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Prime Minister Mackenzie King kept seeing lions.

While on the train from Paris to Berlin in 1937, he saw a lion-shaped cloud facing towards Germany. During a visit to the Berlin Zoo, a zookeeper allowed him to pat a lion cub on the head. While reading the bible aloud, he kept stumbling onto passages that mentioned lions.

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“The lion has appeared over and over again,” he wrote in his diary.

For the 62-year-old King, it was as clear a sign as any that his visit with Adolf Hitler was to be the pinnacle of a divine mission to bring peace to an unsettled Europe.

The awkward Canadian leader had long believed that he had been elevated to the prime minister’s office for a higher purpose. And as a holy feeling seemed to enshroud King as he entered the Third Reich, he determined that this meeting with the Fuhrer was it; the pinnacle of his spiritual journey — “the day for which I was born.”

“I imagine, Mr. King, this is the greatest day of your life,” King’s secretary, Edward Pickering, told his visibly enthralled boss.