I read a comment from a stranger claiming that
Here in Canada, PM Mackenzie King met with Hitler and asked him to only go eastward, and Canada would stay out of it. As in: "Invade Russia, kill as many Slavs as you want, just don't annex anything else". Hitler didn't hold up his end of that bargain, so Canada joined the allies in 1939.
Seeing as how I deleted all of my Feddit accounts years ago, I have no means of asking for a source, and quite honestly I don’t want to go through the trouble of establishing another one. Whether any of this was what the stranger had in mind, I cannot say, but it remains damning all the same.
First, here is Mackenzie King’s opinion on Slavs. Quoting Erik Goldstein’s ‘Neville Chamberlain, the British Official Mind and the Munich Crisis’ in The Munich Crisis, 1938: Prelude to World War II, page 282:
Nevile Henderson, while ambassador at Berlin, wrote to Halifax: ‘The Teuton and the Slav are irreconcilable — just as are the Briton and the Slav. Mackenzie King told me last year after the Imperial Conference that the Slavs in Canada never assimilated with the people and never became good citizens.’²⁸ Czechoslovakia’s strategic importance might be appreciated by many officials, but there was little or no empathy for the peoples caught up in the maelstrom.
Mackenzie King did not have a high opinion of Jews, either, as can be seen in a diary entry that he wrote on March 29, 1938. Quoting Professors Irving Abella’s & Harold Troper’s None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948, page 17:
The prime minister of Canada was obsessed with the notion that the admission of Jewish refugees might destroy his country. “We must […] seek,” King recorded in his diary, “to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood.” Nothing was to be gained, he believed, “by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one.”
Allowing Jewish refugees into Canada, he told his cabinet, might cause riots and would surely exacerbate relations between the federal government and the provinces. In effect, any action permitting an appreciable number of Jews to settle in Canada would, in King's mind, undermine the unity of the nation. This was no time for Canada to act on “humanitarian grounds.” Rather, said the prime minister, Canada must be guided by “realities” and political considerations.³²
Pages 36–7:
And Mackenzie King himself was beyond reach. As far as he was concerned, the admission of refugees perhaps posed a greater menace to Canada in 1938 than did Hitler. If accepting Jewish refugees could threaten Canada’s national cohesion, could there not be merit in Hitler’s fears about Jews in Germany?
“The truth is,” King wrote, “Hitler and Mussolini, while dictators, have really sought to give the masses of the people, some opportunity for enjoyment, taste of art and the like and, in this way, have won them to their side”; and perhaps in a veiled reference to the Jews of Germany, King went on to say that “the dictatorship method may have been necessary to wrest this opportunity from the privileged interests that have previously monopolized it.”⁰¹
[…]
King fondly recalled his meeting with Hitler in Germany [in 1937]. As the American diplomat reported back to Washington, “He described Hitler as being, in his opinion, a very sincere man. He even described him as being ‘sweet’ He said that he [Hitler] had the face, as he studied it, of a good man, although he was clearly a dreamer and gave the impression of having an artistic temperament. During the conversation Hitler had sat with his hands folded and his only gesture was to raise and lower his hands from time to time without unfolding them. He [King] intimated that he had asked Hitler some very frank questions and that he had been satisfied with Hitler’s answers.”⁰²
In September 1938, less than a year before Canada declared war on Germany, King was still mixed in his attitude to Hitler—sorrowful over Hitler’s methods but understanding of his motives. “He might come to be thought of as one of the saviours of the world,” King wrote. “He had the chance at Nuremberg, but was looking to Force, to Might, and to Violence as means to achieving his ends, which were, I believe, at heart, the well-being of his fellow-man; not all fellow-men, but those of his own race.”⁰³
In a thesis that is a partial response to One is Too Many, Justin Comartin concedes that ‘Prime Minister Mackenzie King shared the general pattern of mild prejudice that prevailed in interwar Canada’ but ‘the evidence will illustrate he was by no means rabidly anti-Semitic, and was genuinely concerned of the plight of European Jewry’ (something that the authors of One is Too Many already noted).
As socialists, we are not impressed with liberal politicians’ generic condemnations of the Third Reich for taking its antisemitism one step too far, nor with their feigned helplessness at their alleged inability to accept myriads of Jewish refugees while allowing who knows how many Axis collaborators and former Axis personnel to stay in the Anglosphere. Whether a head of state was a casual antisemite or an extreme one is of limited importance to us, especially when said state covets the reputation of being a paradise for refugees.
I was unable to find an instance of Mackenzie King explicitly urging the Third Reich to invade the Soviet Union. We have little reason to believe that such an action would have appalled him, however. Quoting H. Blair Neatby’s William Lyon Mackenzie King, Volume III, 1932–1939, pages 223–4:
King […] was now convinced that Chamberlain could be trusted to work for peace and that even German expansion in eastern Europe might not bring Britain into a European conflict.³⁹
Page 273:
The leaders of the Opposition parties co-operated. They were no more eager than King to initiate a debate on Canadian foreign policy because, like King, they were not prepared to take sides for or against German expansion. A forthright stand would imply a commitment to participation or to neutrality if European powers declared war and either alternative was politically unacceptable. It seemed wiser to keep silent.
Page 274:
King’s first reaction to Hitler’s threats had been that war in eastern Europe was inevitable and that Russia would become involved; “the problem,” according to King, “will be whether Britain and France can, in some way, stay out. I wish with all my heart that the French–Russian alliance was at an end.”⁴
Here Mackenzie King seems to be implying that a war against the Soviet Union would be fine as long as France and the British Empire were uninvolved. While he did not put it quite like that, it is difficult to read his message any other way. Certainly it is at least easy for anybody to infer as much.
Roy MacLaren’s Mackenzie King in the Age of the Dictators is filled with sordid information about this prime minister’s diplomacy, but for brevity’s sake I shall quote only a couple of pages. Page 184:
In a thank-you letter to Göring of 28 July (following the telegram he had sent him from France), King reviewed in detail possible arrangements for him to travel by rail across Canada, including on the Kettle Valley line in the East Kootenay district of the CPR. He enclosed travel pamphlets and brochures, but also included the text of his CBC broadcast, in which [he] had said that if war did come it would be the fault of the international press.³⁷
A fortnight later, King sent Ribbentrop a three-page handwritten letter of warmest thanks, asking him to tell Hitler, Göring, von Neurath, and Hess “how deeply touched I was […] and how deeply gratified I have felt at the visit as a whole.”³⁸
At a small dinner party at Laurier House soon after his return to Ottawa in mid-July, King told the journalist Bruce Hutchinson that he had found Hitler ‘a simple sort of peasant’ and not very bright, who wished only to possess the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. That insignificant prize would satisfy him and the theft of foreign property did not seem to distress King. No, he said, Hitler did not intend to risk war. And to those peaceful motives King undoubtedly felt that he had made his own valuable contribution.³⁹
Page 250:
Although only one week remained before [the Fascist] invasion of Poland, King continued to hope that Hitler would pursue peace, recalling that during his 1937 visit to Berlin, he had “left Hitler not with a curse but with a blessing […] may God’s blessing guide you.”⁶¹ Two days later, he added, accurately, “I never let myself declare […] against Hitler.”⁶²
As an overt royalist, King rejoiced in sharing with Tweedsmuir his conviction that “the King’s visit had helped immensely in uniting Canada […] that last September I would not have had a united Cabinet, that Lapointe, Cardin and Power (I might also have added Rinfret) would probably have resigned and there would have been difficulty besides in fighting for Czecho-Slovakia. Today I had all united on our participation if there were an act of aggression which brought England and France into a war with Germany.”⁶³
King also sent a message to Chamberlain to urge King George VI to appeal directly to Hitler to allow more time for negotiation. He did so because he was convinced, as he recorded in his diary the next day, that Hitler believed “in compassion, pity as the thing to aim at, also ultimate perfection in purity of living […] [He] is a mystic […] a spiritualist […] and thus his life becomes intelligible. It is that which makes this appeal to his good, his spiritual side, important. Hitler will feel compassion for mankind, pity is holding the sword for today […] That I truly believe.”⁶⁴
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
