HITLER

AND

INDIA

Vaibhav Purandare is the author of Savarkar: The True Story of the Father of Hindutva, Bal Thackeray and the Rise of the Shiv Sena and Sachin Tendulkar: A Definitive Biography. He works as a senior editor with The Times of India.

Praise for the book

For too long, too many Indians have laboured under the delusion that Hitler not only supported India’s independence but that he hastened it. How this belief perdures is odd given the vast statements and writings of Hitler in which he said plainly that Britain is entitled to the Raj based upon its power, fortified by its undiluted Anglo-Saxon heritage. In fact, Hitler wanted to make Russia his India. Finally, someone has written the decisive book that will put these canards to rest. Vaibhav Purandare has conducted painstaking archival research to unearth some of the most bizarrely fatuous efforts of Indians in the independence movement to curry favour with Hitler who, on most occasions, were rudely rebuffed as were the myriad requests that Hitler remove deeply offensive statements about India in Mein Kampf. Purandare also presents statements of Indian luminaries who exposited their affection for fascists without clue or irony. Their flirtations with mass murderers should prompt a revisiting of the esteem they enjoy. Purandare’s volume is extremely readable with his deep appreciation for the absurd and jocose turn of phrase. At times, I found myself guffawing out loud. Get this book for every known or suspected Hitler enthusiast as well as for the historical ignoramuses in your midst.

—C. Christine Fair, Professor, Security Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC

First published by Westland Non-Fiction, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited, in 2021

1st Floor, A Block, East Wing, Plot No. 40, SP Infocity, Dr MGR Salai, Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai 600096

Westland, the Westland logo, Westland Non-Fiction and the Westland Non-Fiction logo are the trademarks of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.

Copyright © Vaibhav Purandare, 2021

ISBN: 9789390679997

The views and opinions expressed in this work are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publisher is in no way liable for the same.

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For Baba and Mom

Jagdish Purandare

and

Jyotsna Purandare

AUTHOR’S NOTE

‘Well, well … here’s something,’ I said to myself.

The year was 2011. I was reading Mein Kampf, the autobiography of Adolf Hitler, and a particular passage in the text had piqued my curiosity. It was about India.

I was aware that Hitler’s autobiography was one of the perennial bestsellers in India, and almost every bookstore in the country, big or small, famous or unnamed, why, even the fancied and unfancied streetside bookstalls, had a copy, more often than not prominently displayed.

Do the extraordinary number of the book’s buyers know what Hitler had said in it about India? I wondered as I slammed its pages shut. When I asked around, I realised most of them didn’t. At the same time, I thought, have I seen all I need to see, or is there much more to it?

This spurred a search in the archives, German, Indian and global, and the discoveries were startling. Equally startling was the truth that Hitler’s view of India was a completely forgotten chapter of India’s history. That was odd, given that history was more and more a contested subject in India, much as in the rest of the world. Indians born decades after Independence were increasingly becoming aware of Winston Churchill’s opinions about their country and its people, but Hitler? The question more or less drew a blank. There was a gigantic gap there.

What was Hitler’s outlook towards India and its people? How did he see their struggle for freedom from the British Raj? How did he perceive British rule itself in relation to India and the rest of the world? Did he have opinions on Indian history, culture and civilisation, on Indian traditions, and on the direction the country would eventually take? And had he voiced them anywhere, in public or in private? If he had, had they resulted in any consequences during his life and times?

Considering how devastatingly consequential a role Hitler played in modern history, these questions were vital. Addressing them would contribute to a fresh assessment of the German dictator, an assessment we must make of all important historical figures, good or bad, from time to time. Such an assessment would be of particular value if it were not West-focused, but from the East, and from a place other than Japan (a key Axis force in the Second World War) in the East.

As far as India was concerned, a genuinely close examination was even more critical on account of the consistently high sales of Mein Kampf, the casual manner in which the name ‘Hitler’ was thrown about on the subcontinent, either by way of criticism or, in some cases, even praise, and the notion that several Indians still seemed to harbour in the twenty-first century—that the German Führer was a friend of the Indian people and had extended wholehearted support to their demand for political liberty.

What made the gap truly extraordinary was that it existed despite the fact that works on Hitler and the Nazis would fill up more libraries in the world than most other subjects. There are volumes written about him, the Third Reich and the Second World War, but there’s almost next to nothing on the subject on hand.

This book, dear reader, is an effort to fill that gap.

1

ENTER THE THIRD REICH

The knock on the door was loud and startled A.C.N. Nambiar, who was reading his newspaper. In a moment, it turned into the thudding sound of a powerful shoulder forcing itself against the door.

It was 7 p.m. on 27 February 1933. Nambiar, an Indian journalist and anti-colonial agitator, was seated on his desk in the front room at his flat in central Berlin. The front page of the evening paper, spread out in front, had him fully engrossed. The Reichstag or German Parliament had gone up in flames the previous night. The blaze had run through the main chambers, where the people’s representatives sat, and leapt up through the building’s gilded cupola, destroying it completely.

Adolf Hitler, sworn in as Chancellor of Germany barely four weeks ago, had launched a crackdown against opponents of his Nazi Party even before the fire had been fully extinguished. He had roped in his party’s strong-arm unit, the Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung) or SA, for this purpose. The SA had just been formally appointed as ‘auxiliaries’ to support the police force.

A twenty-four-year-old Dutch worker with communist leanings, Martinus van der Lubbe, had been arrested from a corridor near the burning chambers and had apparently confessed to the crime. A whole lot of communists were rounded up as a consequence, but so were many others believed to be antagonistic to the Nazis—writers, journalists, artists, lawyers, pacifists and members of the clergy. The Nazis hated communism, which they saw as a distasteful force propelling their principal ‘enemy’, the Jewish community. At the same time, anyone and everyone deemed ‘anti-national’ was being picked up indiscriminately.

Ironically, Nambiar hailed from the south-western Indian coastal state of Kerala—the province that would get the world’s first duly elected communist regime after India’s independence in 1947. He was in his thirties and left-leaning, without a shadow of doubt. Having studied at Presidency College in Madras in the teens of the twentieth century, he had initially moved to London, where he had a few teaching stints to his credit before shifting to Berlin in 1924. When he left for Berlin, which, in his opinion, was far more vivacious than the capital of the UK, he had carried along most of the Indian nationalist impulses picked up during his stay in the heart of the British Empire, where a number of liberation-seeking Indian radicals were active and vocal after the end of the First World War.

Nambiar’s sympathies for the Left were a direct result of his interaction with European socialists and communists who were, at the time, supportive of the Indian demand for freedom. For a couple of years, between 1929 and 1931, Nambiar had run the India Information Bureau (IIB) from two rented rooms in Wilhelmstrasse, which was to the German capital what Downing Street was to London, the city’s deep, political core. The Bureau, which dealt in the dissemination of news and opinion, had been funded by the Indian National Congress (INC), the principal mass organiser of the Indian freedom movement. It had, as a matter of fact, been set up by Nambiar on the prodding of Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru was in Brussels in 1927 for the International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism and had met the Malayali journalist then.1 It was here that the League Against Imperialism (LAC), largely a creation of the global communist movement, was born. It was more a debating society than anything else and remained so until its dissolution in 1935. But Nambiar had an undeniable association with it, as did many other non-communists of the period, like the scientist Albert Einstein and writer Romain Rolland. Nambiar was no communist, however; at the most, he could be described as being solidly in favour of the Left’s professed project of social equality like countless others across the world in the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution.

The man’s direct link with the ‘Reds’, however, was through marriage. Nambiar’s wife was Suhasini Chattopadhyaya, a card-carrying communist and the younger sister of the illustrious Indian poet and first woman president of the INC, Sarojini Naidu. Yet, her growing left-wing radicalism was actually one of the reasons the couple had gradually drifted apart. Suhasini had left for India in the late 1920s, in the hope that her husband would eventually follow her home. But he had stayed back in Berlin and got himself a German girlfriend, a Bavarian named Eva Geissler. She, like Suhasini, was a confirmed communist.

The moment Nambiar opened the door, six brown-shirted Stormtroopers pointed loaded revolvers at him. If he tried to resist, he’d be shot, they told him. He was asked to go with them to a car waiting outside.

Two of the SA men took him down and four stayed back to collect his possessions. They came down fifteen minutes later, bringing along numerous bundles, one of which contained Nambiar’s typewriter. He was in the habit of punching out pieces to be sent to various publications in India on it; the most prominent of these was The Hindu, the popular English daily from Madras (now Chennai).

Pushed into a vehicle, he was driven to a local SA station, which was not a police station really. The SA had built its own parallel lock-ups in vacant warehouses, basements and abandoned garages, all places described soon thereafter as ‘wild concentration camps’ by Berliners to distinguish them from official concentration camps. Along the way, one of the SA men joked that they now had enough typewriters for themselves.2

The SA station was located on the third floor of a building. While being walked up the stairs, Nambiar was ‘savagely assaulted’ by two of the Brownshirts ‘with leather whips’.3 Inside the station, the bundles containing his stuff were opened. There were lots of papers: a manuscript of a book on India that Nambiar had been working on, newspaper cuttings, pocket books, files and private correspondence. From among the Indian newspapers and periodicals that had been found, two were kept aside by the inspecting squad for being somewhat suspect. One was Capital, a business weekly from Calcutta, because its title was similar to that of Karl Marx’s famous text, and the other was the Indian Textile Journal, which the investigators felt needed inspection because it had a ‘red’ cover.

Initially made to sit in a corner, Nambiar was soon led by two of his SA assailants to the man who was the head of the station. ‘With a supercilious smile,’ Nambiar recalled later in his account of the incident, the station head posed ‘a number of silly questions without waiting for any answer’ and made ‘condemnatory remarks about India’s struggle for self-determination’.4 The remarks didn’t surprise the journalist at all: he had witnessed, firsthand, the rise of the Nazis and had also written about their intense antipathy towards India and Indians. Simultaneously, the SA guards searched Nambiar’s person and some other guards moved forward and placed all the ‘incriminating’ material seized from his flat before their boss. After this, the Indian was led to another corner where some of the Nazis entertained themselves by pointing ‘finger guns’ at him.

Ten minutes later, the station head ordered that Nambiar be taken to the regular police station. From the doorway to the vehicle, Nambiar was held by two SA minders in what he described as ‘jiu-jitsu grips’, a reference to a Japanese form of combat. In jiu-jitsu, an armed opponent is neutralised by an unarmed person by means of various grappling techniques. On the way, the SA men cracked jokes at his expense. One guard pointed to his own torn trousers, the result of having carried out ‘raids’ all day, and asked the detainee if he could give him a mark, the German currency, to have them mended; another said he was feeling bad that he’d have to hand him over to the regular police, who didn’t really know ‘how to give proper treatment’ to characters like Nambiar.

At the police station, Nambiar’s arrest was formalised. His necktie, shoelaces and suspenders were removed, and for the night, he was sent to a dark cell with no bed, ‘just sitting accommodation’.

The next morning, Nambiar was taken to the Berlin police headquarters at Alexanderplatz, where all the accused held over the last twenty-four hours had been summarily dispatched, one after the other. A police officer here recorded his personal details such as name, address and profession. While the questions were being posed to him, another officer ‘gleefully’ told Nambiar that ‘gallows were being raised for arrested political prisoners’ so that they could all be hanged. From there he was led to a common cell, where he spent two nights with other prisoners. On the third day, he was shifted to a solitary cell.

In the same city, and around the same time when Nambiar’s horrific ordeal had begun, another Indian opened the door to his flat to let in a dozen Stormtroopers, all pointing their revolvers at him. This was Jaya Surya Naidu, son of Sarojini Naidu and nephew of Nambiar’s wife, Suhasini Chattopadhyaya. The eldest of the poet’s four children, thirty-two-year-old Jaya Surya was a student of medicine at Berlin University.

He asked the SA men what they wanted. ‘They told me to shut up, struck me on the head with the butts of their revolvers, and began ransacking my room,’ he recollected later.5

Jaya Surya’s landlady, a German who wasn’t a Jew, was so badly beaten up by the Stormtroopers that she fled Berlin and didn’t return. Naidu himself was asked very sharp questions about ‘ammunition supplies and communist organisations’. Once his keys, passport and medical papers had been taken, the Nazis, he stated, pushed him down ‘five flights of stairs, whipping and beating me … with belts and straps until my back and neck were bleeding and bruised’. Battered and ‘almost unconscious’, he was dragged into a car ‘before a jeering crowd’ and taken to one of the Nazi barracks, where he was grilled for three hours, ‘all the time being pushed and struck’ by the Stormtroopers.6 After a while, a cop in plainclothes came in and took him in an official police van to the Berlin police headquarters. He spent two days in the lock-up there, not knowing that his aunt’s husband was in another part of the same prison. Naidu was then transferred to a prison in Spandau, fourteen kilometres west of Berlin.

2

IN MEIN KAMPF

One day in September 1919, Adolf Hitler was told by his bosses in the German army’s political department to attend a meeting of the German Workers’ Party which had been founded earlier that year by a locksmith named Anton Drexler. The party was small, with barely forty members on its rolls. He took a seat unobtrusively in the rear of the cramped beer hall in Munich where the meeting was taking place. When one of them argued that Bavaria should leave Germany and join Austria instead, the pan-German nationalist in Hitler rose and attacked the speaker in the strongest terms. The party chief was impressed and asked Hitler to join the outfit, pressing into his hands a leaflet.

The thirty-year-old jumped at the opportunity.

Adolf Hitler was born in the border town of Braunau in Austria on 20 April 1889. His mother Klara, a farmer’s daughter, was a gentle woman who doted on him. But his father, Alois, a customs inspector, was a stern patriarch who often beat up the boy when he was in a foul mood. Fortunately for the boy, Alois had, some years before Adolf’s birth, changed his own surname from Schicklgruber to Hitler. Imagine the entire German nation saying ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’

Adolf gave up schooling just before he could finish his secondary school, having struggled with, ironically, German. He would go on to employ the very language to catastrophic effect as Nazi leader and the Führer of the Third Reich. He loved to draw and saw a future for himself in the world of art. Two years after his father’s death in 1903, Hitler, his sister Paula and mother moved to Linz, one of the provincial centres in the then Austrian empire. Adolf spent two years there, mostly dreaming of becoming a great artist.

In 1906, he visited Vienna for the first time and was struck by the beauty of its buildings. Having decided to move to this attractive city, Adolf applied to the Academy of Fine Arts there the following year and was sorely disappointed when his application was turned down. ‘Test drawing unsatisfactory. Few heads,’ the assessors said.1 Within days of this rejection, Adolf’s mother died, leaving the eighteen-year-old devastated. Orphaned, he now moved to Vienna, nevertheless, on his own to make something of himself. For five years, he led the life of a drifter, finding little success and struggling to sell most of his paintings as a freelance artist.

Adolf was, right from his schooldays, a proponent of pan-German nationalism, an idea endorsed by several people at the time in Austria and beyond. Unlike his father, who had been rather proud of his credentials as a state official, Adolf did not believe in the Austrian state at all. Hitler’s biographers are of the opinion that he picked up the German nationalist ideology from Georg von Schönerer. During Adolf’s growing-up years in Linz, Schönerer had been ‘the mouthpiece of a pan-Germanistic hatred of the Jews’ and someone who ‘blended hatred of the Habsburgs (the Austrian ruling dynasty) and the Catholic Church with anti-Semitism’.2

This sentiment further intensified within Hitler in Vienna, where anti-Semitism was ‘endemic’.3 Vienna’s mayor of the time, Karl Lueger, and his Christian Socialist Party, routinely abused the Jews, whose numbers in the city had gone up from 6,000 in the mid-nineteenth century to 1.75 lakh or 8.6 per cent of the total population in 1910.4 The young Adolf agreed with Lueger that the Jews, who had ‘a strong presence … in the professions, academic life, the mass media, the arts, and in business and finance’, and the Marxists, who had supporters among the poorer Jews and who spoke of internationalism and labour rights without recognising the idea of Germanic unity, posed a threat to the German population. Adolf also ‘detested’ the Slavic people who were present in significant numbers in Vienna, and he referred to this situation as ‘all this racial mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats’.5

Hitler left Vienna for Munich in 1913 on gaining his father’s inheritance, because he had no desire at all to fight for the Austrian state in an impending war. As someone—according to Hitler—born on the wrong side of the Bavarian border, he could not have evaded conscription in the Austrian–Hungarian forces if he stayed there. In Munich, a German city, on the other hand, Hitler enthusiastically applied to serve in the Bavarian army when the First World War broke out in 1914. By a strange oversight, he was taken in, even though his nationality was Austrian. Finally, having found purpose in life at the age of twenty-five, Adolf made his mark as a dispatch runner who took messages to the frontlines of the conflict, braving a number of risks. He even won the Iron Cross in August 1918. Two months later, Adolf suffered a mustard gas attack near Ypres in Belgium. Before he could be discharged from a military hospital in Pasewalk, around 120 kilometres from Berlin, he learnt that Germany had surrendered.

Hitler was shattered by the defeat and equally gutted that a new democratic republic had been formed in Berlin, with left-wing Social Democrats playing a key role in it. He held them and the Jews entirely responsible for the ‘stab in the back’, as he described the defeat, and for the Versailles Treaty which imposed heavy reparation costs on Germany. On his return to Munich, he joined the army’s political department which was, in truth, its espionage and propaganda unit.

That was when he attended a meeting of the German Workers’ Party and seized the opportunity.

Hitler’s impassioned speeches soon began to draw crowds. An initial meeting in October 1919, at which he was the main speaker, attracted a crowd of 111. When he stood up to speak in the guest house of a beer hall on the evening of 10 December 1919, a total of 300 men and women were in attendance. That was a sizeable crowd, given that barely two months ago the party had not had more than forty members, with less than half turning up regularly for meetings.

It was at this meeting that Hitler spoke about India for the first time. Initially, his listeners were given the impression that he was doing some serious finger-pointing at Britain and its conquest of India, its exploitation of the land, the people and her tremendous resources. Yet, the listeners realised very quickly that almost instinctively and naturally, the wagging finger had quite swiftly turned into a metaphorically extended handshake towards imperial Britain, and an exceedingly warm one at that.

‘Who is responsible for the humiliation of Germany? Who is right? Is right possible without power? Is the victor always right?’ Hitler asked those present. Then, after citing the cases of Russia, North America and Austria–Hungary as powers with either ‘more space than their people needed’ or with expansionist designs, he moved to the Indian example. ‘India provides England and half of the world with natural resources. How does England treat India? Who is in the right?’ he asked.6

Before this could be construed as criticism of colonialism, he declared, ‘The Englishman has reason to be proud. About fifty-sixty years ago, England controlled trade, industry and traffic, and British capital could be found everywhere.’ Nonetheless, with the Germans having launched their colonial policy in 1880, ‘where previously the Englishman was the Lord, now the German took his place’. Germany, in short, had apparently caught up with all-conquering England, and that was a good thing, in Hitler’s view.

Adolf Hitler never really wrote his autobiography, Mein Kampf; he dictated all of it to his deputy, Rudolf Hess. The first part was taken down by Hess in 1924 inside Landsberg Prison, where Hitler and his close associates had been sent after their unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, Germany’s wobbly experiment with democracy after the First World War. The second part was dictated over the two summers of 1925 and 1926, after Hitler was released from prison in December 1924, having served just a little over a year, despite being sentenced to five.

In the first part, Hitler railed against Jews and Marxists, discussed his childhood, youth, several historical events and the politics of the day, and even dedicated quite a few pages to a discussion on the dangers posed to the health of German society by the sexually transmitted disease, syphilis. In the second, he spelt out the Nazi Party’s programme and aims, the nature of the German state it would build if it acquired power and the foreign policy such a state would have to pursue. This articulation was put forth in the most pleasurable of surroundings—the beautiful mountains near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps of southern Germany. Hitler waxed eloquent in front of his amanuensis, Hess, on the overseas alliances a Nazi-directed state ought to forge and foster, and the nations and peoples it apparently had better keep at arm’s length.

Indians, quite clearly, belonged to the latter category. Hitler laid down, in the most unequivocal terms, his views on India and its people. Since the second volume too was purportedly a continuation of his own story, the bit about India, too, unsurprisingly began with the early days of the ‘movement’ that Hitler was leading.

Most critics later described Hitler’s account of his own life as wholly unreliable and mostly fictional.

When, in 1920-21, the National Socialist German Workers Party or Nazi ‘movement’ was ‘slowly beginning to raise itself above the political horizon’ and the ‘German national freedom movement’ was ‘pronounced’, Hitler claimed people had approached his party ‘from various quarters’ in a bid to establish some sort of connection with ‘the freedom movements of other countries’. This was apparently intended as an experiment along the lines of ‘the league of oppressed nations’, an idea then ‘propagated by many’.

Those involved in it were ‘chiefly representatives of individual Balkan States’, but there were, ‘in addition, some from Egypt and India’. These people were, ‘individually’ and ‘always’, in Hitler’s opinion, ‘gabbling pomposities’, and they were ‘without any realistic background’.7

Yet, what supposedly struck Hitler as remarkably odd was that ‘not a few Germans’ were taken in by these ‘inflated Orientals’. The Germans, in their naivete, ‘immediately believed they had before them an adventurous Indian or Egyptian student’ or a ‘representative’ of India or Egypt. What these Germans couldn’t see was that the Indians or Egyptians ‘were at most individuals behind whom stood nothing at all’, and they had been ‘authorised by nobody to conclude any agreement with anybody at all’. So ‘the practical result of every relation with such elements was null, unless one particularly wants to record the loss of time as a deficit’, he noted nastily. For his part, Hitler declared that he had ‘always guarded against such attempts’ to connect with Indians, because he had ‘better things to do than to fritter away weeks on such fruitless conferences’.8

He went out to further explain that even if the Indians, who were seeking out Germans, had been ‘authorised’ and were truly representative, he would scarcely have promoted any interaction, much less offered any encouragement. Hitler firmly held that ‘the whole business was useless and even harmful’, because ‘the attempt to disarm’ rulers ‘by a league of oppressed nations is not only ridiculous but also disastrous’, and it would only mean that Germany ‘devotes itself not to reality but to fantastic’ and ‘fruitless hopes and illusions’.

To find a stark illustration of just how ‘fantastic’ these ‘illusions’ were, there was no need to look any further than India, Hitler suggested. He said that in 1920-21, there ‘suddenly arose in folkish circles’ the ‘childish and incomprehensible hopes that England was facing a collapse in India … some Asiatic fakir or other, perhaps, for all I care, some real Indian fighters for freedom, who were then running around Europe, contrived to stuff even otherwise quite intelligent people with the fixed idea that the British Empire, whose keystone is in India, was on the verge of collapse right there’. It didn’t occur to these out-and-out dreamers, Hitler felt, that in this case, too, as it had been in the case of the proposed league of oppressed nations, ‘the father of all thoughts was only their own wish’. It was ‘really rather childish to assume that in England they do not know how properly to estimate the importance of the Indian Empire for the British world union. And if anybody flatters himself that England will let India go without risking her last drop of blood, that is simply a bad sign of the absolute failure to learn from the World War and the complete misunderstanding and ignorance of Anglo-Saxon determination.’ Further, it was ‘proof’, according to him, ‘of the German’s total lack of any notion of the whole method of British penetration and administration of this empire’.9

There were, according to Hitler, only two ways that England could lose India, each more improbable than the other. The truth, Hitler strenuously asserted, was that ‘England will lose India only if it either falls victim to racial degeneration within its own administrative machinery’, which ‘at the moment’ he was completely and confidently ruling out, ‘or if it is compelled to by the sword of a powerful enemy. Indian rebels will, however, never achieve this’.

Moreover, Hitler’s own choice in the matter was absolutely transparent. ‘As a German, I would … still far rather see India under English than under some other rule,’ he said.10

This peremptory smackdown of the Indian freedom movement was followed by a more damning statement, which was the very heart of Hitler’s political philosophy. A ‘coalition of cripples’ representing subjugated countries could not storm a powerful and determined empire, in his opinion. But there was something much more basal and central to his belief. ‘As a folkish man, who estimates the value of humanity on racial bases,’ he stated, ‘I may not, simply because of my knowledge of their racial inferiority, link my own nation’s fate with that of these so-called oppressed nations.’11

The lines from Mein Kampf quoted above are from a translation of the original German text, done by a team of American scholars.12 This team translated the text when Hitler was well-ensconced in power in Germany and was on the verge of dragging the world towards a new war. I have chosen their work because I found it the most readable. Two other translations must be referred to here, for the simple reason that numerous Indians from Hitler’s era were able to understand Hitler’s thoughts through them. Both these translations were from Britain, a place India was then shackled to. Indians often responded to these translations as much as they did to the American one, perhaps more so given India’s links during that period with the British empire.

In one of these translations, by E.T.S. Dugdale,13 the term ‘gabbling pomposities’ used by Hitler to describe Indians is replaced by ‘chattering busybodies’, and in the other, by James Murphy,14 Indians are characterised simply as ‘charlatans who gave themselves big airs’. Similarly, ‘inflated Orientals’ in the American translation was replaced by ‘jabbering’ in one of the texts and as plain ‘pompous’ in another. The term ‘Asiatic fakirs’ from the work of the US translators was unanimously replaced by ‘Asiatic mountebanks’. With reference to the subject of the racial status of people from ‘oppressed nations’, Dugdale quotes Hitler as being unwilling to ‘link the destiny of my people with the destiny of those inferior races’, while Murphy’s translation is equally blunt: ‘I know how worthless they (those nations) are racially.’15

There is no scope for ambiguity. Hitler had very decided views on the Indian freedom struggle and the Indians who were in the thick of it.

Where did Hitler’s views about India and the Indians really come from? To unravel that, we need to go back to the finer details of his career as a political agitator.

In January 1920, Hitler was made the propaganda chief of the German Workers’ Party. In the subsequent month, he changed the organisation’s name to National Socialist German Workers Party or the Nazi Party. Addressing a gathering of 1,200 people in Munich’s famous Hofbräuhaus Festival Hall on 17 April, Hitler asked, for the second time, if it was right or legally justified for small populations to rule entire continents and mentioned England in the context of India, China (the Opium Wars) and the Boers of South Africa. But even as he reiterated his wish that Germany should replace Britain as a superpower, he exclaimed in the same breath, ‘England, with its few million people, practically rules one-fifth of the earth. British marinism! British colonial power, the biggest in the entire world!’ Asking how a country like England ‘could even get to this power’, he then promptly went on to answer the question as well. ‘One, due to British national sentiment, which is so absent in our people. Two, through racial purity in the colonies. The Englishman has always known how to be lord and not brother. Three, through his extraordinary genius. He always managed to grab economic power.’16

This blow hot, blow cold stance of Hitler, however, left some listeners a little confused. Was Hitler’s question about Britain’s ‘right’ to rule more important than his praise for Britain’s might or vice versa? What did the oscillation really mean?

At a meeting in Munich’s Kindl cellar in September that year, Hitler, whilst keeping up the same act of ambivalence, dispelled all doubts.

Addressing a crowd of 2,000 people, Hitler spoke of ‘the starvation of India’ by the British ‘through export of grains and planting of cotton and India rubber’. Immediately after that, he asserted that the whole point of it was that ‘right was only where power is, and at the end of the day, right without power was no right at all’. There was a lesson there for Germany, which he wanted it to learn at once. ‘There was no right for Germany (after the war defeat) because it did not have power anymore.’17

Power was extraordinarily crucial for Hitler, the emerging politician, and even in his otherwise rambling and turgid autobiography, he stated baldly and crisply that ‘Germany would either be a world power or there would be no Germany’.18 Of even higher significance was race, which, for him, constituted the very underpinnings of such power.

On both counts, in the Nazi leader’s imagination, the British were wonderfully equipped, and the Indians did not even qualify. For Hitler, race came before power, and regarding that, Hitler had some clear views about India.

Hitler’s view of India was shaped to a great extent by the opinions of the controversial political philosopher, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.19 Chamberlain was a Britisher who admired the Germans so much that he became a German citizen. In keeping with the Aryan invasion theory, Chamberlain believed that white-skinned Aryans had entered the Indian sub-continent from the north-west some 1,500 years ago and had reached the height of metaphysical thought with their contemplation of matters worldly and otherworldly. But their racial purity had been ‘ruined’ by mixing with the local population, he contended.

Hitler’s ideas on racial purity were echoed by a young man he met during the period where he was alternately bashing and glorifying British rule in his speeches.

Alfred Rosenberg, born to an Estonian mother and a Lithuanian father, had studied engineering in Riga in Latvia; he lived in Paris for a while and emigrated to Germany at the end of the First World War. Hitler was impressed with the young Rosenberg, four years his junior, when the two ran into each other in Munich in 1920. He appointed him as the editor of the Nazi mouthpiece, Volkischer Beobachter.

Rosenberg had studied Indian history and culture in some detail. He knew, for instance, how the word ‘Aryan’ had come to occupy a place in racial parlance. William Jones, a British scholar in India in the nineteenth century, had found a whole lot of similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin. He conferred the name ‘Arya’, which means noble in Sanskrit, to those who spoke and used these languages. Eventually, other linguistic scholars had discovered that forty other languages, including German and English, shared the same characteristics and divided them into families. That time onward, serious thinkers had wondered how Indians and Europeans had come to speak such similar languages. A bunch of theorists, many of them nationalist-minded Germans, had jumped to the (essentially groundless) conclusion that people of the Nordic race, with their blue eyes and blond complexion, had spread out from their German ‘Fatherland’ and conquered the blighted eastern parts of the globe. In 1853, a French diplomat named Joseph Arthur de Gobineau had written, to much popular acclaim, that these tall, lithe and handsome Germanic ‘Aryans’ were ‘superior to all other races and responsible for every great accomplishment in civilisation’.20 Hitler’s intellectual guru, Chamberlain, had more or less picked up Gobineau’s claim and propagated it successfully among newer generations of Europeans.

Rosenberg employed this knowledge, as well as his otherwise more-than-superficial understanding of Indian history, to wilfully put out a grossly distorted version. He praised to the skies the so-called gallant Aryans, who had presumably galloped into India on their horses and said they had ‘separated themselves from the dark alien peoples’ they had encountered on the subcontinent. The outcome of their ‘instinctive aversion’ for the indigenous Indian population was the caste system, which bore the name ‘Varna’, that ‘means caste, but it also means colour’.21 The ‘black brown natives’ were bogged down in the world of magic, bizarre cults and superstition, and ‘after a long battle against the constantly intruding ideas of the racially inferior aborigines’, Rosenberg said, ‘the Aryans evolved a worldview which, for depth and range, cannot be surpassed by any philosophy’.22 This philosophy and burst of creativity constituted, as Chamberlain had stated previously, the works of the poet Kalidasa, the seeker of ultimate truths, Shankara, and the canonical texts, the Vedas and the Upanishads.

The problem, according to this friend of Hitler’s, was that the Aryans got so caught up in their quest for enlightenment and universal oneness of spirit that eventually, ‘the sacrificial cult of spirits and gods began to intrude’ and ‘the alien blood … seeped in’. Subsequently, after many generations, ‘only the teaching remained’ while ‘devoid of its vital racial pre-requisite’, the once-superior Aryan race disintegrated and ‘racial decay overtook’ the land. ‘The rich, blood-based meaning of Varna was entirely lost,’ Rosenberg lamented.23 Varna was now ‘only a division between technical, professional and other classes, and has degenerated into the vilest travesty of the wisest idea in world history’. The ‘modern products’ of this ‘racial pollution’, in other words, modern-day Indians, were in Rosenberg’s words ‘poor bastards’ or ‘wretched mongrels’ who could not be seen as Aryans or proto-Aryans, ‘seeking healing for their crippled existence in the waters of the Ganges’.24

As Hitler systematically built up his party through the 1920s and also through his years in power, his opinions on India and Indians remained consistent. He believed that the Indians were, in racial terms, outright rejects. He outlined his prejudices against them forcefully, combining hatred with contempt. His autobiography, of course, referred to Indians in harsh terms and so did his assessments and articulations outside of it.

3

NATIONALIST? SOCIALIST? CAPITALIST?

Gregor Strasser, one of the prominent early leaders of the Nazi Party, was having lunch with his family in his Munich home on 30 June 1934 when the agents of the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, dragged him out. He was charged with joining hands with SA chief Ernst Rohm in carrying out a putsch and taken to a prison cell, where he was shot dead by three men. The final bullet was fired by Reinhard Heydrich—who later notoriously chaired the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 where the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish ‘problem’ was discussed.1

Why does Strasser feature in a story on Hitler and India? Because the difference of views between the two, which began with Strasser’s emphasis on ‘Socialist’ and Hitler’s on ‘National’ reached a flashpoint when the Strasser faction openly supported the colonies’ right to self-determination.

Undivided, pre-partition India was a ridiculously distant 6,000 kilometres away from Germany, and yet it impinged on the German and Nazi mind space in two highly significant ways.

The first was connected to the relationship a war-battered Germany would choose to have with the British Empire. Would it be an adversarial relationship, given Imperial Germany’s recent humiliation in a world war, or friendly?

The other issue at hand was a direct offshoot of the first. It was more about principle than policy, and about ideology rather than a simple and of-the-moment, for-the-moment political expediency. Naturally, it deserved separate treatment. How was Germany of the 1920s-30s, or Nazi Germany if the Nazis ever came to power, going to look at the Indian demand and push for complete political freedom? Were the Indians going to be viewed, as scholar Milan Hauner put it, ‘as a part of the just struggle of the “have-nots” against the post-Versailles imperialist domination of the world’? And would they be enlisted in this struggle or be left out, coldly and deliberately?

The Nazi Party found itself to be quite bitterly divided on this point, with one faction led by Hitler and another headed by Gregor Strasser, who was later brutally murdered, advocating starkly contrasting approaches.

Strasser, originally from Landshut, Bavaria, was a ‘tall, slightly corpulent’ chemistry and pharmacy graduate from the University of Munich who had set up a drug store of his own. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1921 because he was absolutely convinced that Adolf Hitler had ‘the makings of a great man’ and would usher in a new era in Germany.2 His convictions about Hitler’s qualities as a leader notwithstanding, he was not in agreement with the Nazi leader on every aspect of party policy. Strasser placed a great deal of stress on the ‘Socialist’, while Hitler did so on the word ‘National’, in the party’s name. Strasser’s personality and predilections were somewhat different too: he was ‘a hearty eater and a hearty drinker’, had a ‘keen sense of humour’ and liked others, too, to have a really good time. Hitler, on the other hand, was a ‘non-smoker, non-drinker and non-meat eater’, a proud teetotaller known for preaching ‘the spartan life’.3

Strasser, who became one of the first Nazi deputies (members) in the Reichstag in the 1920s, was a hugely popular man among his people, especially in northern Germany, where Hitler had asked him to take overall charge of party organisation. According to one Hitler confidant, Strasser was ‘more esteemed’ in the northern parts ‘than Hitler himself’.4 To no one’s surprise, Strasser emerged and remained, until the early 1930s, the ‘principal organiser’ of the Nazis nationally and was easily ‘the second most important man in the Party’5 after Hitler. Strasser, in fact, was the man who ‘discovered’ Paul Joseph Goebbels, the club-footed Rhinelander who would eventually create a new and notorious benchmark in the world for propaganda. In the early days of his own political career, Goebbels was among those who saw Strasser as ‘more efficient than Hitler’ and felt ‘he had greater patience with party functionaries, he was not given to nervous breakdowns, like Hitler, and he seldom raised his voice’.6

Goebbels also believed that Strasser’s personality was of a ‘much more revolutionary character than Hitler’s’. ‘Opposed alike to Marxism and capitalism’, he ‘foresaw a new equilibrium’7 on the basis of state ownership of resources, whereas Hitler, himself purportedly a socialist, appeared inclined to give a lot more leeway to the world of business and industry.

Gregor Strasser was of the frank opinion that Germany ought to take the side of colonised people like the Indians. He ‘demanded equality between nations’ and believed that there should be ‘no dictatorship, either of class or of race’.8 His short and stockily-built brother Otto Strasser, five years younger and himself a revolutionary-minded member of the Nazi Party, shared these views about the colonised peoples. So did Goebbels, who joined what eventually came to be known as the Strasser group within the steadily growing party. According to a biographer of Goebbels, he clearly, at this stage of his career, ‘flirted with [the idea of] an ideological alliance with other rebellious “have not” countries such as India and China.’9

Goebbels and everyone else in the Strasser group found it somewhat surprising that Hitler was, from the beginning of their association with him, batting for an alliance with England. This despite Karl Hausofer—a professor from whom Hitler borrowed the term ‘lebensraum’ (living space) to define Nazism’s expansionist stance—expressing serious doubts in the middle of the 1920s about whether Britain would be able to retain India ‘even as a dominion’, given its progressively weakening empire.10 On Hitler’s advocacy of Britain as an ally of Germany, among other things, Goebbels wrote in his diary in the mid-1920s, ‘I am flabbergasted. What a Hitler! A reactionary!’11

Hitler was, nevertheless, not plagued by any doubts on this point. For him, racial credentials were of the utmost importance, and in that respect, England, of the so-called unsullied ‘Aryan blood’, had a remarkably high position. He was convinced, at the same time, that if Germany were to start expanding in the east, as he badly wanted it to, England would easily allow it to do so, as long as it did not contest Britain’s own claims over colonies. On the contrary, France was, in his estimation, one of the ‘mongrel’ nations of Europe, ‘the country of “negroids”’, and might not tolerate acquisition of any ‘living space’ for Germans.12 Moreover, Hitler was dead sure that England would enthusiastically sign up for the anti-Bolshevik campaign that he had envisioned. As he saw it, once the Russians were defeated and crushed, Germany and England would neatly divide most of the world between themselves, and with America as their ally, this ‘white man’s rule’ would be the great glory of the blue planet.

The Strasser brothers owned and ran a number of German language newspapers and periodicals which were palpably pro-Nazi in character. Even so, from time to time, they chose to diverge from the Hitlerian stand on issues. For both sides, a worrying flashpoint occurred at the end of 1925 when the Strasser group put its weight in favour of the expropriation of German royal houses. Hitler, on the other hand, said the princes ought to be allowed to keep their castles, their lands and their money. When the Strasser bloc voted against the princes in a party meeting in north Germany and a representative of Hitler’s objected to the proposed resolution, Goebbels, then the editor of one of Strasser’s papers, was up on his feet, demanding angrily that ‘the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the National Socialist Party’.13

Three months later, in February 1926, when Hitler, at another party meeting, ‘made a brilliant plea for the princes and the claims of their aristocratic families’, the very same Goebbels unhesitatingly and opportunistically jumped ship and became a devoted follower, abandoning the Strassers altogether. Pretty soon, Goebbels was nicely set up by the Nazi Party chief as the more powerful and official voice of the National Socialists.

Whatever the factional feuds, Hitler, who was confidently expanding his hold over the party with his passionate oratory and doubtless charisma, ensured that there was no split in the Nazi ranks. He assured Gregor Strasser more than once that he saw him as a highly valued colleague and told him that his brother, Otto, was bright as well and could be counted on as an asset to their ‘movement’.

Gregor, ever the genuine believer in Hitler’s leadership, gave in easily, but the more self-willed younger brother didn’t. In his papers, Otto kept contesting Hitler and his policies from time to time, until there came a point when Hitler felt compelled to summon Strasser Junior to Hotel Sanssouci in Berlin ‘for an urgent discussion’.14

The immediate trigger for this summons was the support extended by Otto Strasser and his papers to an industrial strike called in Saxony in April 1930 by the trade unions there. Hitler was seriously cultivating Germany’s industrialists at this point in time and saw the endorsement of unions by pro-Nazi publications as deeply problematic. But as details of the discussion that took place between him and Otto later revealed, there were other, unstated triggers too, and tensions built up over a period were inevitably coming to a head.

The Strasser camp followers and their publications had regularly been describing not just Germany but also ‘the suppressed nations of Asia, Africa and the East’ as ‘common victims of international capitalism’ and trying to make common cause with the ‘League of Oppressed Nations’. In the same month that the trade unions had declared their strike, Count Ernst Reventlow, a Strasser partisan, had sternly criticised British colonial rule in India in Der Nationale Sozialist (The National Socialist), a weekly belonging to the Strasser brothers which was widely distributed, with seven editions published in various parts of Germany.15

Count Reventlow was an old, well-regarded and influential member of the erstwhile German aristocracy who had joined the Nazis in 1927, but only after explicitly withdrawing a manuscript in which he had described Hitler as being too dependent on Rome.16 The article written by him for Der Nationale Sozialist mentioned Mahatma Gandhi’s name in the headline as the leader of the Indian revolt against the British Raj. Hitler had already underlined his strong dislike of the Indian liberation struggle in his autobiography, and to an earlier suggestion on emulating Gandhi in Germany in 1923, he had positively baulked at it. In January 1923, French troops had marched into Germany’s Ruhr district on the grounds that the war’s losing side had defaulted on its reparation payments. With Germany seeing unprecedented unity across the political spectrum over this act of France, the Weimar government had urged people and political outfits, regardless of their ideology, to carry out a campaign of passive resistance to the occupation.

Hitler was violently in disagreement with the nature of the response. Angrily, he had told a gathering in Munich, ‘As a model, they hold up to us, India and what is called “passive resistance”. True, they want to make an India of Germany, a folk of dreams which turns its face away from realities, in order that they can oppress it for all eternity, that they may span it body and soul to the yoke of slavery.’17 Pacifism was, for Hitler, equal to ‘cowardice’, a surrender of ‘the human dignity of the Germans’ and a ‘readiness to agree to everything until nothing more remains’.18

Interestingly, the sense of trust in Gandhian methods had been slightly shaken within India itself around the same time that Hitler made these remarks about non-violence. Gandhi had stirred up the Indian imagination by launching his non-cooperation movement in 1920 and promised that Swaraj, by which he meant self-governance within the ambit of empire and not a complete severing of ties with Britain, could come within a year. That hadn’t happened. Thousands had filled prisons in response to his spirited call. But he had, after the burning of a police station in Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces by a furious Indian mob and the accidental death of several policemen as a result, abruptly called off the agitation. That left many of his followers in disarray and quite some, disillusioned. Even so, they returned to him after a while. In April 1930, the month in which Reventlow’s piece was published, they had, as a matter of fact, well and truly shaken up the British establishment by marching along with the Mahatma in thousands from Ahmedabad to Dandi in Gujarat to defy the Raj’s salt laws.

At their meeting at the Berlin hotel on 21 May 1930, Hitler began by imploring Otto Strasser not to stray too much from the official party line. The Nazis didn’t want to lose a man of his worth, Hitler told him. Otto was ‘young’, ‘an ex-soldier’, a ‘veteran’ National Socialist, and ‘should still be capable of learning and understanding’. But, Hitler said, ‘I can’t say as much for Reventlow. He’s an old man, and a journalist into the bargain, incapable of changing his ingrained ideas. He’s a hopeless case. But you …’19

When Otto refused to relent, the conversation turned into a verbal duel, with heated arguments on domestic politics, art and crucially, race and foreign policy. Aside from his belief that the Indian demand for self-rule was just, Otto was convinced that India was among the ‘formerly unindustrialised’ nations which had the ability to use Western technology to compete with Europe on issues of trade and felt that Indian nationalists, with their boycott of Western goods, were wrecking European markets.20 ‘Gandhi’s spinning wheel’, according to him, was ‘one typical instance’ of how ‘nationalist struggles of liberty’, ‘especially among the semi-colonial and wholly colonial peoples’, ‘were always linked with attempts to boycott “white goods”’, which essentially meant ‘the capitalism of Europe and the USA’.21

Hitler was now accustomed to rebuking the Strassers for their opinions, but this time, he seemed to demonstrate a greater sense of alarm than before. ‘What we have to do,’ he said, ‘is to select from a new master-class, men who will not allow themselves to be guided, like you, by the morality of pity.’ The message was that it was this ‘morality of pity’ that was making Otto and his elder brother speak up for colonised people. ‘Those who rule must know that they have the right to rule because they belong to a superior race. They must entertain that right and ruthlessly consolidate it.’

‘Dumbfounded at these words,’ Otto Strasser told Hitler that his racial ideas seemed to be ‘a flagrant contradiction of the great mission of National Socialism.’22

This made Hitler furious. ‘What you preach is liberalism, nothing but liberalism,’ he said and launched into a passionate diatribe:23

There is only one possible kind of revolution, and it is not economic, or political, or social, but racial … the struggle of inferior classes and inferior races against the superior races who are in the saddle. On the day the superior race forgets this law, it is lost …

Hitler aggressively condemned Otto’s ideas of foreign policy and termed them as ‘false’, further stating ‘as though he were addressing a public meeting’:

You have no racial knowledge. Didn’t you declare [your support] openly for the Indian independence movement when it was obviously a rebellion of the inferior Hindu race against the valorous Anglo-Nordic? The Nordic race has the right to dominate the world, and that right will be the guiding principle of our foreign policy. That is why any alliance with Russia, a Slav-Tartar body surmounted by a Jewish head, is out of the question … That is why an understanding with England is indispensable. We must establish Germano-Nordic domination over Europe and then, with the co-operation of America, over the world … The land for us, the seas for England …

So, the Strassers had better not go around championing the cause of ‘The League of Oppressed Nations’, because the way Hitler saw it:24

The alliance of the downtrodden nations is a dumb slogan … When today the Indians live under the rule of England … or the Blacks under the rule of any European people, so is this grounded (sic) in their inferiority … The Freedom fight (sic) of the Blacks, Indians and so forth is an attempt to break the natural order … The admiration of Gandhi is, in my estimation, a racial perversity.

After seven long hours, this marathon of a conversation ended with neither side conceding on any single point and Hitler showing signs of ‘acute impatience’.25 The repercussions were almost immediate. Within days, contributors to Strasser’s papers began to be expelled from the Nazi Party.

The ill will and suspicion that existed between the Hitler and Strasser camps deepened quickly thereafter. Otto Strasser formed his own breakaway group within the Nazi Party, called the Black Front, and it released its own manifesto which stated, among other things: 26

For us, consent with the Indian fight for freedom from English domination and capitalist exploitation has been and is important. This is so mainly from the fact that each weakening of a contractual power of Versailles is favourable, as is the sympathetic agreement with each fight which leads the subjugated peoples against their exploitative usurpers. It is a compelling result of our concept of nationalism, a volkisch peculiarity, that we assume the burden of other peoples and nations.

Hitler, meanwhile, continued to lay special emphasis on the racial aspect and underplayed the economic one. In an interaction with chiefly English and American press representatives in Berlin in end-1931, he sounded almost Gandhian in his apparent forgiveness towards Britain, until it became evident that he was doing so purely on grounds of racial unity. Hatred, he said, was understandable in times of war, but it was hard to understand why it should be nourished for years afterwards. ‘It would be foolish, for instance, for Germany to gloat over the prospect of the loss of India by the British Empire, which would be a misfortune for the rest of the world, including Germany,’ he asserted.27

A month later, in January 1932, Hitler addressed a group of big businessmen from western Germany at the Industry Club in Dusseldorf. This speech, made at a time when he was assiduously wooing the captains of industry, marked one of his successes as an orator. Hitler succeeded, to a considerable extent, not only in blunting their opposition to his party which had ‘socialist’ in its name but in getting quite a number of them to turn into its patrons.

They realised they didn’t have to worry too much about the socialism aspect of the party, because Hitler insisted that it was ‘the political conception of supremacy … peculiar to the white race’ which was behind that race’s triumph, not any moral or economic theory. ‘Take any area you like, take for example, India,’ he told the 650 industrialists who were present. ‘England did not conquer India by the way of justice and law: she conquered India without regard to the wishes, to the views of the natives, or to their formulations of justice, and, when necessary, she has upheld this supremacy with the most brutal ruthlessness.’

England would not be able to hold on to India if it relied purely on economic conquest, he made plain. ‘Suppose the Englishman in the future were to wage his war for India with economic means alone, suppose the Englishman were finally to relinquish that outlook which once gained him India, that outlook which maintained his hold on India through the many rebellions and the long and bloody wars about the middle of the last century, and then you will see, the English factories will not hold India for the English: they will stand silent, because the old spirit of England, the spirit which once created the conditions from which the factories arose, that spirit has been lost!’28 Hitler’s fervent hope, of course, was that England’s racial spirit would remain intact.

All of this flew in the face of what the Strassers were trying to propagate. As soon as the Nazis came to power in early 1933, Otto Strasser, having burnt all his bridges with Hitler, fled Germany for fear of being killed. His elder brother Gregor chose to stay back, still convinced that Hitler, growing ever more phenomenally in popularity, was truly the right man for Germany. Right at the beginning of this chapter, we saw how that ended.

With the Strassers neutralised, Hitler’s view became the Nazi Party view.

4

INDIANS IN THE THIRD REICH

Remember Nambiar and Naidu, fellow Indians from Chapter 1 who had been taken away by the SA for supposed crimes against the German state? Their arrests had triggered a heated debate back in England.

Around the same time, news emerged that a few British engineers had been arrested in Russia, and a ruckus ensued in British Parliament, with loud demands for their quick release and rescue. The British government responded with alacrity, making an aggressive push for their citizens’ return to liberty.

Colonel Josaiah Wedgwood of the Labour Party had gained a fair degree of notoriety in imperial Britain as a sympathiser of the Indian people and their demand for political emancipation. He had earlier shone a disconcerting light on the torture suffered by Indian prisoners in the British penal colony in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. His description of the Port Blair prison was crisp and precise: ‘Hell on earth.’

On this occasion, Wedgwood fired away on the floor of the House of Commons spiritedly. ‘Was there any further news on Nambiar and Mrs Naidu’s son? In view of the fact that Mr Nambiar is still in prison, and it is not known in which prison he is, and also that many prisoners have been tortured,’ would the UK government ‘show the same assiduity in protecting the interests of British subjects’ as it had ‘shown, rightly, in protecting the interests of British subjects in Russia?’ Had ‘inquiries been made by our Minister in Berlin as to the conditions and whereabouts of Mr Nambiar? … Where is this man imprisoned, and how is he being treated?’1

The government in London responded with answers that sought to implicate the incarcerated Indian instead of Hitler’s regime. Both Stanley Baldwin, Lord President of the Council, and the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, used the Nazi version to point fingers at Nambiar.

Baldwin stated that the British ambassador in Berlin had been informed by the Nazi government that ‘a large quantity of communist subversive propagandist literature has been found among Mr Nambiar’s papers’. Anthony Eden further added, ‘I understand that the German authorities have some 2 cwts. (hundredweights, each hundred a unit of weight equal to a 100 pounds) of literature to examine.’ Be it Russia or Germany, the British government ‘will adopt the same attitude towards any country’, he assured Wedgwood. Yet the plain fact was that Britain, until the time of this reply on 20 March 1933, almost a month since the arrests, had not bothered to find out where Nambiar had been imprisoned and how he was being treated. ‘I will try to get that information,’ Eden said, matching Baldwin’s stiff upper lip in ministerial reserve.2

‘Does the Honourable Member really consider,’ Wedgwood asked, making no attempt to disguise his disbelief at the regurgitation of the Nazi version, ‘that the charge levelled against a presumed Communist by the German Government has any more foundation than the charge levelled against English engineers by the OGPU (the Soviet secret police) in Russia?’3

Had Nambiar been visited in prison at all? Eden replied that he ‘has been visited regularly in gaol by a German friend who has informed His Majesty’s Embassy at Berlin that he appeared to be in quite good health’.4 So, no British government representative had insisted on seeing him in jail or on examining his condition, Wedgwood prodded.

This prompted senior Liberal Parliamentarian Archibald Sinclair to speak out. Britain and its people were ‘rightly indignant’ over the arrests in Russia, he said, but ‘in the Berlin case, there had been much less information’, and the United Kingdom government ‘ought to have moved far more rapidly than they had done, and with the same confidence as in the Moscow case. Our ambassador should have gone straight to the German authorities and found out to what treatment these men were being subjected.’5

To recap, the SA had raided the Berlin apartments of the two Indians, A.C.N. Nambiar and Jaya Surya Naidu, in their crackdown on political opponents after the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933. The two Indians were taken into what was being called ‘protective custody’, quite a bizarre practice brought back into force by Hitler’s law-enforcing hordes from the earliest days of their regime. They had pulled out, for drastic use, a provision under an 1850 Prussian law which had been extensively employed in the initial post-war years of turmoil (1919–22) but more or less discontinued since. According to that law, ‘protective custody’ meant that a person either required the state’s protection or was a potential threat to the state and needed to be taken into custody. Legally, the whole matter was intentionally ambiguous, and the detention was undefined and could well be indefinite, with no formal charges that the detainee could contest. Employing a lawyer for defence was useless in such cases, and detainees had no right to approach the courts.6

Not surprisingly, for almost a week after the arrests of Nambiar and Naidu, there was absolutely no word on where they had been taken and kept. The Nazis wouldn’t reveal their whereabouts and wouldn’t say what their condition was, what the nature of the evidence gathered against them could be, and how they were being treated in custody.

They were, after all, British subjects and so the government in London legally and officially had the power to ask questions of the German authorities. Britain had, at the time, a national government. Though dominated by Conservatives, it had in Ramsay MacDonald a prime minister from the Labour Party, plus some rebels who had moved away from the Labour Party and Liberals.

For some time, the British government didn’t utter a word, although reports of Nambiar and Naidu’s detention had been published all over. Nine days on, Clement Atlee, a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) and future post-war British prime minister, spoke up in the House of Commons. Were the reports of the arrests of Indians true? Would the British government carry out an ‘immediate inquiry’ into the matter?7

Yes, the news coming out of Berlin was accurate, confirmed Stanley Baldwin, speaking for Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, John Simon. But there was no word of condemnation. The British ambassador in Germany, Baldwin said, was ‘already in communication with the competent German authorities’ to find out more. The ambassador ‘has learnt unofficially that Mr Naidu has now been released’, he noted.8

This is how the first scrap of info, the barest bit, came out, combining casualness and officiousness in equal measure. Naidu was out of jail. But when? Where? On what conditions? What was he charged with in the first place? Nothing on that whatever.

The liberal English daily, Manchester Guardian, intensified the public calls for more information. Its editors wrote on 21 March 1933:9

The conditions to-day in Germany, which are in fact those of a revolutionary terror, are not such that the government should be satisfied with mere general assurances of this kind where the safety of its nationals is concerned. Of British prisoners in Germany, as of British prisoners in Russia, we want to know where they are being held, how they are being treated, and what is the charge and on what evidence against them. The reports on the way the Nazis treat their enemies and of Captain (Hermann) Goring’s instructions to the police and the Storm Troops on the care of communists and political prisoners do not assure one that arrest and detention are a humane process in Germany today. In view of such reports, the government should make every effort to ensure that any British subject who has been arrested, or whose safety is in any doubt, does not suffer the same treatment as the German government accords to so many of its own subjects.

The British government was mum. It had, for some reason, bought the message touted ‘by a German friend’ of Nambiar’s who had apparently vouched for his good health behind bars, without sending in its own representatives to check. It had not considered it necessary to dispute accusations made against Nambiar. And the most crucial of all, it had not struck a critical note towards the Nazi regime.

Thus, very little continued to be known about Nambiar in jail and about Naidu even after his release from jail. But, four days after the comment in the Guardian, information about both Indians suddenly appeared at once. In both cases, the announcements were not pushed out by the official British establishment, which did not appear too eager anyway; they came from Berlin.

Naidu transmitted his own story over the phone to a journalist in England. He had been battered by a dozen Nazi Stormtroopers, hit on the head with butts of revolvers and whipped and struck with belts and straps. After two days at the Berlin police headquarters, he was taken to another prison at Spandau. Five days later, he was released and simply told that there ‘had been a mistake’. ‘The regular police,’ he said, ‘in contrast to Stormtroopers were very polite and considerate.’ Nonetheless, their politeness had limits. ‘In spite of all his efforts,’ Naidu said, he had ‘not been able to get an apology or explanation or even secure the return of his papers, keys, or passport.’10

On the same day that Naidu’s account appeared in a British paper, Nambiar was suddenly, without any explanation, released just like Naidu. His release after exactly twenty-six days in prison was conditional: he was told to leave Germany within a week. In the report recounting his ordeal, Nambiar wrote:11

On the afternoon of 25th March, I was told I was free to go and a paper was handed over to me with instructions to leave Prussia within eight days. No reason whatsoever was disclosed to me for the raiding of my flat. No charge was brought against me. No explanation given for keeping me in custody for twenty-six days. The articles removed from my flat were not returned to me, excepting an empty box and a small bundle containing some old magazines. The twenty-one marks I had on me at the time of my arrest, I was told, had gone to cover the cost of my transport and stay in custody! I asked the official across the counter to give me at least twenty-five pfennig (about two pence) for tram fare, having to go some miles … this was firmly refused.

The Gestapo told Nambiar that they had decided ‘not to bring a charge against him but to deport him as an undesirable alien’.12 They wouldn’t even return Nambiar’s passport. He made several requests and several rounds of the Berlin police’s offices, but to no avail. Fortunately for him, the British authorities issued a fresh passport and shipped it across to Berlin from London so that Nambiar could depart for Prague, with his girlfriend Eva Geissler and two little bags. He became the first Indian to be thus expelled by the Nazis.

It was subsequently revealed that the Nazis had ‘smashed to pieces’ the office of the Congress-sponsored IIB, at Friedrichstrasse 24, Berlin just a little before Nambiar’s incarceration. This was where the Malayali journalist had worked from. The officials had ‘strewn on the ground’ all the ‘documents and equipment’ there.13 In February, they had also ‘raided’ and shut down the Berlin office of the League Against Imperialism, with which too Nambiar and Naidu had been closely associated.

In fact, it was likely that apart from their ‘non-Aryan’ roots, it was their association with the League Against Imperialism that had aroused a great deal of suspicion in the Nazi mind. The League had started out as a left-wing force, though not communist, and a firm supporter of colonised people, including Indians. Gradually, the communists had more or less seized control of the organisation. Therefore, several anti-imperialists, including most Indians linked to it, like Nambiar and Naidu, had chosen to distance themselves from it. They saw themselves as anti-colonial activists, not as ‘Reds’.

Yet, for the Nazis, any potential combination of the ‘Indian’ and ‘suspected communist’ tags was bad enough, and they moved fast against such undesirables. Soon after Nambiar was thrown out of Germany, another Indian in Berlin, D.K. Gupta, was arrested by the Gestapo ‘on suspicion of activities detrimental to the State’.14 He too was wrongly accused of being a communist.

Hailing from the state of Bengal, Gupta was a student at Berlin University and also a researcher. He, however, was secretary of the Berlin International Club, a ‘non-political association of English-speaking foreigners’15 in the German capital, which the Nazis appeared to have confused with a communist group.

Like the two Indians before him, Gupta was taken to the Berlin police headquarters where his purse, fountain pen, clothes and money were all taken away from him. He spent eighteen consecutive days in prison without any charges being made out against him. On his release, he was abruptly deported—the second Indian to face summary expulsion.

Gupta made his way to the British capital and told a representative of the press that he considered himself very lucky to have been able to reach there. The Nazis still had his money and his belongings, and it was only because of a ‘friendly Englishman’ that he had somehow succeeded in getting across.

Conditions inside Nazi-controlled jails were dismal and distressing, Gupta had said. All that the prisoners got as food was ‘black bread and coffee for breakfast and supper, and porridge and milk for dinner’. There were ‘political prisoners of all nationalities—Chinese, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Jews’, and Gupta had seen ‘some whose bodies were all marked with the beating and lashing they had received, and others whose eyelashes had been burned off’.16

While Gupta was still languishing behind bars, on the evening of 23 April 1933, Bavarian authorities guarding Germany’s borders with Austria flagged down a vehicle in which a brown-skinned man in his thirties was travelling. He gave his name as ‘Saumyendranath Tagore’. The Bavarian cops were unaware that he was the grand-nephew of poet Rabindranath Tagore—not that it would have made much of a difference anyway. Saumyendranath was arrested on the spot on the outrageous charge that he was plotting to kill Adolf Hitler!

Nazi papers reporting on his arrest described him as ‘an individual of Herculean build’, adding that ‘many suspicious materials had been found in the car’ in which he was travelling. ‘In reality,’ Saumyendranath stated, ‘nothing was found, as absolutely nothing was there.’ The charge of hatching a conspiracy to eliminate Hitler was absolutely incredible, and Saumyendranath described it as ‘grotesque and false’. He was frankly appalled that all of this had happened especially when he was not a stranger to Germany at all; he had spent a lot of time there, on and off. He explained, ‘It was very well known to the German police who knew all my activities in Berlin that my political creed was absolutely against individual terrorism.’

And yet, it was his political creed that could be marked out as the real problem for the Nazis. Unlike other Indians rounded up by Hitler’s men, Saumyendranath Tagore was a bona fide communist. He was, in reality, one of the most prominent faces of the then fledgling communist movement in India, and even if the Nazis did not know how significant a political activist he was back home, they knew for certain about his allegiance to the Communist Party, of which he had never made any secret.

The grandson of Rabindranath’s eldest brother, Dwijendranath, Saumyendranath had started out as an ardent follower of Mahatma Gandhi when he had launched the non-cooperation movement in 1920. But disillusionment set in after Gandhi’s abrupt withdrawal of the stir in the wake of the Chauri Chaura incident. Subsequently, this member of the Tagore family of Kolkata’s Jorasanko Bari moved to the Workers and Peasants Party. In the mid-1920s, he became one of the early members of the Communist Party of India. As someone who identified with the Bengali revolutionaries fighting for India’s freedom, he sought to establish links between the rebels and Bengal’s peasants and workers, quickly arousing the suspicion of the Raj. Before he could land in the police net in his home province, Saumyendranath fled to Europe, arriving first in Berlin and from there, going to Moscow. There he attended the Communist International’s Sixth World Congress, met top Comintern officials and complained to the Soviets about how a compatriot of his, M.N. Roy, in the garb of being a communist functionary, was misusing funds sent to India from Moscow.

In the late 1920s, Saumyendranath seriously considered heading home; he was tubercular and in frail health. Just then, the British named him as an accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case related to a rail strike called by labour activists, and he decided to stay put in Berlin. In the German capital, he worked with Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the ‘live wire’ of the Berlin India Committee formed during the First World War. ‘Chatto,’ as this brother of Sarojini Naidu was called, had gone to London in 1902 to study for his Indian Civil Services exams. But his nationalist impulses led him to join the fiery Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and other Indian revolutionaries in the British capital. He later studied at Oxford at the same time that Jawaharlal Nehru was at Harrow. From there, he first moved to Paris and then to Berlin, where he led a group of Indian revolutionaries during the war years.

After the war, Chatto stayed back in Berlin, married an American woman, Agnes Smedley, and carried on his work of anti-imperialist resistance. He kept up correspondence with Nehru in India, Rash Behari Bose in Tokyo, H.N. Ghose in New York and Barkatullah in Kabul so that a ‘travelling nationalist movement’ could be organised ‘around the Berlin hub’. Nehru and his father, Motilal, visited Berlin in 1926 on Chatto’s request, and Nehru agreed to join the League of Imperialism’s executive council when Chatto was anointed its general secretary. Similarly, it was on Chatto’s urging that Nehru attended the International Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in Brussels in 1927, which propelled the future Indian prime minister on to the international stage. Chatto was also A.C.N. Nambiar’s brother-in-law and had collaborated with him in setting up the IIB in Berlin, whose office the Nazis had ransacked ahead of Nambiar’s arrest.

In short, Chatto, characterised by Agnes Smedley as ‘the epitome of the secret Indian revolutionary movement’ and ‘perhaps its most brilliant protagonist abroad’17 was one of those ‘wandering’ Indians derided by Hitler in Mein Kampf as ‘gabbling pomposities’ and ‘inflated Orientals’ carrying in their heads what Hitler believed to be rather ‘fanciful notions’ about their country’s independence from the British.

Among the other Indians who were studying in Berlin as the Nazi Party grew in prominence in the second half of the 1920s were Ram Manohar Lohia, who would go on to become a top socialist leader in India, and Irawati Karve, who would eventually distinguish herself as an anthropologist and scholar. Students formed the biggest group of Indians in Germany, though it was never big enough to constitute any sort of threat, demographic or otherwise, to anyone. For instance, in a span of four years from 1929 to 1933, only about a hundred Indian students had enrolled at Berlin University, among them Lohia and Karve. Professionals from India formed the second big group. And the revolutionaries were the smallest in number, their count dwindling quickly as the First World War receded into the past. One of the Indian revolutionaries to leave Germany by the end of the 1920s was Bhupendranath Dutta, brother of Narendranath Dutta, better known as Swami Vivekananda.

Saumyendranath had worked alongside Chatto until 1932, after which both of them moved away from the German capital. Chatto shifted to the Soviet Union and Saumyendranath left for Italy to recover from a severe bout of tuberculosis. It was when he was on his way back to Berlin after undergoing treatment in Italy that he was stopped near the border and taken into custody by the Gestapo. (Chatto’s story had a very tragic end. He had escaped Hitler but couldn’t escape that other twentieth-century monster, Joseph Stalin. He was arrested in July 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, and executed in September that year.)

From the border, Saumyendranath Tagore was taken straight to the police headquarters in Munich. He spent four days in custody, during which he said, ‘the victims of Nazi terror’ with whom he was locked up showed him ‘the marks of brutal beatings on their bodies’ and narrated ‘shocking tales of brutalities of the Nazis’.

‘What I have seen and what I have heard,’ he noted, ‘exceed all the accounts of the brutalities that we come to know through newspapers.’18

Wedgwood also spoke up for this ‘Indian Tagore’ in the House of Commons, as did the Labour lawmaker from Broxtowe, Frederick Cocks. Was the British government taking any steps in connection with the latest arrest? he asked. The foreign affairs secretary, John Simon, replied, ‘It is not, I understand, certain that he (Saumyendranath) is a British subject, but His Majesty’s Consul-General at Munich has been instructed to make inquiries of the Bavarian authorities. I am informed that a report is on the way.’19

Within hours of this brief discussion on the subject in the British Parliament, Saumyendranath was suddenly released from the Gestapo prison, while the Munich police headquarters said there was ‘no confirmation of the suspicion’ against him.20 The wording of the police’s conclusion was loaded with meaning. It wasn’t that the charge had no basis, it was just that ‘suspicion’ about Saumyendranath’s plot to kill Hitler couldn’t be confirmed. He left Germany almost immediately.

Given Saumyendranath’s impeccable and, from the Nazi point of view, damning communist credentials—he had even translated Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto into Bengali and written a biography of Lenin—it was a piece of remarkably good fortune that he could get out of jail relatively unscathed. It had come about simply because Hitler and the Nazis had no intention at all of alienating England at this point in time. Having recently ascended to power, Hitler was, on the contrary, extremely keen to cultivate the British and be on their right side. Besides, the question of Saumyendranath’s arrest—and of the incarceration of Nambiar, Naidu and Gupta—had been quite forcefully raised in the British Parliament by Wedgwood and a few others.

This persistent probing by a few British parliamentarians had paid off for the Indians in another respect too: it illuminated another instance of arbitrary detention which had remained totally under wraps until then.

Under pressure to put out the full list of ‘British subjects’ arrested by Nazis, John Simon on 18 May 1933 mentioned a ‘Mr Tendulkar’. He turned out to be Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar, a twenty-three-year-old student of mathematics at Marburg University. Tendulkar was arrested in March, and on the last day of that month, he was ordered to leave Prussia within a week, since he was a ‘communist sympathiser’.21 The German authorities ‘had satisfied themselves that he had been closely connected to the German Communist Party’, Simon stated, though the truth was that the Nazi allegations were altogether false and untenable.

Dinanath Gopal, or D.G. Tendulkar, was a man with roots in Ratnagiri and he lived in Mumbai’s Kalbadevi. He later became a prominent figure in the world of writing and publishing in India for his eight-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi which, for its lucidity and its liberal quoting of the Mahatma’s own words, both spoken and written, retains its value as an important reference tome in the twenty-first century.

The British establishment’s indifference to the sufferings of Indians in the Third Reich could be explained by the fact that it was as averse to alienating Hitler in 1933 as he was to making an enemy of the London government. But Britain had not permitted the much-desired goodwill to come in the way of its response to the arrests of three Britons in Germany during this period. Its approach to their cases was proactive and aggressive—in marked contrast to the way it looked at the arrests of Indians.

On the evening of 21 April 1933, Nazis, accompanied by police personnel, had burst into the rooms of an Indian students’ club in Berlin and picked up a Britisher, W.W. Mann or William Mann, along with several others. Mann had been living in Berlin for several years as an English teacher and lecturer and was known for giving weekly broadcast lessons on the wireless. He had been invited to the Indian students’ club ‘to discuss the possibilities of forming an English conversational circle’. He was dragged to the police station by the Nazis, placed under arrest and kept in the lock-up for the night. The next morning he was taken to the police headquarters where he was detained ‘at first in a common cell with a large number of other prisoners and afterwards in a single cell’. Three days later, he was released ‘without explanations’.22

The two other Britishers who were held were Harold Frazer and Thomas Catchpool. Frazer was the president of the Indian students’ club where Mann had gone for a meeting. Employed as a journalist with the German Trans-Ocean News Agency, he was ‘hauled out of bed’ by the Nazi auxiliary cops and taken to ‘an unknown destination’.23 Catchpool, the head of a Quaker Centre in Berlin, was accused of disseminating false news against Germany; he was denounced ‘by a former charwoman’ who reported to the police that ‘there was a lot of literature which must be communist’ in his home. His home was searched for five hours and he was held, but was released late the same night.24

While in Saumyendranath’s case, John Simon had nonchalantly questioned his status as a ‘British subject’ and merely stated that ‘inquiries were being made’ by the German Consul General in Berlin and ‘a report was on the way’, in Mann’s case, however, he told Parliament that the British ambassador to Germany had made ‘a protest against the arbitrary detention in prison … when no charge was made against him (Mann)’ and had issued ‘an official note’ to the German foreign affairs minister ‘asking for a full investigation into the circumstances’ of the arrest.25 In the other two cases too, ‘energetic action’ was taken, with British diplomats stationed in the German capital seeking immediate permission from Nazi authorities to visit the incarcerated Britons and, after determining their safety, asking for and securing their release.26

Baldwin, who, as president of the Council, had earlier offered the terse comment that ‘it has been unofficially learnt that Mr Naidu has been released’ and simply repeated Nazi allegations against Nambiar regarding the alleged seizure of incriminating material, too, was hardly reticent. He told the House of Commons that on 13 April, Harold Frazer ‘was visited at the Moabit prison by His Majesty’s Consul at Berlin … and informed that he could write to the Consulate at any time regarding his requirements’.27 Then, on 21 April, the British ambassador in Berlin had ‘addressed a second note to the German minister for foreign affairs (Baron von Neurath), asking to be informed as soon as the precise details of the charge against Mr Frazer had been determined and as soon as a decision had been reached regarding the tribunal before which this charge would be heard and the date on which the hearing would begin’. The matter had not been left at that. Baldwin said that on 26 April, the British ambassador had ‘further’ made ‘strong oral and written representations’ about Frazer’s case to Baron von Neurath, who had ‘promised to investigate it at once’. Neurath had also promised to immediately probe Mann’s case, and on the whole, Baldwin noted with some satisfaction, the British ambassador in Berlin was ‘pursuing the matter with all the energy at his command’.28

Indians living as subjects in the Raj were painfully aware that they couldn’t really expect anything substantial from the British government when it came to defending their freedoms in Nazi land. That would be expecting the enslaver to champion the cause of the enslaved. The public record was disgraceful enough—in a single year, 1931, for instance, the British government admitted in Parliament29 that the Raj had whipped over 3,000 Indians in various prisons across the country under the callously named Indian Whipping Act of 1909. For such a regime to complain about the whipping of an Indian like Nambiar inside a Nazi prison would have been too much to expect.

But the events unfolding in Nazi Germany had triggered fresh concerns about a new oppressor. One of the pro-freedom newspapers in India which articulated these concerns and sharply criticised the Hitler regime was the Bombay Chronicle.

The Chronicle was not too cautious in speaking the truth as it saw it. When Hitler, safely ensconced in the seat of power, moved immediately to muzzle the German press and banish foreign correspondents, expel Jews from every profession and de-legitimise every political party except his own NSDAP,30 the paper described him as a ‘mad man’.31 It ran the full account of Nambiar’s ordeal, in his own words, and citing the story of Saumyendranath Tagore’s torment originally published in the Daily Worker in the UK wrote that ‘he was not only handcuffed, but made to give his fingerprints and photographed with criminals’. ‘We do not know whether he was whipped like Mr Nambiar,’ it stated, ‘but the hooligans repeatedly threatened to kill him.’32

Its commentary on all that was ongoing was stern and disapproving. ‘We see no reason to disbelieve what Mr Tagore writes, for the Nazis seem to be capable of any atrocity, especially against unarmed and innocent men. They have yet to prove themselves in actual fight, but they look more or less like paste-board soldiers,’ it remarked. The paper’s editorial writers went on, ‘What is Sir John Simon doing? Is there to be no redress against this high-handed sort of action which has been repeated twice in the case of Indians? Indians must note how unwelcome they are in Nazi Germany, though they were welcomed before “Prussianism” became insurgent.’33

These observations underscored the reality about Nazi Germany that many Indians had recognised right from the beginning. They were fully conscious that it was not merely pursuit of ideological purity that had resulted in the Nazi crackdown on so many of them. Those who thought differently from the Hitlerites were already a problem for the regime, and communists and Jews in particular were prime targets. But the range of opponents the Nazis included in their intimidation campaign was very wide, and the element of racial dislike was intrinsic to it. Nambiar had explicitly written about the abusive terms his captors had used for the Indian anti-colonial rebellion, and Saumyendranath and the others too had noted that their origins and ‘racial stock’, as Hitler’s men called it, had determined Nazi conduct towards them.

5

‘WALKING, TALKING’ INDIANS

This is where the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose enters our story. Bose was to have an extremely complex and often difficult relationship with the Nazis in his single-minded pursuit of the goal of Indian independence.

The son of a well-known government pleader from Bengal, Subhas Bose studied at Cambridge and was widely expected to serve the British Raj, much like his father, as a member of the Indian Civil Service. But he quit to plunge into the freedom movement, creating quite a stir. By the early 1930s, he had established himself as a prominent leader of the Congress. In 1932, he was arrested, along with Gandhi and other Congress leaders, and sent to Mandalay prison in Burma. There his health deteriorated, with an attack of bronchial pneumonia, symptoms of tuberculosis and abdominal pains, and the British allowed him to go to Europe in the summer of 1933 for convalescence.

Despite limitations placed on his activities, he wanted to use the visit to Europe not merely to fight his own ill health but to push the cause of Indian self-rule. After visits to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, he arrived in Berlin in July 1933. The Nazi government offered him accommodation at state expense, but he chose to stay at a private hotel instead, paying from his own pocket.

Bose was acutely aware of the worrying goings-on in Germany. His nephew Asoke Bose, son of Subhas’s elder brother Sarat Chandra, was studying engineering in Munich at the time. Asoke had observed that the Nazis had ‘started a campaign of hate against the Jews and at the same time, of slander against coloured races, including Indians, dubbing them as “inferior” people’.1 Moreover, the testimonies of those who had suffered were emerging. Both Saumyendranath and Nambiar had written articles on their experiences in Nazi Germany in the Indian press. Saumyendranath had called upon Indians to organise protests against Hitler’s regime,2 and Nambiar had reminded them of how Hitler had, before coming to power, ‘in his capacity as the supreme Nazi leader’, referred in ‘hostile terms’ to ‘India’s struggle for the right to manage her own affairs’. Speaking to the British press, Nambiar said that Hitler had gone ‘out of his way to refer to India’s movement for self-determination as a development not good or desirable and declared that any weakening of the British hold on India would be a calamity’.3 The patriotic papers in India had expressed serious concerns over the humiliation meted out to Indians, with the venerable Modern Review of Calcutta, for instance, writing that the accounts of Indians ‘savagely assaulted’ in Nazi Germany ‘make very painful reading’.4

A little before Bose reached Berlin in July 1933, an altogether fresh case of atrocity had been reported. An Indian student in the German capital, Monindra Kumar Sen, had been denounced to the Nazi authorities by two persons. One of the informers had told the Nazis that Sen had described Hitler as ‘uneducated, mean, fanatical and stupid’.5 The Berlin police immediately issued an order expelling Sen and withdrew it only on the urging of the German Foreign Office, which, concerned as it was about the country’s image abroad and especially in Britain, was getting worried about the prospect of liberal British parliamentarians acquiring yet another stick to beat Nazi Germany with. One of the principal arguments the Foreign Office made to convince the Berlin cops to back off was startling, an example of a perverse kind of racism: it stated that Sen ‘should not be arrested because he had been denounced by another Indian’.6 In other words, was there really any reason to attach too much credibility to an Indian’s story?

If the German Foreign Office was concerned about British politicians, Subhas Bose was anxious to highlight their duplicity in the Nazi press before he landed on German soil. He wrote to his nephew Asoke:7

A paper is published by the Nazis there (Munich). I am thinking of sending a letter to the editor of the paper in 2-3 days. I shall write therein—the British press and the British politicians are making a lot of propaganda on the conditions in Germany. But when the British Government use repressive measures in India, they remain silent. I do not know whether they will publish my letter. Do you know anybody who can put in a word to the authorities of the paper in that behalf?

Bose eventually sent the letter to the Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazi mouthpiece edited by Alfred Rosenberg. It was never published. Bose’s nephew concluded that ‘in accordance with the policy enunciated by … Adolf Hitler in … Mein Kampf’, the Nazis had ‘on assumption of power taken up a pro-British as against an anti-French line, not merely in the matter of foreign policy but in the cultural spheres as well, and would not entertain any propaganda which might be regarded as anti-British’.8

Not exactly in response to his nephew’s comments, but recognising this reality on his own, Bose decided to get to the root of the matter—to the very contents of Mein Kampf, that is. He wanted to meet Hitler so he could convince him that his assessment of the Indian freedom struggle was wrong. He wanted Hitler to remove the contemptuous remarks made about Indians from future editions of his autobiography. Meeting Goebbels was important too, because he was responsible for Nazi propaganda. The Nazi government had assigned three interlocutors for Bose, all from the German Foreign Office. Bose told them it was important for him to tell people in India that he ‘had it from the mouths of responsible German politicians themselves that they are no enemies of India’.9

The interlocutors told Bose that Hitler was too busy and could not meet him. From the account provided by Lothar Frank, a member of the Nazi Party who closely interacted with Bose, it is evident the interlocutors deftly avoided pushing for a meeting, given the rapprochement Hitler was badly seeking with England.10 They would try and fix a meeting with Goebbels, they said instead. That too didn’t happen, but Bose met Rosenberg and came away so annoyed by the Nazi ideologue that he recorded his disappointment candidly in a piece he wrote for the Indian press.11 In the same month, Volkischer Beobachter, with Rosenberg at its helm, wrote that ‘Germany has no interest whatsoever in the internal affairs of India’, which, according to the Nazi official Lothar Frank was ‘a semi-official declaration … meant to be a sop to the British government because Bose had tried … to establish contact with the Foreign Policy Section of the National Socialist Party in order to persuade it to arrange a meeting with Hitler’.12 The Beobachter comment was perfectly emblematic of the Nazi regime’s style of messaging: a not-so-subtle hint to Bose and others like him to abandon their quest for an alliance with the ‘Nordic’ community. It was stagey self-seriousness in expression in order to court the British, and strong-arming of its own Nazi officials so that they wouldn’t pursue the interests of visiting Indians beyond a quite token and perfunctory point. Equally disturbingly for Bose, Indian student groups in Munich and Berlin drew his attention to ‘offensive passages’ and ‘insulting references to Indians’ in a pamphlet that Rosenberg had published after the Nazi ascent to power.13

On Rosenberg’s pamphlet, Bose wrote to his Munich-based nephew Asoke from Berlin, ‘The pamphlet you sent me reached my hands some time ago. I was tackling the authorities here over the statements of Herr Hitler and Dr Rosenberg—but so far I have had no result.’14 Some Indians had, around this time, begun speaking in favour of organising a trade boycott of Germany back home, but Bose wasn’t in favour of any such thing, at least at that moment. Despite the setbacks he had already suffered, he wanted to engage with the Nazis.

His persistence paid off at least in one respect. In the months following his early disappointments in Nazi land, Bose was also by the side of his ally and ailing friend, Vithalbhai Patel, elder brother of Vallabhbhai Patel, first in Czechoslovakia and then in Geneva in Switzerland. After Vithalbhai’s death in October 1933, he moved to Nice in France for a while. But he continued to correspond with the Nazi authorities, and partly as a result of the representations he made, and partly due to the negative publicity the case had generated, the Nazis withdrew Nambiar’s expulsion order at the end of the year and allowed him to return to Berlin.15 The Nazis had also agreed to compensate Nambiar for the loss of his belongings while he had been in their custody. Nambiar, though, refused to re-settle in Nazi Germany. It was too hostile a place for Indians, he felt.

Any hopes that the concessions made in Nambiar’s case would result in real and meaningful change in Nazi policy were soon demolished. When Bose returned to Germany in March 1934, the conditions there had deteriorated further for fellow Indians. German dailies such as the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Koralle, Kolnische Zeitung, Kolnische Illustrierte, Das Haus and many others had published ‘articles which tend to bring Indians into contempt or ridicule before the German public’. With any and every pro-India word practically blocked, he himself was at the receiving end of racial insults. When he was walking along the streets of Munich, Bose was taunted with calls of ‘Neger’ (‘Negro’) by German children. Indian students there told Bose that they had ‘all been addressed by German children as “Neger”’. Worse, Indian students had even been pelted with stones. And whenever such abominable acts had taken place, Bose recorded, the parents or guardians of the aberrant German children had ‘instead of rebuking them … encouraged them’.16

While Hitler and Rosenberg’s ‘unfriendly statements’ had set the ball rolling in terms of hostilities, the campaign being carried forward by the Nazi-controlled press had intensified with senior Nazi leader Hermann Göring telling the UK’s Daily Mail in February 1934 that Mahatma Gandhi was an ‘anti-British Bolshevik agent’ and that ‘years ago, he (Göring) had refused to meet a colleague of M. Gandhi’. Göring’s statement about Gandhi was ‘entirely false’, Bose said, adding that it was ‘widely known that M. Gandhi is hated by all communists, whether in India or outside India’. Further, Bose noted his worry that along with all the race propaganda that was poisoning German minds, the Nazi government’s ministry of justice was contemplating a ‘legislation against Jews, Negros and coloured people’ which would prohibit any marital union with people of these communities and effectively make them persona non grata. ‘If this draft legislation becomes law,’ he remarked, ‘a mark of racial inferiority will be permanently put on Indians as a nation.’17

Still being kept ‘at arm’s length’18 by the top Nazi leadership—‘I did not … meet any of the big guns, except Reichsminister Dr [Kurt] Schmidt [minister of economics],’ he told his nephew—and having to interact mostly with lower-level officials of the Foreign Office, Bose demanded in a memorandum issued to one of his Reich interlocutors that three steps be taken by Hitler’s regime if relations between Germany and India were to be maintained. One, ‘anti-India propaganda in the German press should be stopped’. Two, ‘a statement friendly to India should be made by responsible German leaders in order to nullify the effect of unfriendly statements made in the past’. And three, ‘the proposed racial legislation against Indians should be dropped’ and ‘race propaganda in German schools and universities should not be so conducted as to generate hatred against Indians’.19

If Bose was saying all this from German soil, there were those who were communicating from Indian shores as well, and asking Hitler to take a small step which could bring about a potentially big shift in Indian perceptions. The University of Calcutta expressed its willingness to introduce Mein Kampf as a textbook for post-graduate students of political economy, sociology and international law if Hitler simply deleted all the anti-India passages in the book. In May 1934, the German Consul General in Calcutta reported this gracious offer to Auswartiges Amt (the German Foreign Office), noting towards the end of his official letter that ‘the Indian side continues to cite the remarks in question as evidence of an alleged anti-Indian attitude on the part of the Reich Chancellor’.20

The Reich Chancellery sent an extremely curt and cutting response to its own Foreign Office, saying that ‘for fundamental considerations’—those related to the NSDAP’s racial ideology—Hitler didn’t want to grant permission to change or soften the wording regarding India in the English edition of Mein Kampf.21 The Reich Chancellery’s reply to the German Consul General in Calcutta was a little more broadly spelt out:22

Berlin, 22 June, 1934

The State Secretary

In The Reich Chancellery

The sale of Mein Kampf in India could possibly be promoted if the Indian wishes for a change in the wording were taken into account.

Apart from the fact that such a change would encounter considerable printing difficulties, it is not supportable that the wording … be changed in consideration of the special interests of individual national groups.

Nor should it be in the interests of our good relations with England, in the opinion of the Chancellor himself, if the dissemination of his work among Indian students, who take a more or less revolutionary stance in relation to British rule over India, were to be promoted by special means.

This was a straight rebuke—at a time when Indians, and especially Indian students in Germany, were looking for some reassurance. At least three groups of Indian students—in Munich, Berlin and Vienna—wrote to the German Foreign Office, the other German ministries and, at least in one case, directly to Hitler himself explicitly seeking such a reassurance and stating that in the fields of both academia and industry, they were increasingly facing out-and-out discrimination in the form of denial of training and other opportunities. Their nearly identical letters, the first draft of which, unsurprisingly, was written by Subhas Bose himself, received very wide publicity in the Indian press.

Along with what the Indian students described as their own ‘monster memorandum’, they also sent to all the Nazi ministers a booklet they had painstakingly prepared to put forward their case. It contained all the reports about India which had appeared in the German press, so that the ministers could see for themselves the ‘malicious lies’ that were being told day in and day out. To the students’ utter astonishment, not a single Nazi minister even acknowledged having received the memorandum and the booklet, let alone send a proper reply.

M.S. Khanna, the chief of the students’ organisation in Munich, disappointingly noted that the Nazis seemed to have easily ‘beaten the British government’. British diplomats stationed across Germany were of ‘very little help’ to Indians in any case and were ‘only too glad’ to trot up some excuse or the other for their inaction, he said. Even if they did, after much persuasion, occasionally move so much as a finger, it would be with a rather ‘grudging tone’, he added. Yet, to any letters or memoranda, the Indians were at least accustomed to getting ‘the usual note’, however formal in nature, from the British government, saying ‘the matter is engaging our attention’, or some other words to that effect. ‘But not one of the German ministers ever cared to send us a line … They tried absolutely to ignore the Indian protest,’ Khanna said.23

Just when the students had altogether abandoned any hope of getting a reply, they received a wholly unexpected and astounding invitation from the Reich minister for publicity and propaganda, Goebbels. The invite was sent through the Deutsche Academy, the institute which had long had the formal responsibility of communicating with Indian students on German soil. Goebbels wanted to see Khanna, the head of the Munich students’ group.

When Khanna entered his office, he saw that Goebbels had, on his table, ‘a bundle of press cuttings from the Indian newspapers’. Goebbels received the young Indian warmly and initially, for a minute or two, ‘played the entertaining host’. Then he got down to real business, his tone undergoing a slight but easily discernible change. ‘Look what your Indian newspapers are doing,’ he told Khanna in German, pointing to clippings. ‘Have we not treated you Indian students in our universities with the greatest courtesy and looked after your comforts and attended to your grievances, whenever they arose …? And in return your papers are carrying on a very uncharitable and false propaganda against us. Do you think it is fair on their part to do so?’24

Indian students in Germany had no access to any of their own country’s papers, and definitely not to the pro-freedom Indian press. A little relieved that the nationalist papers back home had indeed taken note of the students’ plight, and perhaps emboldened by those reports in front of him, Khanna told Goebbels that ‘systematic anti-Indian propaganda was being carried on in the German press and the Indians were feeling somewhat bitter about it’. He also told him that not a single Nazi minister had bothered to even acknowledge the memorandum and booklet they had sent. At this, Goebbels ‘expressed surprise that the copies sent by us had not reached him’, Khanna stated. He even promised a ‘thorough enquiry’ and then went on to make what the Indian student termed as ‘a sensational request’.

Goebbels told Khanna that in his capacity as president of the Indian students’ organization, he ‘should write in the Indian press that the reports appearing in the Indian newspapers were false’. Goebbels wanted each one of the negative reports powerfully contradicted and promised Khanna that he would provide him all the facilities needed to write and send across detailed refutations to India. Khanna told a correspondent of The Bombay Chronicle that he refused to do any such thing, ‘having been a resident of Germany for a long time and knowing full well the truth in those reports’. At this point, the interview which had been sought by Goebbels himself was ‘abruptly ended’.25

Soon thereafter, however, the Reich Foreign Office suddenly stepped in to respond to Indian grievances. Its officials, in consultation with the NSDAP’s Office of Racial Policy, assured Indian students’ groups in Munich, Berlin and Vienna in a communique26 that ‘there is by no means any reason for concern about Germany’s supposed attitude towards the Indians, as has arisen in circles of Indians living in Germany and, moreover, also in part of India itself’. The Foreign Office wished to emphasise that ‘the racial concept of National Socialism is far removed from disregard for, or even hatred of, other races and peoples. The new Germany takes the position, which has repeatedly been publicly expressed, that it is only the intermixing of races through marriage which is undesirable. The possibility of friendly cultural and economic traffic based on mutual respect among the peoples and races of the earth should remain untouched; in fact, it should be intensified. Within the German Reich, economic or legal restrictions against members of foreign races were out of the question. Economic restrictions for racial reasons had been applied only to the Jews as a necessary step on behalf of the German people to prevent them from being overrun by a foreign ethnic group’.

In the same vein, it stated that ‘if, in individual cases, the aforementioned principles towards Indians were not followed, or if the hospitality which is, of course, extended to any Indian has been violated, this must be understood as the trespassing of irresponsible individuals which happened in the course of the revolutionary upheaval, for which the German Reich cannot be held responsible … The persons in charge will do anything they can to prevent such trespassing in future and make sure that the principles laid out above are fully implemented’.

Four assurances were handed out to Indian students on their specific complaints: a) there would be no restrictions on Indian students doing practical work in German factories; b) the Racial Political Office of the NSDAP and the Reich ministry for public enlightenment and propaganda had agreed to help combat occasional anti-Indian passages in the press; c) the Racial Political Office was ‘ready to devote particular attention to fight misrepresentations in the propagation of racial theories and pay special attention with regard to India’; and d) no new racial laws were planned, and ‘it was certainly not intended to worsen the situation of Indians living or studying in Germany for reasons of race’.

Each one of these assurances turned out to be entirely devoid of meaning and was intended more to assuage liberal British opinion than to address any Indian complaints. Bose was soon writing to the German Foreign Office and the head of the Deutsche Academy that even after the Foreign Office’s letter, ‘nothing has been done’ and that the anti-India ‘propaganda is continuing’.27 The fresh instances of racial discrimination were, as a matter of fact, glaring. An article in the Volkischer Beobachter had referred to Indians as ‘mongrels’.28 Racial propaganda, instead of being checked or toned down, was being carried on quite shrilly and stridently. An article in the Frankfurter Zeitung praised the British plan for a new constitution for India, a plan that freedom-seeking Indians were highly critical of because they saw it as undermining Indian interests. Many Indian students were still ‘receiving no support for undergoing practical training in German firms’, and in one particular instance, Bose stated, a German factory had been ready to accept an Indian volunteer, but ‘the Committee of the German government did not give the necessary permission’.29 (Not too long thereafter, an Indian won a doctorate in dentistry in Berlin and was employed to work as an assistant to the director of the conservation department at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University’s dental institute. On the first day at the university, when this Indian, Shanti Behari Seth, great-uncle to writer Vikram Seth, reported to work, he was shown a letter that his boss had received from the Nazi education ministry. The ministry had rebuked him for employing a ‘foreigner’ as an assistant. Seth would not be allowed to do post-doctoral work there. Seeing no hope for future prospects on Nazi land, he decided to leave for London without any delay.)30 And, despite the assurance that no discriminatory legislation was being planned, race laws had, indeed, been introduced.

In mid-September 1935, the Nazi regime passed the Nuremberg Laws, outlawing sexual relations and marriage between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’. According to these notorious laws, any sign of love or romance between an Indian and a German was a punishable offence, as Indians were not deemed to be Aryans.

Right from the beginning of the Nazi rule, there had been murmurs that such intimate relations had been frowned upon and effectively terminated. An official from the princely state of Hyderabad, who had visited Germany towards the end of 1933, had reported on his return that ‘German girls, who had married Indian students, were deprived of their nationality’.31 This new legal formulation put the official lid on these liaisons, marital or otherwise, and one of its many victims—apart from helpless Jews—was an Indian from Goa.

Born into a family of modest means, Ayi Ganpat Tendulkar was, as a child, precocious. Too young at the age of fifteen to sit for the board exams in his native Goa, he walked 800 kilometres to Ahmedabad and stood first among 800 candidates in the exams there. He soon acquired proficiency in six Indian languages, including Sanskrit. As the account written by his daughter, Laxmi Dhaul Tendulkar, tells us,32 he worked for a while with Vallabhbhai Patel as his secretary before leaving for Paris for higher studies. There he met and married an Italian girl, but the marriage didn’t last long. In 1922, he moved to Germany to pursue a doctorate in applied mathematics and, as a student at Gottingen University, married one of his classmates. That marriage too ended quickly. After completing his doctorate, Ayi took up a course in mechanical engineering in Berlin, while at the same time working as a correspondent for German dailies Berliner Tageblatt and Weltbuhne.

In January 1933, the month in which Hitler came to power, Tendulkar met well-known German movie scriptwriter Thea von Harbou at a friend’s place in Berlin. Harbou had a fascination for India, and Tendulkar had just returned from his homeland after having covered Mahatma Gandhi’s political activities there. They struck up a conversation and fell in love. Tendulkar was twenty-five years old and she, at forty-two, was seventeen years his senior and already married.

Harbou’s husband was the celebrated filmmaker Fritz Lang and she had been writing for all of his films, including the widely hailed Dr Mabuse, The Gambler and The Metropolis after marriage. They had been married for over ten years when she met Tendulkar. One of the things that she and her husband had initially bonded over was their tremendous interest in India—not so much everyday India but the exotic land that has flourished in Western imagination.

Otherwise, the marriage was largely an unhappy one. Harbou was bitter about Lang’s many extramarital affairs and later said that they stayed married for eleven years just because ‘we had not found time to get divorced’. One day Lang returned home to find his wife in bed with Tendulkar, and the marriage ended, finally.

Harbou and Tendulkar continued to meet regularly, but in private, because the Nazis had seized power and did not like the idea of German women—who were supposed to create the future Nordic ‘Aryan’ generations— co-habiting with men of colour. Tendulkar had already been forced to discontinue writing for the Berlin papers on account of being an Indian. Remarkably, the bond between the two deepened, despite the fact that Harbou was seen to be sympathetic towards Hitler and would eventually go on to join the Nazi Party (she later claimed that she became a member of the party only so that she could help Indians living in Germany).

With the race laws coming into effect in September 1935, Harbou and Tendulkar had a secret wedding to avoid being sent straight to prison. Soon, Tendulkar’s brother Yeshwant joined him in Germany for his own studies. Harbou advised him to stay in the same Berlin flat as the couple. He would naturally arouse suspicion as an Indian, she said, and if the Brownshirts came calling, she could, as a German, offer an explanation. Things were deteriorating quickly for ‘foreigners’, and increasingly, Tendulkar and his brother stayed in the background socially, going out in public only when they felt it was safe to do so and almost never in the company of Harbou when she, a personality in her own right, attended functions or receptions.

Ultimately, the all-pervasive state caught up with Harbou and her hidden husband. She was summoned to the main Reich Office in the city, taken to a desolate room, made to stand next to a wooden table in a corner and subjected to interrogation. The initial questions were about the suicide of her ex-husband Lang’s first wife Liza, which she knew nothing about and had nothing to do with. This was a set-up. As soon as she looked suitably disturbed, the subject was changed. Wasn’t Harbou ‘involved’ with an Indian? Didn’t he go by the name of ‘Tendulkar’? Wasn’t he living with her, in her house? Hadn’t he been working for the Berliner Tageblatt, a Jewish paper, for many years? Hadn’t the paper sent him to India on an assignment? Wasn’t she aware of the activities of Indians against the British? Hadn’t Tendulkar’s brother too come to Germany? The officer said he was sorry, but Harbou’s activities would have to be monitored going forward, owing to her association with ‘foreigners’. The Nazis had anyway been tailing her for a while; the shadowing and surveillance would now be intensified.

Harbou left the Reich Office totally shaken. She knew it was only a matter of time before the Nazis confronted the Tendulkar brothers and subjected them to some really nasty treatment. With tears welling up in her eyes, she told them that the only way out was for them to leave Germany immediately. Highly reluctant, Ayi Tendulkar finally agreed, and along with his brother, boarded a ship to India, his powerful emotional bond with his German wife abruptly broken.

After the Nazis had failed to keep their word on the many assurances they had offered, Bose, who had initially rejected the idea, suggested that Indians press ahead with policies designed to block trade and other links with Nazi Germany, including academic ones. For his part, he would actively ask Indian students to consider other avenues for education, technical or otherwise, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Italy, and would advise India to ‘buy more from Czechoslovakia and less from Germany’.33

Such a course of action had been advocated by some others earlier, but with a leader of Bose’s standing identifying a pressure point in terms of trade, the earnest call acquired a significance of its own. India’s most influential body of the captains of industry, for example, wrote to its Berlin counterpart, the Reich Chamber of Commerce, asking for clarifications about the German government’s policy vis-à-vis Indians. This was clear enough indication that Indians were getting serious about hurting Germany’s economic interests.

The Nazis were particularly sensitive to economic matters in their early years in power. Germany had suffered a devastating economic collapse after the First World War, and there was no way Hitler could either build his own credibility or work towards the fulfilment of his political agenda of Lebensraum without the country first regaining its economic muscle and clout. He had already had a taste of what Nazi Germany would be in for if it alienated world opinion so swiftly. In his first few months in power, Jews had been ejected from all walks of German life: the press, educational institutions, academia, the film and music industry and even the judiciary. This, along with the smashing of Jewish showrooms and properties, and the wilful arrests and thrashing of political opponents of all hues, had invited widespread condemnation, especially in the British and American press. The nationwide boycott of Jewish shops and businesses on 1 April 1933 had, in particular, triggered much outrage and protests in the form of economic blockades. By mid-May, German exports had taken a big hit, and Germany’s shipping industry was on the verge of collapse, with several nations marking out no-go areas; local economies at two of the major ports had crashed, and regional governments were seeking funds from the national exchequer. Hitler, at first, dispatched the new Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht to Washington and Rosenberg to London to try and soothe some ruffled feathers, but when that effort didn’t have the expected result, he gave an address to the Reichstag that was primarily aimed at pacifying Britain and the US. At the same time, he granted an exclusive interview to a journalist from the widely-read American magazine, Collier’s Weekly, urging Franklin Roosevelt’s government and US citizens to ‘understand’ Germany and asking American businessmen to secure their economic interests, which, in his view, they anyway wanted to ‘see consolidated’. Painting his own regime as a victim rather than an aggressor, Hitler said in the interview, ‘If only all Americans could come over here to Germany. They would look about and ask themselves where is this revolution, where is this terror, where is all this destruction and chaos I’ve heard about?’34

Rather than pursue a ruinous policy with regard to Germany’s trade ties with India, Hitler, who had earlier turned down Bose’s request for a meeting, repeated his Collier’s Weekly act, granting an exclusive interview, in December 1935, to the director of the Indo-German News Exchange, A.L. Sinha.

Sinha was by no reckoning one of India’s top or most influential journalists, but it was clear why he was chosen. After India’s papers had raised grave concerns over the growing vulnerabilities of Indians in Nazi Germany, Sinha had done a couple of generous and blatant plugs for Hitler and his government in the press and on public platforms. In one such public address at Aligarh Muslim University in northern India, he had heaped fulsome praise on Hitler, stating that in the Führer, the ‘disheartened, disillusioned, defeated and impoverished’ German people had ‘found a deliverer’, and that when ‘democratic institutions were found to be unfit for Germany’, ‘seven men who joined together in 1921 … had become today six million Nazis and achieved ‘by sheer dint of determined hard work’ the ‘seemingly hopeless task of reviving the culture, honour and self-respect of Germans’. As ‘the one man in Germany who commanded universal confidence’, Hitler, Sinha had stressed, ‘was justified in the recent round-up of traitors’ as ‘it was the only way to deal with the situation’.35 He had also sent Indian newspapers a glowing account of the reception accorded in Munich to an Indian professor, Mahindra Nath Sarkar of Calcutta University. He laid bare his intention behind sending the despatch by stating in his very first paragraph that ‘it may be of interest to the reading public in view of the still unsatisfactory reports from Germany regarding the conditions of the Indians in that country’ and that such expressions of German goodwill ‘will alleviate some of our fears regarding racial discrimination’.36

Records of Hitler’s conversation with Sinha, preserved in the Reich archives, tell us that Sinha began his interview in a similarly sympathetic and salutation-filled manner. He ‘thanked’ Hitler ‘for the honour of the reception’, ‘briefly described his journalistic activity’ and said that ‘in India, unfortunately, the view is still strongly represented that National Socialism regards the people of India as an inferior race’. Sinha himself ‘endeavoured to counter this view’ and felt ‘it would be of particular value to know what the German Chancellor himself thought of this question’.

Hitler replied:

The German people wished to live in peace and friendship with all other nations. The National Socialist theory was tailored exclusively and specifically to the German people themselves. We did not seek to impose this theory on other peoples. Our attitude towards other races is that of objective disinterestedness. Just like the Indians, the German people are made up of several races and tribes. The Indian people, with their thousand-year-old culture, have given themselves their own racial laws, which cannot simply be transferred to European conditions. Dr Goebbels was quite right when he said it was not correct to speak of inferior races. No race is in itself inferior; the different races that populate the earth are at the most different from one another. This also applies to the Jewish race. The Jew is not in himself inferior in his disposition, but his ideas are not fit for the German people, they are rather downright shameful, and therefore the Jew must ensure that he must live by himself as a people. Every race must find its world within itself, and that is why we rightly opposed that another race should try to impose its characteristics upon us, as the Jews in Germany had done. For our part, we did not want to enter the world in which other peoples and races live; we had no intention of subjugating any other nation.

Sinha then asked the Führer what the future foreign policy of the Reich would be like. To this, Hitler said:

This question reminds me of a question which American visitors frequently ask me, that is: Are you going to war? Foreign policy has its own dynamic. It is determined by an endeavour that dominates all else, that is, to secure the greatest possible degree of peace and welfare for one’s own people. If one constantly works to raise the standard of living of the people, the peaceful attitude of German foreign policy will follow naturally. Germany wants to trade with all nations and to engage in national dealings in its own good interest, but not out of malicious competition with all other nationalities, but to sell in order to buy and to keep the production apparatus going. Germany did not want to profit from the war (or) from the current political situation, but no one could prevent Germany from delivering coal to Italy from its mines so that the German miners would not lose their jobs and bread. That is why Germany will not participate in any sanctions, but will, as before, stay out of all dealings and foreign policy entanglements.

At no point in the interview did Hitler exude any fake empathy for Indians; on the contrary, he cleverly alluded to the caste system by referring to India’s ‘own racial laws’. But he did substantially tone down his racial rhetoric, his every sentence constructed in such a way as to ensure that the idea of a trade embargo against Germany was not pursued. In saying that no race—not even the Jewish one—was inferior, he responded to the charge that the Nazis looked at Indians as inferior, and underlined strongly that Germany was keen to engage in trade with all nations.

Hitler the diplomat might have gained some serious brownie points with such a pitch, even if the picture he was trying to sell was evidently fake. But Hitler the demagogue found the mask so painfully uncomfortable that he cast it off in less than two months with a demonstration of naked hostility towards Indians.

On 26 January 1936, Hitler addressed a gathering of more than 6,000 students in Munich. His emphasis through the speech was on his firm racial political belief that it was the ‘right’ of European nations to establish colonies. ‘The Indians did not send a delegation to London to say “Please teach us how to walk.” The English went to India to teach the Indians how to walk,’ he said.37

This teaching, he stated, had not been easy. ‘It was a painful process,’ he declared. ‘The Indians insisted on walking in the Indian fashion, while the English felt impelled to teach them to walk along English lines. There was trouble for over a century, but at least the dominant people taught them how to walk,’ he said.

By what right did nations possess colonies, he asked his listeners, and proceeded to provide the answer. ‘By the right of taking them.’ It was all unequivocal. Might was right. ‘If you had asked Cortes (who conquered the Aztec empire in Central America) or Clive (one of the creators of British rule in India) by what right they had taken land for their own countries, they would have replied, “I am a Spaniard” or “I am an Englishman!”’

But on no account must the white colonisers give in to pacifism and allow the colonised to rule themselves, Hitler cautioned. He denounced those imperialists who were suddenly getting a little apologetic about what they were doing and announcing their resolve to ‘civilize barbarous people’ and teach them self-governance. If the European nations adopted such a ‘weak and liberal conception’, he warned them, their colonies would turn around and ‘throw off their yoke’.

‘After all, what a great statesman said is true, that the British Empire was built up by adventurers. Today, American professors dispute the justification of this conception, but when the white race abandons the foundations of its rule it will lose that rule.’38

There was tremendous outrage among Indians over these deeply scornful remarks, with several prominent people and publications saying that things had finally come to a point where nothing short of a complete ban on German goods would suffice. Nonetheless, there was a sobering awareness that there were genuine limits to what Indians could do in their situation as a subject people; the real decision-makers in India were the British, whom Hitler had praised to the skies. That had made the verbal insults perhaps that much more harder to bear.

Hitler had ‘betrayed moral cowardice and ill breeding by attacking a helpless and, unfortunately for the time being, fallen people, knowing full well that they are unable, at present, to retaliate effectively … He has made himself utterly ridiculous in his endeavour to please and pamper his new ally, British Imperialism,’ said the dynamic Congress leader from Mumbai, K.F. Nariman.39 The Bombay Chronicle said that ‘India, if she were a free country, would have taken immediate steps to compel him (Hitler) to offer an apology.’40 But she was in no position to do so, unfortunately.

Bose was in Berlin at the time, and he ‘made his protest known’.41 He was of the opinion that Indians in Europe, in particular, ought to speak up against Hitler, though he acknowledged that those in Germany would find it hard to do so in view of possible repercussions.

Bose’s three-year stay in Europe was going to end soon. ‘I regret that I have to return to India with the conviction that the new nationalism of Germany is not only narrow and selfish but arrogant. The recent speech of Herr Hitler in Munich gives the essence of Nazi philosophy,’ he wrote to the head of the Deutsche Academy.42 He had had ‘long meetings’ recently with two more Nazi officials, Bose stated, but the result was ‘practically nil’, and he had left the meetings convinced ‘that they attached very little importance to the Indian question’. Nevertheless, he was ‘still prepared to work for an understanding between Germany and India, but ‘this understanding must be consistent with our national self-respect’.43

When asked by a journalist about the overall situation in Europe, Bose indicated plainly that Hitler’s comments in Munich were very much on his mind.

You must excuse me today if I am not in a mood to discuss this question (of the overall situation) at length. But I will refer to only one point. During the last few weeks my mind has been greatly disturbed at the insulting remarks made by the German Führer about the Indian people. This is not the first time that India had been insulted by the outstanding leaders of Nazi Germany. It is quite clear that Germany today is determined to curry favour with England by insulting India. I can have no objection if the Germans desire to lick the boots of the Britishers, but if they think that in the year 1936 an insult hurled at India will be quietly pocketed by us, they are sadly mistaken. I am glad to find indications that public opinion in India has already been aroused on this question and I hope that we shall be able to demonstrate that the Indian people can no longer be insulted with impunity.44

Barely months after Hitler had asserted the ‘right’ of ‘the white man’ to conquer other lands and peoples, he played the role of host for the 1936 Berlin Olympics where a black athlete, Jesse Owens, left his indelible mark on the history of the Games. The other men of colour who made the Berlin Games pretty much their own were members of the Indian hockey team. With the brilliantly gifted Dhyan Chand as their captain, the Indian side conceded only one goal in the whole tournament, and that was in the final, which they won 8-1 against the host nation’s team. In the other matches, the opponents were swept away: Hungary was beaten 4-0, the US 7-0, Japan 9-0, and, in the semi-finals, France 10-0. Dhyan Chand’s own individual tally of goals was eleven, and his brother Roop Chand scored an equal number.

Dhyan Chand later wrote in his autobiography that when the two teams took their places on the field in the finals, ‘the Germans appeared to have the feeling that they were up against an inferior side’.45 That feeling stemmed not so much from a racial approach but from their experience in an early practice game. On the very day they arrived after a long sea voyage, followed by a train journey to the German capital, the genuinely exhausted Indians had played the first of their eight practice games in Germany. The Germans had won comfortably (4-1) and the squad was understandably buoyed by this success because the Indians, having been hockey champions at the 1928 and 1932 Olympics, were the fancied favourites. The Germans had played deftly enough to get to the finals and their confidence was naturally high, but there could simply be no overlooking the fact that the Indian team had steamrolled every opposition on their way to the finals.

The final was scheduled for 14 August but was shifted to the following morning due to heavy rain. 20,000 Germans and fifty Indians, among them the maharaja of Baroda and the princess of Bhopal, turned out to watch the match at the newly-constructed hockey stadium. Before getting onto the ground, the Indian team saluted the tricolour of the Indian National Congress which their assistant manager had carried with him to Berlin.

The Indians scored their first goal just three minutes before the interval, held smartly in check until then by the German team. But after the break, Dhyan Chand and his men displayed the flair and footwork that they were rightly lauded for. In the seventh minute in the second half, the second goal was scored, and by the end of just thirteen minutes, India’s lead had gone up to 6-0 with masterful dribbling, passing and intelligent play.

The Germans were upset, and their goalkeeper suddenly resorted to rough tactics. He hit Dhyan Chand hard in the mouth and removed a tooth. Dhyan Chand had to go off the field to recuperate, but returned soon, barefooted, and instructed his players not to focus so much on scoring goals. ‘We must teach them a lesson in ball control,’ he said. ‘As the stunned crowd watched, the Indians repeatedly took the ball up to the German circle and then back passed to dumfound their opponents.’46 The Germans couldn’t do much; the dominance of the Indians was complete.

In the internet era, a myth has been circulated that Hitler was so impressed by the Indian hockey team’s performance that he offered Dhyan Chand citizenship of the Third Reich and a place in the Reich Army to boot. The story has been so fortified by overzealous netizens that a lot of links attesting to it are available online, including videos with self-assured voiceovers. Clearly, as a result of such widespread circulation and due to the metrics of the internet such as page views, clicks, comments and ‘shares’, they have resulted in some bona fide historians taking the tale into account. But even those who have somehow taken note of it have displayed either a considerable amount of scepticism or open disbelief: one historian of the 1936 Berlin Games has written that Hitler is ‘said to have’47 made the offer to the Indian captain, and another has used the considerably more damning word, ‘alleged’.48

The truth is that there is not a shred of evidence to support the story of the so-called offer. It is also true that Hitler didn’t want to host the Olympics at all in the first place; he abhorred the idea of the Jews, Slavs, blacks and other athletes of colour competing against ‘the whites’. But it was at the time of the Weimar Republic that Berlin had been awarded the Games, so he was caught in a bind, and the German National Olympic Committee told him that the Games could well be used as a propaganda vehicle. So, Hitler relented and asked Leni Riefenstahl, the gifted documentary maker who had made the Nazi propaganda movie, The Triumph of the Will, on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, to make a film on the event.

Riefenstahl captured on camera some moments from the hockey final, and her footage of the Indian hockey team was later cited by some of her supporters, while she was herself attempting to disown her Nazi past, as proof of her having exercised her full editorial freedom. However, Riefenstahl was very much a member of Hitler’s cultural coterie and was continually in touch with Reich propaganda minister, Goebbels, during the Olympics assignment. Goebbels had issued directives to all of German media: foreign victories and German defeats too had to be covered to present a picture of fairness as the German nation wanted to provide the world with proof of ‘its willingness to co-operate in large international projects designed to further universal peace’.49

Another theory about the Berlin Games, again floated recently within India, is that the Indians and the Americans were the only two contingents who refused to do the Nazi salute at the opening ceremony as a sign of protest. True, the Indians did not salute, but it was no sign of protest: they were marching under the British Union flag at the time, and only twenty-odd contingents of the more than fifty participating contingents offered the Nazi salute. Even that number is gravely disputed because the Nazi salute and the Olympic salute were similar, except that in case of the Olympic one, the right arm would be stretched out sidewise and not straight. The Indians did turn their heads to the right while walking past Hitler, and one observer said that one of the Indians reportedly ‘ignored the instruction for “eyes right” as they went past the boxes but waved a “How are you, Hitler?” salute of his own’.50

6

‘SHOOT GANDHI’

Edward Wood, the son of the Second Viscount Halifax of Yorkshire, was born in 1881 without a left hand. As it turned out, it didn’t prove too much of a handicap. In his youth, he became a highly competent hunter and was 6 feet 5 inches tall, his false hand ‘in the form of a clenched fist with a thumb on a spring’1 enabling him, while he’d be out hunting, to effortlessly open gates while holding his reins and signal the horn. He excelled at politics too, holding a host of ministerial berths as a Conservative Party politician, and after he became widely known as Lord Irwin in the mid-1920s, he was appointed Viceroy of India. He was considered so accomplished in the arts of diplomacy that he once started a sentence saying, ‘I should have thought that one might say that it could be reasonably held that …’2 In time, his devout ways earned him the nickname ‘the holy fox’ from Winston Churchill.

In October 1937, Irwin, who was now called Lord Halifax, received an invitation from Prince Loewenstein, president of the German Hunting Association, to the International Hunting Exhibition which was set to open in Berlin. It was not Halifax’s reputation as a hunter alone that had secured him the invitation. After his viceroyalty of India, Halifax had served as the secretary of state for war, among other things, and had played a key role as second-in-command at the British Foreign Office. By the time Neville Chamberlain became the prime minister of Britain in mid-1937, Halifax was Lord President of the Council and was seen to be on the side of the new premier on foreign policy, in which area he continued to be ‘seconded’ to the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. While Eden was said to have an acute dislike for dictators, Halifax, like Chamberlain, was in favour of a policy of appeasement towards Hitler and Nazi Germany. His appeasement tactics had won him several backers in domestic politics, especially in his borough of Birmingham, where, his biographer tells us, several constituents were happy: the opponents of the communists, who shared their dislike of the ‘Reds’ with the Nazis; the champions of imperialism who didn’t see Hitler as endangering Britain’s Raj as against France, which had long been an ‘enemy’ of Britain; the peaceniks who abhorred the idea of another major conflict disrupting global order and the veterans of the First World War, who didn’t want to see the Second breaking out at all; open supporters of fascism; and those who weren’t fascist at all but felt that too much of anti-German propaganda had been carried out in the First World War. There were, in addition, the business circles who wanted trade prioritised over everything else, and there were not a few Britons who felt that ‘the British Royal Family came from there, and only a century beforehand, had it not been for the Prussians, Wellington might have lost Waterloo’.3

Halifax accepted the invitation from Germany very quickly, knowing full well that a meeting with Hitler was almost assured. Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was then the German ambassador to England, had spoken of the desirability of such a meeting in 1936 itself, and the Chamberlain government was also seeking a ‘settlement’ of ‘the European question’. Both Halifax and Chamberlain saw the visit as an opportunity ‘for the sort of relaxed and informal face-to-face meeting with the Nazi leadership which he (Chamberlain) believed could achieve much’.4

Hitler invited Halifax not to Berlin, but to his home, the Berghof, above the village of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. When the British diplomat reached there on the morning of 19 November, he almost ended up inadvertently sabotaging his own mission. Getting out of the car, he mistakenly thought Hitler was a footman and was ‘about to hand him his hand and coat when an agitated von Neurath (the German foreign minister) hissed into his ear, “Der Führer! Der Führer!”’ Fortunately his host had not noticed the gaffe.5

Halifax began the discussion by pointing out how British opinion was ‘offended’ by ‘much in the Nazi system’, particularly the treatment meted out to the Church, the Jews and the trade unions. Then, much like a war general who suddenly and inexplicably surrenders after a suitably effective first strike, he lavished praise on Hitler for ‘performing great services in Germany’ and added that if public opinion back in England was critical of the Nazis, ‘it might no doubt be in part because the people of England were not fully informed’ of what was going on in Germany. This placatory talk was followed up by a sincere assurance that an ‘Anglo-German rapprochement would not mean an attempt to divide Berlin and Rome’.6

Hitler replied by speaking briefly of the wrongs heaped upon Germany by the imposition of the Versailles Treaty and, perhaps sensing that Halifax was saying things that would perfectly suit him, allowed the former Lord Irwin to carry on. Halifax gave Hitler the line he wanted immediately. He referred to the question of the ‘possible alteration in the European order’, and stated that among the specific questions were those of ‘Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia’, the places Hitler was eyeing, and made it clear that ‘England was interested to see that alterations should come through the course of peaceful evolution and that methods should be avoided which might cause far-reaching disturbances’.7 In effect, he was telling Hitler that the British government was fine with provisions of the Versailles Treaty being amended with regard to Danzig (as a Free City under League of Nations jurisdiction), Austria (as a country not allowed to join Germany politically) and Czechoslovakia (as a new, independent state with three million German speakers). So long as it was all done peacefully and without resulting in too much turmoil, it was all right.

Hitler knew he had got what he wanted and, assuming the role of the champion of peace, told Halifax that ‘Germany sets great store by good relations with all her neighbours’ and that ‘international order should be built up not on force but on law’. When Halifax asked Hitler when talks on the details of an Anglo-German rapprochement could start, Hitler ‘first shrugged this off’ and, when his guest pressed him again on the topic after lunch, said, ‘One must be able to wait … in a few years today’s problems might wear a quite different complexion.’8

All through lunch, Hitler was particularly foul-mouthed, by now perhaps arrogant in the belief that the British sounded cravenly eager for some sort of ‘settlement’. He dismissed all the predictors of weather patterns as ‘idiots’, said that anyone who took a plane ‘if he can go by train or road’ was a ‘fool’, sneered at the hunting exhibition to which Halifax had been invited in the first place, and when someone remarked that Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, had just had a child, remarked that ‘the Austrian birth rate was declining sharply’ due to ‘Austria’s forced separation from Germany’.9

The torrent of abuse reached a crescendo after lunch, when Hitler, entirely on his own and without any prodding from anyone present, brought up the subject of India. He told Halifax that he had made it compulsory for the SS to watch the movie, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which extolled the British conquest of India, because he believed that ‘this was how a superior race must behave’, and proceeded to offer, what was in his view, a ridiculously easy and effortless solution to the ‘Indian problem’. ‘Shoot Gandhi,’ he exclaimed, ‘and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of the Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established.’10 In this manner, the one that he was increasingly adopting across Germany to deal with most internal troubles, the submission of the Indians would be complete. ‘You will see how quickly they will collapse as soon as you make it clear that you mean business.’11

An appeaser he might well have been, but Halifax was still apparently taken aback. Ivone Kirkpatrick, a British Embassy official who was present at the meeting, recorded that Halifax ‘gazed at Hitler with a mixture of astonishment, repugnance and compassion. He indicated dissent, but it would have been a waste of time to argue.’12

Would it really have been such a waste of time to argue against the idea of the mass killing of Indians? Or was Halifax, by not reacting strongly to Hitler’s hysterical outburst, being foxy as ever, just as he had been in his own dealings with Indians?

As Viceroy of India between 1925 and 1931, Halifax, in his avatar as Lord Irwin, was the first occupant of the Viceroy’s House (now the Rashtrapati Bhavan), designed by well-known British architect Edward Lutyens in New Delhi. He had, early in his assignment as Viceroy, refused to ban American writer Katherine Mayo’s openly anti-India book, Mother India, believing that it ‘might help reconcile American opinion to British rule’. He consciously and cleverly positioned himself as a ruler who believed that ‘Britain should carefully guide India’ to self-government ‘in the short to medium term’—here self-government was defined as being under the umbrella of the empire, like some other autonomous colonies, and not complete independence. When the time came, in the late 1920s, to appoint a parliamentary commission to review the working of the 1919 Montague–Chelmsford reforms and recommend further steps towards self-government for India, he had plainly communicated to the then Secretary of State Lord Birkenhead that he should not have any Indians on the commission.

The Indians called for a boycott of a commission they would have no representation on, and its leader, the Liberal politician, John Simon, and other members were greeted with black flags when they arrived in Mumbai in February 1928; they got a similar reception wherever they travelled across India.

The Congress itself was divided over what it must do beyond the boycott. Motilal Nehru came up with a report for the Congress that demanded ‘full responsible government’ and immediate dominion status, which meant ‘the constitutional state which would put India on par with the white colonies of the Empire’. Gandhi and Motilal were in favour of adopting this report; Subhas Bose and Motilal’s son Jawaharlal, on the other hand, wanted India to have nothing to do with the British and pressed for complete independence. Finally, the moderates and the young radicals dissolved their differences and agreed to announce that if the British did not accept the Motilal Nehru report by 31 December 1929, the Congress would relaunch its non-cooperation movement in order to get the colonisers to just leave.

To find a way out of the trouble, Irwin promoted the notion of a declaration of dominion status. He sold it differently to different people: he told the Indians of the gains they would make on attaining that status; he explained to the Labour Party, which had in 1929 come to power in Britain and which had quite a few leaders sympathetic to the Indian cause, that the natives had their ‘rights’; and he confidently asserted before the imperial diehards in his own Conservative Party that the ‘Congress would be split and assured them that the actual attainment of Dominion Status was still some way off’.13

The Congress rejected Halifax’s declaration and pronounced ‘Poorna Swaraj’ or total independence as its goal. Gandhi launched his civil disobedience movement and the famous salt agitation, and the First Round Table Conference from November 1930 to January 1931 lost all meaning owing to the Congress’ refusal to participate in it. In such a situation, Irwin held extensive talks with Gandhi over three weeks starting 17 February 1931 and clinched what came to be known as the Gandhi–Irwin Pact. The pact led to the end of the civil disobedience movement and confirmed Congress’ participation in the Second Round Table Conference.

Hours after signing the agreement, Gandhi went back to see Irwin, appearing dejected. He told Irwin that Jawaharlal Nehru had told him he ‘had unwittingly sold India’. The Viceroy told the Mahatma not to worry so much; he himself was sure to get cables soon from England telling him that ‘in Mr Churchill’s opinion I had sold Great Britain’.14 In the context of the Gandhi–Irwin talks, Churchill had already said barely days earlier that ‘it is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King–Emperor’.15

For all his engagements with Gandhi and other senior Indian leaders, his personal admission of ‘a growing intellectual consciousness, or more truly self-consciousness’ in India ‘closely akin to what we generally term nationalism’, and his statement that liberty-loving Englishmen could not ‘take objection to pursuit by others of their own liberty’,16 however, Irwin had firmly established the limits of his outreach towards Indians. Before leaving the country in April 1931, he refused to commute, despite appeals from the Congress and petitions by scores of Indians, the death sentence given to the political revolutionaries Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. All three were hanged on 23 March 1931.

Even if Indians didn’t agree with much of his outlook and most of his actions, the reality was that Irwin had handled delicate situations and crises for the empire on Indian soil. Hitler, in contrast, had never set foot in India and had, until then, not met or interacted with India’s political leaders or representatives. Yet, when Hitler made his outburst about dealing with Indians, Lord Halifax’s overall response—or the very subdued nature of it—helped lift Hitler’s mood enormously and made him feel superbly confident about what he was planning. The result was the Munich Pact of 1938 which emboldened Hitler to pursue his aggressive designs. Yet for Halifax and Britain, at that particular moment at Hitler’s alpine retreat, the practicalities of placating the Reich Chancellor had not proved to be daunting at all.

Halifax’s approach, and Britain’s policy of appeasement, undoubtedly also made Hitler’s evenings at the Berghof far more relaxed and pleasurable. A great many of these evenings were spent watching The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, the film he spoke to Halifax about.

During his years in power, Hitler spent an inordinate amount of time at his mountain residence, even establishing a Reich Sub-Chancellery there and issuing orders and signing laws from this ‘second capital’. Work was not intensive and seldom intrusive; contrary to the stern, uniformed commander he appears to be in his photographs, Hitler was not quite a man of military discipline in his daily life, and the Berghof came to be known for its atmosphere of unmistakable domesticity, regardless of all the officials and other staffers who would be present. Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend, was always there, and he ‘surrounded himself exclusively with absolutely loyal (and usually long-time) followers and their families and friends …’ It was always ‘the same limited circle’, as Christa Schroeder (Hitler’s secretary) remarked in a letter to a friend.17

The Führer’s personal adjutant Fritz Wiedemann wrote in 1938 of Hitler’s daily routine at the Berghof. Hitler woke up very late, at one or two in the afternoon, then took his lunch and a ‘stroll in the fenced-off area’, in summer, typically preceded by a ‘march past’ of two to three thousand visitors, and then afterwards there was ‘a get-together on the terrace, then dinner at seven inside, and finally a movie’.18

For movies, Hitler had built a private cinema in the basement of the retreat, and it was here that he saw The Lives of a Bengal Lancer fairly regularly.

Released in 1935, this Hollywood film, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper, told the story of the forty-first Bengal Lancers, a British cavalry unit in India’s Northwest Frontier Province that protected the empire from an invasion by the Afridi tribe. It did splendidly at the box office, was nominated for seven Oscars and won the award for best assistant director. Essentially, the film took the view that Indians had no right over their own land as they were not civilised, and the reviewer at The New York Times wrote that ‘it is so sympathetic in its discussion of England’s colonial management that it ought to prove a great blessing to Downing Street’.19

Herbert Dohring, who was a part of Hitler’s SS bodyguard unit from 1936 to 1943, saw the film on a number of occasions along with other members of the guard. He wrote:20

It was certainly his (Hitler’s) favourite film. He couldn’t wait to see it. He would sit down and rub his hands together. ‘It’s starting, it’s starting,’ he would say. And he would always talk about it—this huge English empire—how such a relatively small people could establish and manage something like that and keep it in order.

7

HIMALAYAN AND OTHER ADVENTURES

Alittle over a year before the Second World War broke out, a team of Germans wearing muddy boots landed entirely unobtrusively, and almost surreptitiously, along the eastern borders of India. Were the Germans there to scout for spots for a sabotage mission in case peace with England did not work out and a conflict became inevitable? Were they looking at the Raj’s vulnerabilities on one of its most precious territories, or at the possibilities of tying up with some of India’s eastern neighbours for an alliance that might prove to be strategically and tactically useful in the short and medium term? Did they want to gauge the readiness or the mood of the Indian soldiers recruited by the British for the defence of India?

Nothing of the sort, really. The Germans had landed to find out for themselves the exact source of the origin of the Aryan race.

This expedition was the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer or head of the SS, the Nazi force whose insignia of the double thunderbolt had created terror across Germany. Himmler was the chief of all of the German police in the Nazi regime, whose men were in supreme control of the concentration camps which had begun to spring up from the very year in which Hitler had come to power. The first concentration camp had come up in Dachau just outside Munich; their number had gradually increased and they were to gain an unforgettable notoriety in the years still to come.

Right from the beginning, India was very much a part of the Aryan race theory. The Indo-Germanic group of languages had established a philological link, and racial supremacists had come up with their own twisted theories to make the case for a people of ‘superior blood’. Even if Indians had suffered on account of what the racialists termed as miscegenation, might not some remnants of the original be found, at least somewhere close to it, was the question. This is where Tibet came into the bizarre picture. Those who swore by the idea of white Nordic geniuses were either taken in, or at least extremely familiar with, the story of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where apparently the heaven-sent people of the purest blood had lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this island city had allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt. All of God’s rather superhuman gifts to humankind that had somehow survived had supposedly moved on to more secure spheres. The region of the Himalayas was on this shortlist of regions of refuge, and Tibet in particular was one of the all-time favourites because it was famous for being ‘the roof of the world’, as far away from any ‘sinking’ feeling that a race whose rightful home had been swallowed up by the sea could possibly get.

Most of the Nazi leaders were enthusiastic believers in such scarcely credible theories, but Himmler definitely went the farthest of them all. In 1935, he set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe or The Bureau of Ancestral Heritage. Its remit was to find where exactly those extraordinary beings from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the resultant deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered. In 1938, the SS Reichsführer sent a squad of five Germans to Tibet on his fancied, pseudo-scientific search operation.

Two of the team’s members stood out from the rest. One was Ernst Schafer, a gifted zoologist. Schafer was young, barely twenty-eight years old, and had been to the India–China–Tibet border twice earlier. In the post-war years, he attempted to either downplay or altogether deny his Nazi connections, but the truth was that he had joined the SS soon after the Nazi triumph of 1933, much before Himmler acted as his patron for the Tibet expedition.1 Schafer was crazy about hunting and loved to gather all sorts of trophies in his home situated in an elite neighbourhood in Berlin. Sometime in late 1937, Schafer took his wife Hertha out for a duck hunt on a lake near the German–Polish border. He was about to shoot from the boat they were in, when he slipped. The rifle fell against the seat of the oarsman and fired off, the bullet hitting his wife’s head. She died within an hour.2

The second key man on the team was Bruno Beger, a young anthropologist who had joined the SS in 1935. He would take measurements of the skulls and facial details of the Tibetan people and make face masks, he said, ‘especially to collect material about the proportions, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region’.3

The ship carrying the five Germans docked at Colombo early in May 1938. From there, they took another one to Madras and a third one to Calcutta. The British authorities in India had been pretty wary of the travelling Germans and saw them as nothing but a bunch of spies. They were initially reluctant to allow them to pass through India, and the then British-run The Times of India even ran the accusatory headline, ‘A Gestapo Agent in India’.4 The British political officer in Gangtok in Sikkim, an independent mountain kingdom at the time, too, was not enthusiastic about granting the men entry into Tibet through Sikkim. But ultimately, Britain’s appeasement policy prevailed over all these concerns, as did the Nazi team’s own resolve to push as far ahead as possible en route to their desired destination.

At the end of the year, the five Germans, with swastika flags tied to their mules and heavy baggage, entered Tibet. The swastika was a ubiquitous sign in Tibet, known locally as ‘yungdrung’. Schafer and the team would have seen plenty of it during their time in India itself, where, among Hindus, it had been for long a symbol of good fortune, visible outside homes, inside temples, at street corners and on the backs of tempos and trucks. The Nazis had taken this symbol, sacrosanct and popular in cultures, not just across Asia but the world, and distorted it in every way, including its appearance, by turning its arms around and changing it to stark black in colour and placing it inside a white circle which, in turn, was surrounded by the stark red of the party flag.

The thirteenth Dalai Lama had died in 1933 and the new one was only three years old, so the Buddhist Tibetan kingdom was being controlled by a regent at the time. On the whole, the Germans were treated exceptionally well by the regent as well as by common Tibetans, and Beger, who made face masks, even acted as a sort of amateur doctor for locals for a while. What the friendly and unsuspecting Tibetan Buddhists did not know was that in the perverse imagination of the Nazis, Buddhism was a religion that had weakened the Aryans who had come to Tibet and resulted in the loss of both their spirit and strength.5 Just when it appeared that Schafer and the others could spend a lot more time exploring things for their real ‘research’ in the guise of carrying out serious scientific investigations in areas such as zoology and anthropology, in August 1939 the German expedition was abruptly cut short by the inevitability of the conflict which began early the following month. Beger had, by then, measured the skulls and features of 376 Tibetans, taken 2,000 photographs, ‘made casts of the heads, faces, hands and ears of seventeen people’ and ‘the finger and hand prints of another 350’. He had also collected 2,000 ‘ethnographic artefacts’, and another member of the contingent had taken 18,000 metres of black and white film and 40,000 photographs.6 Himmler made all the arrangements for his favoured team to fly out of Calcutta at the last moment and was himself present to greet them when their plane landed in Munich.7

Though the mission had been unexpectedly cut short, Schafer continued to remain one of Himmler’s favourites and was appointed by the SS Reichsführer subsequently as head of a research institute in Munich. Beger, the anthropologist, was, sometime in 1943, summoned by the Nazi authorities as an expert to Auschwitz—that sinister factory of death—to measure the heads of more than 100 inmates there while they were still living in the concentration camp. After the measurements were taken, so that the Nazis could get to know how to identify the allegedly ‘inferior’ kind of skulls and perfect their murderous racial science, the prisoners were sent to the gas chambers. Their dead bodies were later ‘injected with a preservative and then placed in vats containing diluted ethanol’.8 They were to be kept intact, as skeletons, for future research, but the course of the war did not leave enough room for that. Schafer got a short term in prison after the end of the war and eventually found himself on the list of de-Nazified Germans, but Beger was brought to trial and sentenced to three years in prison as an ‘accomplice to murder’.9

Bizarrely enough, even after Germany had been ruined in the global conflict, a section of neo-Nazis appeared to have clung to another outlandish conclusion. They claimed that further along the same massive Himalayan ranges where Himmler’s men had ventured, in the Gilgit region of Kashmir specifically, there lived a tribe that was originally Aryan and had, after all these years, still retained much of its Aryanism and its unique attributes. These people were apparently the Brokpas, also known as the Dards, a tribal community in the region. Apart from Gilgit, they were also spread across the Leh and Ladakh regions of Jammu and Kashmir, including Kargil. One writer, several decades later, even quoted the state’s then tourism secretary as telling him that ‘neo-Nazi women from Germany’ were in the habit of travelling to the snowy peaks ‘to get impregnated with Aryan seed’.10

The origin of the fantastic theory of Aryans in Leh and Ladakh could be attributed to G.W. Leitner, a Hungarian German Jew and an amateur ethnologist, who visited the area late in the nineteenth century. Leitner was so utterly fascinated by the features of the locals in the region that in a eureka sort of moment he declared that he had found the ‘cradle of the Aryan race’ and cited mentions of the Daradas in ancient Sanskrit texts and in the works of the Greek geographer Strabo to support his argument.11

Whether it was Himmler’s fanatical researchers or the purportedly neo-Nazi women of the later years, they were evidently looking in the wrong places. Himmler’s team, in particular, could have easily and far more accurately spotted their own Nazi types at least, if not the ‘original Aryans’, at far lower altitudes and much closer to the ground in India—in the city of Calcutta, for instance, where Schafer and his men had first landed from Madras, and in the western Indian commercial centre of Bombay or Mumbai.

A year before Hitler came to power in Germany, a young European girl in her early twenties, Maximiani Portas, had travelled to India, a place which she considered the ‘easternmost and southernmost home of the Aryan race’.12 Born in the French city of Lyons to an Englishwoman and a French man with a Greek–Italian heritage, she had, early in her life, identified with the Jew-hating Nazis. Like Alfred Rosenberg had claimed in his writings, she too formed an opinion that the Aryan stock had flourished in India before getting mixed up with the local population. Enchanted by the mystical appeal of Hinduism, the major faith of the land which the so-called Aryans had ruled, she lived in Shantiniketan in Bengal for a couple of years before spending some time in Mathura as a teacher. In 1936, she was back in Bengal and joined the Hindu Mission in Calcutta, having already changed her name to Savitri Devi. She even declared to the authorities at the Hindu Mission that she was a devotee of Adolf Hitler and that he was the one man who could save the Aryan race. In the course of her work as a teacher at the Hindu Mission, she met A.K. Mukherji, a Bengali and a self-professed Nazi sympathiser. He used to publish a fortnightly, The New Mercury, which sang praises of the Hitler regime and of Hitler’s racial philosophy. The two got married, and Savitri Devi went on to develop her own theory that Hitler was an ‘avatar’, an incarnation of one of the great gods. After the war, she returned to Europe without her husband and, convinced that Hitler was still alive and would emerge out of hiding at the opportune moment, worked diligently at spreading the Nazi doctrine and on distributing pro-Nazi pamphlets. While on one of her distribution campaigns, she was arrested in 1949 on German territory, put on trial and expelled from the country. She returned to her hometown in France and from there, established and maintained contacts with neo-Nazis in Germany, England and the US and wrote books glorifying Hitler. In the 1970s, she returned to Calcutta to live with her husband and died in 1982, proud that she had remained, right until the end, a staunch member of the Hitler cult.

Unbeknownst to most citizens of Bombay, something similarly bizarre was going on in a hidden enclave in their city at the same time that Himmler’s team was in Calcutta looking for ways to get into Tibet. At an undeclared location, secret Nazi trials were unfolding—they took place on 17 October and 7 November 1938. A German citizen living in the western Indian metropolis had been denounced by three other Germans to the ‘local’ authorities of the Nazi Foreign Organization for having criticised the Führer. Eric Leonhard was a member of the Nazi Party, but the four witnesses had specific complaints to make against him before the ‘local court’. One of them, Vogel, said that in a conversation with him and three other Germans on 28 September—close to the time the Munich crisis was developing in Europe—Leonhard had remarked, ‘I don’t know whether one can involve the whole of Germany in a war for the sake of three-and-a-half million Sudeten Germans.’13 The defendant tried to say that Vogel was drunk and had misunderstood his comments, but another witness, Werner Schroeder, confirmed having heard the whole conversation, and a third witness, who went by the name Burchard, said that Leonhard had said something similarly critical in his presence as well. He added that when he had been collecting ‘winter relief fund subscriptions’, Leonhard had made statements ‘implying that this money was used for armaments’ and had ‘only subscribed Rs 30 though he stated that Rs 75 was also being paid for him at home’.14 The fourth witness, the local Nazi group leader Koester, further accused Leonhard of ‘absenting himself from a party gathering on 1 October without offering any excuse’.

The verdict was swift. The findings of the ‘court’ were that ‘Leonhard stands aloof from the aims of the Nazi Party and that the District Court of the Nazi Foreign Organisation be asked to exclude him from the party’. Until the district court’s decision came in, Leonhard would not be permitted to attend party gatherings in Bombay. Before the ‘district court’ could hear the matter, however, Leonhard, who had filed an appeal against the original verdict, left the city. In 1939, the outbreak of the war put an end to all such secret Nazi trials, at least on Indian soil.

8

INDIAN ENTANGLEMENTS

Sometime in September 1933, Mahatma Gandhi, a stern opponent of modern industrialisation, wrote in his journal Harijan of the rejuvenation of village industries in Nazi Germany with a degree of approval. Hitler was, at that time, only a few months in power, but had already unleashed a reign of political repression. ‘That village industries in Germany are being revived at the point of the sword is not relevant here,’ he remarked. ‘What is relevant is that a country, which has shown the highest technical skill and is amongst the most advanced in the matter of industrialisation, is trying to go back to village industries for solving the problem of her terrible unemployment.’1

Gandhi’s limited approval did not last long; his intolerance for any kind of violence, let alone the Nazi kind of brutal behaviour, was extraordinary. In December 1934, when a friend of his from Germany wrote to him, Gandhi wrote back—evidently bearing in mind what Indians there were going through at that time—that ‘the best way you, living in Germany, can serve India is to befriend those Indians who are living in Germany’.2 Later, as the Hitler regime’s excesses grew, Gandhi described Nazism as a ‘naked, ruthless force reduced to an exact science and (that) worked with scientific precision’.3

In 1938, this ruthless force was employed to deadly effect. After Hitler occupied Austria in March, the Jews there were publicly humiliated, and soon the violence spread to the original realm of the Reich, Germany. Jews were spat upon and assaulted; their homes and apartments were attacked, their key synagogues in major cities were set on fire and their businesses were forcibly shut or sold, at throwaway prices, to ‘Aryans’. Nazi confidence increased manifold after September, with the Munich Pact allowing the Reich to swallow up the Sudetenland which was part of Czechoslovakia. Nearly 8,000 Jewish shops were destroyed across Germany in November, and the amount of glass from broken shops strewn all over Berlin was so huge that its residents called the night of wanton destruction ‘The Night of the Broken Glass’ (Kristallnacht). In that month alone, almost 100 synagogues were razed, hundreds of others burnt, ‘countless’4 apartments were attacked and close to 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.5

Appalled, Gandhi wrote in the Harijan that ‘the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter.’ Importantly, for someone so reputed as a proponent of non-violence, Gandhi stated that ‘if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany to … prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified’.6

The Nazi newspaper Nachtausgabe (Evening Post) wrote acerbically that Gandhi had ‘rendered neither himself, his movement nor German–Indian relations any service by his article on a subject he does not understand’. Further, it delivered a threat and brought in an element of blackmail. ‘What would the Indians say,’ the paper asked, ‘if we began to concern ourselves with Indian affairs? Quite a lot of interesting things could be unearthed not only about the British but about the Indians.’7

‘I was not unprepared for the exhibition of wrath from Germany over my article,’ Gandhi said in his reply. ‘I have myself admitted my ignorance of European politics.’ But ‘the main facts about the atrocities are beyond dispute,’ he remarked. ‘When the anger over my writing has subsided and comparative calmness has returned, the most wrathful German will find that underlying my writing, there is friendliness towards Germany, never any ill-will.’

‘The Berlin writer’, Gandhi continued, ‘has surely enunciated a novel doctrine, that people outside Germany may not criticise German action, even from the friendliest motives. For my part I would certainly welcome the interesting things that Germans or other outsiders may unearth about Indians.’

He didn’t need to speak for the British, he said. ‘But if I know the British people at all, they, too, welcome outside criticism when it is well-informed and free from malice.’ The Nazi mindset, on the other hand, he found problematic. ‘In this age, when distances have been obliterated, no nation can afford to imitate the fabled frog in the well,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes it is refreshing to see ourselves as others see us. If, therefore, the German critics happen to see this reply, I hope that they will not only revise their opinion about my writing but will also realise the value of outside criticism.’8

But there was one kind of outside criticism that Gandhi appeared to have not quite anticipated for himself. It came from the victims of Nazi violence, the Jews themselves. In the course of framing his first statement on the German treatment of Jews, the Mahatma had suggested that the Jews respond to the Nazis by adopting the path of ahimsa or non-violence.

Gandhi said the Jews ‘ought not to feel helpless’ in the face of the Nazi onslaught. ‘If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him, to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon,’ he wrote. ‘I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment.’ If the Jews offered such civil resistance, ‘they cannot be worse off than now’, he argued, and added that ‘suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can’.

Gandhi conceded that if they followed this method, ‘the calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews’, but ‘even the massacre … could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant’.

He went on to compare the state of the Jews in Germany to that of Indians in South Africa. There was ‘an exact parallel’ there, he believed, and pointed out that the Jews ‘could offer satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa’ as they were ‘a compact, homogeneous community in Germany’, ‘far more gifted than the Indians in South Africa’, and they had ‘organised world opinion behind them’. Their ‘truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanised man’ would enable them to ‘score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity’.9

When a number of Jews responded angrily to his suggestion, saying that they had been practising non-violence for 2000 years, Gandhi complicated his argument by casting blame on the community. ‘The Jews, so far as I know, have never practised non-violence as an article of faith or even a deliberate policy,’ he declared. ‘Indeed, it is a stigma against them that their ancestors crucified Jesus. Are they not supposed to believe in eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth? Have they no violence in their hearts for their oppressors? Do they not want the so-called democratic powers to punish Germany for her persecution and to deliver them from oppression? If they do, there is no non-violence in their hearts.’ The Jews, according to him, had not been ‘actively non-violent’ but had ‘called down upon the Germans the curses of mankind, and they wanted America and England to fight Germany on their behalf’.

To those who felt that non-violence would hardly work in Nazi Germany, Gandhi said it actually had the power ‘to melt the stoniest hearts’, and if the Jews demonstrated it, ‘Herr Hitler would bow before the courage which he has never yet experienced’.

‘I do not think that Hitler and Mussolini are after all so very indifferent to the appeal of world opinion,’ he declared.10

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, one of Gandhi’s ardent admirers, was terribly put out by these views, as were many others who thought Gandhi had offered his advice without having grasped the nature of the Nazi regime.

Stating that the situation of Jews in Germany was not at all comparable with that of Indians in South Africa, Buber said, ‘Jews are being persecuted, robbed, maltreated, tortured, murdered. And you, Mahatma Gandhi, say that their position … is an exact position of Indians in South Africa … Do you know or do you not know, Mahatma, what a concentration camp is like and what goes on there? Do you know of the torments in the concentration camp, of its methods of slow and quick slaughter …? Indians were despised and despicably treated in South Africa. But they were not deprived of rights, they were not outlawed, they were not hostages to a hoped-for change in the behaviour of foreign powers. And do you think perhaps that a Jew in Germany could pronounce in public one single sentence of a speech such as yours without being knocked down?’ Buber said he had spent five years in Germany ‘under the present regime’ and had ‘observed many instances of genuine satyagraha among the Jews’ which had ‘exerted apparently not the slightest influence on their opponents’.

Referring to Gandhi’s line that ‘I would challenge them (gentile Germans) to shoot me or cast me into the dungeon,’ a well-known rabbi from the US, Judah Magnes, wrote, ‘Many Jews—hundreds, thousands—have been shot. Hundreds, thousands have been cast into the dungeon. What more can satyagraha give them?’ The rabbi further asked, ‘How can Jews in Germany offer civil resistance? The slightest sign of resistance means killing or concentration camps or being done away with otherwise. It is usually in the dead of night that they are spirited away. No one, except their terrified families, is the wiser. It makes not even a ripple on the surface of German life. The streets are the same, business goes on as usual, the casual visitor sees nothing. Contrast this with a single hunger strike in an American or English prison, and the public commotion that this arouses. Contrast this with one of your fasts, or with your salt march to the sea, or a visit to the Viceroy, when the whole world is permitted to hang upon your words and be witness to your acts. Has not this been possible largely because, despite all the excesses of its imperialism, England is after all a democracy with a Parliament and a considerable measure of free speech? I wonder if even you would find the way to public opinion in totalitarian Germany, where life is snuffed out like a candle, and no one sees or knows that the light is out.’11

A Christian missionary who met Gandhi told the Mahatma that he didn’t know or understand Hitler and Mussolini. ‘They are incapable of any kind of moral response. They have no conscience and they have made themselves impervious to world opinion. Would it not be playing into the hands of these dictators if, for instance, the Czechs following your advice confronted them with non-violence?’12

Gandhi was not alone in misjudging the situation. Most of India’s national spokespersons across the political and ideological spectrum were making a grievous mistake one way or the other.

In 1921, Rabindranath Tagore had visited Germany. The reception he received was phenomenal, and there were big crowds everywhere to hear him speak, but a section of the anti-Semitic German language press was hostile, writing that ‘Tagore was a Jew, whose real name was “Rabbi Nathan”; that he had married a rich Jewess from Bombay by the name of Oppenheimer, daughter of a bamboo-dealer; and that his wealth came from this marriage’.13 This was all rubbish, and the only truth was that Tagore was known as ‘Rabi’ in his circles, and that is what the publication had possibly picked up and either misheard or twisted it to ‘Rabbi’. In 1926, during another visit, there was a second odd encounter: while Tagore was speaking at Berlin University, not too far away, inside a zoo in the same city, a bunch of Indians—human beings, not birds or animals—were on display as ‘exhibits’, and a group of students from Allahabad were protesting against the Germans for ‘parading a hundred Indians with wild beasts’.14

A stranger thing happened in Italy that same year. Mussolini, who was already in power, rolled out the red carpet for Tagore. According to details dictated by Tagore himself to his private secretary, during the course of their conversation in Rome, the poet said to the dictator, ‘I have seen your masterful personality. You know you are the most misrepresented person in the world. I also came with grave doubts and misgivings but I am glad to have met you, for it has cleared many misunderstandings.’

Mussolini readily agreed, saying, ‘I know I am most misrepresented and most abused. But what can I do? I must go on with my work.’

Tagore replied on a note of high optimism, ‘Perhaps a new Rome is being created. I see signs of a new creative activity. There is need of harsh discipline before one can attain true freedom. But such discipline is negative, it merely removes obstacles, it cannot of itself create. A great vision is necessary for a new synthesis. I believe I see signs of this masterful vision in Italy.’15

After the meeting, Tagore told a fascist publication, ‘His Excellency Mussolini seems modelled body and soul by the chisel of a Michelangelo, whose every action showed intelligence and force.’16

What Tagore got in return was an editorial in Mussolini’s own publication, edited by the dictator’s brother. The paper stated, ‘When the unemployed hangers-on of certain circles of culture decided to invite the celebrated Indian poet Tagore to tour our country, we were not enthusiastic for the idea. Italy, by good fortune for herself and the world, has plenty of literary schools and of art in general and has nothing to learn from the Indians. Anyway, Mr Tagore, poet of Flowers, Stars and Pounds Sterling, unbuttoned his tunic and spoke in broken English to various provincial gatherings overcome by the imbecile attraction of the exotic and the international … A poet who does not feel the tragedy of his own people is for her a pseudo-mystic. The dishonest Tartuffe whom the idiocy of others has promoted to the stature of greatness profited by Italy’s traditional and lordly hospitality … Italy laughs at Tagore and those who brought this unctuous and insupportable fellow in our midst.’17

Gandhi, too, had been initially taken in by Mussolini. Visiting Italy on his return from the 1931 Round Table Conference, the Mahatma praised the dictator for ‘his care for the poor, his opposition to super-urbanisation, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital and labour’ and his purported commitment to the welfare of his people.18 Many of the Italian ruler’s ‘reforms’, Gandhi admitted, ‘… attract me. He seems to have done much for the peasant class. I admit an iron hand is there. But as violence is the basis of Western society, Mussolini’s reforms deserve an impartial study … My own fundamental objection is that these reforms are compulsory. But it is the same in all democratic institutions. What strikes me is that behind Mussolini’s implacability is a desire to serve his people. Even behind his emphatic speeches there is a nucleus of sincerity and of passionate love for his people. It seems to me that the majority of the Italian people love the iron government of Mussolini’.19

Bose, who had failed to secure an appointment with Hitler during his 1933-34 Europe tour, had succeeded in meeting Mussolini, however. Not once, but twice. Unlike Hitler, Mussolini worked consciously to cultivate foreign leaders, and Bose developed a feeling that Mussolini spoke to him more on terms of equality than the Germans, demonstrated no racial contempt and treated him as an important Indian figure. Bose told his German contact, Lothar Frank, that Mussolini had asked him, ‘Do you really and firmly believe that India will be free soon?’

‘When Bose said “yes”, Frank wrote in his account of the conversation, ‘Mussolini asked him again, “Are you for reformist or revolutionary methods for achieving Indian independence?”’ Bose said in reply that he preferred revolutionary to reformist methods. Mussolini said, “Then indeed you have a chance.” Continuing the discussion, Mussolini asked him again, “Have you got any plan for such a revolution?” As Bose remained silent, Mussolini told him, “You must immediately prepare a plan for such a revolution and you must work continuously for its realization.’’’20

Fellow Bengali and former Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das was also impressed with Mussolini’s regime. ‘Some superficial and prejudiced observers of new Italy have spoken of “Fascist tyranny” and condemned the Fascist regime. To me it is clear that the Fascist government or a particular official might have made some mistakes on particular occasions; but fascism stands for liberty with responsibility and it is opposed to all forms of license. It gives precedence to duty and strength, as one finds in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.’21 Bose himself was increasingly convinced that ‘the next phase in world history will produce a synthesis between Communism and fascism’ and that ‘it will be India’s task to work out this synthesis’. He even coined an Indian term for such a ‘synthesis’—‘Samyavada’ or ‘the doctrine or synthesis of equality’.22

Jawaharlal Nehru, the other left-leaning radical in the Congress apart from Bose to have forced the organisation to take up the ‘Poorna Swaraj’ chant instead of mere autonomy, had made it clear from the beginning that he loathed fascism as well as Nazism. More than once, between 1933 and 1936, he refused to allow the Nazis to play host to him when he was in Germany, and turned down an invitation from Mussolini to meet him. But he was not without his own blind spot. In April 1936, Nehru said that it was in Stalin’s Russia that ‘we find the essential democracy present in far greater degree among the masses there than anywhere else’.

Of the votaries of Hindu nationalism, Balakrishna Shivram Moonje, the founder of the Nagpur-based group, Hindu Sabha, had met Mussolini in 1930 when he was in Europe for the First Round Table Conference.23 Moonje was a mentor of sorts to the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. The first RSS chief’s successor, Mahadeo Sadashiv Golwalkar, wrote soon after Hitler’s Anschluss in Austria and his takeover of Sudetenland that these moves represented the fulfilment of Germany’s ‘natural and logical aspiration’. Germany, he wrote, ‘strove and has to a great extent achieved what she strove for—to once again bring under one sway the whole of the territory hereditarily possessed by the Germans but which as a result of political disputes had been portioned off as different countries under different states’. For example, Golwalkar stated, ‘Austria … was merely a province on par with Prussia, Bavaria and other principalities which made the Germanic Empire. Logically Austria should not be an independent kingdom but be one with the rest of Germany. So also with those portions inhabited by Germans which had been included after the War in the new State of Czechoslovakia.’24 He further noted that ‘Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for use in Hindusthan to learn and profit by. Then the state language is German, and the foreign races living in the country as minorities, though they have freedom to use their respective languages among themselves, must deal in the nation’s language in their public life. The factor of religion, too, is not to be ignored.’25

Hedgewar’s other, and far more important intellectual guru, was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Indian revolutionary who had spent a decade of imprisonment in the British penal settlement on the Andamans. Savarkar, who came up with an elaborate theory of Hindutva in the early 1920s, also approved of the annexation of Austria and Sudetenland.

‘Germany was perfectly justified in uniting the Austrian and Sudeten Germans under the German flag,’ he pointed out. ‘Democracy itself demands that the will of the people must prevail in choosing their own government. Germany demanded plebiscite; the Germans under the Czechs wanted to join their kith and kin in Germany. It was the Czechs who were acting against the principle of democracy in holding the Germans under a foreign sway against their will. England’s pretension that they sided (with) the Czechs because democracy was in danger was thus a mere eyewash, and a stunt. Had the cry raised by England of “Democracy in Danger” been sincere, she should have first withdrawn her army of occupation from India and left Indians free to organise themselves into a free and democratic state … The fact is that when Germany was weak they partitioned it piecemeal. Now that Germany is strong why should she not strike to unite all Germans?’26

This ‘England’ factor would constantly and invariably be on the minds of India’s political representatives whenever they set about determining their own policies. The Indians were not a free people. So, despite the Bose-led Congress in 1938 protesting against Germany’s act of gobbling up Austria and Czechoslovakia, there was the question of the British Raj to be dealt with when making one’s choices. That is why, despite the Congress’s conviction as an outfit that it did not want to have anything to do with Nazism and fascism, it did not automatically extend its support to Britain as war clouds loomed on the horizon in 1938 and darkened in the early months of 1939.

India was anyway pulled into the war by the British without any of its political leaders being consulted. The then Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, simply made an announcement that India had joined the war. At the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, Gandhi was ‘horrified’ at the prospect of destruction of Westminster Abbey and London’s Houses of Parliament. He had, earlier that year, written a letter to Hitler asking him to renounce the path of violence and prevent war; he wrote two more letters to the German dictator in May and June 1940 and told Linlithgow that ‘Hitler is not a bad man’, and that Germany’s future generations would ‘honour Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, as a matchless organizer and much more’. In a Christmas letter to Hitler in 1941, Gandhi extolled the Führer’s ‘bravery and devotion to your fatherland … Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents’, though he added in the same letter that there ‘was no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity’.27 As ‘a life-long and wholly disinterested friend of the British people’, Gandhi in July 1940 even made an appeal ‘to every Briton’ to fight Nazism with non-violence. ‘I want you to fight Nazism without arms, or, if I am to retain the military terminology, with non-violent arms,’ he said. ‘You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but not your souls, nor your minds.’ If the Nazis chose to occupy British homes, Gandhi added, ‘you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them. This process or method I have called non-violent non-cooperation’.28

The leader of India’s Depressed Classes, B.R. Ambedkar, a stout opponent of Gandhi, slammed this ‘pacifist’ approach and said ‘he (Gandhi) fortunately has no experience as to how the Nazis will deal with his mass civil disobedience. No doubt the Nazis will give Mr Gandhi a very short shrift and prove that his plan of direct action can be put out of action at the very start’.29 Ambedkar said he was determined to support the British war effort (he would later, in 1942, join the Viceroy’s expanded Executive Council).30 ‘There are parts of the Nazi Order which must compel every Indian to give anxious thought to its dangers … The most important part is the one which enunciates the creed of racial gradation.’ Here, the ‘Brown Races—and Indians are included in this category,’ had ‘the last place’ as ‘serfs of the German and the White Races’, and Hitler’s denunciations in Mein Kampf were clear enough. ‘The Nazi ideology is a direct menace to the liberty and freedom of Indians. Given this fact, there is the strongest reason why Indians should come forward to fight Nazism,’ Ambedkar pointed out.31

Gandhi, of course, clarified, lest freedom-seeking Indians should misunderstand him, that when he had said he was ‘horrified’ at the prospect of London’s Parliament being destroyed, he was speaking only for himself and not the Congress; and Nehru said that in a battle between ‘democracy and freedom on the one side and fascism and aggression on the other’, the choice was evident, making it clear which way he was leaning. But the British were still stubbornly holding on to India, weren’t they? They were still not promising to grant her complete independence, so the Congress could not make up its collective mind, and it dilly-dallied for months on the stand it should take on the global conflict even as it passed a resolution asking Britain to make its ‘war aims’ transparent.

As confusion over what the next course of action must be reigned within the Congress, the left-winger Bose and the right-winger Savarkar saw things slightly differently. For both, the war presented an obvious opportunity.

Savarkar had, in 1937, taken over as the president of the Hindu Mahasabha. He saw a communal conflagration coming on the subcontinent, with the Hindu community ranged against the Muslims who were increasingly mobilising under the leadership of the Muslim League’s Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah’s party had failed in its efforts to form an alliance with the Congress after the 1937 provincial elections. In order to make the point that the Congress alone did not represent Indians and the Congress voice was not the only one worthy of being recognised, Jinnah had sent two of his representatives to Europe while the Czechoslovakia crisis was brewing, to ‘establish the (League’s) credentials’ with the ‘German and Italian governments’.32 Jinnah had also told Viceroy Lord Linlithgow at the start of war that the only way out of the situation for India was ‘partition’; and he would soon, in March 1940, pass the ‘Pakistan resolution’ at the Lahore session of the League.33 Savarkar thought that the moment was just right to ‘militarise’ Hindus for the approaching conflict and called upon them to join the British-controlled Indian Army in large numbers. If they were sent out on war duty, it would be so much for the better, he believed, for they would acquire some much-needed experience when the time came to defend the country once it was free.

Bose, who had so often complained about the Nazis and their conduct, firmly believed, on the other hand, that Britain’s enemy could be India’s political, diplomatic, military and intelligence ally. Being driven into a corner by Gandhi—who had openly orchestrated a coup within the Congress and ensured that Bose did not become its president for a second consecutive time—clearly helped the Bengal leader to make his decision.

And so it was that a year-and-a-half before Gandhi launched his Quit India movement in August 1942, despite considerable unease in the Congress, including in the mind of Nehru, who did not want any such agitation at such a delicate moment for Britain, when the Japanese were not too far away from India’s borders, that Bose slipped out of his Elgin Road residence in Calcutta and surfaced, one fine day, in Berlin.

The intricacies of politics and the complexity of the Indian and international situations had cast their webs in strange ways. Savarkar, defender of Nazi actions in Austria and Czechoslovakia, had joined the British war effort. Gandhi, whose heart was with Britain in such a conflagration, was veering towards beginning a do-or-die stir to try and evict the Raj from Indian soil. Nehru, who wanted no role to play in any such stir, was being pulled in the direction Gandhi was dictating. And Bose, who had slammed both the Anschluss and the Sudetenland grab, was seeking to be friends with the Nazis.

9

HITLER AND BOSE

Subhas Bose had tried reaching out to the Russians when he was contemplating making an escape and fighting the Raj with the assistance of anti-British forces outside of India. With Stalin signing an improbable no-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, he hoped that the Soviet regime might not dither in this respect. But he got practically no response, resulting in his staking just about everything to first reach Kabul in Afghanistan and then making the right connections there to be able to reach either Moscow or Berlin or Rome. Bose’s ‘Great Escape’ from under the nose of the British (he was under house arrest) in January 1941 and his journey from Calcutta to Kabul is the stuff of legend.

Bose was taking a gigantic risk but he was a man possessed with the idea of making a mighty and, as he envisioned it, decisive assault on British rule in an ambitious bid to free his homeland.

In this single-minded pursuit of the goal of Indian independence, he made elaborate preparations for travelling incognito. Just below his left ear, Bose had a mole. Blackish-grey in colour, it was mentioned on his passport as his identification mark. It was surgically removed before he left his Elgin Road home.1 Besides, Bose grew a longish beard and disguised himself as a Pathan from the Northwest Frontier, with a fez cap, a leather jacket over a salwar kameez and Peshawari chappals. As if to complete the picture, he carried with him a Kabuli blanket too.2

Kabul was a hub of spying and diplomatic activity, where missions of various political and military powers, often at odds with each other, carried out intense manouevres, big and small, covert and overt. Here again, the Soviets were unresponsive, so Bose got in touch with the German legation and Italian diplomats instead. They interceded on his behalf and got Moscow to at least grant him a transit visa, which eventually helped him enter Europe.

How did the Nazis agree to have Bose by their side in Berlin? Firstly, the Italians were quite enthusiastic about the propaganda possibilities against the Allied forces offered by such a senior and popular Indian nationalist—they even gave him the assumed name of an Italian official, Orlando Mazzotta, as he boarded a plane from Moscow to Berlin. Secondly, the Germans themselves felt that now that they were engaged in a conflict with Britain despite Hitler not having wished for it, any embarrassment for their rival in the middle of hostilities was welcome. They were not averse to partaking from the sizeable propaganda pie and of enhancing the material already on hand which they had been putting out diligently since the outbreak of war.

Remarkably enough for a paper which had not too long ago termed Indians as ‘mongrels’ and ‘sub-human’, the Nazi mouthpiece Volkischer Beobachter appeared to have suddenly raised some fundamental questions about the nature of the British regime in India. One of its headlines from November 1939 shouted out loud, ‘Britain’s Bloody Responsibility in India’, with the accompanying strap screaming even more loudly, ‘Murderers, Bankrupt People and Exploiters Established a World Empire!’ This was followed by a series of articles on the ‘Seven Moral Sins of Warren Hastings’ and other pieces which had headlines that could make the UK’s Daily Mail run by Nazi sympathiser Lord Rothermere feel a sense of serious tabloid competition, such as ‘Enslaved India’ and ‘350 Million People Defend Themselves Against British Slavery’.3

Hitler himself had changed his tune. For the moment, at least. He’d had absolutely no desire to wage war with Britain. He wanted the conflict he had planned against Poland to be localised, not a general one involving Britain and France. When Britain finally ended its policy of appeasement and gave the Poles a guarantee of assistance against German aggression, Hitler even offered to guarantee the British Empire’s possessions—the chief one of which, ‘the jewel in the crown’, was India—if he were allowed to have his way in the east. He crushed Poland swiftly but, as the ‘phoney war’, dismissively called the ‘Sitzkrieg’ or the ‘Bore War’, materialised, with Britain and France declaring war on Germany, he finally found fault with the British Empire.

On a sour note, Hitler said in a speech addressed to his party cadre in Munich in February 1940 that Germany had been the victim of a gigantic world swindle after the First World War, but it was not alone. ‘Others were taken in too. India was deceived, for the Indians had been promised independence in the event of a British victory,’ he said and proceeded to ask Britain why it wasn’t paying attention to its burgeoning troubles in India. ‘Mr Chamberlain, at the moment when the whole of India is protesting against him and the Arabs are fighting against him, pretends to be fighting against German domination of the world by force,’ he noted. ‘God did not make the world for the British,’ he declared, and added, ‘I believe there is a God who created nations and gave them all equal rights.’4 A world not made for the British? Equal rights for nations? These were new terms and a direct repudiation of what he had maintained all along: the genius of the Empire and the ‘white man’s right to rule’.

Significant sections of the Indian nationalist press responded with sarcasm. The Amrita Bazar Patrika of Calcutta wrote, ‘We suppose, had India been under Hitler, the first thing he would have done would have been to give India her independence! Has he not given Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland their freedom?’5 The National Herald, a pro-Congress paper from the northern provinces, commented that since, ‘… according to Hitler and the Nazis, Indians occupy a place in the ladder of creation somewhere between ape and man, is it these anthropological experts that are to speak for this country before the world?’6

Bose was wondering, however, if the string of easy successes the Nazis had achieved in the initial phases of the war could be put to use for a worthy purpose. Underlining Germany’s military strength, he wrote in March 1940, ‘It seems that in modern warfare, speed and mobility are exceedingly important factors … besides detailed planning and adequate preparation, energy and vigour are needed to fulfil a particular programme according to a timetable. All these qualities the Nazis certainly possess. Owing to their speed and mobility, they have invariably caught the enemy napping and overpowered him without much difficulty … Germany may be a fascist or an imperialist, ruthless or cruel, but one cannot help admiring these qualities of hers … Could not these qualities be utilised for promoting a nobler cause?’7 Bose also had a certain kind of background to refer to. During the First World War, Indian revolutionaries had indeed sought Germany’s assistance to overthrow the Raj.

Fortunately for Bose, the close contacts assigned to him on German soil were officials from a sub-section of the German Foreign Office who were not Nazis; one of his chief contacts, Adam von Trott, would even be executed later for a bomb plot on Hitler’s life in July 1944. War spawns all kinds of departments and sub-departments within governments for the myriad tasks that might suddenly appear to arise, and these departments can sometimes work at cross-purposes. That was certainly the case within the German government during the Second World War. The German Foreign Office, in any case, was somewhat more moderate in its dealings with foreign populations than the Nazi political bosses, and sections within the Office got an opportunity to act with greater autonomy as more and more sub-groups dedicated to specific subjects mushroomed, making ministerial oversight not so simple. By the time Bose arrived in Berlin in the first week of April 1941, there had sprung up within the Foreign Office an Information Department, headed by Trott. Soon, a ‘Working Group for India’ was formed within the Information Department, and it transformed quickly into a ‘Special Department for India’.8 Directly under the control of the anti-Nazi Trott, who, during his student days as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford, had been much impressed with Gandhi, this department had, among its senior members, Alexander Werth and F.J. Furtwangler. ‘There were only very few National Socialists among them,’ and though they did not have the status of civil servants (Trott would get such a status later with his promotion as third secretary), the group’s members were ‘practically’ their ‘own masters’ in their ‘relatively vast working sphere’.9

Werth was, like Trott, a part of the Foreign Office desk that dealt with Britain and the British Empire, including India, and like Trott, he disliked the Nazis; Furtwangler was a trade union leader and an India specialist. Without doubt, these three officials made Bose’s stay on German soil more bearable than it would have been if he had been surrounded by bona fide Nazis. Had it not been for this small bit of fortune, it is doubtful if Bose would have stayed on in Germany for as long as he did.

Within a week of establishing a temporary base at Hotel Excelsior in Berlin, Bose sent a memorandum to the Nazi government. He wanted to set up a ‘Government of Free India’ in the German capital; its activities were to be funded by a German loan which India would repay once she was free. Keen to launch a military operation against the Raj, he wished to put together an army of 100,000 (a figure he later reduced to 50,000) by recruiting Indian soldiers enlisted by the British who had now been captured by the Axis Powers as prisoners of war in North Africa. His plan involved work to be carried out ‘in Europe, in Afghanistan, in the tribal area (independent zone) between Afghanistan and India, and last but not least, in India itself’ and propaganda over the radio ‘calling on the Indian people to rise up for their freedom and launch a revolt against the British authorities’.10

Bose’s first meeting was in April itself, with Dr Ernst Woermann of the Foreign Office’s Far Eastern desk. Woermann was totally non-committal in his response to the Indian’s proposals. At the end of the month, Bose met Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop’s answers to most proposals—a Free India government, the raising of an army of Indian prisoners of war or aggressive propaganda—were common: ‘too early’, ‘premature’ and ‘not so soon’.11 One thing Ribbentrop was categorical about: he flatly refused any declaration in favour of a free India. He did agree to arrange for funds for anti-British propaganda, nonetheless. Hitler’s foreign minister was thinking about what the Germans wanted and what Bose could give them—some information warfare against the British amid armed hostilities—and not what the Indian was seeking.

Ribbentrop, who was known for his subservience to Hitler, also parroted some of the Führer’s new lines about how ‘England was finished’ and asked Bose what the Indians thought of Germany. Bose bluntly told the minister that feelings against the Nazis were strong in India as they were seen to be trying to dominate other races, and he brought up the issue of the anti-India passages in Mein Kampf.12 Ribbentrop offered the usual Foreign Office explanation: Germany merely wanted ‘racial purity’ and not its own rule over other races. As for Hitler, no, Ribbentrop would not advise a meeting between Bose and Hitler anytime soon; once again, the point he made was that it was ‘too soon to undertake such decisive steps’.13

The setting up of the propaganda unit in Berlin, to be called the Free India Centre, was slow, and disappointed with the general German hesitancy, Bose thought of going to Rome in order to try and convince Mussolini, who had met him earlier. A meeting with Mussolini did not materialise during this visit, but Bose met his son-in-law, Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, who wrote after their conversation that ‘in Berlin his (Bose’s) proposals have been received with a great deal of reserve’, and ‘nor must we be compromised’.14 Italy would not promise anything yet.

While in Rome, Bose received a significantly disappointing piece of news: the Nazis had launched Operation Barbarossa, their full-scale invasion of Russia. He had been banking on the pact between Germany and Russia; in his own words, ‘the Soviet Union had been popular in India’. On his return to Berlin, he told Woermann that ‘in India they believed that the Soviet Union was an anti-imperialist power and thus the natural ally of India against England’, and in the Germany-Russia war, ‘the Indian people were sure that Germany was the aggressor and thus also an imperialist power dangerous to India’.15 At this point, Woermann assured him, misleadingly, that the Germans had every ‘intention of’ issuing ‘a proclamation in favour of a free India’ at ‘a favourable moment’,16 and Bose chose to remain in Berlin.

In July 1941, a meeting with Trott’s boss, Secretary of State Wilhelm Keppler, was arranged, and Bose found himself at the receiving end of a monologue about the greatness of Hitler. He could hardly get a word in. The positive fallout of the meeting was that work on the Free India Centre finally gained momentum as a result of Keppler’s nod, and the Azad Hind Radio, at the end of the year, began broadcasts to India in a number of languages.

Bose also tried to gather as many trustworthy associates around him as possible. The first person he called was Emilie Schenkl, whom he had met during his stay in Europe between 1933 and 1936. Their friendship had developed further with regular correspondence from 1937. As soon as he had reached Berlin in April 1941, he asked German officials to get in touch with Emilie and ask her to come over from Vienna to Berlin. She did, and stayed with Bose throughout his stay in Germany. They married in 1942; she became pregnant; and their daughter, Anita, was born in November that year in Vienna.17 Another prominent aide who joined Bose was A.C.N. Nambiar, but not without displaying a tremendous amount of reluctance. Bose made several requests to Nambiar, who had moved to France after his experiences in prison in Hitler’s Germany, to come to Berlin. Nambiar was in no mood to go back, and said so. Finally, Bose went to France to attempt to convince him, and he still said no. It was only after Alexander Werth spoke to Nambiar on behalf of the German Foreign Office during this visit with Bose, and after a reassuring sort of interaction with the German authorities, whom he was understandably deeply sceptical about, that he ultimately agreed.18 Bose was proven right about going to such lengths to get him to Berlin; later, when Netaji left for Japan, it was Nambiar who led the Indian contingent, or whatever was left of it, in Germany. Some other bright Indians too came in; among them N.G. Swamy, who had first come to Bose’s notice in 1934 when he had protested from Vienna about the Nazis’ shabby treatment of Indians, N.G. Ganpuley, Habibur Rehman and Girija Mookerjee.

But Bose was still quite ill at ease. That was because he was convinced that he was being spied upon and his phone conversations were being tapped by the Nazi authorities.19 There were other humiliations too. On their visit to Rome, Trott helped Bose buy some clothes, which the Indian badly needed, and also bought furniture for a place that the Nazis wished to move Bose to, in another part of the German capital. When they were back in Berlin, Keppler raised a whole lot of questions about the expenditure incurred, and there was a mighty row between him and Trott which undoubtedly reached Bose’s ears.20 (Later, according to Werth, Bose sent half a million yen from Japan to Germany as repayment of loans advanced to Indians by the Nazis; the money was from subscriptions he had collected from Indians in southeast Asia.)21

Not just that, the Political Department of the German Foreign Office, which was staffed with Nazis and not the likes of Trott, Werth and Furtwangler, even seriously considered somehow getting Bose out of Germany. For some time, they looked at the possibility of asking him to move to Switzerland so that he could operate the Free India Centre from there, thus giving the Germans a shield, both from the British and against them. The German Embassy in Rome came up with the suggestion that Bose be shifted out to ‘a neutral country since he was such a difficult personality, unwilling to start anti-British propaganda himself unless an Axis Declaration concerning Free India appeared beforehand’.22 This was a candid admission that Bose was refusing to simply do the Nazis’ bidding without his own country getting German support for its liberation.

Bose was soon moved from the hotel to a villa in the Charlottenburg locality of Berlin, and the Free India Centre functioned from November 1941 in a building in Liechtenstein Allie of the diplomatic enclave Tiergarten. In December, the Indian Legion, the earliest incarnation of Bose’s Indian National Army, began to take shape with prisoners of war getting recruited. Bose was firm that the Legion, albeit a part of the German forces, should not be used on the eastern front but solely against the British, though it was understood that the state of the war would ultimately determine things. The Legion’s members, who were sent for training to East Prussia, had to take their oath in the name of both Bose and Hitler. The oath went like this: ‘I swear by God this holy oath, that I will obey the leader of the German State and People, Adolf Hitler, as commander of the German Armed Forces, in the fight for the freedom of India, in which fight the leader is Subhas Chandra Bose, and that as a brave soldier, I am willing to lay down my life for this oath.’23 The strength of the Legion, at its highest, was 7,000 as long as Bose was in Germany.

The infrastructure, both material and in terms of manpower, was thus seemingly and ostensibly being put in place. But there was nothing political so far. No word in support of Indian independence, and no concrete promise from anyone at the top of the Nazi hierarchy.

Bose had wished to meet Ribbentrop a second time precisely to secure such an assurance and to ask about a meeting with Hitler, since the dictator was going to be the final arbiter from the German side in such important matters. He made several requests for an appointment, but Ribbentrop cited urgent work and declined over and over again. The appointment was put off for so long that Bose made up his mind not to turn up even if he were asked to. In November 1941, when a meeting was sanctioned at last, Bose nevertheless agreed to go, keeping his personal pride in check.

Oddly enough, he was summoned to Ribbentrop’s office at the hour of midnight. Bose was asleep already and in his kurta and pyjamas; he was woken up and asked to go to Wilhelmstrasse. Not surprisingly, he went in a foul mood and asked Ribbentrop upfront to get the anti-India parts removed from the text of Mein Kampf. Trott was present as Bose’s contact, and he was totally embarrassed that the meeting ended almost immediately after it had started, with the Nazi foreign minister completely at a loss as to what to say. ‘The National Socialists, the foolish Ribbentrop in particular,’ wrote the other Bose interlocutor, J.F. Furtwangler, ‘had not a clue where to begin with this strange oriental—whether he should be shown to the people as an allied oriental prince in order to strengthen morale, or whether he should be kept on ice as the Gauleiter for a conquered India.’24

Furtwangler further wrote that ‘the atmosphere of the National Socialist psychopathic tyranny with its intrigues and prattling chaos was’ for Bose ‘a permanent strain on his nerves’.25 The strain got worse as reports of Japanese aggression and advances began to reach Bose. After their attack on Pearl Harbour, the Japanese forces, at the beginning of 1942, having first got hold of Malaya, laid siege to Singapore and captured it in mid-February. It was at this point that Bose emerged from his ‘Orlando Mazzotta’ avatar and declared over the radio that he was in Germany. He was declaring war on England, he said.

Yet his progress, definitely, was stuck. Things seemed to have settled into some sort of a disconcerting pattern in Nazi Germany. Bose would ask for a German and Axis declaration in favour of Indian independence, and the Nazi response would be cold and indifferent. He would demand a meeting with Hitler, and it would not be granted. Increasingly, the east beckoned, as Japan took a huge number of Indian soldiers prisoner, people who could possibly be mobilised for a fight against the Raj. But without German commitment Bose could do very little. Even if he wanted to move out, he needed to meet Hitler first. Besides, of the big Axis powers, if Hitler gave his word somehow, it would help to put pressure on Britain. In any case, Bose could not turn to the Russians for help any longer: Stalin had joined hands with Bose’s enemy, Britain, and America too had entered the conflict on the Allied side. In India, the Communist Party of India too had made a spectacular somersault: what it had described as an ‘Imperialist War’ at the time of the Hitler–Stalin pact had, post-Barbarossa, become for it the ‘People’s War’, and India’s communist leaders and publications were sharply denouncing the heavily left-leaning Subhas Bose as a ‘Quisling’ and a ‘tool of the Fascists’.26

With the failure of the Cripps Mission to India in April 1942 and with Mahatma Gandhi gradually veering towards launching the Quit India agitation, Bose grew exasperated enough to try and seek a meeting with Mussolini again if the one with Hitler wasn’t going to happen despite all his efforts. The overall sentiment was also that the Italians were racially a little less hostile and at least, happened to listen to him patiently from time to time. Mussolini agreed to not only meet this time around but ‘allowed himself to be persuaded by the arguments produced by Bose to obtain a tripartite (Germany–Italy–Japan) declaration in favour of Indian independence’. Mussolini’s son-in-law Ciano recorded that the Duce ‘has telegraphed the Germans proposing … proceeding at once with the declaration. I feel that Hitler will not agree to it very willingly’.27

Only the previous month, Hitler had consigned to the bin a declaration on Indian freedom. It had been prepared by the Japanese, so they too were ready to make the declaration. It was revised by the German Foreign Office and presented to Hitler by Ribbentrop. But Hitler had said that there was ‘no point in adhering to such a declaration just when the Japanese want it’, and a few days later, he had told Mussolini the same at their meeting in Salzburg when the Italian ruler had argued in favour of the declaration.28 Now Mussolini had, despite the discussion with the German Führer in Salzburg, allowed himself to be convinced by Bose. Would Hitler make way and concede?

As it turned out, Hitler’s pride was wounded by the fact that Mussolini had met Bose before him. To Bose’s astonishment, the moment he landed in Berlin from Rome, he was told that the Führer was ready to meet him.

There has been considerable disagreement among chroniclers on where the meeting took place. According to some sources, it was at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and according to others, at Hitler’s war-time headquarters in East Prussia. Whether it happened on 27 or 29 May 1942, too, is open to question as different accounts mention two different dates. Evidence of the meeting having taken place, however, is incontrovertible: Hitler’s Foreign Office interpreter, Paul Otto Schmidt, has left behind a detailed account,29 and there is a genuine photo of Hitler and Bose shaking hands and exchanging smiles; Hitler in his grey military coat and Bose in a suit he had taken to wearing in Germany.

According to the account by Hitler’s interpreter, Bose, at the outset, ‘greeted the Führer as an old revolutionary and thanked him for the honour bestowed upon him by this reception’. He said ‘the day would forever remain as a historical date in his life’ and further thanked Hitler ‘for the hospitality and the kindness shown to him by the German Government’ and ‘for the help … in the formation of an Indian Legion’.

‘The help of the “Tripartite Powers”,’ said Bose, ‘was necessary for India, even though the actual war of independence had to be fought out by India herself. While India must do her duty in this war, she also needed the sympathetic support of the external world’. In this context, he went on, ‘the time had now come for taking up the question of military collaboration with the Japanese armed forces’. But India ‘did not want to be left to the resources of Japan alone’, so it ‘attached a lot of importance to establishing the closest relationship with Germany and Italy and (wanted to) be assured of the sympathy and help of these countries’.

Bose told Hitler he was keen to undertake a ‘journey to East Asia’. He was ‘motivated’, he said, ‘by the desire to find a point as close to India as possible, from where the Indian revolution could be directed’. Schmidt wrote that Bose then ‘came up with the request that the Führer should give him (Bose) some advice as an old and experienced revolutionary’, because even though the situation in India ‘was very different from that in Europe, there must be certain basic principles on the basis of which all revolutions had to be carried out’.

Hitler began to hold forth straightaway on the military situation of the moment and delivered one of the lengthy monologues he was becoming increasingly notorious for. In the midst of it, he explained why he was not willing to issue any declaration in favour of Indian freedom.

‘Germany and India had the same merciless opponents,’ he told Bose. There was England, of course, but ‘the Bolsheviks and the Americans were also common enemies’. Moreover, ‘England, America and Russia were not playing a clean game with one another. America wanted to take over the legacy of England, and Russia again hoped to be the successor of both.’ He felt that ‘for Germany and India it was immaterial’ whether it was America or Russia that succeeded in these games, but he emphasised that ‘in India one should not shut one’s eyes to the Russian danger, and certain friendly views of Pandit Nehru regarding the Russians appeared extremely dangerous to him (the Führer)’.

One advantage for India, he suggested, was that it ‘would clearly feel the effect of Germany’s victory in Europe’. In fact, ‘without the successes of Germany during the last two and a half years, it could hardly have been possible for Japan to make such progress in East Asia, let alone the question of entering the war. India and Germany were therefore fighting the same battle against the same enemies, absolutely irrespective of where they met them’. Hitler’s opinion was that ‘India now had the one and only opportunity to shake off the English yoke without falling into the hands of the Russians, because Russia would now be completely smashed by Germany’.

Contrary to what Hitler was claiming, the Russian winter and the counter-offensive by Stalin’s forces had already resulted in debilitating reverses for Operation Barbarossa. That apart, what did Hitler have to say about the demand for German support for a ‘free India’ declaration? Despite all the talk about how India was benefitting from Germany’s military gains, Hitler said he did not want to make promises he couldn’t keep. His exact words, according to Schmidt, were that ‘he had never promised anything which was beyond the range of his own effectiveness’. He cited the example of Egypt, where his general Erwin Rommel had just launched an assault. ‘Should Rommel achieve only limited success, a comprehensive statement now about the fate of Egypt would only cause damage,’ he said. ‘If, however, Rommel succeeded in defeating the opponent … he (the Führer) would then at once appeal to the Egyptians to throw off the British yoke.’ With regard to his ‘own home, Austria’, he added, ‘He had therefore issued a proclamation to the Austrians only on the 12th of March 1938, i.e. one day before the marching in. A politician, who wanted to be taken seriously, could not act otherwise.’ The same ‘held good for Arabia’, he pointed out. ‘He would not have hesitated to issue a proclamation to the Arabs. But now, with Germany still one thousand kilometres away from Arabia, such a proclamation would be irresponsible.’

‘India,’ at any rate, he said, ‘was endlessly far from Germany. The only possibilities of communication with India were by land or air. Land communication would be via the Persian Gulf if the southern route was chosen; in the north, however, it would be via Afghanistan. In any case, the path would be only over the corpse of Russia.’

At this point, he returned to the subject of Japan, clearly pointing in that direction as far as the resolution of the Indian question was concerned. Hitler said he considered Japan’s astonishingly rapid advance to be the historical event of the world of the last half year, by means of which her armies had practically advanced to the borders of India. He didn’t know Japan’s aim, he admitted, and did not know whether the Japanese considered it more important to relieve their flanks from being threatened by Chiang-Kai-Shek or to seek a rapprochement with him, or whether they first wanted to turn to Australia or India. But if British power were to be defeated in East Asia, it ‘would possibly lead to the collapse of the British Empire. Such a collapse would naturally mean a great relief for Germany and would spare her a lot of blood. Thereafter, Germany would follow the sequence of events in East Asia with keen interest, and it was her wish to help as far as possible from her side. This she would do by hitting the British wherever she found them.’ In strategic terms, he believed ‘the submarine battles … would prove to be of indirect help also for the war in East Asia, just like the air attacks on British industrial centres and the war in North Africa. Each defeated English division there would liberate Indian forces, and the Indian forces which were held captive in them could later be put into action for the war of liberation of the Indians.’

‘Germany could not do anything more at the moment,’ he told Bose, drawing the line. ‘If, however, Germany could gain access to the borders of India like Japan, which would probably take another one or two years, then he would have requested Bose to stay with him, march into India with the German troops and subsequently kindle the revolution against the British.’

Just in case Bose still hadn’t got the whole point despite the Führer having made it more than once, he added ‘under the circumstances prevailing at the moment he could only advise Bose to bank on the Japanese’. Bose ‘should negotiate with the Japanese not only for influencing events in his motherland but also for restraining the Japanese themselves from committing psychological mistakes by appropriate advice’.

He also made it clear that the Indians could hardly hope to win freedom by way of staging a purely internal rebellion. He elaborated:

As an old revolutionary he could only give Bose the advice to quickly exploit the chance of an internal revolution in India with the enemy pressure from outside … Neither the anti-fascist and anti-national socialist trends of thought of Nehru nor the passive resistance of Gandhi would pay off in the long run. British power could be smashed only if the Indian nation rebelled simultaneously with an external attack. Such an upheaval could be best organised from as close a position to the country concerned as possible. Hence it would be best for Bose to take up his position at such a point which would be nearest to India and from where the strongest military pressure could be exerted on the Britishers. He did not know whether the Japanese actually wanted to exert this pressure. They had not mentioned anything positive to Germany.

In other respects he did not believe that a revolt alone, without external help, could bring the Indians freedom. As an old revolutionary he knew that with the progress in the field of modern arms, even a relatively small number of troops, properly organised and backed by the decision to make full use of their weapons, could keep a big country in check. Only with the help of external military pressure would it be possible for the internal revolutionary forces to hinder reinforcements and transportation of troops by disrupting communication lines and thus contribute to the military collapse.30

Still, the journey that Bose wished to undertake must not be by air, ‘which could compel him to a forced landing in British territory’, Hitler warned. Bose was ‘too important a personality to let his life be endangered by such an experiment. One had to chalk out a safer path for him. A Japanese submarine had at that time arrived in Europe and could take Bose along in case it was returning soon’. Otherwise, Hitler himself ‘would place a German submarine at Bose’s disposal, which would take him to Bangkok’. With the help of a map Hitler ‘then explained to Bose the probable route of the journey round the Cape of Good Hope and put the duration of the journey at approximately six weeks’. The communication routes ‘from England and America to India and Russia’, he noted, ‘could be cut off by the laying of submarine barricades between Natal and West Africa as also in the vicinity of Madagascar and India’.

The conversation didn’t end there. Bose had earlier, in a moment of lucid exposition, stumped Ribbentrop. His integrity made him speak his mind on this occasion as well, even as the Führer was lecturing as if he were speaking to a novice, and he brought up the subject of the anti-India remarks in Mein Kampf, telling Hitler that he should clarify Germany’s attitude towards India, albeit ‘at a suitable opportunity’. Hitler tried to explain away the scornful remarks by highlighting the context. He had, he said, ‘previously taken a stand solely against certain tendencies according to which subject nations were supposed to build up a united front against the oppressors’. In view of ‘the weakness of these nations, he considered this to be completely wrong, especially because the same circles which stood for such a policy in Germany also recommended a sort of passive resistance for the Reich of the Indian pattern, which in any case was a completely wrong doctrine’.

Bose persisted and ‘requested afresh for the moral and diplomatic support of Germany for India, so that she need not have to depend on Japan alone’. In reply, Hitler first ‘defined India’s tasks’. These were, according to him, ‘elimination of British influence, avoidance of Russian influence, efforts to come to some sort of agreement with Japan about India’s eastern border, and finally internal organisation and reconstruction of India with the purpose of achieving Indian unity’. This last bit was not so easy, he thought. ‘Indian unity,’ he asserted, ‘would be a time-consuming task, which according to the analogy of restoration of German unity would probably take one hundred to two hundred years.’

On the question of German support for India, Hitler pretended that he believed Bose was speaking about ‘after the war’ and remarked that ‘it would hereafter consist of only economic support’. He added that ‘Bose should not forget that the power of a country could only be exercised within the range of its sword’.

‘At the time of parting,’ the interpreter wrote, ‘the Führer extended his best wishes to Bose for the success of his journey and plans.’

Bose realised that the only outcome of the meeting was a submarine for him to go to the east. Hitler had kept him waiting for more than a year (thirteen months to be precise), during which he did not give him time for a one-on-one meeting. During that period, Bose found the rest of the Nazi leadership too wholly unhelpful, except in pushing propaganda that would ultimately be of benefit to them in the war. When the meeting with Hitler finally happened and they spoke for about an hour, the German dictator, as always, took up most of the time. Of the seven pages of the conversation recorded by his interpreter, Bose’s talk covers barely one, while Hitler’s ramblings take up the other six. In that long monologue, Hitler did not offer to back a declaration for an independent India though two of his allies, Italy and Japan, had agreed to do so and Mussolini himself had broached the subject with him in Salzburg. Bose had repeatedly been telling the Nazis that propaganda work from Berlin without an Axis declaration would be ‘extremely difficult’, and ‘even the question of setting up a Free India Centre in Europe was of secondary importance to him as long as there was no Axis declaration on Free India’.31 For Hitler, all that was evidently of no significance. He did not even agree to erase certain remarks from Mein Kampf. Bose had effectively gained nothing from the meeting.

Bose’s best biographers have described the sole face-to-face interaction he had with Hitler as ‘disastrous’, ‘awful’ and one in which the still-hopeful Indian nationalist indubitably ‘made no progress’ even though he was ‘shaken by the lack of communication and support’.32 Bose himself thought of the interaction as a ‘disappointment’ and ‘did not like very much to speak about it’, according to one of his close aides, Girija Mookerjee. Bose even told his associates later that Hitler was nothing but the German version of the Fakir of Ipi, with whom ‘a logical discussion … of any topic for even a few minutes was practically impossible’.33

Soon after, the German press got whiff of the Hitler–Bose conversation. And immediately, specific instructions were sent out to the totally pliant papers from the Nazis: one, they must not reveal how Bose came to Germany but only say he was welcome; two, while they could say Hitler had met a representative of the Indian nationalists for the first time, there must be no comparison with, or attacks, on Nehru and Gandhi; and third and most important, the papers must certainly not create the impression that Bose’s presence in Berlin meant a green signal from Hitler for ‘a general revolution in India’.34

With his stint in Nazi Germany proving to be unproductive in most respects, Bose climbed into the German submarine U-180 on 8 February 1943 and set off for Asia. He was transferred, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, to the Japanese submarine I-29 and became a guest of the Japanese.

What he did not know at precisely that point in time, and what the world was to know later, was that Hitler, who had asked the Indian leader to work with the Japanese, was not at all happy about the prospect of the Japanese defeating Britain in Asia. As Japan had made swift advances, Hitler had bemoaned in front of one of his generals, Gause, that ‘it means the loss of a whole continent, and one must regret it, for it’s the white race which is the loser’.35 Goebbels too recorded in his diary that Hitler ‘profoundly regrets the heavy losses sustained by the white race in East Asia’.36

Moreover, when the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, Oshima, had told Hitler in January 1942 about Japan’s intention of moving towards Burma and targeting British bases in India and called for a joint German–Japan declaration supporting India’s freedom, Hitler had suggested that if the war continued for long, Britain would move its principal offices to Australia and New Zealand in order to fight Japan from there. That was why, he insisted, it was ‘very important’ that Japan should focus on seizing the southeast Asian region as a whole so that any future peril coming from that direction could be blocked.37 In other words, Bose was told to join Japan so that Indian aims could be achieved, and the Japanese were counselled to proceed, not towards India but in the opposite direction, with their eyes fixed on Australia and New Zealand.

On Russia, a subject Hitler had discussed with Bose as well, the Führer had very clear and definite ideas which he had earlier shared with his military commanders. Russia will be ‘Germany’s India’, he had told the commanders in August 1941, barely a month after the Germans had launched Operation Barbarossa. ‘What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us,’ he pronounced excitedly.38 ‘It must be possible to control the eastern territory with a quarter of a million men,’ he said. ‘With that number, the British ruled 400 million Indians.’39

In Hitler’s scheme of things, Germany would exploit Russia in just the same way that Britain exploited India. Ukraine and the Volga would become ‘the granaries of Europe’, Germany would provide iron to Europe and export ‘corn for all in Europe who’ll need it’, and in the Crimea, ‘we will have citrus fruits, rubber plants (with 40,000 hectares we’ll make ourselves independent) and cotton’. He further elaborated that ‘the Pripet marshes will give us reeds. We will deliver to the Ukrainians head-scarves, glass chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like. We Germans—that’s the main thing—must form a closed community like a fortress. The lowest stable-lad must be superior to the natives’. He perceived the Russians as racially poor; the Slavs ‘a rabbit-family’ whose ‘natural and desired condition was one of general disorganisation’ and the Ukrainians ‘every bit as idle, disorganised, and nihilistically Asiatic as the Greater Russians’. The German would keep their distance from them, as the British did in India from the ‘natives’, by travelling ‘in the upholstered first- or second-class railway carriages—to separate them from the native population’.40

Before this holding up of British-ruled India as a ‘model’ for Germany, and whilst the Soviet–German pact was still in place and Barbarossa only in the works but still not executed, Hitler had even suggested to Stalin’s emissary Molotov that the Soviets should seriously think of getting India into their sphere of influence. Hitler was worried, in the second half of 1940, that if Britain did not surrender, and if Russia and the US came forward to join hands with it, Germany would be in grave trouble. He told Mussolini at a meeting in Florence in October 1940 that as Molotov would soon be in Berlin, he wanted to ‘steer Russian energies towards India’.41 When Molotov arrived, Hitler began the meeting with one of his monologues about the global situation and spoke of ‘the defeat’ of Britain and of Germany’s apparent lack of interest in the Balkans, an area of Russian interest. Molotov, for his part, touched upon sensitive points in the relationship between Germany and Russia and mentioned Romania and Finland in particular, where Germany had apparently broken the terms of its agreement with Stalin. ‘You’ve got to have a warm-water port. Iran, India—that’s your future,’ Hitler said.

‘Why, that’s an interesting idea, how do you see it?’ asked Molotov, and Hitler, unable to answer in any detail as he was totally unprepared for an explanation, adjourned the meeting for the day.42 The next day, Molotov focused sharply on Romania and Finland and did not bring up India, and later told Ribbentrop that Soviet interests lay in the Balkans and the Baltic and not in the Indian Ocean.43

Some chroniclers have seen, behind this transparently insincere prod to the Russians, an attempt to spark a conflict between Russia and England, so that the British would join hands with Hitler and he, in turn, could go ahead with his intended invasion of Russia as part of an alliance he had always desired.44

10

‘THE INDIANS ARE LUCKY’

Hitler spent much of his time, at the height of the war between 1941 and 1944, at his headquarters in East Prussia. There he had, in the form of his full entourage, a thoroughly captive audience. With his penchant for holding forth on everything under the sun, he subjected the whole team, including his senior generals and commanders who might be visiting for a short while, to endless soliloquies over lunch and dinner. These mostly disjointed, jumbled, vague and digressive but forcefully raucous, stark and doctrinaire conversations were meticulously recorded on the orders of Hitler’s secretary, Martin Bormann, and according to the historian Hugh Trevor–Roper, who wrote an introduction to the voluminous ‘table talks’, no subject was spared by Hitler. He spoke on everything from the Ice Age and the ‘Aryan Jesus’ to ‘Viking vegetarianism’ and ‘Spartan soup’, and from the pharaohs of Egypt and the Shinto faith of Japan to the political conservatism of Winston Churchill and the apparent frailty of American unity.1 There was plenty of tittle-tattle too—for instance, the case of a ‘Jewess’ with rings on all her fingers whose partners had, according to the Führer, understandably killed themselves; and the illegitimate children that the printer of the Volkischer Beobachter had dutifully fathered across several cities.

There was a great deal of meandering discussion on how the war was going, how it would all end up, and how the vastly expanded Third Reich would look like and behave. And in the elucidation of all the plans he was drawing up for the Reich, ‘again and again Hitler’s mind’, wrote Trevor–Roper, ‘reverted to the example of the English conquest of India … and then, he would allow his mind to roam erroneously over the history of England and India, subjects of which he knew nothing’. Hitler spoke just as much about the present as far as India and the Empire were concerned, with equal ignorance and the same, staggering confidence.

The Raj held lessons both exciting and sobering for Hitler. The first was the sense of achievement a people felt when they, with a very small team on faraway territory, ruled over a disproportionately large populace. ‘The basic reason for English pride is India,’ he said over dinner one evening in August 1941.2 ‘Four hundred years ago the English didn’t have this pride. The vast spaces over which they spread their rule obliged them to govern millions of people—and they kept these multitudes in order by granting a few men unlimited power.’ Repeatedly, he rattled off comparative figures to make the point that this was what the Reich was setting out to achieve in Russia.

The Reich would incorporate certain elements of the British colonial bureaucracy, including palatial homes for top provincial administrators. ‘The German colonist,’ Hitler said in the course of the same conversation, ‘ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. German services will be lodged in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces.’ The distance between the ruler and the ruled would be made clear, as British officials had done in India with their aloofness from the general population. ‘Beneath the shelter of the administrative services, we shall gradually organise all that is indispensable to the maintenance of a certain standard of living. Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres, we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like. It is merely necessary that we should rule them. In the event of a revolution, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the affair will be liquidated,’ he said matter-of-factly.3

He believed that the British in India had been very clever in leaving the cultural life of the locals, whatever there was of it, largely undisturbed. ‘The British are respected for their worldly wisdom in respecting the customs of the countries subject to them. In reality, this attitude has no other explanation than the determination not to raise the natives’ standard of living,’ he said to his aides on the evening of 10 January 1942.4 One look at India’s villages and at some of India’s most sacred spots would confirm that, he felt.

Recommending a book on India by Ludwig Alsdorf, which he had been reading, to German diplomats, Hitler said that according to it, ‘it was not the British who taught Indians evil ways; when the first white men landed in the country they found the walls surrounding many of the towns were constructed of human skulls’.5 As it happened, he had also ‘been reading tales of the burning of corpses at Benaras’.6 The British had let such practices continue, he said. If the Germans had been there, he was sure, they would have made stupid mistakes. ‘If we were out there,’ Hitler explained, ‘our hygiene experts would rise in their wrath and institute a crusade, backed by the most rigorous penalties, to suppress this evil practice! Every day official chemists would come and analyse the river water, and in no time, a new and gigantic ministry of health would be set up! The British, on the other hand, have contented themselves with forbidding the immolation of widows.’ Hitler simply marvelled at such a standoffish approach. ‘Just think of it!’ he exclaimed. ‘Two hundred yards downstream of the place where they pitch the half-burnt bodies of their dead into the Ganges, they drink the river water!’7

He had his own theory about why the British had outlawed the practice of sati, the immolation of widows on the pyres of their husbands. ‘The prohibition of suttee for widows, and the suppression of starvation dungeons, were dictated to the English by the desire not to reduce the labour force, and perhaps also by the desire to economise wood!’ he said.8

He saw the creation of separate territories over a single entity as another touch of British genius. ‘The British started by dividing the country; one portion consisted of Crown Colonies, and the other was made up of independent princely states, whose rulers became vassals of the British Crown.’9 The appearance of relative autonomy was deceptive; in reality, the Crown was fomenting disunity.

‘They (British) set so cleverly about presenting these measures to the world that they provoked a wave of admiration. That’s the strength of the English: to allow the natives to live whilst they exploit them to the uttermost … The climax of this cynical behaviour … is that it gives them the prestige of liberalism and tolerance,’ Hitler said.10

Yet, however desirable he believed such aloofness and indifference to be, and however impressed he was by the misleading picture of autonomy the British had created, Hitler’s tolerance had its limits. In the book he was reading, he pointed out, it was said that the lesson for colonial rulers in India ‘begins in the street itself; anyone who wastes even a moment’s compassion on a beggar is literally torn to pieces by the beggar hordes; anyone who shows a trace of human sentiment is damned forever’.11 Like most of whatever else that he was saying so casually, this was a gross misrepresentation of facts, but Hitler went on to state that this sort of conduct by the Indians was ‘the reason why the typical Briton marches ahead, superior, disdainful and oblivious to everything around him’.12 The Germans would not stop at mere disdain, though. ‘If we took India, the Indians would certainly not be enthusiastic, and they’d not be slow to regret the good old days of British rule!’ Hitler declared.13 On another occasion, after mouthing similar lines of utter contempt for India and her people, he said, ‘The Indians can think themselves lucky that we do not rule India. We should make their lives a misery!’14

It wasn’t as if the British had not made their mistakes, he stressed. They had given the Indians a degree of education, had industrialised the country and even taken steps to build infrastructure and enhance life expectancy. Here, it might have appeared that he was contradicting himself, since he was talking about British aloofness all the time. So he was at pains to explain that all these measures had been initiated in order to buttress British control over India but had produced certain effects that the colonisers had not quite seen coming.

‘When one treats a people as the English have continually treated the Indians,’ Hitler said, ‘unpardonable folly is to send the youth of the country to the universities, where it learns things that it would be better for it not to know.’15 Education could lead to a desire for political liberty among the locals, so Hitler didn’t want ‘a horde of schoolmasters to descend on’ the Reich’s eastern territories ‘and force education down the throats of subject races’.16

Similarly, the building of infrastructure and industry had to be well thought out. ‘In India,’ he contended, ‘the British invested huge sums: railways and other modes of transport, factories and port installations. If each of three hundred and eighty million Indians merely buys a reel of cotton every year, imagine what a volume of business that adds up to! Cotton goods were at first manufactured in England. It’s only little by little that factories were built in India herself. It’s the capitalist notion of business that led to that result. People thought that the saving on transport costs and the employment of less expensive labour would increase the margin of profit … What was the result? Today, England has an army of two million and a half unemployed.’17 With regret, he reiterated, ‘To their misfortune, the English have industrialised India. Unemployment in England is increasing, and the English worker gets poorer.’ The country Germany was engaged in conquering, he continued, ‘will be a source of raw materials for us, and a market for our products, but we shall take good care not to industrialise it’.18

The increase in India’s population was itself a matter of concern for someone as solicitous of British interests as Hitler. ‘I read today,’ he said one cold evening in January 1942, ‘that India at present numbers three hundred and eighty-eight million inhabitants, which means an increase of fifty-five millions during the last ten years. It’s alarming.’19 The same thing was happening in Russia, he added, and noted that they must not allow it. Mortality overall was going down, he said, ‘due to the progress made by the health services’. What were the doctors up to? he wondered. ‘Isn’t it enough to vaccinate the whites?’20 At any rate, ‘Britain does not wish to see India over-populated; it is not in her interest,’ he said in August 1942 as scores of Indians were filling the country’s jails in response to Gandhi’s Quit India call. ‘On the contrary, she would rather see a somewhat sparse population.’21

The ‘impasse’ that Britain was facing in India during the war, he had concluded already, was because it had slipped in holding firm to its racial principles. For Hitler, the whole world was organised on racial ideas and around racial blood; he perceived no other reality. ‘She (Britain) is no longer strong enough to act as a dominant race. The British have overestimated the power of their prestige during the last few decades; and now they are reaping the rewards of their weakness and paying the penalty for failing to remain faithful to those wise principles which characterised the epoch of their greatest glory,’ he theorised.22

But could the Indians survive on their own if they succeeded in driving out the British?

Unfortunately, in India, Hitler said, ‘Revolt is an endemic condition. Gandhi tried to succeed by pacific methods, but whatever be the methods chosen, the Indians are unanimous in their desire to shake off the British yoke. Some of them would like to try Bolshevism for that purpose, others would like to try us. Others would prefer to owe nothing to the foreigner. For all, the object is the same; it’s liberty—and nobody cares about the state of anarchy that will follow in India upon the departure of the English.’23

What, exactly, did he think would happen? ‘There are no bloody insurrections in India today, the difficulty for the Indians is to reconcile the divergent interests of such a diverse population. How are the princes and the Brahmins, the Hindus and the Mussulmans, all these hierarchised and partitioned castes to be combined in a common front?’ he asked.24

‘If the English were to be driven out of India, India would perish,’ he asserted in September 1941,25 and six months later, he claimed yet again, ‘If the English give India back her liberty, within twenty years India would have lost her liberty again.’26

This perception was similar to that of his archrival in the conflict, Winston Churchill, whose success within British politics Hitler desired over the moderate and mild-mannered Stafford Cripps. So, when Cripps went to India to negotiate with Indian leaders in March and April 1942, Hitler sincerely hoped that the mission would fail, not because he wanted the Indians to be uncompromising but because he saw Cripps as a sell-out who would allow for the disintegration of the Empire.27

There were other ways in which the two war adversaries thought identically about India. The country was ‘just a geographic term’, ‘the Indian nation does not exist’, Churchill had said more than once in his long political career.28 ‘I hate Indians,’ he proclaimed in 1942. ‘They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’29 The following year, as three million people died in a famine in Bengal, with Churchill as the British premier deliberately diverting their food provisions elsewhere for the war effort, he said, ‘The only quality of the Hindus is that there’s a lot of them and that is a vice.’30 He also, like Hitler, made his violent imperialistic visions known. Gandhi, he said on one occasion, ‘ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back’.31

Churchill ‘would sooner give up political life at once, or rather go out into the wilderness and fight, than to admit a revolution which meant the end of the Imperial Crown in India’.32 And it was in November 1942 that he made the pronouncement at the Mansion House in London that ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’33

Not surprisingly, Hitler, speaking in the Reichstag in August 1940, said, ‘Mr Churchill ought perhaps, for once, to believe me when I prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed—an Empire which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm.’34 As the tide in the war began to turn decisively from 1942 onwards, Hitler said to his compatriots at the dinner table, ‘There’s not a single Englishman, at this moment, who isn’t thinking constantly of India. If one were to offer the English this alternative, to keep India whilst abandoning Europe to Germany, or to lose India whilst retaining the control of Europe, I’m sure that 99 per cent of them would choose to keep India. For them, India has likewise become a symbol, for it’s on India that she built the Empire. Out of four hundred and fifty million subjects, the King of England has three hundred and fifty million Indians.’35 When the Japanese made remarkable progress in the east, Hitler said he did not think that Japan ‘would embark on the conquest of India. They’ll surely confine themselves to blockading it’.36 But what if British communications were broken? ‘They (the British) can trumpet abroad their intentions concerning Europe, but they know very well that it’s the possession of India on which the existence of their Empire depends. If I were in their place, I’d say, “It will be impossible to reconquer India once it’s lost.”’37

Till the end, Hitler clung desperately to the hope that the British would enter into an alliance with Nazi Germany in order to save their rule in India, ‘the jewel in the crown’. When the end of the war appeared imminent in 1945, and the hope of an Anglo-German alliance too was finally extinguished, Nazi Germany, out of a sense of hopelessness more than anything else, finally said it was willing to support an Axis declaration in favour of Indian freedom. At this stage, Germany, facing devastating and utter ruin, was also scrambling about for troops to hold off, to the extent possible, the Allied forces from reaching the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where Hitler had eventually moved from East Prussia to his bunker underground. Even at this very late stage, nevertheless, Hitler would not countenance the idea of bringing in the Indian Legion, which the Nazis had earlier helped Subhas Bose to create.

During a military conference at the Reich Chancellery on 23 March 1943, in which thirteen of his senior military officials were present, the discussion veered towards foreign divisions that could still be pressed into service. One of the military officials, Lieutenant Colonel Borgmann, referred to the Indian Legion. ‘The Indian Legion is a joke,’ Hitler exclaimed in derision. ‘There are Indians who couldn’t kill a louse, who’d rather be eaten themselves. They wouldn’t kill an Englishman either. To have them face the English of all people is really a stupid idea, I think.’38

In the same breath, Hitler questioned the bravery of the Azad Hind Fauj or the INA that Bose had built in the east after his departure from Germany. In July 1943, Bose had formally taken charge of the INA from Rash Behari Bose, given it the rallying cry of ‘Chalo Delhi’ and in October that year, formed the provisional government of Free India. When Bose took over, the INA had 12,000 soldiers; by 1945, they had swelled to 45,000. These soldiers had not acquitted themselves badly at all: they had fought in the battle of Arakan and in the campaign in Imphal–Kohima in 1944, and helped the Japanese forces in Burma achieve initial successes. But soon, the Japanese forces had been outnumbered by British forces in the air and had been forced to retreat. When Japan was pushed to the banks of the Irrawaddy towards the end of 1944, the INA had displayed enough bravery for the British intelligence department to write, after the war, that ‘they (the INA units) faced up to British equipment, tanks, guns and aircraft with rifles and bullock carts and empty stomachs’.39

But Hitler was telling his generals, ‘Why should the Indians fight more courageously for us than they fought in India itself, under Bose’s leadership? They put Indian units into action in Burma, under Bose’s leadership, to free India from the British. They ran away like sheep. Why should they be braver with us?’ He continued, ‘I think that if the Indians were used to turn prayer wheels or something like that, they’d be the most untiring soldiers in the world. But to use them in real bloody combat is ridiculous. How strong are the Indians …? Besides, it’s nonsense. If we had an abundance of weapons, we could afford such jokes for propagandistic reasons. But if we don’t have an abundance of weapons, these propagandistic jokes just can’t be justified.’40

ENDNOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. The setting up of the League Against Imperialism was ‘the main object’ of the 1927 International Congress Against Imperialism and Colonialism in Berlin. Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997), p. 208.

2. Nambiar’s account of his arrest in Berlin appeared in The Bombay Chronicle on 8 May 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Naidu’s interview published in The Belfast Telegraph, 25 March 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

6. Ibid.

CHAPTER 2

1. Robert K. Wittman and David Kinney, The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of The Third Reich (William Collins, London, 2016), pp. 77–78.

2. Comment by the editorial committee for the US edition of Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1941), p. 125. The US edition had an editorial committee which included John Chamberlain, Sidney B. Fay, John Gunther and seven others.

3. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (Penguin Books, UK, 1952, 1962 ed.), p. 39.

4. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (Penguin Books, UK, 2001), pp. 32–33.

5. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1941), p. 160.

6. Document no. 1 in Reginald H. Phelps, ‘Hitler als Parteiredner im Jahre 1920’ (Hitler as a party speaker in 1920), published in the journal Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 1963.

7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1939), p. 954. This is the first complete and unabridged American translation.

8. Ibid., pp. 954–55.

9. Ibid., pp. 955–56.

10. Ibid., p. 956.

11. Ibid., p. 957.

12. The team of scholars in the US comprised John Chamberlain, Sidney B. Fay, John Gunther, Carlton J.H. Hayes, Graham Hutton, Alvin Johnson, William L. Langer, Walter Millis, R. De Roussy De Sales and George N. Shuster. The US edition of his autobiography edited by them appeared first in 1939; the edition I have consulted is the 1941 one.

13. Published by Hurst & Blackett, London, 1933, with the consent of the publishers of the German text (Verlag Frz. Eher Nachf G.M.B.H.), Munchen, Germany. This was an abridged translation. Link: https://ia801607.us.archive.org/25/items/PDFMeinKampf1933/PDF-%20Mein%20Kampf%20%5B1933%5D.pdf.

14. Published in 1939, a full translation into English by James Murphy. Link: http://greatwar.nl/books/meinkampf/meinkampf.pdf.

15. Dugdale, pp. 170–171 and Murphy, pp. 533–555.

16. Document no. 3 in Reginald H. Phelps, ‘Hitler als Parteiredner im Jahre 1920’ (Hitler as a party speaker in 1920), published in the journal Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 1963.

17. Ibid.

18. Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy: Germany, Japan and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War (London, German Historical Institute, Klett-Cotta, 1981, vol. 7), p. 35.

19. Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (Vintage Books, 2010), p. 50. When, precisely, Hitler read Chamberlain’s then-bestselling work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899, is a matter of debate among historians and Hitler’s biographers. Alan Bullock believed Hitler may have read it during his time in Munich in 1913 and 1914. Hitler himself told the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank that Chamberlain was among the many writers he read during his stint in Landsberg prison after the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, but then Hitler can’t always be taken at face value.

20. Robert K. Wittman and David Kinney, The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of The Third Reich (William Collins, London, 2016), pp. 100–102.

21. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) p. 59. Accessed on Internet Archive (archive.org): https://ia601406.us.archive.org/24/items/mythofthe20thcenturyalfredrosenberg_340_Y/Myth%20Of%20The%2020th%20Century%20Alfred%20Rosenberg.pdf.

22. Ibid., p. 59.

23. Ibid., pp. 60–61.

24. Rosenberg (1930), p. 60 and India in Axis Strategy (1981), p. 26.

CHAPTER 3

1. Otto Strasser, Hitler and I (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1940), pp. 197–198.

2. Otto Strasser and Michael Stern, Flight From Terror (1943), p. 14 and p. 23. Accessed on archive.org: https://ia801309.us.archive.org/6/items/FlightFromTerrorOttoStrasser/Flight%20from%20Terror%20-%20Otto%20Strasser.pdf.

3. Douglas Reed, Jonathan Cape, Nemesis? The Story of Otto Strasser (London, 1940), pp. 25–26.

4. Ibid., p. 26.

5. Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography (Hollis and Carter, London, 1949), p. 115.

6. Ibid., p. 33.

7. Strasser (1940), p. 81.

8. Ibid., pp. 82–83.

9. Reed (1940), p. 36.

10. Hausofer quoted in India in Axis Strategy, p. 22.

11. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death (Frontline Books, London, 2010), p. 100.

12. Strasser (1940), p. 209.

13. Ibid., p. 86.

14. Ibid., p. 100.

15. India in Axis Strategy: Germany, Japan and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War, Milan Hauner, Publication of the German Historical Institute, London, Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, 1981, pp. 25–26.

16. Hitlerism: The Iron First in Germany, ‘Nordicus’ (The Mohawk Press, New York, 1932), p. 60.

17. ed. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (1942, vol. 1) pp. 81–82.

18. Ibid.

19. Strasser (1940), p. 101.

20. Paul Gottfried, Modern Age, ‘Otto Strasser and National Socialism’ (Spring 1969 issue), p. 145.

21. Otto Strasser, Germany Tomorrow (Jonathan Cape, London, 1940), pp. 131–132.

22. Strasser (1940), p. 107.

23. Ibid., pp. 107–108.

24. The reference here is to Otto Strasser’s piece for the paper of the German Youth Movement, August 1930. Dorothy M. Figueira, Aryan Ancestors, Pariahs and the Lunatic Fringe (Comparative Civilizations Review, 1991, vol. 25, no. 25, Article 2). Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol25/iss25/2.

25. Strasser (1940), p. 113.

26. Dorothy M. Figueira, Aryan Ancestors, Pariahs and the Lunatic Fringe, ‘The Grundmanifest of the Schwarzen (Black) Front’, (Comparative Civilizations Review)

27. ed. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (1942, vol. 2), p. 999.

28. ed. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (1942, vol. 1), pp. 792–793.

CHAPTER 4

1. Proceedings in the UK House of Commons, 16 and 20 March 1933. Available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. The Scotsman, 24 March 1933 Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

6. Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s First Victims: And One Man’s Race For Justice (The Bodley Head, 2015), p. 30.

7. Questions and Answers in the UK House of Commons, 9 March 1933. Available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard.

8. Ibid.

9. The Manchester Guardian, 21 March 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

10. The Belfast Telegraph, 25 March 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

11. The Modern Review, June 1933, p. 704.

12. Vappala Balachandran, A Life in Shadow: The Secret Story of A.C.N. Nambiar (Roli Books, New Delhi, 2016), p. 85.

13. eds., Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlanderand Douglas T. McGetchin, Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Routledge, New York, 2014), pp. 144–149.

14. Details given during proceedings in the UK House of Commons, 18 May 1933. Available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard.

15. The Times of India, 20 May 1933.

16. Ibid.

17. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1944), p. 15.

18. Saumyendranath Tagore, Against the Stream (Saumyendranath Memorial Committee, 1975), pp. 17–18.

19. Proceedings in the House of Commons, 27 April 1933. Available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard.

20. The Times of India, 29 April 1933.

21. Daniel Bruckenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (Oxford University Press, New York, 2017), p. 172.

22. Yorkshire Post, 25 April 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

23. The Manchester Guardian (5 April 1933) and the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (Durham, England, 4 April 1933). Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

24. The Manchester Guardian, 5 April 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

25. The Manchester Guardian, 27 and 28 April 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

26. The Manchester Guardian and Western Morning News (Devon, England), 5 April 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

27. Belfast News-Letter, 2 May 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

28. Ibid.

29. Proceedings in the House of Commons, 13 June 1933.

30. The Hitler regime promulgated on 28 February 1933 the Decree of the President for the Protection of People and State. This decree placed a ban on assembly, imposed restrictions on freedom of expression and the freedom of the press, sanctioned the checking of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and the confiscation of property and allowed for searches and indefinite detention without a warrant. The Communist Party was banned on March 7, and after the Nazis won 52 per cent of the vote in the March elections, an Enabling Law was enacted, allowing the government to bring in laws, including constitutional amendments, for four years without parliamentary assent. At the same time, Jews were dismissed from the civil service, teaching, the publishing industry, journalism, radio, farming, the theatre and films. Later in the year, all political parties except for NSDAP were banned.

31. The Bombay Chronicle, 15 April 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

32. The Bombay Chronicle, 10 May 1933. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

33. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5

1. Asoke Nath Bose, My Uncle Netaji (ESEM Publications, Calcutta, 1977), p. 83.

2. Daniel Bruckenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (Oxford University Press, New York, 2017), p. 176.

3. The Modern Review, Calcutta, June 1933, p. 704.

4. The Modern Review, June 1933, p. 703.

5. Bruckenhaus (2017), p. 176.

6. Ibid., p. 176, footnote 48.

7. Bose (1977), p. 76.

8. Ibid., pp. 76–77.

9. Jan Kuhlmann, trans. Christel Das, Netaji in Europe (Rainlight, Rupa, 2012), p. 14.

10. S.K. Bose, A Werth and S.A. Ayer, A Beacon Across Asia: A Biography of Subhas Bose (Orient BlackSwan, Kolkata, 2008), p. 43.

11. Kuhlmann (2012), p. 14.

12. S.K. Bose, et al. (2008), p. 43.

13. Bose (1977), p. 83.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 86.

16. eds. Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose, Netaji Collected Works: vol 8 ‘India’s Spokesman Abroad, Subhas Chandra Bose, Letters, Articles, Speeches and Statements 1933–1937’, (Permanent Black and Netaji Research Bureau, New Delhi, 2012), pp. 62–63.

17. Bose and Bose (2012), pp. 62–63.

18. Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (Leonard A. Gordon, Rupa Publications, New Delhi), 2012, p. 281.

19. Bose and Bose (2012), pp. 63–64.

20. Letter of 17 May 1934, Records of the German Foreign Office, BundesArchiv, 1933, vol. 2, p. 149.

21. Records of the German Foreign Office, Bundesarchiv, 1933, vol. 2, p. 156.

22. Letter of 22 June 1934, Records of the German Foreign Office, Bundesarchiv, 1933, vol. 2, p. 155.

23. The Bombay Chronicle, 14 July 1934. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Letter of 14 November 1934, Bundesarchiv, vol. 2, pp. 233–237.

27. Bose’s November 1934 letter to Dr Thierfelder quoted in India’s Spokesman Abroad, pp. 113–115.

28. Bose to the Foreign Office, 7 May 1935.

29. Ibid.

30. Vikram Seth, Two Lives (Little Brown, UK, 2005).

31. Dr K. Habib Hasan, chief chemist with the Nizam of Hyderabad, was selected to represent the Indian Chemical Society at the 25th anniversary of the Societe de Chemie Physique in Paris. While in Europe, he also visited Germany. The Times of India, 5 December 1933.

32. Laxmi Dhaul Tendulkar, In the Shadow of Freedom: Three Lives in Hitler’s Berlin and Gandhi’s India (Zubaan Books, New Delhi, 2013). The full account of Ayi Tendulkar’s story reproduced here is sourced from her book.

33. Bose and Bose (2012), p. 116 and p. 131.

34. Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s First Victims, p. 151 and pp. 159–164; and Richard J. Evans, The Coming of The Third Reich, p. 358.

35. Quoted in The Bombay Chronicle, 20 August 1934. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

36. Sinha’s letter in The Bombay Chronicle, 16 August 1934. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

37. ed. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (1942, vol. 2, pp. 1258–1259), and The Times of India, 28 January 1936.

38. Ibid.

39. The Bombay Chronicle, 30 January 1936. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

40. The Bombay Chronicle, 29 January 1936. Accessed through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

41. Bose and Bose (2012), pp. 152–153.

42. Ibid., pp. 165–167.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., p. 346.

45. Goal, Major Dhyan Chand’s autobiography, published by Sport & Pastime, Chennai, 1952, accessed by this writer at http://www.bharatiyahockey.org/granthalaya/goal/.

46. Christopher Hilton, Hitler’s Olympics: The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games (The History Press, UK, 2006), p. 227.

47. Hilton (2006), p. 227.

48. Anton Rippon, Hitler’s Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games (Pen & Sword Military, Pen & Sword Books Ltd, Yorkshire, UK, 2006), p. 192.

49. Hilton (2006) p. 1.

50. Hilton (2006), p. 147.

CHAPTER 6

1. Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax (Head of Zeus, UK, 2014), p. 9.

2. Ibid., p. 14.

3. Ibid., p. 71. This is a reference to Queen Victoria’s German origins and the fact that the Prussians had fought with the English to defeat Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

4. Ibid., p. 87.

5. Ibid., p. 96.

6. Ivone Kirkpatrick, Halifax Papers, The Inner Circle, pp. 94–101; Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter, pp. 75–7; CAB (Public Record Office) papers, all quoted in The Holy Fox, Andrew Roberts, p. 97.

7. Halifax Papers, quoted in The Holy Fox, p. 97.

8. Ibid., p. 98.

9. Kirkpatrick, quoted in The Holy Fox, p. 99.

10. Ibid., p. 99.

11. Madhushree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and The Ravaging of India During World War II (Basic Books US, 2010), p. 31.

12. Quoted in The Holy Fox, p. 99.

13. Roberts (2014), pp. 37–8.

14. Lord Halifax, Fullness of Days, Collins, London, 1957, quoted in Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, Richard Toye, Pan Macmillan, 2011, p. 177.

15. Churchill’s speech at the West Essex Conservative Association, quoted in Churchill’s Empire, p. 176.

16. Roberts (2014), pp. 59–60.

17. Heike B. Gortemaker, Eva Braun: Life with Hitler (Penguin Books, 2012), p. 128.

18. Ibid.

19. The New York Times, 12 January 1935.

20. Michael Munn, Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (Robson Press, 2012), p. 131.

CHAPTER 7

1. Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey, 2003), p. 4. I am indebted to Hale’s work for details on the Tibet expedition and also on Schafer and Bruno Beger’s lives. Unless otherwise cited, information about the expedition is sourced here from this work.

2. Ibid., p. 131.

3. Ibid., p. 129.

4. Ibid., p. 159.

5. Ibid., pp. 16–18.

6. Ibid., p. 298.

7. Ibid., p. 297.

8. Ibid., p. 364.

9. Ibid., p. 371.

10. Kai Friese, Transition Journal, ‘The Aryan Handshake’ (Indiana University Press, 2000, Issue no. 83), p. 6 and Kai Friese, Civil Lines 4, ‘Liver Is Not Mutton’ (Permanent Black and Ravi Dayal Publishers, 2001), p. 9.

11. ‘The Aryan Handshake’, pp.7–8 and ‘Liver Is Not Mutton’, p. 11.

12. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and The Politics of Identity (New York University Press, 2002), pp. 90–91.

13. The Times of India, 26 January 1940.

14. Ibid.

CHAPTER 8

1. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Publications Division, Government of India, 1999, vol. 62), p. 85.

2. Ibid., vol. 65, p. 428.

3. Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill (Arrow Books, 2009), p. 448.

4. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (Penguin Books, 2001), p. 141.

5. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (Penguin Books, 2006), p. 591.

6. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Publications Division, Government of India, 1999, vol. 74), pp. 239–242.

7. The Bombay Chronicle, 8 December 1938.

8. Gandhi’s letter quoted in The Bombay Chronicle, 10 December 1938.

9. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Publications Division, Government of India, 1999, vol. 74), pp. 239–242.

10. Ibid., pp. 297–298.

11. Arun Shourie, Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? How Suffering Refutes Religions (Harper Collins, New Delhi, 2012), pp. 176–180.

12 The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 74, pp. 308–312.

13. Dr A. Aronson, Rabindranath Through Western Eyes, ‘Deutschoesterreichissche Tageszeitung’ (Kitabistan, Allahabad, 1943), p. 63.

14. Rabindranath Through Western Eyes, ‘Shanghai Mercury’, 25 October 1926, p. 51.

15. Notes of P. C. Mahalonobis quoted in Rabindranath Through Western Eyes, pp. 74–75.

16. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-minded Man (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996), p. 267.

17. ‘Popolo d’Italia’, quoted in Rabindranath Through Western Eyes, p. 77.

18. Romain Hayes, Bose in Nazi Germany (Random House India, 2011), p. 9.

19. Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2012), p. 277.

20. Ibid., p. 278.

21. Ibid., p. 277.

22. Ibid., p. 279.

23. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, ‘Details from Dharmaveer Dr B.S. Moonje Commemoration Volume (Nagpur, 1972)’ (Columbia University Press, New York, 1996).

24. M.S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Bharat Prakashan, Nagpur, Fourth edition, 1947), pp. 42–43.

25. Ibid., p. 43.

26. Veer Savarkar’s Whirlwind Propaganda, (A.S. Bhide, Bombay, 1941), pp. 52–53.

27. Herman (2009), p. 446 and 448.

28. The Times of India, 3 July 1940.

29. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Govt. of Maharashtra, Education Department, October 1991, vol. 17, reprinted by Dr Ambedkar Foundation, January 2014), pp. 328–330.

30. Dhananjay Keer, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Life and Mission (Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 2019), p. 347.

31. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol. 10, pp. 38–9.

32. Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (Pimlico, 1998), p. 283.

33. Ibid., pp. 284–287.

CHAPTER 9

1. Asoke Nath Bose, My Uncle Netaji (ESEM Publications, Calcutta, 1977), p. 199.

2. Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2012), p. 423.

3. Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy: Germany, Japan and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War (Publication of the German Historical Institute, London, vol. 7, Klett-Cotta, 1981), p. 118.

4. The Times of India, 26 February 1940.

5. The Argus, Melbourne, 17 February 1940.

6. Cairns Post, Queensland, Australia, 5 April 1940 and The Lockhart Review and Oaklands Advertiser, 13 February 1940.

7. Gordon (2012), p. 410.

8. S.K. Bose, A. Werth and S.A. Ayer, A Beacon Across Asia: A Biography of Subhas Bose (Orient Blackswan, Kolkata, 2008), pp. 98–102.

9. Giles MacDonogh, A Good German: Adam von Trott zu Solz (The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1992), p. 189.

10. Romain Hayes, Bose in Nazi Germany (Random House India, 2011), p. 172.

11. Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent (Penguin India, 2013), p. 204.

12. Hayes (2011), pp. 186–187.

13. Ibid., p. 187.

14. Gordon (2012), p. 449.

15. Ibid., p. 451.

16. Ibid.

17. Gordon (2012), pp. 446–447.

18. MacDonogh (1992), pp. 194–195.

19. MacDonogh (1992), p. 196.

20. Christopher Sykes, Troubled Loyalty: A Biography of Adam von Trott (Collins, London, 1968), p. 360.

21. S.K. Bose, et al. (2008), p. 106.

22. India in Axis Strategy, p. 358.

23. Gordon (2012), p. 459.

24. MacDonogh (1992), p. 197.

25. Ibid.

26. Gordon (2012), p. 481.

27. Gordon (2012), p. 483.

28. Mihir Bose, The Lost Hero (Wise Canvas, Vikas Publishing House, 2014), p. 328.

29. ed. Sisir K. Bose, Netaji & India’s Freedom (Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta, 1975), pp. 310–315. The full details of the conversation cited here are from Schmidt’s account.

30. Schmidt’s account in Netaji & India’s Freedom.

31. India in Axis Strategy, p. 358.

32. Quoted in Bose’s biographies by Mihir Bose, Leonard A. Gordon and Sugata Bose.

33. Jan Kuhlmann, trans. by Christel Das, Netaji in Europe (Rainlight, Rupa, 2012), p. 117.

34. Ibid.

35. Gordon (2012), p. 467.

36. Ibid.

37. Johannes H. Voigt, Hitler and India (Vierteljahreshefte zur Zeitgeschichte 19, 1971), p. 36.

38. Alex J. Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and economic planning for German occupation policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–41 (Berghahn Books, 2006), p. 80 and Brothers Against the Raj, p. 442.

39. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945 Nemesis (Penguin, p. 401).

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., p. 331.

42. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Vintage Books, 2003), p. 338.

43. Hitler 1936–1945, Nemesis, Kershaw, pp. 333–334.

44. Voigt (1971), pp. 33–63.

CHAPTER 10

1. Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma Books, 2000 edition, from the introduction written by Hugh Trevor-Roper for the Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1953 edition.

2. Ibid. p. 23

3. Ibid. p. 24

4. Ibid. p. 199

5. Ibid. p. 655

6. Ibid. p. 656

7. Ibid. p. 656

8. Ibid. p. 199

9. Ibid. p. 671

10. Ibid. p. 199

11. Ibid. p. 654

12. Ibid. p. 654

13. Ibid. p. 199

14. Ibid. p. 656

15. Ibid., p. 203.

16. Ibid., pp. 424–425.

17. Ibid., p. 264.

18. Ibid., p. 42.

19. Ibid., p. 207.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid. pp. 654–655.

22. Ibid., pp. 435–436.

23. Ibid., p. 203.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 33.

26. Ibid., p. 354.

27. Ibid., pp. 368–370. Hitler said, ‘Between Churchill and Cripps I have no hesitation in choosing. I prefer a hundred times the undisciplined swine who is drunk eight hours of every twenty-four, to the Puritan. A man who spends extravagantly, an elderly man who drinks and smokes without moderation, is obviously less to be feared than the drawing-room Bolshevist who leads the life of an ascetic. From Churchill one may finally expect that in a moment of lucidity—it’s not impossible—he’ll realise that the Empire’s going inescapably to its ruin, if the war lasts another two or three years. Cripps, a man without roots, a demagogue and a liar, would pursue his sick fancies although the Empire were to crack at every corner … To judge Cripps accurately, and to appreciate the dangers he represents, one must not forget that the Tories have always been the props of the Empire, and that Cripps’s gaining control would mean the end of the Empire. With his hypocritical social programmes, he’d be sure to dig a pit between the mother-country and the Dominions, especially the Catholic Canadians, Australia and South Africa. One must therefore eagerly hope for the failure of his mission to India.’

28. Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (Bantam Books, New York, 2009), pp. 380, 395–6.

29. Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (Pan Macmillian, UK, 2010), p. 227.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., p. 172.

32. Herman (2009), p. 221.

33. Ibid., p. 230.

34. Ibid., p. 206.

35. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 199.

36. Ibid., p. 187.

37. Ibid.

38. Helmut Heiber and David M. Glantz, Hitler and his Generals, Military Conferences 1942–45 (Enigma Books, 2003), p. 712.

39. Mihir Bose, The Lost Hero (Wise Canvas, Vikas Publishing House, 2014), pp. 337–340.

40. Heiber and Glantz (2003), p. 712.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol. 10 and Vol. 17, Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra, October, 1991, reprinted by Dr Ambedkar Foundation, January 2014

Dr A. Aronson, Rabindranath Through Western Eyes, Kitabistan, Allahabad, 1943

Vappala Balachandran, A Life in Shadow: The Secret Story of A.C.N Nambiar, A Forgotten Anti-Colonial Warrior, Roli Books, New Delhi, 2016

Norman H. Baynes (editor), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2

Asoke Nath Bose, My Uncle Netaji, ESEM Publications, Calcutta, 1977

Mihir Bose, The Lost Hero, 2014 revised edition, Wise Canvas, Vikas Publishing House, 2014

Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose (editors), India’s Spokesman Abroad, Subhas Chandra Bose, Letters, Articles, Speeches and Statements 1933-1937, Netaji Collected Works Volume 8, Permanent Black and Netaji Research Bureau, New Delhi, 2012

Sisir K. Bose (editor), Netaji & India’s Freedom, Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta, 1975

Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire, Penguin India, 2013

Daniel Bruckenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017

Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), 1962 edition, Penguin Books, UK

Major Dhyan Chand, Goal, published by Sport & Pastime, Chennai, 1952

Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996

Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Books, 2006

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 62 and Vol. 74, Publications Division, Government of India, 1999

M.S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined, Bharat Prakashan, Nagpur, Fourth Edition, 1947

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and The Politics of Identity, New York University Press, 2002

Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose, Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2012

Heike B. Gortemaker, Eva Braun: Life with Hilter, Penguin Books, 2012

Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey, 2003

Lord Halifax, Fullness of Days, Collins, London, 1957

Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy: Germany, Japan and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War, Publications of the German Historical Institute, London, Volume 7, Klett-Cotta, 1981

Romain Hayes, Bose in Nazi Germany, Random House India, 2011

Helmut Heiber and David M. Glantz, Hitler and his Generals, Military Conferences 1942-45, Enigma Books, 2003

Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed An Empire And Forged Our Age, Bantam Books, New York, 2009

Christopher Hilton, Hitler’s Olympics: The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, The History Press, UK, 2006

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated and edited by a team of 10 US editors, Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1941

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by E.T.S. Dugdale, Published by Hurst & Blackett, London, 1933

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, a full translation into English by James Murphy, UK, 1939

Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996

Alex J. Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and economic planning for German occupation policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-41, Berghahn Books, 2006

Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris, Penguin Books, UK, 2001

Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, Penguin Books, 2001

Jan Kuhlmann, translated by Christel Das, Netaji in Europe, Rainlight (Rupa), 2012

Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin, Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Joanne Miyang Cho, Routledge, New York, 2014

Dhananjay Keer, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Life and Mission, Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 2019

Giles MacDonogh, A Good German: Adam von Trott zu Solz, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1992

Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death, Frontline Books, London, 2010

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Vintage Books, 2003

Madhushree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and The Ravaging of India During World War II, Basic Books (US), 2010

Michael Munn, Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity, Robson Press, 2012

Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence Jonathan Cape, London, 1997

Douglas Reed, Nemesis? The Story of Otto Strasser, Jonathan Cape, London, 1940

Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax, 2014, Head of Zeus, UK, 2014

Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Hollis and Carter, London, 1949

Anton Rippon, Hitler’s Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games, Pen & Sword Military, Pen & Sword Books Ltd, Yorkshire, UK, 2006

Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of The Twentieth Century, 1930. Accessed on Internet Archive (archive.org)

Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, Vintage Books, 2010

Arun Shourie, Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? How suffering refutes religions, Harper Collins, New Delhi, 2012

Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China, Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1944

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Otto Strasser, Hitler and I, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, USA, 1940

Otto Strasser and Michael Stern, Flight From Terror, 1943

Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him And The World He Made, Pan Macmillian, UK, 2010

Saumyendranath Tagore, Against the Stream, Saumyendranath Memorial Committee, 1975

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Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma Books, 2000 edition

Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944. With an Introductory Essay on The Mind of Adolf Hitler by H. R. Trevor-Roper (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953

PAPERS AND DOCUMENTS

BundesArchiv, 1933, Vol. 2

German Foreign Office archive (Auswartiges Amts-Politicsches Archiv)

Proceedings in the UK House of Commons, 1933, Historic Hansard, accessed online (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard)

PERIODICALS AND JOURNALS

Vierteljahreshefte zur Zeitgeschichte 19, 1971

Modern Age, Spring 1969 issue

The Modern Review, Calcutta, 1933

Transition Journal, Issue no. 83, Indiana University Press, 2000

Civil Lines 4, Permanent Black and Ravi Dayal Publishers, 2001

NEWSPAPERS

Belfast News-Letter

Cairns Post, Queensland, Australia

Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (Durham, England)

The Argus, Melbourne

The Lockhart Review and Oaklands Advertiser

The Belfast Telegraph

The Bombay Chronicle

The Scotsman

The Manchester Guardian

The New York Times

The Times, London

The Times of India

Western Morning News (Devon, England)

Yorkshire Post

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research and the writing of this book took nearly ten years, what with the unearthing of sources, the tracing of much obscure material in Germany, UK and India, the several translations required from the original German and the fact that I was carrying out my daily responsibilities at my workplace while working on the project and also, for some time, researching another book which I finished well before this one. Papers, periodicals, books, official Nazi, German and British correspondence and the correspondence of several leading Indian political figures too had to be looked into.

All of this, and the writing itself, would have been impossible had it not been for the unstinting support of many people. The famous English novelist and playwright Kiran Nagarkar offered much encouragement, read the full draft and made important suggestions; unfortunately, he passed away before the book could see the light of day. My heartfelt thanks to him. Many thanks to the German scholar Claudia Richter and to Ranjeer Kumar of the Institute of German Studies for translating some of the key German texts from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and equally to Mayur Shetty and Vaijayanthi Chakravarty for generously helping me to get hold of long out-of-print books from The Asiatic Library of Bombay. Dileep Padgaonkar, the former erudite editor-in-chief of The Times of India, pointed to some primary and secondary sources which turned out to be critical; unfortunately, Padgaonkar passed on while I was still working on the book. Long-time editor and journalist Sudha Sadanand promptly offered a helping hand when I needed it and Karthik Venkatesh, my editor at Westland, made the text far better than it originally was with his deft touch, along with his fellow-editor, Priya Iyer. My special thanks to Karthik and to my publishers, Westland, and the publishing house’s leading lights Gautam Padmanabhan and Karthika V.K., for their readiness and promptness in every respect.

And a big thank you to my family—my wife Swapna, son Vikrant, parents Jagdish and Jyotsna Purandare, brother Kunal and sister-in-law Avani. Without you all as pillars of support, I couldn’t have done a thing. This book has been possible only because of you.