seeing Spain as the last anti-Communist citadel of Europe - and failed. Thus Merezhkovsky's choice of the new European "heroes" narrowed down to Adolf Hitler. Merezhkovsky had never seen Fascism as an alternative to Communism. As early as 1930 he wrote of a doomed Europe stuck between the two "stores of explosives: Fascism and Communism", expressing hope that some day these two evils will somehow destroy one another. But the danger of the Fuhrer's possible subjugation of Europe was still the lesser evil for him - compared to possible Communist expansion. The "Hitler dilemma" was the only thing husband and wife ever disagreed on. Gippius hated and despised the Fuhrer, referring to him as "an idiot". Merezhkovsky thought he found a leader who'd be able to take the whole of Antichrist Kingdom upon himself, this outweighing for him such trivia as the fact that his own Joan of Arc (1939) was banned in Germany on the day of its release. In summer 1939 Paramount (in collaboration with the French Association des Auteurs de Films) bought Merezhkovsky's scenario The Life of Dante. The production was cancelled on September 1, as World War II broke out in Europe. On September 9, fleeing the air raids, the Merezhkovskys moved to Biarritz in the south of France, where they spent the next three months, communicating mainly with the French and the English military officers, but also with Irina Odoyevtseva and her husband Georgy Ivanov. On June 27, 1940 the German Wehrmacht occupied Biarritz. Here in a hotel on August 14 the writer's 75th anniversary celebration was held, organized by a group of French writers, with some notable Russians like Pavel Milyukov, Ivan Bunin and Mark Aldanov invited. It was there that Merezhkovsky made comments which (according to biographer Yuri Zobnin) were later presented by some memoirists as his "infamous German radio speech". Still, even Zobnin admits that there were reasons to regard Merezhkovsky as a Nazi sympathizer. In the autumn of 1941 Merezhkovsky found himself in the center of his German admirers – students, mostly, but army officers too. It was their German friends who helped the couple move back to Paris from Biarritz where they found themselves penniless and on the verge of homelessness. "Merezhkovsky flew up to the Nurnberg fires with the agitation of a newly born butterfly... By this time most of us stopped visiting them," wrote , a Green Lamp