Authentic Very Rare Actual Military Recording 1946 WWII Nuremburg Nazi Trials
$
200
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Description
During the course of the trials, which were held from November 1945 to October 1946, newspaper accounts detailed the events.
Only a mere 50 hours of the proceedings were filmed, and the nascent television broadcast market was small. The court also published written transcripts of the trials, which run for thousands of pages.
At the same time, audio technicians recorded 1,942 black gramophone records. They offer a complete sound record of the trials. After the trials concluded, they were shipped to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
This record is an actual military recorded from the trial. Record is in Excellent Condition.
"They were, in a way, forgotten," said Ottar Johnsen, a professor of signal processing at the University of Fribourg. "Not lost, but forgotten."
In 2006, Johnsen received a call that the Nuremberg recordings had been pulled out of the archives, and the International Court of Justice was looking for way to digitize them.
Officials were concerned that the recordings, now 70 years old, were too old and fragile to play with a standard record needle.
Luckily, Johnsen had been researching a solution inspired by Stefano Cavaglieri, a colleague at the Swiss National Sound Archives.
"It was a completely strange idea about taking a picture of a record, look at the sound, and extract the sound," Johnsen said.
German war crimes defendants sitting in a courtroom of the International Tribunal on November 20, 1945. Mondadori Portfolio by Getty ImagesA student named Sylvain Stotzer volunteered to help work on the idea.
"My typical teacher reaction was that it would not work," Johnsen said.
After only a month, Johnsen and Stotzer succeeded in reading their first record. The process relied on a film photograph of the record's surface taken in a darkroom.
The physical grooves in records contain the sound, so a picture that reveals microscopic detail is crucial. The negative is placed in a high-resolution scanner, and the scanned image is put on a computer where an algorithm reads the sound from the image.
The International Court of Justice thought that Johnsen's technology could extract the sound from the antique Nuremberg records without damaging them, so in 2006, an ICJ archivist brought 10 records to Switzerland to do a test. Johnsen, Stotzer and the archivist gathered around to listen to the first recording.
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"It was very, very clear. It was Jackson," Johnsen said.
He's referring to Robert Jackson, a former associate justice of the Supreme Court who took temporary leave to be the chief prosecutor for the United States at Nuremberg.
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