In Hitler, Mackenzie King saw something of a saint: Excerpted from ‘Shadows of Tyranny’

 

‘As I talked with him I could not but think of Joan of Arc,’ Canada’s prime minister wrote of his meeting with the Führer.

Ken McGoogan’s new book “Shadows of Tyranny” seeks to parallel current political trends in the United States to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe in the 1930s. As some sounded alarm bells about Germany’s new leader, some were charmed — Canada’s PM emphatically among them.

In the spring of 1937, Canada’s prime minister was still clinging to the view, originally espoused by British prime minister Winston Churchill, that the greatest guarantee of world peace was a strong British Empire working in concert with the United States. By then, the media baron Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian expatriate, had become furiously anti-Hitler. And Churchill himself was churning out syndicated political articles warning that the Nazis were rearming for war.

That William Lyon Mackenzie King did not perceive Hitler as a threat to the Empire presents a puzzle. What was wrong with the man? Certainly, he lived in a world of his own. Born in 1874 in Berlin, Ontario — now Kitchener, two hours west of Toronto — young William had grown up worshipping his mother far beyond what might be considered typical of a son, regarding her as a kind of saint. She was the daughter of William Lyon Mackenzie, leader of a failed Canadian rebellion in 1837. The grandson did not lack intelligence. He earned a scholarship to the University of Toronto, where he studied law, politics, and economics. Then he earned a doctorate at Harvard University before returning home to Canada and entering public service. He became a trusted adviser and confidant to prime minister Wilfrid Laurier and, after his death in 1919, became Liberal Party leader.

King would become the longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history — 22 years over three nonconsecutive terms. Having held the office from 1921 to 1930, he regained it in 1935. Two years later, King sailed to London, where at an Imperial Conference he met German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. This man would serve as Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs from 1938 to 1945 and would play such a vital role in creating the death camps that, after the Nuremberg trials, he would become the first war criminal to be executed by hanging.  (more...)

In Hitler, Mackenzie King saw something of a saint: Excerpted from ‘Shadows of Tyranny’