On April 22, 1983, the news magazine Stern told the public that it had discovered Adolf Hitler’s diaries. Three days later, it presented them at a press conference. The magazine had paid 9.3 million marks (more than 4 million U.S. dollars at the time) for 62 volumes of the so-called Hitler diaries, which were quickly revealed as forgeries. In July 1985, forger Konrad Kujau and former Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann were each sentenced to more than four and a half years in prison. This press scandal was instrumental in discrediting the tendency toward an “unprejudiced” and euphemistic assessment of the Third Reich in West German popular culture.