The Silk Road Page #5

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gambled his celebrity

on a highly controversial cause.

Hedin's achievements had attracted

influential admirers.

One was Adolf Hitler.

There was a special relation between

Sven Hedin and Adolf Hitler

who had only had two heroes in his

life, and one of them was Sven Hedin.

It was Sven Hedin's stories

that had kind of awakened

the young Adolf Hitler to the world.

So when they met in the '30s

and the beginning of the '40s,

Hitler wanted to talk about all the

heroic things that Sven Hedin had done.

Hedin, the attention seeker,

was flattered.

In 1936, he gave the opening speech

at the Olympic games in Berlin.

For Hedin, Germany had always been

a symbol of honor and discipline.

He would refuse to see that

the Third Reich was the cause

of the horrors to come.

In 1940, an eye disease that plagued

Hedin all his life resurfaced,

and the explorer went partially blind.

A Norwegian resistance fighter

was brought to Sven Hedin

to tell him about the torture

that he had sustained on the hands

of, of German soldiers.

And Hedin couldn't believe him

because it just didn't fit his image

of what a German soldier is.

And then the Resistance man told him

that his face was badly scarred.

And he took Sven Hedin's hand

and Sven Hedin could feel the scars.

And the story goes that Hedin's eyes

then are filled with tears

but still he couldn't believe that

a German soldier could do

something like that.

In 1945, when the atrocities of

Hitler's regime were undisputed,

Hedin chose to ignore them.

He was always very naively

attracted to these men of power.

And it's never as glaring as

when it comes to Adolf Hitler.

Sven Hedin simply didn't want to see

that this was an evil man.

"One thousand heavy steps

towards the goal.

Not one back."

The motto that led Hedin to triumph

in the desert

now led him to disgrace in Europe.

An unrepentant Nazi sympathizer,

Hedin was an international outcast.

Banished from the world stage,

the defiant explorer wrote about

his past in the limelight.

Hedin sent a letter to a friend's

"I understand that you will speak

at school about my travels in Asia.

Greet the deserts and mountains

when you speak to them,

but tell them that I do not long

after them anymore."

After World War II,

Hedin never returned to Asia.

When the Communists seized control

of China in 1949,

they severed all links with the West.

The Silk Road

Hedin's lifelong obsession

was once again abandoned.

Sven Hedin died in his sleep

in 1952 at the age of 87.

By his bed was a photo of his beloved

Mille, with an inscription on it:

"You have been by my side

on all my travels".

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