Canada's Second World War Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was in Germany on this date in 1946. He, of course, was the only Allied leader who held office during the war that had personally met most of the senior Nazi leaders during his controversial visit to Berlin in 1937. Almost a decade later, with the Nazi's defeated, Mr. King visited the Nuremburg trials, and was taken to see the those on trial in their cells. Turning to his personal diary afterwards, he made special mention of Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess.
"What interested me particularly was the sight of Hess, King wrote. " He was sitting up. Looked through his little cell aperture. Was sitting up eating his food, back to the door. It recalled in a singular way how he had been sitting opposite me when we had our talk together in Berlin, in 1937. When we came back to the cell, a second time, he was lying on his back and looking towards the opening. When I looked in, his eyes suddenly blazed up as though he recognized me in a moment. They were like coals of fire. I shall never forget the look on his face. I took care not to wait a second but to move right on… I find it hard not to get the odour out of my nostrils and the feeling left on me throughout the day was one of having been in some unclean and unwholesome place. Like sharing the habitation of rats and vermin."
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.