From: Chris Lihou <clihou@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2017 10:28 PM
To: Arthur Royster
Subject: The “Hitler Telephone”

Dear Arthur,

This pathetic affair is a case of wishful thinking on the part of those who have paid huge money for this “artifact” and desperately want to believe this phone is genuine. If we look at the first photo below, we can see that the words “MODELL SIEMENS” have been impressed into the plastic with a hot metal die, probably part of the injection mold used to create the shell of the phone. All the letters are clean and straight and the same size. The words “ADOLF HITLER” on the other hand, have been crudely carved into the plastic with a Dremel tool or electric pencil. The D is larger than the A, the O is above and not on the same level, the L does not make a right angle but looks like a hockey stick, in short, the name is extremely crudely inscribed. Given the superb level of craftsmanship in German manufacture of the period, and given that this phone was supposedly for the Fuehrer himself, whose every possession was of the highest quality made by a highly precise manufacturing infrastructure, this kind of alleged workmanship is almost risible. It stretches credibility to the breaking point. Similarly, the eagle and swastika seem to have also been carved with a Dremel tool, but with slightly more skill.

The paint does seem to have genuine age, with wear, crazing and flaking due to drying out. Without examining under magnification the paint down in the recesses of the eagle and swastika, and the name, one cannot tell from this photo if the Dremel tool was recently applied to an old red-painted phone with age on it, and the recesses then filled in with new red paint, or whether the tool was applied to the phone when it was originally black, and it was then painted 70 years ago, in which case the paint in the recesses would be similarly old and dried out. Regardless, the quality of the carving is so poor as to defy the possibility that this phone could have been used by Hitler.

Then we come to two photos of the case, which is probably an old hat-box for some kind of helmet. It is most probably of the period, and has a wartime “envelope re-use” label with the name of the alleged owner. Well, all right, maybe he did use this label, not for re-using an envelope, but to put his name on this box. The box clearly has nothing to do with the phone, having labels from Maiden’s Hotel in Delhi, Canadian Railways, Carlton Hotel in Montreal, Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin, and whatever else. Colonel Payner (?) must have been an extraordinarily well-traveled person in the midst of a war…. Certainly Hitler would not have carried “his phone” to New Delhi in this box, or on Canada Rail, as both India and Canada were staunchly British at that time. (Or could he? In some alternative reality or parallel universe, maybe Germany did conquer India, and Hitler passed the news back to Berlin on this very phone.)

A nice old box, which on E-bay might fetch all of $75.00.

In short, the phone is either a new fake or an old fake, which could be determined by testing the paint in the recesses of the Dremel carving to see if it is dried out or not.

To sum up, either recently or soon after the war, which could only be determined by testing the red paint in the Dremel carving, someone pulled a fast one on a gullible English buyer.