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London, October 5, 1997

Sir,
I N Helsingin Sanomat,September 28, your journalist Sole Lahtinen wrote an article “Käsikirjoituksen aitoudesta epäilyjä” in which he stated (see enclosed photocopy [not posted on this site]):

“A controversial historian David Irving supplied ‘diaries’, which were at first supposed to be written by Adolf Hitler, to the international press for a considerable sum of money at the beginning of the 80s. Later it turned out that they were made by an antique dealer Konrad Kujau and they were fakes.”

This is a total reversal of the facts. May I ask you to be so good as to publish a correction?

Two Germans, Gerd Heidemann (a well-known Der Stern journalist) and Konrad Kujau, a common forger, were later convicted for faking the Adolf Hitler diaries. When they were shown to me in 1982 I at once detected that they were forgeries. Der Stern (Hamburg) and The Sunday Times (London) had however paid between them $5 million for the diaries, and they decided to publish the “diaries”.

At Der Stern’spress conference in Hamburg announcing the publication, on April 25, 1983 (see the enclosed photo by Associated Press [not posted on this site]) I was the only person to denounce the diaries as forgeries, as the AP caption makes plain.

Yours faithfully,
David Irving