LONDON, May 23: Photographs of Adolf Hitler at a German music festival taken just over a month before the start of World War II were made public for the first time on Wednesday.

The late British spy Charles Turner took them at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth on July 26, 1939, his son said. They include snaps of Hitler emerging from his car, chatting with a fellow Nazi and collecting flowers from children.

“He regarded these photos as an extraordinary souvenir of a remarkable and fortuitous event,” said David Turner, 64, the son of Charles Turner, after making them public while launching a project to trace his family's roots.

He told Britain's domestic Press Association news agency that Hitler, whose forces invaded Poland just over a month after the photographs were taken, met briefly with his father in the small German town of Bayreuth.

He said the record of their conversation remains a British government secret, but Hitler had given his father “carte blanche permission” to snap the pictures because the Nazi leader thought he was only a fellow music lover.

After earning a reputation as a composer, Charles Turner visited the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth in 1934, the first of a series of annual visits to the event which Hitler also regularly attended.

In 1938, British intelligence asked Alan Angles, a friend of Turner, to set up a unit to examine the growing German threat, and Turner ended up supplying information from the Bayreuth festival in 1939.

When he arrived in Bayreuth, Turner was greeted by his host, a member of the chamber of commerce, and one of Hitler's inner circle.

“The miraculous happened,” said his son. “My father was invited to join Hitler's entourage for the day, today July 26. He was given carte blanche permission to photograph the Fuhrer.” Hitler's itinerary included meeting Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

The photographs, which he discovered after his father's death 30 years ago, carry priceless sentimental value, said Turner.

“They are very, very important to me and my family,” he said, adding he had considered them “an intimate family matter” until he decided to trace the family roots.

The Press Association said it had no access to the photographs.—AFP