Dear friend...
July 23, 2024
On July 23, 1939, Mohandas Gandhi wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler, hoping to forestall World War Two. “Dear friend,” he began. “Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. … It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state.”1
Forty days later, Germany invaded Poland.
Gandhi had read Mein Kampf in September 1935, a few years after Hitler came to power in Germany. (According to his secretary, the book was kept in the bathroom and read while on the toilet!)2 Another biography soon followed, and one on Lenin.
Hitler’s annexation in Czechoslovakia in late 1938 prompted a newspaper column. “If I were a Czech,” Gandhi mused in the pages of Harijan, he would die at the hands of the German forces, unarmed and independent, thus saving his honor. Satyagraha was not a weapon “of the weak but of the brave. There is no bravery greater than a resolute refusal to bend the knee to an earthly power.”3
By the spring he had begun pondering a personal letter. When he put the appeal to paper, it was brief and to the point: a mere two paragraphs. The British censors intercepted it, and the missive never reached Hitler… not that it would have made the slightest difference.
Gandhi could hardly have chosen any other course. When confronted about Hitler’s lack of conscience, he objected to the supposition that the dictator was beyond redemption. “[B]elief in nonviolence is based on the assumption that human nature in its essence is one and therefore unfailingly responds to the advances of love.”4
Once the war was underway, Gandhi wrote a longer letter to Hitler on Christmas Eve, 1940, asking him to put his disputes before an international tribunal and make an effort for peace. Again, his letter was suppressed; the authorities objected to being described as an imperial power that held “one-fifth of the human race … under the British heel.”5 And that was the end of that.
Have you ever made an appeal to someone’s conscience and received silence in return?
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (July 23, 1939) p. 36,687
Ibid (September 25, 1935) p. 32,850
Ibid (October 6, 1938) p. 35,683
Ibid (Before December 12, 1938) p. 35,903
Ibid (December 24, 1940) p. 38,311