Just wait 10 seconds and the vedio will start.
And how can you be certain that any of that audio is true, and spoken by Hitler, or Mannerheim ? This could be any 2 German speaking men making up a tall tale.
It’s been proven’ it is Hitler’s voice. The other man in the audio secretly taped Hitler.
So according to that video, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union to protect Romania and Finland. Despite the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the SU that In addition to stipulations of non-aggression, included a secret protocol dividing Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland into German and Soviet spheres of influence, anticipating potential “territorial and political rearrangements” of these countries. Thereafter, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded, on September 1 and 17 respectively, their respective sides of Poland, dividing the country between them. Part of eastern Finland was annexed by the Soviet Union after the Winter War. This was followed by Soviet annexations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertza region.
That Hitler was worried about the loss of Romanian oil despite the simple fact that he had already before the war announced that he wish living room and resources from the east, that Romanian oil imports were smaller than imports from elsewhere including the SU. Germanys oil situation would have been better if Germany had not invaded the SU.
Do please provide this proof of your claim. Who has proved it, where is the evidence? In this case, a simple claim is insufficient provenance.
But, lets play along for just a moment.A very short moment. If this is in fact old half sack himself, what proof do you have that the dialogue is nothing more than misinformation, or edited out of context. I also find it unlikely that Hitler, and his guard would miss the presence of recording equipment. This Site has no patience, or tolerance for Hitler/Nazi apologetics, so do provide proof, and sharpish.
Germany invaded the USSR because it was the only hope Hitler had of matching the industrial output of the United States in a perceived global struggle, most everything else in window-dressing or apologism…
Really Vonss, your source is David Irving? What did Goebbels have to say on the subject? He was slightly less biased…
All a very well spun yarn Vonss, but none of this is any manner of proof. I have seen more convincing stories done by intoxicated College students, posted on youtube. So Vonss, what is your point in all of this? What are you hoping to convince us all of?
I’m no linguist, but I am not convinced. Actually, I’m quite skeptical. Hitler was quite parranoid about being recorded, and unless it was previously hidden in the furniture or something, there’s no way the recording could be unknown to him. The just didn’t have miniaturization technology yet to nake one “pocket” sized. All still solid state electronics with tubes. Unless a reputable, unbiased research facility with vocal recognition thechnology says different, It AIN’T Hitler. At least as far as I’m concerned.
Can’t seem to access the youtube clip. What are we talking about here? As far as I know, the only known (and reasonably credible) recording of Hitler’s voice outside formal contexts is of part of a conversation with Mannerheim during his visit to Finland - and that would only have been possible because the Finns had complete control of the venue and facilities in advance (colmháin’s comment refers). As for Hitler’s motivation for invading the Soviet Union - I agree with Nick and others, but would add that, insofar as one can find any social/economic/political unity in the National Socialist “project”, the conquest of “soil” specifically in Russia is, to say the least, a major objective in itself. “Mein Kampf” may be composed of tedious ramblings to a large extent, but they are clear in conveying Hitler’s contempt for state borders, and the alleged imperative of German expansion in the East, and in Russia in particular – “If we speak of soil in Europe today we can have primarily in mind only Russia and her vassal border states”. Hardly prefigures an intent to launch a huge war in order to defend Romania and Finland, to me. And as for using David bloody Irving as a source – spare me. I am probably more charitable than most historians and students of history in regarding Irving as one of History’s lost sheep; but he is truly and irrevocably lost. Best regards, JR.
Irving’s early work was quite good, at both academic and popular levels, as illustrated by The War Between the Generals.
His later excursions into bizarre revionism do not detract from the quality of his earlier work, but most people seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater by dismissing all of his work because of the implausibly poor quality of his Holocaust denying work etc…
Hello, Rising Sun. Regarding David Irving, I give him his due, which is more than would many he would perhaps like to consider professional colleagues. He is clearly a very talented researcher, with a great instinct for locating sources. However, his credibility as an historian (in which profession his training is, at best, rudimentary) is, at this stage, totally shot. The judgements in Irving v. Lipstadt reveal a consistent pattern of the manipulation by Irving of his sources, not to elucidate the Past insofar as possible in its own terms, but to prove preconceived hypotheses of a rather far-fetched nature. In the light of these judgements, his earlier works should be – and indeed have been – reviewed, revealing that while they are not quite as distorted as more recent productions, they are still stained with the same sin to a considerable extent. I would not go so far as many, who would now view Irving’s work (even the later stuff) as totally unworthy of attention. However, any use of these works as secondary sources must be highly, highly tentative and critical. They are not the sort of thing that should be left around an undergraduate library without carrying a severe health warning. As regards any future “contributions to History” he may choose to make, well, he has clearly made his choice. The road of the “Institute for Historical Research” and of Zundel is not a road that anybody interested in History should follow. That is all I meant. Best regards, JR.
Hitler was quite parranoid about being recorded, and unless it was previously hidden in the furniture or something, there’s no way the recording could be unknown to him.
I’m not saying I support the validity of the translation or audio “in question,” but I do recall there being an incident in which Mannerheim met with Hitler in a rail car that had been “bugged” by the Finns (I believe that’s the incident JR refers to). The Germans did catch on, and required the listening/recording devices be removed – I presume the Germans would also have wanted the “partial” recording destroyed, but can’t recall any such details. (Don’t ask me for cites or anything, because this is purely off memory)
I have trouble envisioning Hitler meeting with another head of state and making so many statements that verge on being “excuses.” Further, the information simply seems too “basic” for such a high-level meeting – though perhaps I’m being naive about how leaders act when they “relax” with each other (to me, true relaxation requires a level trust – and could Hitler truly trust Finland, after have given that nation to the Soviet sphere of influence, triggering the Winter War? What if/how much Finland knew, etc. etc…). Regardless of all that, the real shocker for any one who believes the recording to be actual: like any head of state, Hitler sometimes <gasp> told lies! Real or not, the audio doesn’t mean much of anything, except perhaps what Hitler wanted Mannerheim to think.
There is also all the physical/historical evidence about how unprepared the USSR was to defend itself, much less take the offensive, in Romania or elsewhere… To be fair and look on “the other hand,” German Intelligence DID have a variety of “lapses” concerning the USSR in particular. BUT by the time this film claims the conversation took place, the German army would have already “chewed through” Soviet units without arms or ammo, would have known there had been no build-up necessary to make an offensive in Romania or elsewhere, etc., etc. Others have pointed out Hitler’s desire for Living Space and other inconsistencies. But I guess some folks will believe what they want to believe…
I don’t totally agree. While, I have not read Irving due to his relatively recent tainting and defiling of himself, I think there were some clues (based on critiques I’ve read of his work) such as his clear, baseless exaggeration of civilian casualty figures in his (first?) book on Dresden. But then again, I haven’t read it so I could be wrong…
I think it should be stated, and I am not s student of the Eastern Front, that many of the Soviet Red Army units that were initially steamrolled by the Heer/SS advance were run by commanders who were ordered --by none other than Stalin-- to stand down on pane of death in order not to ‘provoke’ the Germans massing on the border so obviously that a Soviet boys-Pioneer troop would have known a general attack was imminent. I think Beevor goes into this in his book Stalingrad, and states that some Red Army commanders did take their lives in their hands by ordering convenient “live-fire exercises” on the eve of Barbarossa, and issued ammo and instructions to battle positions to their troops. They tended to fare a bit better…
He’s not the only one to suffer from that to some degree. There is no shortage of respectable and respected historians (and others such as economists and sociologists) who approach their topics from a particular viewpoint, such as Marxist or feminist* analysis, or to prove pre-conceived opinions (I wouldn’t put it as high as hypotheses in many cases) such as, in Australian history, the Aborigine as ‘the noble savage’ and the passive victim of rampant racism by an unremittingly inhumane and violent white society when a dispassionate assessment of the evidence does not support that extreme and narrow conclusion, any more than the opposing extreme represents a balanced interpretation.
I doubt it’s possible to write a completely objective and impartial history on many major topics, and notably some aspects of WWII and related aspects such as the Holocaust and Japan’s brutal treatment of POWs and civilians. Irving’s views on the Holocaust and the official Japanese line on China and WWII, particularly up to the mid-1990s, are examples of absurdly distorted presentations which are contradicted by all the evidence. They are nearer to assertions than deductions based on a careful assessment of all the evidence.
But, as writing history is an exersise in interpretation of facts (and facts which may themselves be disputed) rather than the production of correct or incorrect results as in arithmetic, even a careful examination of all the evidence can lead to widely divergent and even completely contradictory conclusions. A perfect example is the different views surrounding the use of the atomic bombs against Japan. The dominant view is that they were necessary to end the Pacific War and were used exclusively for that purpose, but other views include that they were used to demonstrate American power to the Soviets to curb Soviet expansion east and west; ditto to the communists contesting control of China with the nationalists; to demonstrate to Japan that it could not afford to resist American power in future; or as an experiment to see how how atomic weapons worked against real targets and people; or that they were used simply to justify the huge effort and expense of the Manhattan Project. My impression is that there is an element of truth, to varying degrees, in all of those views and that they all form part of a balanced consideration of the reasons the bombs were used, but some proponents of a particular viewpoint make the, in my opinion, mistake of focusing disproportionately on one aspect and thereby present a distorted interpretation. Those approaches tend to reflect a bias by the writer, but not necessarily the same bias. For example, the ‘the atomic bombs were not necessary to end the Pacific War but were dropped purely to inhibit Soviet expansion’ thesis suits pro-Soviet opinion as much as it suits anti-American opinion which has no pro-Soviet element.
In the end, I doubt that there can ever be a completely ‘correct’ interpretation of many historical events and their causes, but I think that there can be interpretations which patently fly in the face of the available evidence, such as Holocaust denial, which do not deserve to be accepted as worthy of serious consideration, at least until further evidence emerges to tip the balance in favour of what at the time appear to be bizarre opinions.
*A fine example of how ‘analysis’ can be distorted by adherence to a particular view is a minor report produced down here a couple of decades ago, with funding from a government legal aid body, on domestic violence in lesbian relationships. As a lawyer who had handled a reasonable number of lesbian domestic violence cases I had formed the impression that they were at least as violent as many heterosexual relationships and that the incidence of violence was quite possibly higher in lesbian relationships. The report supported my impression, but concluded that it was not because women had any greater, or even any, propensity for violence against other women as they are by nature caring and loving souls, but that the pressures and traumas of living in a male dominated society was the root cause and that men ultimately were responsible for the violence lesbians inflicted upon their partners.
Nice quality audio clip
In the everyday life Hitler voice is low, but the records from his speeches are bad quality mostly or Hitler hoot and this made his voice unrecognizable
IIRC in his Dresden book Irving arrived at his casualty figures by uncritically repeating those provided by Goebbels. Which in turn were arrived at simply by adding a zero to the numbers he was getting from the rescue services.