Image Alt: | DVD cover (2010) |
Genre: | Drama-documentary miniseries |
Director: | Alastair Reid |
Based On: | Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries by Robert Harris |
Starring: | Jonathan Pryce Alexei Sayle Tom Baker Alan Bennett Roger Lloyd-Pack Richard Wilson |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Language: | English |
Composer: | John E. Keane Tim Souster |
Producer: | Andrew Brown |
Executive Producer: | Lavinia Warner John Hambley |
Num Series: | 1 |
Num Episodes: | 5 |
Company: | Euston Films for Thames Television in association with Warner Sisters Productions |
Network: | ITV |
Selling Hitler is a 1991 ITV television comedy-drama mini-series about the Hitler Diaries hoax and was based on Robert Harris's 1986 book Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries.
In 1981, Gerd Heidemann (Jonathan Pryce), a war correspondent and reporter with the German magazine Stern, makes what he believes is the literary and historical scoop of the century: the diary of Adolf Hitler.
Over the next two years, Heidemann and the senior management figures at Stern secretly pay DM 9.3 million to a mysterious "Dr Fischer" (Alexei Sayle) for the sixty volumes of Hitler's diaries, covering the period from 1932 to 1945, plus a special volume about the flight of Rudolf Hess to the United Kingdom. Some of the money is made as payment to "Dr Fischer", but the larger proportion goes into Heidemann's pocket to finance his extravagant lifestyle and collection of World War II memorabilia, including the yacht of Hermann Göring.
To the dismay of all, including eminent historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper (Alan Bennett), who had verified the diaries as authentic, it is discovered after the publication of the first extract that the diaries are crude forgeries by Stuttgart criminal Konrad Kujau.
The five-part series was directed by Alastair Reid and starred:
The series, which The Guardian described as "a rollicking comedy with black edges", was released on Region 1 DVD in July 2010.