Black Light
Cases unlock in order, like levels. This is case 145 of 200.
Hamburg, Sunday, 24 April 1983, 9 pm. In a locked room at the weekly magazine Kompass, sixty black-covered notebooks wait in a safe: the "secret diaries of the dictator" who led Germany into war.
Tomorrow at 11 am, editor-in-chief Ulrich Brenneke will announce them to the world in front of two hundred journalists. The magazine paid 9 million marks for them, in secret, over two years.
At 7 pm, the transcriber put a page under the ultraviolet lamp in the photo lab, and the paper did something that 1945 paper does not do. Brenneke called the police before he called the printer.
Three people know these notebooks from the inside. One of them knows what year they were written.
Locked room at a Hamburg newsroom, 1983, with dozens of black notebooks and an ultraviolet lamp.
Suspects
Volker AsmussenStar reporter of Kompass magazine, who bought the notebooks, 51
Lothar BrücknerMilitary antiques dealer from Stuttgart, supplier of the notebooks, 45
Ilse WendlandPaleographerpaleographer Scholar who reads and dates old handwriting and scripts, especially medieval and early modern manuscripts. who transcribes the Gothic scriptGothic script Angular German style of handwriting and printing, widely used until the 1940s and hard to read today. of the notebooks, 38
The real case
The Hitler Diaries hoax
Hamburg, West Germany, 1983
Read the real case