Forged Hitler diaries to me made accessible in national archives

Forty years after the publication of the forged Hitler diaries in Germany's Stern magazine, they will be handed over to the Federal Archives later this year and made accessible there.

The move was announced jointly by the Bertelsmann publishing group and the German authorities on Monday.

In 1983, the magazine of the Hamburg publishing house Gruner + Jahr published what were purported to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler. They were proven to be forgeries a few days later. It was one of the biggest media scandals of the German Federal Republic.

Federal Archive President Michael Hollmann said the forged diaries showed a "brazen attempt to give the brutal crimes of National Socialism a human veneer that resonated with society in the 1980s."

Accordingly, the documents will be kept at the Koblenz site in perpetuity and made accessible as part of the archive's legal mandate.

The Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) is also examining the forged diaries. Bertelsmann says it wants to obtain as objective a picture as possible of how and why it was possible for the forgeries to be published.