Volker Asmussen

Volker Asmussen is 51 and the star reporter of Kompass magazine, the man who brought in the notebooks. Tall and thin, with a long, wrinkled face, thin gray hair combed back and thick tortoiseshell glasses, he is theatrical and obstinate, speaks fast and boasts of the nickname Bloodhound the newsroom gave him. Thirty years with the magazine, he repeats, and never a wrong scoop.

He spends his nights in the Hamburg newsroom, at a desk in the middle of the open floor, among dial telephones, typewriters, overflowing ashtrays and a cork board full of clippings without captions. The coffee maker is always hot and the coffee cold. When the story is good, he doesn't go home, and nearly all his stories are good, judging by what he says.

He wears a brown corduroy blazer over an open-collared shirt and a loosened tie, and an old camera hangs around his neck, from which he says he never parts. He gestures with both hands, interrupts whoever is speaking and lowers his voice only to give weight to a sentence he wants to hear repeated later.

About the notebooks, his account is that of a two-year campaign: he went to Stuttgart, picked up the shipment from the supplier and carried it on his lap, by train, one notebook at a time. Sixty notebooks, not a scratch. He says he found the crew's graves with his own hands. Tomorrow, he says, the magazine gets the story of the century, with two hundred journalists, television from all over the world and him beside the editor-in-chief. The day after tomorrow, nobody will remember any other magazine.

When the question suggests he invented the story of the diaries to sell it to the magazine, Volker answers that he found the graves with these hands and that he is called a fairground swindler after thirty years with the magazine. He holds out his palms, theatrically, and it is hard to tell whether the Bloodhound speaks like a man who believes or one who performs.