Comedian Andrew Hunter Murray will delve into one of the great media hoaxes of the 20th century in a new Radio 4 series and podcast, The Hitler Diaries Scandal.

In April 1983, the German magazine Stern announced it had found Adolf Hitler’s long-lost diaries. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper authenticated them, and The Sunday Times published extracts in the UK. 

However they turned out to be fake.

The story was that the diaries had been rescued from a plane that crashed while fleeing Hitler’s Berlin bunker in the final days of the Second World War, hidden for decades in East Germany, then smuggled across the Iron Curtain at great risk.

The Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann, nicknamed ‘TheBloodhound’ by colleagues, spent years pursuing the story and spent millions of Deutschmarks acquiring volume after volume. Yet none of it was genuine.

In the podcast, comedian, author and No Such Thing As A Fish podcaster Murray tells the story of an ambitious reporter chasing the scoop of a lifetime, a forger working out of a shop in Germany, media executives drawn in by the promise of a world exclusive, and experts put under pressure to give quick answers.

The series also draws on recordings made aboard Heidemann’s yacht, which had once belonged to Hermann Göring, shedding light on the trade in Nazi memorabilia that helped drive the fraud.

Murray said: ‘The Hitler Diaries affair has everything - forgery, ambition, delusion, big money, Nazis, a media frenzy and some truly astonishing characters. The more I dug into the story, the more unbelievable it became. It’s a perfect example of how any of us can be fooled by a blatant lie, as long as we want to believe it, and I think it has a lot of lessons for us today.’

Daniel Clarke, BBC Radio 4’s factual commissioning editor, said: ‘This really is a belter of a tale - one of those stories that provokes a new thought at every juncture. Andrew is one of our sharpest and funniest writers and is the perfect person to take us into a world that at once seems stranger than fiction and worryingly close to home.’

The Hitler Diaries Scandal is being stripped on BBC Radio 4  at 1.45pm every day next week – and will also be available as a BBC Sounds podcast from next Monday/