manager, please. Yeah. And basically it proved ruinously expensive. It would have taken the quarter of a million marks to get it refurbished.

[Adrian Dob]

Wow.

[Miranda Zickler]

In terms of collections, by the way, Haidaman was also dating Guring's daughter Edda at the time. So he's like collecting people and stuff.

[Adrian Dob]

See, that's. That's weird. You know, where you're like, it's weird, weird. I mean, and I get that, like a lot of people are walking around who just happen to be the children of prominent Nazis at this point, to be honest. And you end up. But it's like you. You gotta have a work life balance. You gotta not date into your work life, ideally.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

That's weird. I feel weird. I feel weird.

[Miranda Zickler]

It's really. I mean, I. I don't know how she would have felt. I. I gotta.

[Adrian Dob]

I gotta be honest, I'm uncomfortable.

[Miranda Zickler]

It's like, are you just. Just dating because of my dad?

[Adrian Dob]

You know, as surely so many women were thinking at this time and place, are you just dating me to get my Nazi memorabilia?

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right. But anyway, so he. He completely was over his head financially with this stupid yacht. And anyway, so like, then, as you might have predicted, he tries to unload it.

[Adrian Dob]

Well, yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

With the same industrialist that.

[Adrian Dob]

That Kuyao has been charming yacht, historic, previous owner.

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, no, he needs to basically deal with the same set of weird collectors as Kuya.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, okay. Oh, this is a meet cute for the ages, huh?

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right. It's to them that they're like, yeah, we'll look into the boat. But hey, have you seen these Hitler diaries?

[Adrian Dob]

And he's like, I am not letting my boat be upstaged.

[Miranda Zickler]

So a little bit more about. About Heideman. So heideman is about six is I think six years older than Kuyao. So mid mid 50s at the middle. The mid-50s at the time. Right when the diaries come out. But kind of same generation but same historic frame of reference when it came to the Nazis as Cuya. Right. They'd been kids, they'd lived with images, but most of their socialization was post war. Right. So Hitler is this kind of image for them. One that dominated their childhoods, but one that was kind of mythical already by the time they were even sort of young adults. But through his former girlfriend, of course, Heidemann was connected to people who were either flesh and blood, real Nazis or neo Nazis or related to either of those two things. Right. Edda Goering, for instance, was apparently a pretty frequent guest in Bayreuth. That's the home of the Wagner clan. So Richard Wagner, the composer. And I'll make a quick plug. If you want to hear more about Richard Wagner and his weird clan of fascist Weebs, you can check out an episode that Moira Donegan and I did over on In Bed with the right wonderful show.

[Adrian Dob]

Wonderful co host of yours.

[Miranda Zickler]

She is amazing. And Richard Wagner's daughter in law, Vinifrid, may or may not have been Hitler's lover. So like, you know, there's a lot of connections there and would have met. I know God would have met there with sort of Ilse Hess, who's Rudolf Hess's widow. So Rudolf Hess was Hitler's second in command who under mysterious circumstances like parachuted into England for some reason. All right, yeah, she, she knew sort of the widows of various other Nazi grandees, but she also like would have known the head of the post war Nazi party and Oswald Mosley.

[Adrian Dob]

Do you think someday there will be like a market for like this is the bra that Marjorie Taylor Greene wore when she shouted that time.

[Miranda Zickler]

Oh God, I mean, I'm afraid so. Right. I mean like, it's just.

[Adrian Dob]

Wait, and I inter. I interrupted you. There was another. Another person. Right.

[Miranda Zickler]

Oh, and they also. She also would have rubbed shoulders with this, with the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Basically, Heideman collected things and people connected to the Nazis. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Is it worth it?

[Miranda Zickler]

And he did this kind of blockbuster, almost adventure journalism, I would say, Right. Where he is kind of where the performance of it, where he goes to.

[Adrian Dob]

Cocktail parties with a bunch of old Nazis.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. He became the personal secretary to some high ranking SS general who was writing his memoir. And so they would visit various absolute war criminals to interview them for these memoirs. But then Heidemann also seems to have collected information for the Mossad during the same thing. It's unclear whether he was under cover or not. But like, it's this very strange thing where like on the one hand the fascination appears to be real, but it also, it does have a, have an oppositional side to it. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Like, was he ever like, hey, that guy you're looking for, I'm actually having lunch with him?

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, he definitely tried. I mean, that's clearly why he was looking for Mengele. He was not looking. He was looking to get an interview and then he was likely going to turn him in. Right. Like it's a weird mixture. Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

Right. Ideally you do the. You do a heat where you sit down for lunch and you get your interview and then you. And then you turn him in.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And so basically through this industrialist, he gets the first volume of these diaries and he decides he needs to meet the dealer that this guy got it from. He wants to find these. And to my mind, this is where things start going off the rails because two things happen. One, Ku Yao eventually agrees to meet with him and to sort of say like, yes, I have more, I can probably get more. But it's difficult enough to find this guy that basically the again, the bloodhound dynamics or the bloodhound dimension of Heideman's personality sort of gets activated. He's like, the fact that it is so difficult to find is exciting to him. Him like he's in it for the hunt now. And so he kind of doesn't do his due diligence when he actually starts ending up with these books. And Kuyao is very, very good at stringing him along. Now, in a bizarre twist, I should plug this very quickly here. These two men's phone conversations were recorded. What? Yeah. Heideman is a full on, full blooded reporter. So he records a lot of these conversations and the magazine ended up with.

[Adrian Dob]

Most of these tapes.

[Miranda Zickler]

There's a German language podcast about this in which you can listen to them.

[Adrian Dob]

I can't believe I forgot to learn German.

[Miranda Zickler]

The impression you get Is like, honestly of an addict and his dealer. This is a guy who is addicted to the chase, to the thrill of getting more of this. And then you get this guy who very, very deliberately feeds him only what he needs to, right? And it's stuff like, you know, he'll call him up, be like, hi, Connie. Like, do we know anything more about the new volume? And he said. And Kuya will say, oh, you know, so I. I got the signal from my brother, but I think the truck didn't come, or I think they were too scared. And then they drove off again. It's supposed to be hidden in, like, I think the, like underneath pianos. And then, like, someone at the.

[Adrian Dob]

This is like how romance scams work, you know, where you're like, well, I can't. I tried to visit you, but I got stuck exactly in Heathrow and my ankle sprained and I have to go check in on my weasel farm, so could you send me another $7,000?

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. And so basically, it is a. It is a kind of homosocial romance, right? He, as. He. As. As you did, Heidemann, starts calling Kuyao Connie, although he doesn't know his real name. He thinks his name is Conrad Fisherman, but still he calls him Connie. And basically there is just this constant back and forth of frustration and discovery, Right? Because Kuya does deliver.

[Adrian Dob]

And is he, like, purchasing them as he's getting each volume, or how is this working?

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, no, I mean, Kuya has to write every single one of them, Right.

[Adrian Dob]

God.

[Miranda Zickler]

Some of this is very, very clearly a clever grifter, as you say, running kind of a Romeo scam, right? Like, oh, not today, honey. But. But on the other hand, it's also that. But the poor man now has to fucking write all these things.

[Adrian Dob]

Makes Gone Girl look like amateur hour.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. I mean, like, the amount of black tea he has to use to stain all the pages is, like, insane, right? He must have gone through just, like, box after box of Darjeeling or something. He's in over his head. This guy is kind of going to kind of suck him dry.

[Adrian Dob]

Well, why does he keep saying he's found more Hitler Diaries? Can't he be like, nope, that's it. Hitler Diary, train is leaving the station.

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, because he keeps getting paid more and more money. Well, yeah, so initially, I think, buys the first volume for himself, just like Amadeus. Yeah. And then it is exactly like that. He. And then he. And then eventually cuts in. The higher ups at the magazine. The higher ups at the magazine are like, get this for us. This is the scoop of the century. We trust you. And again, partly based on the fact that like, like historians say, well, everything in this diary checks out. That's because Kuyao was using a chronicle of the Nazi years in order to write it.

[Adrian Dob]

There you go.

[Miranda Zickler]

And so even though there are some real red flags, basically the d' shtan can't stop giving this guy money. And he's basically, well, my brother's out now and then two weeks later he'll be like, oh, but my brother found another person who apparently was able to get a couple of additional volumes of the diary, but he wants more money. And so then they're going to give him more money for those. And they're like, well you promised us four, but there's only two here. It's like, oh yeah, no, you know, and like he sounds like genuinely got.

[Adrian Dob]

Stuck in customs, man.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And he sounds genuinely tired on the phone. You're like, well I bet I'm sure you were up all night making this thing.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. God. And it's like, you know, you could, I don't know, find someone else to help you. Like hire a grad student or something.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. It becomes. But it is this thing where like the difficulty and the frustration of getting these things becomes kind of a story in itself. Right. Remember this is a journalist who kind of loves watching himself. Journalist, basically. Right. Like there's a kind of setting yourself like staging. There's a certain degree of self staging in his journalism. Like you want to be seen doing these things. And so he just loves the story. He loves the fact that it's being smuggled across the iron coat curtain. He loves that like it went down on a plane. It's that, that he's getting it from a high ranking general of the Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Like because you're like, the story of how I'm getting this story is such a great story that I am the star of.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And so eventually the Stan will fork over 9.6 million marks for these things.

[Adrian Dob]

What's the, what's the dollar equivalent of that?

[Miranda Zickler]

I'd have to look it up, but it's something like five to six million dollars at the time, I think, oh.

[Adrian Dob]

My God, why do they have that kind of money?

[Miranda Zickler]

It's really intense sense. I mean basically the, the big publishing house that owns them will like be left holding the bag.

[Adrian Dob]

I don't know if there should be that kind of money involved in the truth, you know?

[Miranda Zickler]

I know. So the other que. The other interesting thing is remember that, that Heideman had serious money Troubles on account of the boat purchase that went.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, yes, that's right. The money pit, if you will.

[Miranda Zickler]

After this whole thing blows up, up, both Kuyao and Haidaman will go to jail. And the reason Haidaman will go to jail is that there is a pretty strong suspicion on the part of the magazine that he skimmed off the top.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

There is a lot of suggestion that he. Or there's a lot of suspicion after this whole thing breaks, that part of why he keeps it going is that with each transaction he skims off the top.

[Adrian Dob]

That makes sense.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's never proven. But, like, where this money goes.

[Adrian Dob]

This is more like casino than I expected when I made that reference.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. But also, like, the. The question of where the money is at the end is a really, really good one. And it's never found.

[Adrian Dob]

No. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's on that plane.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, that's right. It crashed in the South American jungle or something like that.

[Adrian Dob]

It's buried next to the ax from the Hinter Kaifak murders.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. So there is this kind of addiction thing going on where he really sort of needs this to be. This is his fix at this point.

[Adrian Dob]

Right. And he's also, I guess, literally addicted to money because he's bought a yacht. It's all. It's like, what happened with that? You know, Is your wife like, honey, did you go overboard at the auction today? You're like, well.

[Miranda Zickler]

And so they're keeping this all very, very mum as well. They don't want anyone to know that they have this. But there were reasons to think that. That these were fake. Right. Like, it's not. Kuyao is not actually that great at this.

[Adrian Dob]

Such as.

[Miranda Zickler]

The very famous example is that once the Hitler Diaries are presented, anyone, they're like, it. It clearly is supposed to say ah on the front, but it does say fh, which in sort of gothic script can look a little similar, but it's very clearly an F.

[Adrian Dob]

I love that kind of thing.

[Miranda Zickler]

And so, like, the question is, like, they're like, what the fuck does that mean? Like, the true story appears to be that. That Kuya couldn't find the. The right. What do you call that? The right, like stencil or whatever stencil for it.

[Adrian Dob]

He was like, I don't think anyone will notice this. It's only on the COVID page.

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, again, like, if you're selling it to some weird industrialist who's only going to show it to, like, his dumb fascial friends, like, no problem. But yes, putting that on a Fucking cover story that's going to be bought 2 million times and sold to Rupert Murdoch.

[Adrian Dob]

Wait, Rupert Murdoch?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, it's gonna be sold to Rupert Murdoch. Okay.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, God. Oh, that's good.

[Miranda Zickler]

No, just. Just the story, not the. Not the diaries themselves.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, well, okay, that's better. I was thinking for a second that one of the most cursed men in America had one of the most cursed objects in Europe.

[Miranda Zickler]

No, that'd be fun. But no, unfortunately, no.

[Adrian Dob]

But it. I. But yeah, in the spirit of a lot of great hoaxes, it feels like this is done in the spirit of, like, well, I'm not trying to fool that many people. And then it gets out of hand and you're like, oh, God, now I do have to fool that many people. If I'd known I'd had to do that, I would have tried a little harder.

[Miranda Zickler]

And the other important thing to note is that, like, Kuya's fakes had been discovered before. No one knew who he was. No one knew where this came from, but people knew that there were fakes in circulation.

[Adrian Dob]

Okay, I like that.

[Miranda Zickler]

In 1982, very important German historians of the Nazi period wrote this academic book about Hitler's early writings. And they relied heavily on things that they had found in private collections, which turned out to be more than the FDA recommended. Amount of Kuyao.

[Adrian Dob]

It was technically a diary loaf.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And the moment that sort of hit the popular press again, the Stern Heidemann's paper published an excerpt including a poem that Hitler was supposed to have written during the First World War. And then a different academic pointed out that that poem was in fact plagiarized from a 1936 poem of some other Nazi poet. So this is actually a Nazi poem that was attributed to Hitler 20 years before the beginning of the Nazi period. Right. So there were signs that there was a bunch of bullshit in circulation.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, that's the amateur hour. You know, if I'm going to have the extremely famous political figure who I'm pretending to be writing as plagiarizing a poem, I would least make it something that they would know about.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Notice also, of course, that, like, in the world in which Heidemann was circulating, there were a bunch of. He was friends with people who had been there, had been there for the period, and. And very early on, some of them were like, that doesn't really square with how I remember this. Right. But of course, everyone's also constantly lying about their role in the Nazi years, so it's, like, a little hard to take that Seriously, everyone's constantly whitewashing their own role in what had happened. And so basically, I guess people don't take it all that seriously. But there are. You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to SS generals, but a bunch of SS generals saying, like, hey, I don't think this is right. You know, like, and. And basic things where they're like, that's not how the command structure worked. You know, like, that's right.

[Adrian Dob]

Which is like such a. Such a strange situation for people. I mean, it's kind of, like, interesting in that sort of process that I, you know, I think Americans have to really think about more and more of, like, how does a country recover from being overtaken by fascism? And this moment of, like, people having.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

Being forced, in a sense, by this developing story to, to some extent, be like, I actually did this for a living at one time, and this was not what it looked like.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. Except that they are. So, I mean, it's also about the epistemic collapse that goes along with, you know, something as, you know, with Hannah Arendt called the, you know, the breach in civilization with the fact that, like, you didn't want to take an SS general's word for it. Right. Because, like, every word out of their mouth was a lie. But, like, in this case, they were. They were accurately describing what had, what had, what had. How things worked back then. Right. But normally when they're like, oh, this is how it worked back then. It would be followed by like, and that's why I didn't know anything and I was just following orders. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Like the testimony at Nuremberg where you're like, wow, it's interesting how none of you exactly independently conceived of a single idea or even told other people to do stuff. Incredible.

[Miranda Zickler]

Which is ironically, exactly what Kuyao did to Hitler. I imagine this is just like, he's in a hell of his own making. Right. He has to make up entry after entry after entry, and there has to be some plausibility to it. So he has to research and he has to come up with stories about, you know, Goebbels and women, Eva being mad, how Hitler reacts to various important things. And one of the things that really comes through in the eventual diaries, if you click through them today online, is that Kuya's Hitler is essentially two things. Everything good, he originates. He's completely in charge. He's the leader. He's completely like, he's king shit. Anything bad you might associate with the historic personality of Adolf Hitler. He kind of didn't know about Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh really? All right, well, I mean, to be fair, I feel like that was kind of his entire area. So what are we supposed to associate him with? Nice. You know, getting a large group of people in a public space without any trampling or what?

[Miranda Zickler]

It's bizarre, right? He, he, he's, I mean, I, I, I'm making it, maybe I'm overstating it slightly, but you know, like the famous pogroms of 1938. Like, he's like, I can't believe this is happening. Like I have to find out who's responsible. I mean it, honestly.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh God. And then again I'm like, well, Sarah, think about the way boomers post about, you know, these thirst trap tiktoks where he's like an AI holding a baby.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

And you're just like, what, what is, what is with this sexualizing of, you know, the, the boringest devil.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, I believe this. I looked yesterday at the entry for the start of World War II where the implication very clearly is that the fake incursions by the Polish army, the Nazis basically made up this attack on.

[Adrian Dob]

A, I didn't know that on, on.

[Miranda Zickler]

A radio tower in lice to sort of say, like now we're fighting back, we're shooting back is the famous line from, from Hitler's radio announcement.

[Adrian Dob]

Oh, great, okay.

[Miranda Zickler]

Like this was completely, it was barely even like it was completely half assed. But in the Hitler diaries, familiar Hitler we meet there, Kuyas Hitler basically is like, I can't believe the polls would do this to me basically. So he, he is just like the.

[Adrian Dob]

Most, he's just, he's just very passive and he's just, he's literally just a girl, I guess, in this depiction.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, he's a child who wanders into the middle of a movie. Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

And what is that, what is he supposed to want in this narrative? You know, why is he here running Germany?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, there's a, there's a really, so there's a really interesting duality of a guy who like is about, who knows everything and then knows nothing. Right. Perfectly responsible, perfectly in charge and perfectly innocent. Again, this is why I harped on the fact that like, like for Kuyao and for Heinemann, Hitler is this kind of like image. Right. Like this isn't a flesh and blood person they're interacting with anymore. This is an image that they know from their childhood. And I think there's something infantile in the way Kuyao imagines this guy. There's also kind of a, and the.

[Adrian Dob]

Image of like Big Daddy, who I assume there were like, giant posters of and. And things like that, you know.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. I mean, at least in the beginning of their. In their early childhood. Sure. Yeah. I think. I think there's definitely an element here of, like, men will fake 62 volumes of a Hitler diary rather than going to therapy.

[Adrian Dob]

They will. They literally will. Come on now, you know, so this.

[Miranda Zickler]

Is how this conceit kind of spirals more and more out of control, I guess.

[Adrian Dob]

I do love that. Like, that's the kind of thing that brings us down. Right. Because I feel like if it's in the arena of, like, what was Hitler like? My fantasy of Hitler is that he was like this. Then it's like people will debate it forever because it gets into the realm of just, like, people's projections onto the past and whatever baggage they're dealing with by idolizing murderers.

[Miranda Zickler]

So. History's greatest monster. Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

That, you know, that the truth comes out in these little things and in things that can be substantiated, you know, and in negatives that can't actually be proven, such as it is impossible that. That Hitler was writing on this paper because we are able to date it and it is from after his death.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. There are a couple of failures on the part of the publishing house because they still treat it as a scoop and not as a historical document. They sort of bring in historic. They do bring in important historians. Hugh, Trevor Roper, people like that really are kind of like the specialists on the period, but they will only ever parcel out, like, little drips and drabs. And everyone's always like, yeah, it seems plausible enough.

[Adrian Dob]

Because if the truth is proprietary, then, you know, things get weird.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. And, like, the problem arrives only once people really are able to take in the thing, as once people sort of are able to take in this whole thing in its totality. And the other thing that they do that's a real kind of problem is they sort of push it through over the objection of the actual journalists. So, like, essentially, the publishing house takes over, and it's like, well, we're. We're already, as you say, we're already marketing this as a book, as a thing that we can. Yeah, we can push on.

[Adrian Dob]

Which is also a theme in these stories. Right. That often in house, journalists and editors grow like, hey, I don't think we should do this. And they get overridden if it's, like, too big a story to question too hard.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. And then it. And this is why it collapses in this absolutely spectacular fashion, like the two Issues of the magazine that come out with excerpts before the. Before the report comes out, saying, like this. The press conference starts, says, like, this is absolutely not genuine. And it's this bizarre thing where, like, there's this phone call that the podcast, the German podcast about this starts every episode with, which is Heidemann calling Kuyao, being like, what the fuck happened here? Right? And it's the. It's the weirdest conversation. It's the most uncomfortable conversation because this is a guy who, for three years has been buying this guy's stuff, who's struck up a friendship with this guy. They've bonded over how hard it is to get these diaries out of East Germany, which, in fact, one of them has been creating in his. In his, you know, house this entire time.

[Adrian Dob]

It's a little bit like the journalist and the murderer, you know, where you have the true crime writer who's writing to this guy throughout his trial, being like, oh, man, it's so terrible. I can't believe anyone could ever accuse you of murdering your family. And then he's going home every night to be like, and then the evil, evil man sure did murder his whole family. And I guess that sort of like. Of course, a classic tale of homosociality involves someone lying the whole time.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Basically, in that phone call, you can tell that Heidemann is desperately. He's still completely hooked. Doesn't mean that he didn't possibly steal.

[Adrian Dob]

The money, but, like, he's like, I don't even care about the truth anymore. Just give me another fix of Hitler Diaries, man.

[Miranda Zickler]

So he's like, well, Connie, what happened? What happened? And Ku Yao sort of is like. Is genuinely, like. Seems genuinely to care about his friend, even though that man's predicament is fully due to his own actions. And so he has this very slow way of talking, and he's just like, oh, I'm so sorry. I can't believe what you're going through. And basically, you can tell that Heidemann still seems to think is my read of their conversation, that they got snowed by the East Germans.

[Adrian Dob]

We're all trying to find the guy that did this.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. They're both wearing their. Their hot dog costumes and they're. And they're both trying to find the guys who did this. Problem is, you know, there is no East German connection. This stuff didn't come from East Germany. It came from Kuya's own hand.

[Adrian Dob]

It's an interesting culprit. I mean, given everything else you've said so far.

[Miranda Zickler]

One group that you would suspect of being maniacal enough to fake 62 volumes of Hitler diaries just to make the West German press look bad. You might think of the Stasi in East Germany. Right, right.

[Adrian Dob]

You might think, surely something organized is behind this. Instead of just one incredibly and confusingly motivated guy and one other guy who got in the hole after buying a big Nazi yacht.

[Miranda Zickler]

And capitalism.

[Adrian Dob]

That would be weird.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yes, exactly. There is a kind of system confus here where they kind of are unable to grapple with the weirdness that capitalism is able to unleash in everyday people. And Heidemann is sort of like, oh, wow, it must be aspiring. It must be these nefarious East German generals. And, you know, basically all of East Germany is like, don't look at us. I don't think we were involved in this at all. Anyway, so the whole thing blows up terribly. The magazine is badly tarnished, and these two men go to jail for quite some time. Four years, I believe, which German standard is substantial for what amounts to financial.

[Adrian Dob]

Crimes here, too, for that matter.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, it's true.

[Adrian Dob]

The one time there's an overlap.

[Miranda Zickler]

And. Yeah, and so that's. That's the story of the. Of the Hitler diaries.

[Adrian Dob]

Wow.

[Miranda Zickler]

Kuya doesn't maintain his innocence. He basically was like, yeah, I did this. And then once he left, left prison, started marketing his own fakes. So, like, he'll be like, this is a genuine Kuyao.

[Adrian Dob]

This is an authentic fake.

[Miranda Zickler]

This is an authentic fake. Which then leads to the absurd situation that people are faking Kuyas. So he has to fight. He has to fight these art forgers that are, like, faking in his style. He's like, hey, I'm faking here.

[Adrian Dob]

It is really interesting that there's, like, like, and this is, I think, probably truer of Americans than in other countries, but it. It seems pretty true of humans in a general way. Like, such an allure of the con artist where we want to be close to con artists and we will buy a fake fake in that way. And, like. And then you end up with, like, yeah, yeah, fake con artists. You know, like, apparently the guy whose story was the basis of Catch me if you can, that's right. Frank Abnergale, who, you know, arguably, I think there's, like, quite a lot of evidence, quite a lot of evidence suggesting that he didn't pull off, you know, most of the more ambitious scams that he wrote about later, and very little evidence supporting the idea that he did.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

Again, like, everything I know is. Is very, like, US Centric. But here I think it's like we recognize on some level that the American character is the con artist, you know, and that, like, how do you.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

End up in charge of a country that doesn't belong to you? It's like, well, you. You make up a great story about it, sonny boy, and then you get people to buy into it. And then if you want somebody's stuff, you say, hey, stop attacking me. And then you. You kill them.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, I think. And I think there's a version of this here too, where in some way the diaries speak to the kind of desire to be able to deal with the Nazi past in a way that feels objective and non neurotic.

[Adrian Dob]

Right.

[Miranda Zickler]

But what comes out in the story is that everyone is out of their mind.

[Adrian Dob]

What happens to Haidaman after prison?

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, so he is just kind of embittered. Thinks he was railroaded.

[Adrian Dob]

Don't even ask him about that. Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

He participates in various sort of retrospectives on it. He briefly appears in a movie that was made of this story called Shtonk. And basically, I think, is a consultant for. There's another British show where Jonathan Pryce plays, I believe, Kuya. And so I think he's a consultant on that, but maintains basically he was railroaded and that he really didn't do anything wrong and that he. That he ended up sort of holding the bag for people at the top of his. Of his magazine who were just embarrassed and had egg on their face and needed to find a bad guy. And he dies in 2024. He died last December.

[Adrian Dob]

And I mean, did people have a sense of, like, outrage about these being fake? Was it more of an alleged comedy story when the truth came out? Like, how did the public, public feel about this? Did they feel like they had been conned in a way that really hurt?

[Miranda Zickler]

So I think there's just so much whiplash about the. Whoa, there's Hitler Diaries. We've never heard about this. Whoa. Now they're fake, right?

[Adrian Dob]

Right. I mean, if you had it like an especially busy couple weeks, you would never have noticed.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. You're like, what did, what did I miss? I was in the jungle looking for mango.

[Adrian Dob]

I'm a medical student. What, what, what's this I hear?

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, one. One thing we know is that like, basically a lot of other media people were furious with the magazine for doing this and saying, like, this is really a kind of journalism and a kind of research into the Nazi period, that.

[Adrian Dob]

Really, it's journalism as memorabilia hunting, I guess, really yeah, which.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, exactly.

[Adrian Dob]

Then. And then, of course, there's, you know, the pretty obvious ethical question of, like, you know, if you drive up the street value of Nazi goods, then who ultimately benefits? Old Nazis.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. So because the moment these were revealed as fakes, d' Erstein obviously stopped publishing them and locked away the actual diaries which still exist in their vault. They then allowed them to be digitized at the end of the 21st century, when basically everyone who had had egg on their face had basically retired or died. And so, basically, for a long time, I think people didn't entirely understand to what extent what Kuya had written was this kind of whitewashing of Hitler and really amounted almost to Holocaust denial. Right. And so in the 21st century, people have kind of been pushing, asking, like, well, why were people so taken in by this? And being like, well, there might have been content reasons, too. It was not just about the thrill of the hunt. It was not just about. About the scoop. It was about this image of Hitler that clearly was Kuyao's own, probably. That was definitely one that appealed to the weirdos he tended to rip off, but that also appealed to a guy who was supposed to be a pretty neutral reporter and journalist, and to his left of center, decidedly left of center magazine that he was writing for the Reckoning with this. This farce sort of happened in stages. And inverting the famous Marx dictum, rather than being tragedy repeated as farce, it was farce kind of repeated as tragedy. And sort of people being like, really, there's something about the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past where this diary really marks kind of a wound or a moment where we can tell. Tell that this project has stalled or failed or is a lot more. A lot stranger than sort of 1980s West Germans sort of tended to want themselves to believe.

[Adrian Dob]

And it's interesting that it seems like with the content of the journals coming out, that was, if I'm understanding you correctly, kind of the first moment when the public was able to be like, oh, I guess it looks like actually this was a lie or this was a hoax that was so valuable not just for its historical significance or just because at a certain point, there was so much money on the line that nobody wanted to look into it too closely, but also because it allowed people to be Hitler apologists.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's. There's two things, right? There's the. There's the apologia, and then there is the fact that, like, I mean. I mean, this is. This is a Hard thing to kind of talk about. But post war Germany has made memory culture a big part of its justification. It's sort of self justification, right. We are not like them. That's why you should let us back into NATO. This is why you should let us into the eu. This is why you shouldn't be freaked out if we vacation near you or buy the auto plant near you or whatever. Right. The problem is that, that, that also that memory culture also made Nazi atrocities into an export item. Der Stern was almost certainly thinking of this as like, wow, we are going to get rich from all these Americans, Brits, Australians, Spaniards, French people.

[Adrian Dob]

Right? All these lovely sunburned white supremacists will come flocking to our shores.

[Miranda Zickler]

It's hard to disentangle a genuine desire to work through the Nazi past from the fact that you get noticed as a German magazine or publication or historian, whatever it is, when you talk about that period. Until very recently, the way to get nominated for a foreign film Oscar for a German production was obviously to talk about the Nazi years. Right. Like it's not to say that some of these aren't good movies. It's not to say that there aren't. That some of them aren't artistically significant. But it does mean that there's this very tricky kind of undecidability between commercialism and I think genuine attempt to kind of meet history, to sort of like meet historical responsibilities and not to sort of kind of close your eyes to it.

[Adrian Dob]

Do you find yourself thinking about these topics because kind of looking around today and do you find yourself sort of thinking about at all the trajectory of just what Americans, especially young Americans, I'm kind of thinking are going to go through because you work in academia. And so there is this, which is a weird because it's a place that the rest of the country is baselessly speculating about a lot of the time. But B, where it's like, I would imagine the question of what it's going to be like to continue to grow up for people who you can't remember the world being any different than what it is now perhaps comes up a lot.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, it does. At the same time, your listeners may not know this about me, but I. I wrote a book on cancel culture anecdotes.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

Quite recently there you can sort of tell that fake stories or folkloric stories about language wars, about easily triggered college sophomores can be absolutely untrue, but travel extremely widely and be extremely effective. So honestly, I'm not particularly shocked by my students ability or Inability to deal with facts and history. I think that there are some methods that are easier for them than others. There's sometimes a readiness to believe things that they shouldn't. But I think it's far more interesting that people who put a great degree of faith in legacy media, in local news, in news magazines with glossy covers on them, can be fed a bunch of bullshit, too. Right. And so in some way, to me, the Hitler Diaries are kind of emblematic of that part of it. The fact that, like, there's a lot of disinformation on the Internet. The Internet has led to really epistemic collapse on several issues. That having been said, it is interesting that we cannot, therefore, we can't draw from that the conclusion that somehow print journalism is immune from that. Not that many people are saying that, but there are. But in some way, people who take themselves to be immune are most at risk from being sold a load of goods. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

But it's like, if Hearst could have used AI, he would have, but instead he just had to use, honestly, the better technology of having people draw something that hadn't happened.

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. The technology of lying, you know?

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. I feel mixed on this, Right. Because you look at social media and I look at my relationship with social media, and, like, probably adults already all know that we're like, you know, we've just become lab rats and all this, and we have such a hard time putting down our phones. And then we're like, the kids. The kids won't put down their phones. And it's like. Like, we're the ones who won't put down our phones. And also, restaurants make you order on your phone, which I understand probably helps in this time of even more brutal margins than usual. But, God, I love menus.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dob]

And sometimes it's nice to go to a restaurant without your phone, you know, but anyway, I'm. I swear to God, I'm not auditioning for a segment on 60 Minutes.

[Miranda Zickler]

I was gonna say, you do make. Do an amazing Andy Rooney.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

But at the same time, you are cool. Correct. That I think that this is the thing, right. Like, with the diaries, too, there is this idea like, oh, the young are losing their connection to this history, but then the people who have the connection with that history can be.

[Adrian Dob]

Are insane.

[Miranda Zickler]

Are insane, and can be completely snowed by this stuff where it's like, well, shouldn't his initials at least be right on the COVID Right? Like, someone could have looked at the COVID and be like, huh?

[Adrian Dob]

It's like, why did he want this to be true? What's wrong with you?

[Miranda Zickler]

Exactly. Right. And so in some way the projection onto the young often hides our own insecurities. And I think some of that is true too. Right. The 80s were a time when like this historic memory was receding and you know, where the people who had made the decision were starting to die off. So there is an anxiety here about, well, we have to make sure that the historical record gets transmitted. Well, maybe not like this. Right. That desire, while laudable, can also make you extreme, seemly susceptible to disinformation, to lies, to hoaxing, and to just. Yeah, just whack ass. I mean, it's not like this is. The diaries are the tip of an iceberg of forgery. Right. Like Huyau sold people a, a world in a kind of rose colored Nazi version that these people, these men really went for. And some of them were like, were dyed in the wool like neo Nazis. Some of them, like Heideman, were not. Right. And yet they, there was something there that they desired. Right. And in some way I think that that is something that that story is all about, about this, these projections about, about these secret desires and, and, and what they do with people.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. And also how, you know, mediums or media, I guess, change the way so that none of them are intrinsically more virtuous or more fake proof than any others. I would argue, and I feel like we're arguing and again, it's like it comes down to incentives really. I think the number of incentives at play and the level of resistance that exists in the delivery system for facts. Yeah. I guess it's. One thing that's nice about today is that we have all spent so much time forced to hear the inner thought thoughts of Trump that the street value of more of them would be like one penny.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, right.

[Adrian Dob]

If you think about like a secret Trump diary, I don't know about you, but I'm like, oh my God, no, thank you. I've already read several Trump diaries and that wasn't even on purpose.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, well, we, exactly, we just look at his true social. Right.

[Adrian Dob]

Like when he was mad at Kristen Stewart. I mean I, I really like this story because I feel like it's just messy. It's just like people behaving in ways that like no matter how fake the actual artifact is, are betraying the truth the entire time and the truth about their innermost desires.

[Miranda Zickler]

It seems like for a story about a hoax, it is the most guileless story imaginable. Everyone is super genuine while also lying their asses off and probably skimming money.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. And everyone is revealing so much about what they actually think and feel and the ugliness and the messiness of that. And yeah, yeah. When I think about, like, why would someone. What are people trying to keep if they try and keep Hitler as somebody who didn't know about it? Because that's kind of like saying that Ted Bundy didn't kill anyone. And it's like, well, then he's just a guy from Tacoma who took a really long time to finish college and why would we even be talking about him, you know? But I feel like, as with Trump, it's, you know, who's just the fascist, who I know most intimately from my day to day life, that like. Like, maybe the appeal comes from the fact that there is, I will grant, a form of charisma from being in the presence of somebody who has to keep selling themselves to you and selling you this idea of, like, believe in me and love me, and I will protect you from whatever you want to be afraid of. And that. That. The feeling that we get from that, that some people seem to have genuine addictions to is something that maybe we want to say, like, it's. It's fine to want that. It's. It's okay. A person can. Can offer that and it not be at anyone's expense. And it's like, no, it is because you only get that feeling from choosing a victim to then have everybody decide to scapegoat and kill. You know, that's how that works. And I think that's. You know, I'm no political scientist, but I'm pretty sure that's how fascism works. Are they any good to read? Like, what was it like reading the Hitler diaries?

[Miranda Zickler]

No, they are not Okay. I mean, again, you see why. You understand why they've been. Why they were so heavily exiled. There's just so much stuff that just like, oh, my God, this is so boring.

[Adrian Dob]

What a strange journey this has been. Yeah. Thank you for telling me this tale and taking me by the hand through 62 volumes of Hook's diary. It is, you know, say what you will, it's an impressive number of volumes of anything to fake. And, boy, did his hand probably hurt.

[Miranda Zickler]

I know.

[Adrian Dob]

And no matter how ridiculous of a situation you found yourself caught up in, it's probably less embarrassing than this.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yep, I think so.

[Sarah Marshall]

So there you go.

[Miranda Zickler]

I. I never have have to wake up, be like, wait, I did what? I got super high and did what?

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah, exactly. A high person could simply, simply cannot write 62 forked diaries and.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right.

[Adrian Dob]

Sharing.

[Miranda Zickler]

That's right.

[Adrian Dob]

Adrian, thank you so much for coming and for telling me this story and where can we find you and more of your work and what are you, what are you been up to?

[Miranda Zickler]

Well, you can always find me on my podcast in Bed with the. Right. With the wonderful Maura Donegan who's been a frequent guest on this podcast as well. You can find my writing on Substack where I talk about a lot of German stuff, but not just. Also just a lot of American things these days. And that's Adrian dob.substack.com yeah. And otherwise I'm in various, you know, media when they'll have me. Me. Nothing big to preview right now, but yeah, in general, that is, that is where I am.

[Adrian Dob]

Fantastic. Yeah. And just. And thank you for getting together to talk about history. I always love it and I always love getting into these strange little corners with you. And you did a bonus episode too on this show, I think, last year on Mazes and Monsters, the fear mongering Dungeons and Dragons novel. And that was so fun. And the movie was starring Tom Hanks.

[Miranda Zickler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, thank you for having me. I do think it's a cool story and it's a, it's an. It really. Yeah, it's one of those. It's crazy, hard to believe. But then once you look into it, you're like, it really feels like it's a stronger portrait of a particular time and in a particular place than if those diaries had turned out to be genuine.

[Adrian Dob]

Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I love about these hoax stories. Everyone in there is telling the truth much more genuinely than they do at any other time in their life sometimes.

[Miranda Zickler]

I think that's right. I think that's right.

[Sarah Marshall]

And that was our episode. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you to Adrienne Daub for being our amazing guest. Adria, please come back anytime you like. Thank you to Corinne Ruff for editing and thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. We'll see you next time.