--- title: Lessons from my old paper’s greatest humiliation description: The Hitler Diaries hoax still has resonance 40 years on --- [![logo (2)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(2).svg)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/) [![logo (3)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(3).svg)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/) - [Home](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/en-gb/) - [Advisory](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/advisory) - [121 Consulting](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/121-consulting) - [Content Review](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/contentreview) - [Testimonials](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/testimonial) - [Contact](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/contact-us) # Lessons from my old paper’s greatest humiliation [Alan Hunter](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter) 18 September 2026 9 min read **The Hitler Diaries hoax still has resonance 40 years on** I worked at The Sunday Times for more than 20 years and nobody ever mentioned the Hitler Diaries. It was not a paper that was shy about talking about its triumphs. We did “victory rolls” aplenty surrounding the work exposing the damage caused by the morning sickness drug Thalidomide, the distortions of the MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield and the cheating of the cyclist Lance Armstrong, to name but three. By contrast, we never paused to consider the paper’s humiliations. You might say it’s quite natural to want to gloss over things that go wrong. But, [as I’ve written before](https://tomorrowspublisher.today/editors-picks/time-for-a-media-festival-of-failure/), there’s often a lot to learn from one’s failures. None of which was greater for The Sunday Times than the publication in 1983 of the purported Hitler Diaries, whose English language rights the paper bought from Stern, the German news magazine. Within days of publication they were revealed as unsophisticated forgeries, written in modern notebooks with content copied out from a book of Hitler’s speeches. I said nobody ever mentioned this rather big elephant in our “speaking truth to power” room but that’s not quite true. One senior executive at News UK, the publisher of The Sunday Times, said to me after I had left the paper that “every single journalist – and not just here – should read [Selling Hitler](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Selling-Hitler-Story-Diaries/dp/009979151X) \[the bestselling book about the scandal by Robert Harris\] once a year as a reminder of what can go wrong”. I thought about that comment this week when listening to [a new BBC podcast](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001z66c) about the affair by Andrew Hunter Murray. I raced through its 10 episodes in a couple of days. It’s an easy and engaging listen about how not one, but two publications were duped by a forger who only really started with his work when it looked like he had a possible buyer for the “diaries” in Stern. Somehow he managed to convince everyone at the magazine and Hugh Trevor-Roper, a distinguished historian who was acting as an adviser for The Sunday Times, that they were genuine. Huge amounts of money changed hands for this global exclusive. The facts of the case have long been well known – Selling Hitler was published in 1986 – but nonetheless I think it still has lessons for journalism, especially in a period where our trustworthiness is under question in ways that our forebears in the early 1980s could barely comprehend. Some of them might seem obvious, but that doesn’t mean they are not worth restating. They weren’t obvious to two of the great journalistic institutions after all. Start from a position of disbelief. Hunter Murray says of the diaries that “the story is about how people deceive each other, but also how we deceive ourselves”. He’s right. The world is full of stories that are too good to be true, but for some reason we pursue them beyond the limits of credulity. How likely does it seem to you that Hitler’s diaries, which nobody saw him write, not only could have survived the war and an inferno after the plane carrying them crashed, but also were kept under wraps for another 35 years before coming to light? Seems a little implausible, no? As journalists we have to insulate ourselves from that and, by and large, we do. But I think in a world of disinformation, we need to redouble our efforts and check absolutely everything. Never take anything on trust. I’m always amazed that when there is a story about a topic I really know about, there is always an error that makes me doubt the whole story. We have to get over this tendency in a world of abundant information. Check, check and check again. Listening to the buzzing bees. I studied history at university and there was a book we were guided towards about how to approach the subject by a historian called EH Carr. He advised that you should always look for the “bees buzzing in the bonnet” of every historian. By that, he meant their work was influenced by their politics, their prejudices, their background, their view of the world and we needed to take account of that. Likewise for journalists. The Stern journalist who led the push to print the diaries was, let us say, Nazi adjacent. He used to host reunions of senior Nazis on Göring’s old boat, for goodness sake. It should come as no surprise that the diaries presented the horrors of the Third Reich as something that happened to Hitler, rather than being directed by him. The simple question “who is pushing this story?” should have run the loudest of alarm bells at Stern. Listen to what the experts tell you. This relates to the two points above. A key doubt about the diaries before publication was that a dye found in the notebooks was not produced until after the war. This should have disproved their authenticity. But the Nazi-adjacent Stern journalist said “no, no, the experts have got it wrong – this dye was developed during the war, but not publicised”. This kind of trust-me-they-don’t-know-what-they-are-talking-about argument is deployed in newsrooms far too often. Sometimes it’s right, but editors need to be really cognisant of how journalism’s contrary tendency can also be to its disadvantage. Take time to interrogate the expert advice. It’s never too late. At a certain point in a story’s production cycle it often seems like it is like an aircraft reaching the point of no return on the runway. The editor has been pitched, check calls have been made, pages designed – this story is ready to go. On the Friday before The Sunday Times published its scoop, Trevor-Roper seemed to be having doubts. But at that point momentum had taken over and the paper’s bullish proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was already committed. In truth, though, it’s never too late to pull a story. That’s what should have happened then. That it didn’t should serve as an enduring lesson to everyone in the profession. Ps I’m co-hosting a Revenue Strategy Study Tour of London’s most innovative news organisation on October 20-21. I can guarantee that it’ll be a stimulating couple of days and delegates (tourists?) will come back fizzing with ideas. Visit the WAN-IFRA website [here](https://wan-ifra.org/events/dme-2026/?pagetype=special) for further details. ## Next blog post ## [News needs the focus of B2B publishers](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/news-needs-the-focus-of-b2b-publishers) [Read more](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/news-needs-the-focus-of-b2b-publishers) ![logo (2)](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/hubfs/Assets%20HBM%20Theme/Images/logo%20(2).svg) Hunter Brunt Media Ltd. Company number: 13546179 Registered address: Aston House, Cornwall Avenue, Church End, London N3 1LF - [Privacy Policy](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/privacy-policy) ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Alan Hunter", "url" : "https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter" }, "dateModified" : "2026-11-06T17:16:03.859Z", "datePublished" : "2026-09-18T16:00:00.000Z", "headline" : "Lessons from my old paper’s greatest humiliation", "mainEntityOfPage" : { "@id" : "https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/lessons-from-my-old-papers-greatest-humiliation", "@type" : "WebPage" }, "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject" } } } ```