Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/16/hitler-mannerheim-recording.html
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It’s an interesting recording, and doubly so if you compare it to the familiar recordings of Hitler’s speeches. You wouldn’t think it’s the same man in both!
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Is the typeface in the video comic sans?
Déjà vu.
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Normal speaking voice. Perhaps the only normal thing about him.
Hitler’s crematorium voice was awful.
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Wow. I did not expect him to sound so much like Woody Woodpecker!
Hitler is definitely due for this treatment:
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That’s what evil sounds like, like everything & everybody. Knowing who and what is evil takes courage, and folks we are running very low on that here in the good ole’ USA.
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Apparently one of my relatives (great grand father? Great uncle? something like that) went to a rally in Germany during the 1930s at which Hitler spoke. He didn’t speak a lick of German, but came away convinced that Hitler was awesome and Germany was uber, based purely on Hitler’s speaking characteristics and the crowd dynamics. McLuhan would have been so proud.
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It’s remarkable how reasonable and clear-eyed some of his conclusions are about the future of the Eastern front. He essentially recognizes that they can’t win in the end, but world history would have been different had they attacked in 1940.
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I like the part where he expresses sympathy for the worker conditions at the Soviet tank factory.
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Sympathy? It sounds more like envy and disgust to me. As I am certain that you know, he was quick to copy the method in his own slave factories.
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Another chance for some Mannerheim facts? I guess it is!
CGE Mannerheim had a hell of a life. He was a Fennoswede (a Swedish speaking native of Finland, part of the old nobility) who rose quite high within the ranks of the Russian Empire. Like, bodyguard to the Czar high, if I recall. He was spending some time with the Dalai Lama when he heard that the Russian Revolution happened and then drove (well, was probably driven) across all of Russia in full military uniform during the civil war, he somehow ended up in Finland during independence (gave up on Russia when the czar had been killed I think?) When the Soviet Union attempted to take back its Finnish territory, he was in charge of the army and successfully defended Finland.
Then we came to the fun hitlerey part now that we have the context: Hitler hated smoking. Detested it. So what did Mannerheim do? Smoke a big cigar whenever he talked with Hitler, because he could tell how strong Hitler felt his negotiating hand was by whether or not Hitler asked him to stop blowing smoke in his face.
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I was being a little facetious, but honestly, even just using an expression like “like animals” when referring to how the workers are treated reflects a level of empathy, no matter how minimal, one doesn’t normally associate with Hitler. As you say, it didn’t keep him from treating his own workers that way.
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He sure seems to blame a lot of failures on… not himself.
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It could also have been disdain or even repulsion. He did not have a high opinion of Slavs.
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“The medium is the message” is a great, long-forgotten lesson on media, applicable a hundred times over to today, from how Twitter affects people’s perceptions (and how things happening on twitter get overamplified, from Donald Trump to flat earthers to alt-right idiots), to insert-your-own-example-here. Facebook, Instagram, Breitbart, Tinder – each delivery system affects and shapes the information.
The only one I feel comfortable with is YouTube, because it most closely resembles television broadcast (at times), and even that has its problems. And of course, television broadcast has its own problems.
McLuhan for the win.
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I’ve read a travelogue written by the Finnish author Olavi Paavolainen, “Kolmannen valtakunnan vieraana” (“As a guest in the Third Reich”) about his trip to Germany as part of a Finnish literature delegation in the late thirties. They got a VIP treatment; he was a guest at one of the big Nuremburg party rallies, met Hitler, and heard him speak to the crowds.
Now, Paavolainen was neither pro- or anti-Nazi, exactly; he admired National Socialism (and Soviet Communism) as an attempt to create a new, post-Great War European narrative for the 20th century, while criticizing it for the narrow-minded racism and obsession with discipline. Anyway, it was apparently an almost hypnotic experience, where even a somewhat-skeptical foreigner like him was just swept up by Hitler’s charisma and the swelling mood of the crowd. He later recounted that the speech itself was pretty shallow and empty, just bluster and rhetoric, but at the time you couldn’t stay detached and analyze it dispassionately.
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I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree.
Hitler was just a man, and the Nazis were just people. The message of this recording is that it reinforces that point.
They weren’t freakish alien monsters. They were just people. Like your neighbours. Like your relatives.
What happened then can happen again. It seems unthinkable, but it seemed unthinkable then, too.
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