“I can fight only for something that I love. I can love only what I respect. And in order to respect a thing, I must at least have some knowledge of it.”
– Adolf Hitler, Volume 1, Chapter 2 (Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna) Mein Kampf
ANOTHER strange dream came to me last night.
The previous one inspired a column called ‘The Mind’s Darkest Hour’ a year ago.
This latest carried the same gravity, thick with meaning I couldn’t quite place.
Perhaps the Stroh 80 was partly to blame.
Or maybe the Thursday night reunion on the sidelines of the UBS Asian Investment Conference, where I toasted with former Deutsche Bank colleagues I hadn’t seen since our analyst days in Frankfurt.
Earlier on, my wife and I watched ‘Jojo Rabbit’.
It was my third time seeing the movie, and as always, it left behind something unresolved.
Set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, the movie centres around a 10-year-old boy (Jojo) whose dream is to join Hitler’s regime.
When Jojo meets a Jewish girl hiding in the walls of his house, his whole worldview begins to crumble.
The scariest part was seeing how the Nazis indoctrinated children with such intense hatred.
Looking back, I’m almost certain the dream took shape from that.
At first, I thought I was Jojo. But no, I wasn’t.
Instead, I was someone disturbingly composed: standing beneath a sky of swastika banners, shoulder to shoulder with Hjalmar Schacht, serving as his chief economist.
Schacht had just taken back the presidency of the Reichsbank, the central bank of the German Empire until 1945.
No one ever explained how I got there or when it was.
Time slipped sideways in that world.
But I did know it was post-1923, the year we stared down hyperinflation and won.
Stranger still, the Reichsbank was staffed by men who insisted they’d studied at the German Economic Institute in Cologne, which, by all accounts, didn’t yet exist until 1951.
By a curious twist of fate, in waking life, that very institution would later be where I first crossed paths with my mentor and central banker, Jurgen Morlok, thirteen years ago.
As for politics, it never quite suited me, though it seemed second nature to many of the Nazi elite.
My allegiance has always been to equations and models.
“… because truth, if it exists anywhere, lives in numbers, not in blueprints,” I told Hermann Göring, the man overseeing the Four Year Plan.
So, imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939, a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler.
I had been a vocal critic of him on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship.
No one I knew encouraged me to go.
“He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.”
But eventually, I concluded that hate gets us nowhere.
I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side – even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Two weeks later, I arrived at the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Heinrich Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII.
I haven’t the slightest idea why Englishman Edward was there.
Dreams don’t come with guest lists.
We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews.
But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway.
Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.
He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard.
Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back.
I found the whole thing quite disarming.
I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like.
That amused him to no end, and I realised I’d never seen him laugh before.
Suddenly he seemed so human.
Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard – the public Hitler.
But this private Hitler was a completely different animal.
Oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, as if it were the real Hitler.
The whole thing had my head spinning.
He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him.
Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, and then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.”
That one got me.
Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhoea in the Reichstag.”
Göring remembered.
How could he forget?
He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car.
Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!”
That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night and believe me, there were plenty.
But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation.
He was quite inquisitive and asked me several questions about myself.
I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I told her everything I talked about.
I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation.
Hitler said he could relate – he hated that, too.
“What am I, a secretary?”
He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again.
I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup.
He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.”
Hmm … there are still feelings.
That resonated with me.
We’re not that different, after all.
I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.
Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door.
“I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.”
“I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.”
And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at med.akilis@gmail.com
