Prime Minister Mackenzie King met privately with German’s Nazi dictator, Adolph Hitler, on this date in 1937. In doing so, he was destined to become one of the few Allied leaders to have ever met him.
Hitler lied to King’s face, telling the Canadian leader that he and Germany wanted peace in Europe. “He went on to say so far as war is concerned, you need have no fear of war, at the instance of Germany,” King wrote his diary. “We have no desire for war; our people don’t want war, and we don’t want war. Remember that I, myself, have been through a war.”
Prime Minister King went on to give his private impressions of Hitler. “My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellowmen, and his country, and would make any sacrifice for their good. That he feels himself to be a deliverer of his people from tyranny… As I talked to him, I could not but think of Joan of Arc. He is distinctly a mystic… (Hitler) is unmarried, abstemist in all his habits and ways. Indeed, his life as one gathers it from those who are closest to him would appear to be that very much of a recluse, excepting that he comes in contact with youth and large numbers of people from time to time.”
You can read King’s entire lengthy diary entry for that day at this link: https://www.junobeach.org/canada-in-wwii/articles/aggression-and-impunity/w-l-mackenzie-kings-diary-june-29-1937/
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.