What was going on when I was born?

A West German journalist has been credited with the discovery of what are said to be 60 volumes of diaries kept by Hitler. According to The Sunday Times of London, the handwritten diaries, which were not known to exist, were turned up by the journalist in 1981 after a three-year search that led him to a hayloft cache in East Germany. The journalist was identified as Gert Heidemann, 51 years old, of Hamburg, who, according to the account, turned a lifelong fascination with Hitler into a hunt that eventually turned up a treasure trove of missing documents, memos and paintings signed by the German leader. The newspaper account carried only brief sections of material said to have come from the purported diaries, which are said to cover the period from June 22, 1932, to mid-April 1945.

The Houston Oilers yesterday traded the second pick in Tuesday's National Football League draft to the Los Angeles Rams for the third pick over all and the Rams' fourth-round selections this year and next year, according to Ladd Herzeg, the Houston general manager. The trade was made so that the Rams could select the player they most wanted in the draft, Eric Dickerson, the running back from Southern Methodist University, who had expressed a strong preference to play in Los Angeles. Last week, Herzeg said that if the Oilers were to keep the second pick they would select Dickerson. But the Oilers, who already have an all-pro running back in Earl Campbell, were willing to trade down with Los Angeles, Herzeg said, because they felt they could still get a player they wanted and pick up two additional selections in the process.

A Carpenters Union local in Rockland County has put up $1,600,000 from its pension fund to restart what its builder says is the largest single-family home development in the county. The 700-home development was begun 10 years ago on Cheesecott Mountain in Pomona by Samuel Schecter.

The phone began ringing in Stu Samuels's office at ABC's West Coast headquarters the morning after the first installment of ''The Winds of War,'' last January. The ''overnight'' ratings indicated that ABC had a major hit on its hands in the 18-hour adaptation of Herman Wouk's saga set in the period before World War II, and television producers around Hollywood started calling with their own ideas for war stories. ''I now know of approximately a dozen or more ways of telling the story of World War II, the years preceding, and the years following,'' says Mr. Samuels, who is ABC's vice president of motion pictures for television. Mr. Samuels is not alone. In the weeks since the ''The Winds of War'' and ''The Thorn Birds'' - the 10-hour dramatization of Colleen McCullough's best-seller that ran on ABC last month - attracted a total of, respectively, 140 million and 110 million viewers, producers and writers have flocked to all three networks with proposals for new mini-series, many of them frank imitations of the proven hits.

EVEN the radio station in Torrington could not resist joining what it called ''the theatrics of defeat'' - the local displays of anger, shock, frustration and resentment that followed a 12-to-1 vote by the Board of Trustees of the University of Connecticut earlier this month to close the institution's Torrington campus. The campus is to close on Aug. 15, due to insufficient enrollment. ''If the lights around northwest Connecticut didn't flicker and dim for an instant last Friday afternoon, they should have,'' observed William C. Knudson, the station manager of WSNG who compared the vote to ''an execution'' in a station editorial. Until two months ago, a vote by the trustees would have been enough to close the campus. But the new Board of Governors for the state's higher-education system must now decide such matters. The board voted Tuesday to develop criteria for the merger or closing of public institutions before acting on the trustees' recommendation.

''LOSE your footing or horse-around here, the way kids do, and you can go right down, a sheer drop of 150 feet - 350 feet if you bounce off the first landing,'' said Richard J. Olsen, assistant superintendent of Palisades Interstate Park. Mr. Olsen pointed to broken beer bottles and campfire ashes strewn near the edge of a cliff just north of the George Washington Bridge. ''Alice'' was painted in big white letters on the flat stone underfoot and on a small ledge 15 feet below the summit. ''A girl fell off that ledge,'' Mr. Olsen said. ''She had a blanket spread on it. We also picked up her shoes. A laboratory test showed that she had been drinking.''

''IT'S the greatest sound I've heard, the sound of people's voices, the sound of the trains, the sound of cash,'' said, Terry Marafito, a blind news dealer at the Croton-Harmon railroad station. The 42-day Metro-North strike that came to an end last Monday failed to run Mrs. Marafito and her blind husband, Jerry, out of business. But the Croton station, like many others on the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven Lines, had not been bustling with commerce. ''It was like a funeral parlor in here,'' Mrs. Marafito said last week. ''We swabbed the floor and took the stand apart. We were bored out of our minds.''

Last week started out smelling like roses for the nuclear industry, but it ended with the industry badly wilting. The Supreme Court first ruled that psychological stress suffered by surrounding neighborhoods is not a factor in authorizing nuclear power plants.

Defense Inequality All states are not equal when it comes to defense spending. But for the more fortunate, the outpouring of military dollars could prove a big boon for growth. Data Resources Inc., the economics consulting firm, estimates that in Alaska, for example, 44 percent of the state's economic growth through 1988 will be defense-related. In Connecticut, it will be nearly 33 percent, and in Vermont, 27 percent. By contrast, D.R.I. says that in three states -Montana, Nevada and Wyoming - defense will account for less than 10 percent of their growth during this period. L. Douglas Lee, manager of D.R.I.'s defense economics service, cautions, however, that in many cases the spending comes from just a few programs, and any shift in these programs could change the results.

When it comes to buying a home or an apartment, its location, basic cost and amenities are naturally paramount. Secondary to these considerations, but nonetheless important, is the question of what form of ownership is being offered. Prospective buyers of apartments can choose these days between condominiums and cooperatives, and home buyers who prefer clustered developments of townhouses have both these choices as well as a third, the homeowners' association. In general, prospective buyers need to be aware that buying into a cooperative, condominium or homeowners' association, as distinct from buying a single family house, means sharing decisions with one's neighbors.

IS the United States, with or without the Soviet Union, about to enter a new era in strategic nuclear forces? ''Major new departures'' in long-range missiles and arms control is exactly what the President's Commission on Strategic Forces promised two weeks ago. Commission members proclaimed the end of an era of huge weapons with multiple warheads and the beginning of a more stable age of single-warhead missiles. But how to get from here to there? The commission proposed and President Reagan last week endorsed starting the new era with some of the most destructive weapons from the existing era - 100 new MX missiles, each carrying 10 warheads. The commission and the Administration regard the MX as the keystone of their recommendations - an essential equalizer and bargaining chip. So, in their eyes, everything depends on Congress dropping past objections and agreeing to its deployment in existing silos, vastly hardened.

WHILE Congress continues to debate President Reagan's bill calling for full price decontrol of natural gas in 1986, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken steps to help lower gas prices now. As a result, Long Island homeowners who heat with gas can expect to see their fuel bills from the Long Island Lighting Company ease up somewhat during the next heating season, according to the New York State Public Service Commission. At the same time, however, an increase in the cost of electricity may offset some of the gains for customers who use gas. Last week Lilco's chairman, Charles Pierce, said the utility would ask for a 25 percent increase in electric rates to take effect next spring, most of it to help pay for the Shoreham nuclear plant.