Hitler's Globe

Meher Baba saw Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator in 1941 in Delhi, and said he would have liked to have seen it seven times.

In The Great Dictator Charlie Chaplin plays Adenoid Hynkel, a fictitious dictator based on the then living Adolf Hitler. While writing and preparing for the film, Chaplin studied photographs of Hitler's office. One thing caught his attention -- a giant globe. This became the inspiration for the most famous scene from the film. The globe for the scene was duplicated exactly from the photographs of Hitler's own globe. In the end of the scene the globe pops, and Hynkel (Hitler) cries, indicating that Hynkel's desire to possess the world destroys it in the process.

When the Russians entered Berlin after Hitler's suicide they found the actual room upon which Chaplin's set was based. Everything in it was destroyed by bombing, the ceiling caved in, dust everywhere. But miraculously this globe, depicted in a prop in Charlie Chaplin's film, was unscathed, the sole thing remaining in the room. Symbolically speaking, God had saved the world.

Soviet soldiers pose with 'Hitler's Globe'. Berlin, Germany, 1945.

The Great Dictator was the first film in which Charlie Chaplin ever spoke. His final speech ends with the words "listen... listen" and the camera tilts up into the sky in silence.

(Source of story about Hitler's globe: The Tramp and the Dictator, a documentary by Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft)