A new German study of Adolf Hitler’s encounters with journalists is shining a harsh light on two of the most unsettling surviving “interviews” with the Nazi leader: a forgotten 1922 tabloid report in which he claimed Jesus was of “Germanic” origin and European royals were “actually Jews,” and the only known secret recording of Hitler speaking in a private setting, captured in a railway carriage in Finland in 1942.
The book, Hitler’s Interviews: The Dictator and the Journalists by media historian Lutz Hachmeister, is the first comprehensive account of Hitler’s dealings with reporters from the 1920s to the Second World War, drawing on more than 100 encounters with foreign and domestic journalists.
Hachmeister, who died in August 2024, argues that these meetings reveal not only Hitler’s propaganda instincts but also the vulnerabilities of a media world that often treated him as a “trophy interview” rather than a subject for rigorous scrutiny.
One of the most striking episodes Hachmeister revisits comes from the autumn of 1922, when the Nuremberg- and Munich-based evening tabloid 8-Uhr-Blatt sent a reporter to visit an up-and-coming radical in Bavaria. At the time, the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini had just marched on Rome, and international papers were suddenly looking for “a German Mussolini.”
The visit might have disappeared into the archives if the Hungarian daily Pester Lloyd had not picked it up and summarized it for its Berlin edition a few days later. In that short telegram, quoted in Hachmeister’s study, Hitler is sketched as a tall, nervous man in his mid-thirties, a former poster artist who speaks in broken sentences and leans heavily on rhetorical flourishes. His program is described bluntly as “blatant antisemitism.”
According to that contemporary report, Hitler told the visiting journalist that he had no intention of staging a putsch but wanted to build a new state on a “social foundation” that Jews could never understand. He raged against Marxism as a force that was supposedly “corrupting the world” and claimed that both the young German republic and the former Wilhelmine monarchy had become “Judaized.”
Then came the most inflammatory remarks. In the same conversation, Hitler is reported to have asserted that Jesus had been of Germanic origin while insisting that Pope Alexander VI, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Britain’s King Edward VII were all “Jews.” The supposed proof for Edward’s alleged Jewishness was a rumor that Queen Victoria had an affair with her doctor, “a man named Wolf.”
For Hachmeister, this early interview is not a curiosity but a warning sign that was already flashing red a full decade before Hitler seized power. The bizarre racial reimagining of Jesus, the obsession with hidden Jewish ancestry among European elites, and the portrayal of an entire political order as “Judaized” all foreshadow the conspiratorial worldview that would later underpin Nazi policy and, ultimately, genocide.
Yet the story also reveals how the media responded. French nationalist daily Action Française seized on the 8-Uhr-Blatt piece and introduced Hitler to its readers as a “Bavarian Mussolini,” treating him as part of a new family of charismatic strongmen rather than as a fringe agitator. For foreign audiences, the mixture of colorful description and unfiltered rhetoric seems to have made Hitler more intriguing rather than more alarming.
The only secret tape of Hitler’s “normal” voice
Two decades later, another extraordinary media artifact would be created far from Germany. On 4 June 1942, Hitler flew under strict secrecy to Finland to mark the seventy-fifth birthday of Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, the commander-in-chief of the Finnish army.
After the formal speeches at Immola airfield, Hitler and Mannerheim retired with a small group of Finnish and German officials to a railway carriage for cigars, drinks, and a more relaxed conversation. A sound engineer for Finnish public broadcaster Yleisradio, Thor Damen, had been assigned to record the official proceedings and had left his microphone running in the carriage. Without Hitler realizing it, Damen captured the first eleven minutes of the private talk before SS guards noticed and ordered him to stop.
The recording, which was later preserved by Finnish authorities and made public in the 1950s, is the only known tape of Hitler speaking in what experts describe as an unofficial, conversational tone. On the tape, Hitler dominates the table, speaking almost without interruption as Mannerheim and Finnish president Risto Ryti mostly listen. He complains about the Red Army’s industrial strength, recalls German miscalculations on the Eastern Front, and laments Italian defeats, even admitting that he would have preferred to attack France in autumn 1939 but had been deterred by the weather.
Hachmeister uses the Mannerheim tape to challenge the idea that there was a sharp divide between Hitler’s public performances and his private conversations. Listening closely to the recording, he argues, reveals the same relentless monologue that foreign correspondents experienced when they tried to interview him. Apart from a lower volume and a less theatrical delivery, the structures of the speech are similar: long strings of statistics, sweeping claims, and an almost complete refusal to engage in genuine dialogue.
The tape has also become a key source for historians and actors alike. When Swiss actor Bruno Ganz prepared to play Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall, he reportedly used the Mannerheim recording to study the dictator’s natural speaking voice. Modern listeners, used to recordings of Hitler shouting in public, often react with shock at the tired, almost hoarse tone he uses in the Finnish carriage, which underscores how much of his power depended on staging and amplification.
Media fascination and modern strongmen
What connects the 1922 tabloid visit and the 1942 secret tape, Hachmeister suggests, is not only Hitler’s own “waterfall of words” but also a media ecosystem that was alternately fascinated, overwhelmed, and misled by him.
In the early Weimar years, foreign newspapers and nationalist outlets were quick to cast the Bavarian agitator as a local version of Mussolini, giving him attention that a provincial radical might otherwise never have received. Later, as leader of a major power, he exploited interviews with Anglo-American correspondents to project an image of control and rationality, even as the regime moved toward war and mass murder.
At the same time, Hachmeister notes how few German democratic papers ever sat down with Hitler and how quickly Nazi officials came to see foreign interviews as a waste of time once they controlled their own media apparatus. Internal rivalries between propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Reich press chief Otto Dietrich did not change the basic calculation that the regime preferred its megaphone to critical questioning.
The book appears at a moment when journalists around the world are once again debating how to report on populist and authoritarian leaders who thrive on attention.