Chatting With Hitler in 1942

A historical artifact, the only known unscripted and private recording of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, is being offered online by Radio Finland. Hitler, who never knowingly let his normal voice or conversations be recorded, permitted recordings only of his carefully staged and rehearsed, formal speeches, which he would deliver in a dramatic and high-pitched voice. But after Hitler delivered such a speech in Helsinki during 1942, a sound engineer left the recording equipment running and captured a private conversation between the dictator and Finnish leader CGE Mannerheim, a Nazi ally.

Hitler, alternating between rapid and slow speech in his rarely heard, low-pitched normal voice, confides to Mannerheim things such as, “Had I finished off France in ’39, then world history would have taken another course. … But then I had to wait until 1940. Then a two-front war, that was bad luck. After that, even we were broken.”

According to The Guardian, sound engineer Thor Damen was almost executed after the Gestapo realized what he had done, but Damen managed to fool them into thinking he had destroyed the recording. “It is the only one in existence where Hitler speaks freely,” says Lasse Vihonen, head of the sound archives at Finnish public broadcaster YLE, which operates Radio Finland. The German-language recording (now in RealAudio format) features a 3:20 introduction in Finnish, followed by constantly overdubbed translation and explanations in the latter language.