He held a series of menial jobs until 1957, when he was working as a waiter at the Löbau Youth Club, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the theft of a microphone.

Kujau began to create a fictional background for himself, telling people his real name was Peter Fischer, changing his date of birth by two years, and altering the history of his time in East Germany.

[4] By 1963, the bar began suffering financial difficulties and the couple moved back to Stuttgart, where Kujau found work as a waiter.

At the police station he offered a third set of details, and a false explanation as to why he was masquerading under an assumed identity, but the subsequent fingerprint check confirmed he was Kujau.

[7] In 1970, Kujau visited his family in East Germany and found out that many of the locals held Nazi memorabilia, contrary to the laws of the Communist government.

Kujau saw an opportunity to buy the material cheaply on the black market and make a profit in the West, where there was an increasing demand for such items.

[7][9] Among the items smuggled out of East Germany were weapons, and Kujau would occasionally wear a pistol, sometimes firing it in a nearby field, or shooting empty bottles in his local bar.

One night in February 1973, while drunk, he took a loaded machine gun to confront a man he thought had been slashing the tyres of his cleaning company van.

The outlet also became the venue for late-night drinking sessions with friends and fellow collectors, including Wolfgang Schulze, a resident of the US, who became Kujau's American agent.

In addition to notes by Hitler, he produced documents in the handwriting of Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels.

Although the handwriting was a passable imitation of the owners, the rest of the work was crude: Kujau used modern stationery, which he aged with tea, and created letterheads by using Letraset.

[15] Having found success in passing off his forged notes as those of Hitler, Kujau grew more ambitious, and copied, by hand, the text from both volumes of Mein Kampf, even though the originals were completed by typewriter.

Kujau showed it to Stiefel who was impressed by the work, and wanted to buy it, but when the forger refused to sell it, he asked to borrow it instead, which was agreed upon.