Digitised recordings of conversations with protagonists of 20th century conflict – including undercover conversations with high-ranking Nazis who fled to semi-hiding in South America – will be released ahead of the 80th anniversary of Germany’s surrender in World War Two.
They form part of the Gerd Heidemann collection held at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University, which is described by University of Aberdeen historian and Hoover Visiting Fellow Professor Thomas Weber as ‘the most important private collection on the Third Reich and the inner lives of extremists acquired by a university archive’.
Weber and his Hoover colleague Kathatina Friedla facilitated the acquisition of the archive by Hoover, which includes an abundance of conversations with Nazis spanning the 1960s to the 1990s. Friedla is the Taube Family Curator for European Collections at Hoover’s Library & Archives.
Among those Heidemann interviewed – included in the material made available – is Bruno Streckenbach the head of personnel of the SS agency in charge of the Holocaust, who spoke about what Heydrich and Himmler had told him regarding Hitler's role in the Holocaust.
The release of the recordings and transcriptions in both German and English, will allow researchers to explore, understand, and learn from voices of the past.
Gerd Heidemann, left, with Klaus Barbie
The conversations were conducted by German investigative journalist Gerd Heidemann – a contentious figure who accumulated an expansive trove of materials that document major world events, war, and dictatorship in the twentieth century. His reputation was sullied in 1983 by the acquisition of forged Hitler diaries but new research led by Weber and Friedla has shown that he played a crucial role hunting down Nazis, which included work over two decades for the Israeli intelligence services.
The Hoover Institution, together with Weber, went to great lengths to authenticate Heidemann’s Collection, which included an authentication of Streckenbach’s voice recording by the former head of the voice recognition unit of the German Federal Police.
Weber and Friedla say the release of the Heidemann tapes is an important landmark in understanding the inner lives of key Nazi perpetrators.
“It is due to the tenacity and diligence of Gerd Heidemann as an investigative journalist that we now have at our hands a collection of more than seven thousand folders of papers and a hundred thousand photos in addition to the audio tapes pertaining to 20th century conflict,” they said.
Professor Weber met Heidemann, who died in 2024 aged 93, more than 20 times over a ten-year period.
“We long knew about the World Press Photo Award that Heidemann won in the 1960s for his coverage of colonial warfare. Through an interview I recorded with Gerd Heidemann two weeks prior to his death, we now also know much better about the trust Mossad’s Nazi war crime unit put in him in the 1970s in hunting down Nazi war criminals in hiding,” Professor Weber said.
“Camouflaging as an aide to former SS-General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s liaison officer to Hitler, Heidemann managed to get in touch with the community of Nazis who had fled to South America, including Klaus Barbie, the 'butcher of Lyon', responsible for the deaths of many Jews and resistance fighters."
Gerd Heidemann in his basement archive
Professor Weber added that the newly released tapes show that while being recorded by Heidemann, Barbie and other Nazi war criminals boasted perfectly openly of what they had done, assuming they were speaking among friends.
“The recordings pull away the rug under the lies that Nazi perpetrators told in postwar court rooms. Back in Germany, Heidemann managed to get Bruno Streckenbach to reveal how SS perpetrators and their lawyers had lied in court rooms in a coordinated fashion about their role in the ‘Holocaust by Bullets’, which resulted in the death of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews,” Weber said.
“This is an enormous archive and we’ve only really begun to scratch the surface of the secrets like this that it may hold.
Historians, alongside all those interested in the meaning and role of history, can now begin to sift through the ‘new trove of material’ that will allow them to study in greater detail than ever before the first-person perspective of the radicalization and crimes against humanity by extremists, something Professor Weber says is absolutely vital at a time at which the world once again is starting to give in to the lure of extreme political behaviour.
“In line with new breakthroughs in the study of extremism, we need triangulate the inner lives of extremists against other evidence relating to their behaviour,” he said.
“As Dutch scholar of extremism Rik Peels has said, ‘extremists are also people who act from convictions, for reasons, who have intentions and goals, who think and reflect and make difficult choices. To truly understand and explain radicalization, we must not only look at all kinds of factors that transcend them, but also at what they themselves bring to the table when they explain their beliefs and actions.
“I have spent more than a decade working to ensure the Heidemann archive could be preserved, and with the wonderful work of Katharina and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, it will now be opened up to researchers and the general public across the globe.”
For more information about this collection, visit the Hoover Institution Library & Archives digital collections website and YouTube channel.