Gerd Heidemann, a globe-trotting, high-flying German journalist who thought he had landed the scoop of the century — the private diaries of Adolf Hitler — but who came crashing back to earth after they were exposed as crude forgeries, died on Monday at a hospital in Hamburglucky sprite, Germany. He was 93.

Thomas Weber, a history professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland who was in close contact with Mr. Heidemann, confirmed the death.

Mr. Heidemann was one of the most highly paid correspondents in Germany when, at a news conference in 1983, he revealed what he said were 62 notebooks in which Hitler had written his innermost thoughts. He told reporters that he had bought them from a dissident East German general who found them in a barn near Leipzig.

“They looked at her like she had four heads,” said Debbie Mesloh, Ms. Harris’s communications director at the time, about her appearance a month later at the district attorneys’ conference in Santa Barbara, a conclave of conservative, throw-the-book-at-them prosecutors.

The idea, briefly floated behind closed doors, seemed to fizzle, and Mr. Trump did not publicly repeat it as experts questioned whether such a model would even be possible. But in the weeks since, Mr. Trump has floated ideas that, taken together, would fundamentally change the way Americans are taxed, eroding the income tax while embracing expansive tariffs as a way to raise federal revenue.

The notebooks, Mr. Heidemann said at the time, offered groundbreaking insights into the Nazi leader’s thinking. Among other things, they seemed to indicate that Hitler was largely unaware of the Holocaust — and also that he had bad breath, chronic flatulence and a rocky relationship with his mistress, Eva Braun.

An accompanying editorial in Stern, the magazine where Mr. Heidemann worked, declared that thanks to Mr. Heidemann, “the biography of the dictator and with it the history of the Nazi regime will be largely rewritten.”

But his story began to unravel almost immediately, revealing a long trail of deception, delusion and comic ineptitude.

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