BOOK REVIEW : Tale Behind Sale of Fake Hitler Journals : THE HITLER DIARIES: Fakes That Fooled the World <i> by Charles Hamilton</i> , University Press of Kentucky $24.95, 212 pages

“They talk about the greatest forgery of the century!” scoffed Konrad Kujau, the man who concocted the so-called Hitler diaries in 1983.

“That makes me sore. It wasn’t a forgery. It was a joke.”

The joke, as handwriting expert Charles Hamilton insists in “The Hitler Diaries,” was particularly ludicrous. Kujau’s 62 phony volumes were audaciously crude--but not crude enough to caution media moguls, journalists, historians and assorted scientific experts against proclaiming the authenticity of the Hitler diaries.

“The moment he discovered that he could forge hot-selling documents in ‘Hitler’s handwriting’ and bamboozle the eager collectors and pretend historians of Germany,” Hamilton sniffs, “there was no halting the torrent of bogus Hitleriana that cascaded from his facile pen.”

Kujau was a one-man relic mill, churning out an assortment of forgeries for the ready market in Nazi artifacts: nude watercolors of Eva Braun, sentimental battlefield poetry, even a manuscript of “Mein Kampf,” all of it attributed to and “signed” by Hitler.

But Kujau’s big score was the spurious confidential journal of Adolf Hitler, which he managed to palm off on the German magazine Stern for $4 million in cash.

“The Hitler Diaries” offers an intimate view of the cult of Nazi relic worship in which the paraphernalia of the Third Reich, whether real or ersatz, commands a high price and a peculiar veneration. At the same time, Hamilton gives us an incidental but wholly fascinating history of the dark arts of literary and historical forgery.

Hamilton’s asides about some of the world’s more accomplished forgers, past and present, are included mostly to help us understand that Kujau himself employed none of the tricks of the trade.

Rather, the devil-may-care forger used off-the-shelf copybooks and ink from a local department store to create the Hitler diaries. He slapped on phony seals and ribbons, and even the initials affixed to the “sleazy leatherette cover” of the first volume were palpably fake--he used FH instead of AH because he was so ignorant of Gothic lettering that he could not distinguish an A from an F .

None of the blunders seemed to catch the eye of the collectors or the media or their expert hirelings, and that’s the whole point of “The Hitler Diaries.” Kujau’s work had “precisely the right look to fool anybody totally inexperienced in historic research or unfamiliar with Nazi documents,” as Hamilton writes with characteristic irony. But Kujau managed to fool a much more discerning readership, including Rupert Murdoch, Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper and the loftier editorial circles of Stern, Newsweek and the London Times.

Hamilton writes with rhetorical flourish, occasional moments of hilarity and plenty of ornate, acid-etched sarcasm. He prides himself on being one of the first experts to condemn the Hitler diaries as a forgery, and his book hums and crackles with high-voltage contempt for the willing dupes who were suckered by Kujau.

Drawing on a rogue’s gallery of fetishists, cheats, conspirators and eccentrics right out of a Richard Condon novel, Hamilton allows us to see both the silliness and the weirdness in the cultic practices of the collectors of Nazi regalia.

Still, he apparently feels compelled to offer a halfhearted apology for the collectors, since he apparently spends much of his own time authenticating and appraising the leavings of mass murderers.

“The Hitler Diaries” ends with the biggest joke of all. Kujau, now released from prison, makes his living by selling forgeries that derive their value from the very fact that he forged them: Guaranteed Fake is Kujau’s trademark.

Perhaps that’s what Newsweek really meant when it proclaimed, on the first publication of the Hitler diaries: “Genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end.”

Next: Dick Roraback reviews “Almighty Me” by Richard Bausch (Houghton Mifflin) .