Did Churchill and Hitler ever meet?
Did Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler ever meet? The truth about the two wartime leaders...
Did Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler ever meet? The answer is – almost.
In 1932, Winston Churchill was writing a biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, so was touring some old battlefields of Europe. When he arrived in Munich, an intermediary organised a meeting between him and the rising force in German politics, one Adolf Hitler.
But when Churchill sent a pre-emptive list of questions to challenge Hitler’s racial bias towards the Jewish people – including “How can any man help how he is born?” – Hitler cancelled. Months later, Churchill correctly predicted Jewish persecutions and pogroms, though no-one foresaw the scale of the barbaric genocide to come.
This content was first published in the April 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed
