The prime minister with a crush for Hitler:The day Mackenzie King met the Fuhrer

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Hitler, incidentally, would have the exact opposite reaction. When the dictator visited Nazi-occupied Paris a mere three years later, he made a point of visiting Napoleon’s remains in order to suss out ideas for his own grandiose mausoleum.

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Ultimately, King and Hitler only met for slightly more than an hour. For the Nazi leader, the meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister had been just one appointment among many; a diplomatic nicety shoehorned into a day jammed with briefings and strategy sessions.

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But to King, it was a triumph.

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The next morning, the prime minister had a “vision” of standing in a beautiful summer field tinged with red roses. At the field’s edge rose the buildings of Parliament Hill, all of which seemed fresher and newer than before.

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“The improvement in the buildings was clear — it was a work of reconstruction for which I was responsible,” he wrote.

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Library and Archives Canada

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King had travelled to Berlin just as Canada had begun beefing up its defence budget for fear that they would once again have to fight an increasingly militaristic Germany.

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“We have no desire for war; our people don’t want war and we don’t want war,” Hitler told King upon hearing this.

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It would be a common Nazi refrain right up until the moment that German troops would begin sweeping through Europe. Everyone from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would at some point accept the word of Hitler that the German dictator had no dreams of conquest.

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But King didn’t just believe Hitler; he called the statement a “real note of humility.”

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The German leader then looked the Canadian in the eyes and gave a chilling prediction of what another world war would do to Europe.

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“Let us assume a war came. What would it mean?” he said.

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Regardless of who won, both sides would lose a generation of men — only to then conquer an enemy whose territory had been completely reduced to ashes.

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“We would have obliterated civilization of both countries, indeed of greater part of Europe; all that would be left, would be anarchy,” said Hitler.

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As King travelled home to Ottawa via France, he was roughly following the same route that nearly 300,000 Canadian soldiers would soon have to take going the other direction. Of those, more than 40,000 would never return.

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When war began to break out in Europe only two years after King’s visit, the prime minister had no illusions about what it would mean.

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He envisioned France and the U.K. being turned to rubble, and had a particularly strong mental image of St. Paul’s Cathedral collapsing to the ground. (The London landmark survived World War II).

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Meanwhile, he had “no doubt” that Canada wouldn’t escape this world war unscathed. He predicted that Canada’s coasts, harbours and even some of its inland cities would be bombed.

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Library and Archives Canada

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And yet, it would take time for King to understand the Second World War as being the tailor-made creation of the “calm, passive” man he had met in Berlin that summer’s day in 1937.

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Even as King ramped up his country for another European war, he wondered whether Poland was to blame for provoking this new war, or whether France and the U.K. had simply been too inflexible with the Third Reich.

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“One hardly knows whether to think he was sincere at the time of speaking or not,” wrote King of Hitler on September 6, 1939, the eve of Canada’s declaration of war against Germany.

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“He evidently has turned in a completely opposite direction.”

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