I watched a fascinating program (albeit old now - it was made in 2006) the other night on one of only the few good channels on TV - The History Channel. It was about the private life of Hitler - quite possibly the most evil and destructive man of the 20th Century, although he was an evil man, for evil times in a particularly self-centred and evil world.

The program, cunningly titled Hitler’s Private World details how a computerised lip reading system was able to analyse the hand-held films taken of Hitler and his guests at the Bavarian mountain retreat known as the Berghof.

These films were silent, somewhat casual looking with a reasonably dressed Hitler sporting a suede fedora and chatting with various guests. If you didn’t know it was Hitler (and I hope that there is no one on this earth that doesn’t recognise him) it would seem innocuous, almost pleasant film from that golden age.

As the films are silent we don’t know what he was saying, but of course skilled lip readers have the advantage here as they can perform translations - but only to a point. The program details how when the target moves or is more oblique to the reader, it becomes more difficult to read and beyond a certain point impossible.

Frank Hubner, a speech recognition expert, who happens to be mute and deaf, created an automated lip reading (ALR) system that apparently improves on human reading. A mixture of computational linguistics, image processing and speech system it processes each frame of a film and builds up a complex model of the mouth movements - even when the target in the frame is rotated away from the camera. How exactly it does this I’m not sure but it’s fascinating. I can only surmise it’s mapping muscle/facial/jaw movements, when the angle is great, at critical points a kin to how finger print systems map such things as cusps (islands of minutiae) on the finger. It also recognises mouth shapes when the lips are more visible.

Once it has this model of projected lips shapes and movements and with a database of sounds/words to to these sequences \it is able to then generate the speech!

Hitler spoke - albeit in a standard computer dubbed voice. The program then took a more historical tone in how they wanted to hear Hitler’s conversational voice, not his great booming oratory that he used at rallies and public speaking. Only problem is that no recording existed of him speaking in private until the Finnish released a tape made when he visited their own fascist stooge in the 40’s. Apparently he’d been recorded having a private conversation in a railway carriage lamenting the ferocity and multitude of Russian forces - but it was his private speaking voice.

With this on file a voice actor was employed, and with the computer generated script the silent films were dubbed and Hitler spoke as Hitler, truly a disturbing moment.

It is disturbing because it somehow, humanises Hitler. Well, to an extent that a genocidal mass murder can be humanised. Here is the man that plunged the world in to war, prosecuted genocide on a mass scale and was ruthless in the extreme to his own countrymen and yet, he speaks in a soft voice about arbitrary things.

This is not the Hitler that stood before hundreds of thousands at Nuremberg, commanding and dominating but a man that was just - a man. Watching this sends the mind reeling because it is Hitler, not some uncle or pleasant gentleman. He flirts with Eva Braun, he chats about camera technology and even offers scathing judgment on Reich’s Marshal Goering being akin to a pig. Clearly that relationship was one of necessity and not friendship. You even see a peevish Hitler as he responds to Eva Brauns ministrations about an ill-fitting dress - “you talk about a dress that does not fit, imagine my problems.”

It’s just weird watching Hitler come to life as such. I’m not sure it’s a good thing - maybe it is, maybe it shows that behind every enormity of evil, we’re all just human, with human frailty (it is suggested that he suffered Parkinson’s Disease) and human needs. No supernatural bad guys driving us on - not exterior forces telling us to do the wrong thing. Just man, doing the evil that man does.

The technology that brought this to life though is fascinating - interesting - but the chilling revelations are even more fascinating. I’m sure you will be able to find a downloadable version of the program from some suitable torrent. Go watch it.

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