John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while touring Europe in summer 1945 as a war correspondent for Hearst magazines, wrote in a diary that he believed Adolf Hitler could have still been alive after the Second World War ended.
“[Hitler] had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him,” the future president wrote in his diary, reports The Independent.
The journal is believed to be the only diary Kenney kept. He later gave it to a research assistant, who plans to auction it off in Boston next month in commemoration of what would have been JFK's 100th birthday. The book, consisting of both handwritten and typed pages, is expected to bring in at least $200,000.
Kennedy also wrote in the diary that Hitler "had in him the stuff of which legends are made," making the comments after traveling to Hitler's Berlin bunkers and the "Eagle's Nest" mountaintop retreat in summer 1945, just months after Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker that April.
JFK, after visiting the Berlin bunker, wrote that he wondered if Hitler might be alive, as the room "where Hitler is supposed to have met his death showed scorched walls and traces of fire," and "there is no complete evidence, however, that the body that was found was Hitler's body."
Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction, where the diary will be sold, denied that JFK's words meant he admired Hitler or the Nazi party.
"There’s no glorification, and I wouldn’t take this out of context,” Livingston said. "I think Kennedy was a historian, and he’s writing his understanding of Hitler’s place in history.”
JFK's diary also recorded his trip to England to cover the 1945 general election, when he was correct in his prediction that Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Conservative Party would lose.
“Capitalism is on the way out, although many Englishmen feel this is not applicable to England," Kennedy wrote about British politics at the time. "Socialism is inefficient; I will never believe differently, but you can feed people in a socialistic state, and that may be what will insure its eventual success.”
Kennedy also recorded predictions about Russia, including premonitions about the Cold War.
“The clash with Russia...may be finally and indefinitely postponed by the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations employing it," Kennedy wrote.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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