Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• One of the largest forgeries in Nazi-adjacent history duped multiple news outlets and netted the forger millions of dollars.
• A 60-volume diary attributed to Hitler was published in part by a German magazine and London’s Sunday Times before being outed as fake.
• A known forger and an unscrupulous journalist were behind the spectacular hoax.

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com

The press release started a frenzy almost instantly. Publications around the world couldn’t believe it—did Stern, a German current affairs magazine, really have 60 previously unknown volumes of Adolf Hitler’s personal diaries?

When Stern called a press conference just a couple of days later to reveal its acquisition of the diaries—confirming to those gathered that they’d been expertly authenticated—London’s Sunday Times was present to pony up a sizable amount of cash for the serialization rights to publish the lost prose for their audience.

The prose wasn’t lost, though. It was fake. And it didn’t take long for the world to figure out what the two publications didn’t.

The views Hitler shared in his purported diaries, allegedly written from 1932 through 1945, painted him in an extremely generous light, stating that he didn’t support the Holocaust and believed the Third Reich went too far in the persecution of Jews: “The measures begun on the first against Jewish institutions are too violent for me; I immediately warned the men responsible for them. Some of them had to be expelled from the party.”

It was all too clearly a hoax, one so obvious that those in attendance at the Hamburg press conference expressed immediate skepticism. Within two weeks of the announcement, the diaries were proven fake using methods that should have been employed months before.

But long before the truth came to light, the Stern editors were rather intrigued when magazine reporter Gerd Heidemann brought forward an offer from a Stuttgart antiques dealer named Konrad Fischer. The 60-volume set was supposedly lost near the end of World War II when an airplane crashed, and the diary then sat hidden in a hayloft for decades. But it was now available for a mere 9.3 million Deutsche Marks (or $3.7 million American dollars). The magazine shelled out the money—which Heidemann skimmed off in an act that eventually earned him a jail sentence of over four years—and then sold the serialization rights to Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times for over $1 million.

The press conference launched the cover headline “Hitler’s Diaries Discovered” to sell the story. “There are 60 diaries, they look a bit like school exercise books but with a hard cover,” Peter Wickman, Stern’s London editor, told BBC News. “They have seals outside with a swastika and an eagle and inside of course, Hitler’s very spidery gothic handwriting.”

Of course, Hitler’s very spidery gothic handwriting wasn’t his at all. It technically wasn’t written by “Fischer” either.

That’s because Konrad Fischer didn’t exist—his name was really Konrad Kujau, a known forger of Nazi memorabilia. Some of his diary forging was clever. He provided forged documents and submitted them as genuine so that when authenticators compared the diaries to other documents Hitler supposedly touched, the handwriting would be a match. But other parts of Kujau’s scheme weren’t so clever.

Kujau wrote the forged diaries between 1981 and 1983 and set them during the years following the beginning of the Holocaust. Yet the writings didn’t include anything about the broad massacre of the Jewish people in Europe nor any mention of concentration camps. There were some other simple errors in Kujau’s hoax. The diaries were made with paper, glue, and ink that were all produced after 1945, the year of Hitler’s death. Tea was found to have been used to age the bindings. And the forgery of Hitler’s signature was so poorly done that even non-experts weren’t fooled by it.

The text also contained simple factual errors, like the inclusion of news Hitler couldn’t have known and many modern-day phrases. The gothic lettering preferred by Hitler confused Kujau, and he accidentally wrote the initials FH on the covers instead of AH.

For as successful as it was, the hoax was alarmingly unsophisticated.

Was the diary created as an effort to rewrite the history of one of humanity’s major atrocities? “The decisive thing is that the publisher and Kujau and Heidemann [and] the journalistic highest level of the Stern magazine were interested in the issue itself: to rewrite the history of the Third Reich,” Hajo Funke, a political scientist from the Free University of Berlin told the Australian Broadcasting Company. “You’ll see the intention of all of them who were a part of it was to relativize [Hitler’s] deeds—and this is a scandal.”

With immediate skepticism meeting the announcement of the diaries’ existence, detailed analysis quickly exposed the discrepancies. To say nothing of the poor forging job, a surviving German officer close to Hitler admitted that the leader didn’t keep a personal diary and, following a 1944 assassination attempt, was no longer able to write.

Kujau, who confessed to the con, later said he based his forgery on large sections of a book of Hitler’s speeches and writings that he personalized by adding fabrications about everything from a struggle with flatulence and bad breath to details of Hitler’s relationship with girlfriend Eva Braun.

In the aftermath of the forgery’s revelation, blame was easy to spread. While both Kujau and Heidemann were convicted and handed jail sentences of over four years, many within Stern and the Sunday Times also lost their jobs. Renowned historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, having initially authenticated the diaries, was disgraced.

The authentication process was botched as well, with Stern telling Trevor-Roper it had completed chemical analysis of the paper (it hadn’t) and Trevor-Roper admitting that he largely believed the diaries because of the sheer volume of pages, according to Britannica.

Heidemann claimed he was duped, but Kujau said in his confession—which he wrote in the style of Hitler—that the reporter knew all about the hoax. Kujau served three years of his sentence. When he got out of prison, he began a new career selling “genuine forgeries” of famous paintings.