Hitler Speech 'Rogue' Broadcast Airs Over Chicago Police Radio

CHICAGO, IL — Investigators are trying to discover how and why parts of a 1930s speech by Adolf Hitler from an infamous Nazi propaganda movie were broadcast for nearly five minutes over Chicago's police radio frequencies last week. The unauthorized Fourth of July broadcast contained excerpts from "Triumph of the Will," the 1935 movie by German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the Chicago Tribune reports.

According to Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, the "rogue radio transmission" cut across police frequencies for about four minutes just after 8 p.m. Wednesday, July 4, the report stated. The broadcast — spoken in German — included Hitler's closing speech from Nuremberg's Nazi Party Congress in 1934, an event chronicled in the movie, the report added.

Civilians who monitor the city's police radio traffic noticed the transmission and began commenting about it online, the report stated. Officers were told by a dispatcher to switch radio channels once the broadcast began, the report added.

Unauthorized interruptions on Chicago police radio aren't unusual and happen from time to time, and city authorities work with the department and federal officials to investigate these incidents, the report stated. In March 2016, a rogue transmission broadcasting racial slurs and profanities happened on a police radio frequency used by officers on the Far South Side.

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