Did Hitler or Stalin ever meet face to face and..?
There is no record of Hitler ever meeting Stalin. The only place where they *possibly* could have met, and unlikely at that, is in Vienna in 1913. In January 1913, Stalin was sent to Vienna by Lenin and spent six weeks there writing an article “Marxism and the National Question”. Hitler, after being rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907 – 1908), tried to make a living as a painter, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. He left for Munich in May 1913 when he received the final part of his father’s estate.
They never met face-to-face. Stalin is known to have used some of the tactics that Hitler had used to devastating ends–think the Night of the Long Knives (Hitler) and the show trials and purges of the late 30’s (Stalin). I don’t think that getting Stalin was high on Hitler’s list. He saw all slavic people as being inferior, and they certainly had something he wanted–living space, natural resources, people for slave labor. Plus, Hitler probably realized that Russia had the potential to become a major power, thus took the opportunity to try to stop that. There certainly was idealogical hatred between the leadership of the countries, but it all seems too cynical to be very sincere.
