Being wrong and the Hitler diaries

Won't get fooled again

I’ve been watching the German TV series Faking Hitler (available on All4 if you’re in the UK), about the Hitler diaries fraud. I felt it was OK as entertainment in its own right, but I didn’t really like the way that it had large fictional elements added to it and various factual things taken away. But I think the story of these diaries does tell us a lot about how smart people fool themselves, and how to avoid doing that.

While I wasn’t wild about Faking Hitler, one of my absolute favourite books is Selling Hitler, by Robert Harris, which gives a much more straightforward account of the story. It also contains one of my favourite academic jokes, attributed to Rupert Murdoch: “It’s Latin, Frank. The ‘e’ means you’re out, the ‘meritus’ means that you deserve it”. (There’s an old ITV drama based on the Harris book available on YouTube, with a fantastic cast and which comes highly recommended).

If you don’t know the story of the Hitler Diaries, it’s actually very simple. 40 years ago, journalists at Stern magazine (particularly Gerd Heidemann) fooled themselves and others into thinking that crude forgeries produced by Konrad Kujau were authentic. The Harris book is really about people being wrong in elaborate ways, and I think it’s worth revisiting in the light of some of the ways I’ve seen people being wrong about COVID.

1. You can’t rely on academic reputations

The historian Lord Dacre (formerly Hugh Trevor-Roper - Master of Peterhouse Cambridge and former Regius Professor of History at Oxford) played a significant role in the authentication of the diaries. Despite his role in investigating Hitler’s final days in the Berlin bunker, resulting in the publication of the best-selling book The Last Days of Hitler, Dacre allowed himself to be convinced that Kujau’s forgeries were real. This was partly because he was misled himself (he had been told that the ink and paper had passed testing), but Dacre’s judgement played a huge role in persuading Rupert Murdoch to spend millions on the publication rights.

In the same way, we’ve seen many cases where well-established academics with impressive track records have made fools of themselves over COVID. While of course many academics have done a great job, some of the best analysis of the numbers has come from people still doing their PhDs, or outside the academic system altogether.

But at the very least, you can’t rely on academic titles at fancy institutions when deciding who is right. I can point you at two Professors both working on evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford who disagreed about the evidence on how COVID was transmitted. At the end of the day academic reputations only go so far.

2. Bad people can be right too

It would be lovely if nice people were always right and nasty people were always wrong, because it would make forming judgements much easier. However, the world is a bit more complicated than that. It’s easy to think of unpleasant people who made major scientific discoveries, and it’s an unfortunate fact that one of the first people to correctly call out the Hitler Diary fraud was the notorious David Irving.

Sadly we can’t just make up our minds about truth based on the character of the people making the arguments. However, I have a feeling that you can get away with being obnoxious or wrong, but not both, and it’s probably the case that people who approached the COVID data in a spirit of open-minded enquiry (rather than as a way to confirm what they’d already decided) did best in the long term. But still, you can’t just dismiss what someone says because you don’t like them as an individual.

3. The easiest person to fool is yourself

One of the most fascinating things in Harris’s book is his account of the way that the early victims of the fraud got taken over by it, and became advocates on its behalf. There was a back story linking the supposed diaries to the crash of a plane containing Hitler’s personal effects near the village of Boernersdorf. But as Harris writes:

What gives Kujau's fraud from this point onwards a touch of real genius is that having made the connection between the wrecked transport plane and the diaries, he left it to others to research the background. Never did the victim of a hoax work more assiduously towards his own entrapment than Gerd Heidemann. [...] It is not surprising that by the end he wanted to believe in the existence of the diaries so desperately. By then he had put more work into them than Kujau.

In the same way, with COVID it was possible to see people going down a rabbit hole where they actively sought out things that confirmed their own beliefs. Think of antivaxxers gradually becoming radicalised by consuming a one-sided diet of sources. Having invested so much time in “doing their own research”, they are unlikely to admit that this has been wasted, and more likely to double down on their beliefs. We all need to avoid this, by keeping an open mind, and not simply accepting theories that confirm our prior beliefs too neatly.

4. The media are in the “entertainment business”

While many journalists have done a great job covering COVID and many scientists have worked hard to help them inform the public, it would be wise to remember that the goals of the media are not perfectly aligned with those of scientists. In particular, the final arbiter of scientific truth is not which newspapers will cover your story or take the line you suggest.

A stark example of this in Harris’s book comes through the behaviour of Rupert Murdoch, who spent a large amount of money to secure the serialisation rights for what proved to be a fake. But in the end, that didn’t matter too much to him. Harris quotes him as saying:

Circulation went up and stayed up. We didn’t lose money or anything like that.

In the same way, it would be wise to remember that the media don’t always cover stories to do with lab leaks or other controversies because they want to reach the truth. Sometimes it just makes good copy, and while a newspaper may be happy with an article that generates angry discussion in the comments section or hundreds of retweets online, it may not be as pleasant an experience for the academic involved.

In general, it is worth remembering that a scientist building up a large following on social media is in danger of being paid in Disney dollars (RTs, followers, likes) that are valuable online but worthless in the wider scientific debate. Indeed scientists behaving badly on social media should not forget that they may need to interact with their targets at conferences and on grant award panels in the future.

5. Speed kills

One of the ways that the Hitler diaries fraud succeeded was by forcing its victims into a rapid decision about authenticity. Through mistakes made when offering the diaries for syndication, Stern found themselves forced into publishing before the necessary checks had been completed. The journalist Phillip Knightley, who remembered the previous Mussolini diaries case had warned Murdoch on this specific point:

Beware of secrecy and being pressed to make a quick decision. The Mussolini con men were able to bring off their sting by pressing Thomson to make a quick deal.

In the same way, many COVID commentators seemed to suffer from a desire to get a quick take out there. While it is valuable to provide early warning of future waves, this value is significantly diluted by an effect of crying wolf and warning about waves that don’t transpire. For this reason, there’s little to be lost by being cautious - holding off for a few days or for better data - rather than feeling the need to ring alarm bells at the first sign of possible trouble.