Episode 31 - Haunted by Hitler

In the summer of 1937, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King spent four days in Berlin. He arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station, home of the impressive U-bahn subway which was built in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; a year later this same station would transport Jewish children to Britain. During his time in Berlin, King visited a Hitler Youth Camp, which was later absorbed into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Before he returned to Canada, King sat face to face with Adolf Hitler at the Reich Presidential Palace. “My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him,” King later reflected, “was that he is one who truly loves his fellow-men, and his country, and would make any sacrifices for their good.” When King returned to Berlin in 1946, those sites that so impressed him nine years earlier were now in ruins. Today they are marked with memorials to the victims of Nazism. In his new book, Four Days in Hitler’s Germany: MacKenzie King’s Mission to Avert a Second World War, Robert Teigrob of Ryerson University, shares King’s travels through a history of Berlin before, during and after Nazi rule. In this episode of On War and Society, Teigrob sits down with Kyle Falcon to discuss McKenzie King’s four days in Berlin and the complicated moral questions that it raises about present-day diplomacy and historical commemoration.