April 24, 1983

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.