Hitler's Private World • Braun's 'silent' movies
In 1936 Hitler gave Eva Braun a movie camera. The portables those days came without sound recording. The ‘silent’ films Braun made were recently brought to life with ALR (automated lip reading) technology developed by a speech recognition expert, Frank Hubner.
Braun's movies were useless as evidence of war crimes and remained archived for years until recently when Hubner's technology enabled us to hear what was said in Hitler's Private World.
Words, Tommy Peters
Words, Tommy Peters
The commentary below is re-posted (without permission) from The Telegraph, November 2006.
New computer software that can read lips at almost any angle
has helped make sense of one of the Second World War's lingering mysteries -
Hitler's home movies.
The technology allows the dialogue to be dubbed on to the
silent films, many of them made by Eva Braun at Hitler's mountain retreat, the
Berghof. With the new soundtrack, Hitler can be heard encouraging young
children towards a life in the military, criticising even his closest henchmen
and flirting with Braun.
It has languished in archives since the war after being
found by the US Office of Strategic Services in the cellars under the Berghof.
The film shows very different Hitler from the strident orator who led Germany
into war. At ease among his guests, he cracks jokes and talks animatedly about
his love for cinema - his tastes included Mickey Mouse.
He is also seen teasing Braun about a screening in his
cinema at the Berghof. "I understand you didn't like the movie last
night," he says. "I know what you want. You want Gone with the
Wind." Much of the footage is taken on a terrace at the Bavarian
retreat, with Hitler and his guests relaxing in the sunlight. He finds time to
flirt with Braun, saying: "What are you filming an old man for? I should
be filming you." But the war was never far away. "You talk about a dress
that does not fit … imagine my problems," he says with exasperation to his
lover.
The technology that has allowed the dialogue to be
reconstructed is called ALR — automated lip reading — and has been developed by
Frank Hubner, a speech recognition expert. The computer recognises shapes that
lips make, turns them into sounds and matches these to a dictionary. When actors voice the script that this generates, the result
is home movies all the more chilling for their apparent happy domesticity.
Hitler is shown reading to children, and playing with them. "You be a
brave boy," he says to a small Aryan child. "You will be a fine
soldier one day."
Hitler had bought Braun a cine camera for her birthday in
1936. Given his manipulation of the German people by the use of filmed
propaganda, it is hardly surprising that he showed enthusiasm for cameras.
"Every German family must have one. Every aspect of the nation's growth
would be captured," he says.
Among Hitler's staff shown at the Berghof are Heinrich
Himmler, Albert Speer, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Reinhard Heidrich, Joseph
Goebbels and Karl Wolff. Himmler is seen telling Heidrich and Wolff: "I'm very
busy with this project and that project." A disturbing statement from the
man in charge of the Final Solution.
Film shot towards the end of the war shows Hitler
complaining about tremors in his arm, giving more credence to the theory that
he was suffering from Parkinson's Disease. What also becomes clear is that Hitler did not hold back
from criticising his inner circle. He is scathing about Himmler's enthusiasm
for archaeological digs to establish the origins of the Aryan race but reserved
his bitchiest remark for Goering.
"I looked at him across the dining table and then I
knew that what they say was true," he says, "that pigs eat the flesh
of their own."
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