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Selling Hitler

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Selling Hitler

By: Robert Harris
Narrated by: David Rintoul
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About this listen

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Selling Hitler by Robert Harris, read by David Rintoul.

Spring 1983: it seemed that one of the most startling discoveries of the century had been made, and that one of the world's most sought after documents had finally come to light - the private diaries of Adolf Hitler.What followed was a fiasco of fakery, greed, the duping of experts, and the exchange of extraordinary sums of money for world-wide publishing rights. But that was just the beginning of the story. . .

©1986 Robert Harris (P)2018 Penguin Audio 20th Century Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions Military Modern Politics & Government True Crime War

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Critic reviews

A stunning and compelling story of human folly, duplicity and wishful thinking. Brilliantly researched and narrated, Selling Hitler is as fascinating and as telling today as it was forty years ago (William Boyd)
Most relevant  
very good, very interesting and packed with facts
great performance. unusual story but the fact it's true is amazing

excellent

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Excellent story and narration. This true story has a more intricate plot than some of his fictional books!

Another hit from Harris

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A thriller as well written as Robert Harris’s later fictional works, this is a captivating story about an infamous event. Brilliantly read, this is a superb non-fiction audio book

A thriller about greed, credulity and the fascination with the Third Reich

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Written by Robert Harris & read by the Scottish actor David Rintoul. This is an excellent audiobook of one the most infamous hoaxes of modern history. What will become apparent is men & it really is a drama about men (women are conspicuous by their absence) who ought to have known better. The main characters are motivated by the baser instincts of rapaciousness & egoism. Any attempt at human decency is undermined by complacency, ineptitude & sheer stupidity. A well researched account which results in an unattractive portrayal of the dramatis personae. However a fantastic listen!

An excellent audiobook from the BBC

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I was aware of the Hitler Diaries fiasco in the early 1980s but only to the extent that I vaguely knew someone had got egg on their face but wasn’t sure who or why. Never could I have imagined how many people, who should have known very much better, found themselves coated from head to foot in a chicken run’s worth of egg - and for no good reason other than greed, hubris, fantasising and downright carelessness!
You kind of know it’s going to be funny when the forger, having discovered an aptitude for falsifying, gets booked by the police for forging .... 27 Deutschmarks worth of luncheon vouchers. Undeterred our man hones his skills and starts churning out Hitler ‘art work’ and ‘poetry’. His audacity is matched only by the gullibility of his buyers. After several twists and turns he meets a Stern journalist suffering from the lethal combination of being perennially in debt, unable to convert his journalistic research into readable prose and therefore missing out on the career trajectory he thinks he deserves, and neo nazism. He’s already virtually bankrupted himself by buying Goring’s dilapidated old yacht but lives for the day he can touch or own something penned by the Fuhrer. Diaries churned out to order by the forger from Stuttgart answer all his prayers: his employer, the downmarket mag Stern shells out DM 9 million for the purchase, and he lifts a hefty “commission” for himself before handing over the cash to the forger. Well before publication date the hack is living in a posh apartment with a separate suite for Hitler and other 3rd Reich memorabilia, showering champagne all over the place and refusing to do any other work.
Management egg him on and eventually start trying to syndicate the diaries to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Newsweek. More twists and turns and in the end, inevitably, the whole edifice of fantasy and falsehood comes crashing down. To a man they all make a vital mistake, namely never getting the documents properly verified and each bunch of people wherever they are in the hierarchy taking the word of the last one down. When eventually the magazine does permit some attempts at authentication, they somehow manage to submit an already forged Hitler signature against which to compare the newly forged ones. By this time even our very own eminence Hugh Trevor-Roper has pronounced them genuine and shared in the egg.
Robert Harris turns some meticulous research into a rip-roaring yarn with some real laugh-out-loud moments. E.g. the forger using post war paper over which he throws tea, binding it with a synthetic cord and stamping Hitler’s initials with a letraset type device on the front - only, he gets one of the initials wrong. Do any of the publisher’s Board members notice this? The heck they do! At one point Stern’s newly appointed Finance Director is ordered to find hundreds of thousands of D-Marks NOW - when all the banks are shut. He gets a taxi to the airport where Deutsche Bank has a branch open, stuffs a bag full which the journalist then carries off into the night on a flight to Stuttgart. When the golden eggs represented by the diaries start running out because they’ve reached 1945, the forger mysteriously finds some nudes, a third version of Mein Kampf and an opera penned by the Fuhrer. Does anyone stop to wonder how a man who was notoriously lazy, constantly laid up with some hypochondriac ailment and supposedly running an empire and waging wars found time for all this artistic output? No, they saw only dollar signs.
Under the laughs and sheer crazy incredibility of this tale runs the rather sinister thread of how much Nazi memorabilia still seems to have a market, all over the world, with aficionados gazing at their acquisitions wistfully in purpose-built vaults in their luxurious mansions, while people who should have been long dead or incarcerated keep popping up in the narrative, living comfortably in Switzerland, Spain and Argentina.
But a VERY good, gripping read!

Riveting!

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I have enjoyed reading Robert Harris for more years than I care to admit to! Now that I can listen to them in the car, as a bedtime story etc I enjoy them even more. Although I thoroughly enjoyed this story I did feel at times that it was being dragged out. Short story long if you know what I mean, but I certainly do not regret buying it and I listened right to the end.

Another good story

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I possibly hadn’t read the blurb fully and so was not expecting a non-fiction account of the Hitler diaries fiasco. However the incompetence, ill-timing, bad judgements and naivety of the protagonists make for a totally compelling story.

Unexpectedly engrossing

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An amazing insight into the whole story of the forged Hitler diaries. A riveting read.

Compelling!

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book, excellent narration. well worth giving it some time as it's a slow start.

fascinating listening

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David Rintoul brings the words to life a masterpiece of story narration, Robert Harris takes the listener through a complicated and compelling journey gathering the myriad strands of intrigue and events that demonstrate the human frailty of money, greed and avarice, an excellent storyline delivered simply.

An excellent overview of an intriguing story.

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