The German magazine Stern had a journalist who was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia. Gerd Heidemann was so avid that he once bought Hermann Göring's yacht and restored it. During that project he dated Göring's daughter and met a lot of former Nazis. So when Heidemann managed to get his hands on 60 volumes in Hitler's handwriting, his bosses were inclined to believe these were diaries Hitler kept from 1932 to 1945. A renowned historian examined the diaries and their provenance and believed they were genuine. So Stern paid an enormous amount of money for the volumes in 1983. As word got around, Rupert Murdoch paid for the right to publish the dairies in his British newspaper The Sunday Times.
But as The Sunday Times announced their world exclusive, a day before Stern published the story of the diaries' discovery, doubt were starting to add up about the authenticity of the books. Find out how the fake diaries was unearthed and who actually wrote them at BBC Culture. -via Strange Company