‘You Are Today the One Person in the World Who Can Prevent a War.’ Read Gandhi’s Letters to Hitler

- By Tridip Suhrud

“At 6 o’clock Mussolini.” This cryptic note in his diary of Dec. 12, 1931, is the only record that M. K. Gandhi made of his meeting with Benito Mussolini in Rome.

Gandhi had, since his days as a student in London, come to have deep fondness for the people of Europe, while nurturing deep doubts about the nature of European states. His tenderness for the people was based on the belief that they too—like the people around the world who were enslaved by Europe—were ground under the heel of modern civilization, which was embodied by the rapacious colonial structure that Europe had created and perpetuated. Gandhi could therefore count among his friends and co-workers many women and men from Europe, and he retained a lifelong fondness for the city of London.

European civilization, Gandhi felt, had been weighed in the balance during the First World War and found wanting.

It had been found wanting because it had surrendered almost entirely to the belief that violence could only be matched by superior destructive force. But Gandhi believed that it was possible to alert—and that it was his duty to alert—even those committed to authoritarian rule to possibilities of non-violence, not as a weapon of the weak but of the spiritually superior. Thus his meeting with Mussolini.

And so, in the years after that meeting, as Europe moved inevitably towards a Second World War that threatened to annihilate all humanity, Gandhi was deeply troubled. He was stirred to his depths by the possibility of destruction of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey in London, and the monuments of France and Germany alike. He was a member of a people long subjugated by Europe, but could not contemplate with equanimity India’s freedom and deliverance from colonial rule via either the fall of England and France or with Germany ruined and humbled. A subject people could work towards peace only by working towards freedom from violence—a freedom for even those who were perpetrators of violence.

In 1939, just months before the war would eventually come, he decided to make another appeal, this time directly to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. He tried again in 1940, once the war was underway. Neither of the letters he wrote to Hitler were allowed to be sent by the colonial government, but they were not acts of a naïve person. He knew that the only God that Hitler knew was brute force, but as a votary of truth and as a non-violent resister Gandhi felt duty-bound to appeal to Hitler and Mussolini because, as human beings, they too had the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. Here are those letters. - Tridip Suhrud

Letter to Adolf Hitler, 1939 | Letter to Adolf Hitler, 1940

Courtesy: Tridip Suhrud. "You Are Today the One Person in the World Who Can Prevent a War. Read Gandhi’s Letters to Hitler." TIME, September 25, 2019.