ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 15, 1996 TAG: 9610150129
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
Henri Nannen, founder and publisher of the German magazine Stern, whose distinguished career was tarnished in a hoax over Hitler's ``lost diaries,'' died of cancer Sunday in Hamburg, Germany.
Nannen, 82, was one of the founders of Stern in 1948. In 32 years as editor, he helped make it one of the most popular magazines in Europe. But the magazine suffered a stunning setback to its reputation in 1983, when it published the ``Hitler Diaries.'' Stern retired soon afterward.
The magazine announced on April 22, 1983, that one of its reporters, Gerd Heidemann, had gained access to the documents through his contacts with unrepentant Nazis. The ``diaries'' had supposedly been saved in 1945 from the wreckage of a burning plane in eastern Germany.
Boasting that it had achieved ``the biggest journalistic coup of the postwar period,'' Stern rushed parts of the supposed diaries into print after reportedly paying more than $3 million for them, even though the announcement of the discovery had prompted skepticism.
Within days, tests in police laboratories and examinations by government archivists established that the so-called diaries could not possibly be those of Hitler, who in any event had never been known to keep a diary. It turned out that the Stern reporter, Heidemann, had been duped by a Stuttgart forger, Konrad Kujau.
- The New York Times
LENGTH: Short : 35 linesby CNB