Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has acquired the collection of Gerd Heidemann (1931-2024), an investigative reporter and photojournalist who accumulated an expansive trove of materials that document major world events, war, and dictatorship in the twentieth century.
The Gerd Heidemann collection comprises more than 7,300 binders, approximately 800 audiocassettes, and more than 100,000 photographs, including approximately 20,000 photographic prints and glass plates from the estate of Heinrich Hoffman—Adolf Hitler’s official photographer and a significant contributor to Nazi propaganda—dating back to the 1920s. The Gerd Heidemann collection is the most important private collection on the Third Reich acquired by a university archive, according to Thomas Weber, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The collection is exceptional in that it includes equally significant holdings of text, audio, and photographic material, including primary sources hitherto unexplored by researchers.
The research materials and private papers Heidemann compiled center on the history of Nazi Germany and Nazi Party leaders, in addition to documenting Heidemann’s body of journalistic work on some of the most important political events in the 20th century. This includes audio interviews he recorded during his career at the German newsweekly Stern and spanning his reporting and research across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Above image: Binders from the Gerd Heidemann Collection, consisting of documents, photographs, and transcripts of interviews with former Nazi leaders. (Photo by Hoover Institution Library & Archives, 2023)
“The most historically significant aspect of the collection is Heidemann’s recorded interviews with former Nazi party officials and their associates from the 1970s and 1980s, and documents drawn from the personal entourage of Adolf Hitler and the SS,” said Katharina Friedla, the Taube Family Curator of European Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Among them are audio recorded interviews with Nazi leaders Bruno Streckenbach, head of administration and the personnel department of the Reich Security Main Office, who was responsible for many thousands of murders committed by Nazi mobile killing squads, and Klaus Barbie, an SS officer and head of the Gestapo in Lyon during World War II, who was responsible for the implementation of the Holocaust in France.
The collection also includes extensive documentation of the scandal involving Heidemann, who claimed to have discovered a sixty-two-volume set of diaries purportedly written by Hitler but later revealed as a forgery. German antiques dealer Konrad Kujau was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for the forgery, while Heidemann was forced to resign from Stern and was sentenced to four years and eight months in jail for fraud and embezzlement of funds.
Other parts of the Heidemann collection are already housed in US institutions. They include materials related to B. Traven (also known as Ret Marut), writer and editor of the German revolutionary journal Ziegelbrenner, acquired in 2000 by the University of California–Riverside; and a collection of documents that originated from East Germany, acquired in 2010 by the Wende Museum, an art museum and historical archive on the Cold War located in Culver City, California.
“This remarkable collection – which is really a compilation of many different individual collections – will be mined by students and scholars for generations,” said Eric Wakin, deputy director of the Hoover Institution and the Everett and Jane Hauck director of its Library & Archives. “It contains a trove of material on African wars of independence; the Third Reich, including senior members of the regime; and remarkable taped interviews with leading perpetrators of the Holocaust interviewed after they had fled to South America. Preserving these records continues the Hoover Institution’s mission of collecting archival material, ‘to recall the voice of experience against the making of war,’ as Herbert Hoover said.”
Gerd Heidemann passed away on December 9, 2024. The Hoover Institution Library & Archives shared its condolences with his family and friends. Heidemann's legacy has been preserved and described by and is now available for research at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
Elements of this collection are accessible to the public in the Library & Archives reading room. Plan your visit.
A corresponding event and reception will take place on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 from 4:00-6:00 PM PT in the Stauffer Auditorium at Stanford University and online. This event will be free and open to the public.
For coverage opportunities regarding the Library & Archives or to indicate interest in attending the inaugural event, contact Lauren Covetta, 650-723-2050, lcovetta@stanford.edu
