Africa’s dogs of war and Hitler’s diaries

__ Mercenaries photographed by Don McCullin and Gerd Heidemann The infamous Hitler Diaries are the subject of a BBC Radio and podcast series. It’s not the first time the scandal, which embarrassed both Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and Germany’s Stern magazine, has been analysed as demonstrated by my blog post of 2016. Today’s episode focused on Stern’s journalist Gerd Heidemann. There’s an interesting link here back to Michael Heseltine’s men’s monthly Town. The January 1968 issue ran an article ‘The long reign of the paid killers’. This was a full-blooded, 14-page exposé of the Congo mercenaries. Several of the pictures – dead and decaying bodies on both sides – would probably be regarded as too gruesome to publish today. The opening spread pictures are captioned: ‘One mercenary mounted a skull taken from a dead Simba as a macabre mascot on his jeep.’ The text is by by David Paskov, ‘a tabloid journalist of the old school’ whose later, controversial, theory that the underage…