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I am surprised History stackexchange has yet to have a question on sources for Audio Recordings of Hitler. Please note this is not a duplicate of previous questions on here as previous ones' are not about audio form

Written text or quotations of speeches are easy to cite for me, which I usually do, except this time I am looking for audio recordings in Hitler's voice. Audio recordings and verbal speech contains much more information than pure written text. You cannot understand them in the way the German public did without the auditory context, it is impossible to understand how the German citizens could have been entranced by the hateful rhetoric. You cannot hear the hate or evilness without having it spoken.

I am looking for one particular speech in audio, on dated April 6 1920, where Hitler is quoted as saying,

"We do not want to be sentimental anti-Semites who want to create a pogrom mood, but we are animated by the implacable determination to seize the evil at its root and to exterminate it root and branch. In order to achieve our goal, any means must be acceptable to us, even if we have to join forces with the devil." (Eberhard Jäckel, Axel Kuhn (Hrsg.): Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924.)

Sources I have found say it was a speech in a beer hall given to the nazi party. The book Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924 does not appear in PDF form online, and sources quoting this all ultimately point back to that book. Which leads to a dead-end on where the quotation originally came from, I am expecting from an audio recording that the book is citing.

I have found that speeches usually have a corresponding audio recording of them. But this one is rare in the 1920s, and google search only returns few audio of speeches after 1922 and onward.

Please note, this question is actually asking for: A complete archive of audio recordings of all speeches by Hitler 1919-1945, as the written form does not showcase the emotive form of them. (from which, I could find what I need myself)

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    Recommend we consider this to be a "canonical source request". In my opinion, this question is in scope for H:SE. For the record, I believe this also satisfies the requirement for preliminary research.
    – MCW ♦
    Commented Jul 6 at 20:35
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    Portable audio recording equipment wouldn't have been common back in the 1920s, so it might be somewhat optimistic to expect all of his early speeches to have been recorded (and for those recordings to have survived).
    – Steve Bird
    Commented Jul 6 at 20:37
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    Thanks for replying @MCW, I hope this question is allowed because for research sources, also many other Historians would probably also find this helpful to them as they are probably searching for audio versions and not just written versions, so I think they'll also be interested in this question :)
    – goldenjacob
    Commented Jul 6 at 20:43
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    @SteveBird that's a good point! I'd like to know if anybody here on stackexchange can elaborate if any survived and if they have them
    – goldenjacob
    Commented Jul 6 at 20:44
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    "I am expecting from an audio recording that the book is citing." - If the book is citing the audio recording, what exactly is the citation? If there's no such citation of an audio recording, then it very likely doesn't exist.
    – Brian Z
    Commented Jul 6 at 22:49

1 Answer 1

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Not all of his speeches were recorded, not all recordings survived, and not all surviving recordings are in the same place.

  • A couple of months ago, the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv started a project to collect some speeches. This is expected to run seven years, and it seems that they won't make everything available to the public.
  • The Bundesarchiv holds many German documents of the era. Not all is digitalized, and their web presence seems more geared to people who want to find out what their grandpa did during the war -- protected personal information on less important individuals.
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    The Goethe University who is one of the cooperation partners in that project also has news about the project on their website. The work is to close a gap: "... to date very few of Adolf Hitler’s speeches have been generally accessible".
    – Peter - Reinstate Monica
    Commented Jul 7 at 13:38
  • wouldn't surprise me at all if making those speeches public would fall foul of German laws against spreading Nazi propaganda and symbology. A university can get away with collecting them, but only for academic purposes (so study by their own historians and invited experts from elsewhere).
    – jwenting
    Commented Jul 8 at 17:40
  • @jwenting, depends on context. Around the anniversaries of historical events one gets flooded with documentaries, including parts of speeches. But not the full, uncommented thing.
    – o.m.
    Commented Jul 8 at 18:30
  • @o.m. thank you for this, much appreciated
    – goldenjacob
    Commented Jul 9 at 19:30

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