By PETER ALLEN

Last updated at 23:10 31 December 2007

On the ancient newsreels he is a manic and intensely powerful figure, barking his orders and urging the Nazis on to world domination.

But yesterday this colour picture emerged of a very different Adolf Hitler.

Although he is still only 50, the great dictator looks shrunken, stooped and almost doddering as he stands surrounded by children in fancy dress. And that infamous postage-stamp moustache is flecked with grey.

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Hitler invited the children, probably the sons and daughters of Nazi dignitaries, to his 50th birthday party on April 20, 1939.

The Fuhrer never had any children of his own but liked spending time with those of others - forever enthusing about how important they were to the biological future of the 1,000-year Reich.

His chief propaganda minister Josef Goebbels's six children were one of his surrogate families, as were the sons and daughters of his architect Albert Speer.

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The main picture is one of several taken at the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's mountain-top chalet in the German Alps near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.

They form part of a fascinating colour archive revealed more than 62 years after the Fuhrer's death in his Berlin bunker.

And they also illustrate how rapidly he aged after posing at a 1933 rally of the SA or Storm Department - the brown-shirted mobsters who assisted Hitler's rise to power. Its leader Ernst Rohm, once a close ally of Hitler, was later murdered by the SS.

The pictures have been released by the Rue des Archives picture agency which was founded in Paris in 1936 - four years before Nazi forces occupied the city.

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Hitler was always obsessed with the French capital - "It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris" he announced while posing under the Eiffel Tower in 1940 - and pictures were stored there during the Nazi invasion and beyond.

Although Hitler was initially camera-shy, he soon realised the power of the image and commissioned Hoffmann, a founder member of the Nazi Party, to create numerous officially-sanctioned portraits.

However, Hoffman and his assistants were not used to working in colour, meaning that the Paris batch of photographs is likely to be the work of Hugo Jaeger, who specialised in what was a relatively new technique at the time.