The Fuhrer's Voice

In a London studio, TIME Correspondents Dennis Scanlan and Hans Kahle listened intently to a recording of Adolf Hitler's New Year's speech. Certain phrases they played over & over, or compared with similar phrases in recordings of other Hitler speeches. They were sleuthing in sound, trying to unravel a mystery that had the British press agog: was this New Year's orator really Adolf Hitler?

In long passages the voice flowed on, flat and didactic, as if it were weak and being nursed along: "The National Socialist State -- our 2,000-year-old civilization --can neither be replaced by Bolshevism nor by democratic-p'utocratic ideology. . . . This nation . . . and its leading men are unshakable in their will and unswerving in their fanatical determination to fight this war to a successful conclusion. . . ."

The recording was stopped. Another (a 1942 speech) was put on. There were the same old phrases, the same bombast, the same guttural sarcasm. There could be little doubt. Delivery, syllabic emphasis and sentence build-up harmonized perfectly. There was only one difference: Hitler's 1945 voice lacked the fire of three years ago, but the fury remained.

The record scratched on:

"I know, meine Volksgenossen"--there was the nasal Austrian accent--"I know, meine Volksgenossen, what this war is demanding of you. ... I, more than anybody else, know. ... I also know that German towns will again rise from the ruins . . . more beautiful than ever. . . ."

An echo quavered in the recording--a half-second acoustic echo, revealing to expert ears that this speech had been delivered in an acoustically treated room. It could not have been pieced together from scraps of other speeches. And there was other evidence: references to such recent events, a continuity in thought:

"The year 1944 . . . proved once and for all that the bourgeois social order was no longer in a position to defy the storms of the present or the gales of tomorrow. . . . The liberal age is a thing of the past. To hold the opinion that this upsurging of peoples can be met by proletarian-democratic compromises is childish. . . ."

And the peroration, though not as full-throated as in the past, had the high hypnotic timbre;

"I am at present speaking less frequently, not because I do not want to speak . . . but because my work leaves little time for speeches. ... I have not been sleeping. ... I promise solemnly to the Almighty that the hour will strike when victory will come to the Greater German Reich."

This was the old shrill cry; it was unmistakably Hitler.

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