In the 1940s, while India’s Freedom Struggle was at its peak, the rest of the world was caught up in a war so extensive and brutal that it became the bloodiest war until then. By the time it ended in 1945, with the dropping of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the number of casualties reportedly had touched 70 million.
During these cataclysmic years, two men were charting out the destinies of their respective countries, whose outcome would also impact the world in many ways. One was a pacifist thinker who believed in secularism and human dignity. The other was a maniacal egotist who was wiping out almost half the European population in his bid for racial superiority. At first glance, it appears as though the Mahatma and the Führer have nothing in common. But records show that Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler, hoping to change his mind on the genocide that the Nazis had unleashed.
On 15 March 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and made it into a protectorate. By evening, Hitler’s troops had occupied the capital, Prague. Tensions soared in Europe as Hitler’s expansionist agenda to create a “Greater Germany” of the ‘superior Aryan race’ seemed to become an impending reality. Hitler seemed unstoppable, poised at the cusp of capturing all of Europe in the throes of Nazism.
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