Young Rebels In Vienna
Did Stalin Personally Know Hitler?
By James Donahue
They were contemporaries who became two of the most powerful and destructive dictators in the world. They may have even rubbed shoulders during a period when both Stalin and Hitler were living and studying in Vienna. But other than an exchange of letters involving the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939, there is no evidence that they ever met one another face-to-face or spoke to each other on the telephone.
Hitler was a fascist. He rose to power because the German people were afraid of Communism which was sweeping Asia. Of course Stalin gained his power in the Communist Soviet Union after the death of Lenin. It is believed the struggle between Lenin and Stalin led to the murder of Lenin by poison. Thus the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which involved an agreement by the two dictators not to war against each other, came as a shock to the watching world; probably even the German people.
In a peculiar twist of fate, both Hitler and Stalin were living in Vienna in 1913, just before the start of World War I. Hitler lived in Vienna between 1908 and 1913 where he was attempting to make a living as a painter. He left the city and moved to Munich in 1913 to get involved in the war effort.
Stalin was in Vienna that year to work with Leon Trotsky to write the booklet Marxism and the National Question, an essay that analyzed the nature of Marxism and established Stalin as an expert on the subject of the Communist state.
Two other men, destined for world fame, also were living in Vienna at that time. They were Sigmund Freud and Josip Broz, who later became known as the Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito. Broz was working as a metalworker for the Daimler car plant before being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Freud left Vienna in 1938 after the Nazis annexed Austria.
Vienna at that time was the place where creative minds gathered from all over Europe. Many of the artists and thinkers hung out in about a two-square-mile area in the heart of that city of two million people. There was a café culture there where people gathered to drink coffee and debate the issues of the day. Author Charles Emmerson wrote that “The Viennese intellectual community was actually quite small and everyone knew each other . . . that provided for exchanges across cultural frontiers.”
While it cannot be proven, there is a good chance that Hitler and Stalin did sit in the same coffee shops and even exchange ideas in those days. Neither man would recognize the other as a looming dictator whose actions would destroy the lives of millions of people in the years to come.
Even then, however, if they did talk, it is obvious that Hitler and Stalin exchanged extreme differences of opinion. That Tito, a Yugoslav rebel who fought not only against the Nazis but against the Communists from the mountains, and Freud, already known for his ideas concerning the working of the human mind, might have been mixed in the melting pot, only adds to the labyrinth of what those four might have discussed had they strangely met one day at the same coffee house.
World War I broke out in 1914 and Vienna’s intellectual life disappeared forever. All four men went their separate ways and entered careers that changed the world history in ways no one might have imagined.
By James Donahue
They were contemporaries who became two of the most powerful and destructive dictators in the world. They may have even rubbed shoulders during a period when both Stalin and Hitler were living and studying in Vienna. But other than an exchange of letters involving the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939, there is no evidence that they ever met one another face-to-face or spoke to each other on the telephone.
Hitler was a fascist. He rose to power because the German people were afraid of Communism which was sweeping Asia. Of course Stalin gained his power in the Communist Soviet Union after the death of Lenin. It is believed the struggle between Lenin and Stalin led to the murder of Lenin by poison. Thus the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which involved an agreement by the two dictators not to war against each other, came as a shock to the watching world; probably even the German people.
In a peculiar twist of fate, both Hitler and Stalin were living in Vienna in 1913, just before the start of World War I. Hitler lived in Vienna between 1908 and 1913 where he was attempting to make a living as a painter. He left the city and moved to Munich in 1913 to get involved in the war effort.
Stalin was in Vienna that year to work with Leon Trotsky to write the booklet Marxism and the National Question, an essay that analyzed the nature of Marxism and established Stalin as an expert on the subject of the Communist state.
Two other men, destined for world fame, also were living in Vienna at that time. They were Sigmund Freud and Josip Broz, who later became known as the Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito. Broz was working as a metalworker for the Daimler car plant before being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Freud left Vienna in 1938 after the Nazis annexed Austria.
Vienna at that time was the place where creative minds gathered from all over Europe. Many of the artists and thinkers hung out in about a two-square-mile area in the heart of that city of two million people. There was a café culture there where people gathered to drink coffee and debate the issues of the day. Author Charles Emmerson wrote that “The Viennese intellectual community was actually quite small and everyone knew each other . . . that provided for exchanges across cultural frontiers.”
While it cannot be proven, there is a good chance that Hitler and Stalin did sit in the same coffee shops and even exchange ideas in those days. Neither man would recognize the other as a looming dictator whose actions would destroy the lives of millions of people in the years to come.
Even then, however, if they did talk, it is obvious that Hitler and Stalin exchanged extreme differences of opinion. That Tito, a Yugoslav rebel who fought not only against the Nazis but against the Communists from the mountains, and Freud, already known for his ideas concerning the working of the human mind, might have been mixed in the melting pot, only adds to the labyrinth of what those four might have discussed had they strangely met one day at the same coffee house.
World War I broke out in 1914 and Vienna’s intellectual life disappeared forever. All four men went their separate ways and entered careers that changed the world history in ways no one might have imagined.