While he had nothing but contempt for the Poles and their leaders, Hitler repeatedly expressed his personal admiration for Stalin, ‘one of the most extraordinary figures in world history’, as he called him in July 1941.176 ‘Stalin, too,’ Hitler told his dinner companions a year later, ‘must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is a hell of a fellow! He knows his models, Genghiz Khan and the others, very well . . .’177 ‘Stalin,’ said Hitler on another occasion, ‘is half beast, half giant . . . If we had given him another ten years, Europe would have been swept away, as it was at
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