Hitler and India

Title: Hitler and India – The Untold Story of His Hatred for the Country and Its People

Author: Vaibhav Purandare

Publisher: Westland Non-Fiction, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789390679997

Pages: 206

 

The Second World War was a crucial turning point in Indian history too. There were attempts in the past by revolutionaries to ally with Britain’s rivals, but the British were never before on the verge of imminent collapse as it did in the early-1940s. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose used the opportunity to slip away from house arrest and reached Germany. Over the following months, he personally met Hitler, Mussolini and other Axis leaders and obtained their support to recruit imprisoned Indian soldiers of the British army into a new military outfit to fight for India’s freedom. With German funding and material help, Bose and his army fought valiantly in Southeast Asia but were eventually defeated along with their Axis sponsors. Seeing Germany’s sympathetic stance towards India in the War years, many Indians still believe that apart from his anti-Semitism, Hitler was benevolent to India. There are people who get excited at the initial Nazi victories during the War and regret Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the USSR for inviting a crushing defeat that led to Germany’s humiliation and his own suicide. But, was Hitler sympathetic to India and despised Britain for its colonial rule over it? This book provides the answer and it is a clear negative. Hitler was a racist to the core who believed that all other races should be subservient to the Whites. He thought the English could dominate the world through racial purity and the Englishman always knew how to be lord and not brother to the inferior classes. This book clearly describes the Nazi mindset in the period 1920 – 1945 and how it perceived Indians as sub-human. Vaibhav Purandare is a senior editor of The Times of India and has authored several books of national interest.

 

Colonial historians put forward the Aryan invasion theory to explain the disintegration of Harappan civilisation. Though this was not supported by facts and deliberately spread at the behest of the British, racial supremacists in Europe took to it with great élan. In keeping with the postulates of the theory, Hitler believed that white-skinned Aryans entered India and reached the height of metaphysical thought. Gradually, their racial purity was lost by mixing with the local population. The Germans were thought to be the true descendants of Aryans. Hitler’s view of India was largely shaped by the opinions of Houston Stewart Chamberlain who was a British who so admired Germany that he became a German citizen. Chamberlain in turn had picked up the French de Gobineau’s theory that the tall, lithe and handsome Germanic Aryans were superior to all other races and responsible for every great accomplishment in civilisation. Hitler’s close friend and editor Alfred Rosenberg termed Indians the ‘modern products of racial pollution’. In his words, Indians were ‘poor bastards’ or ‘wretched mongrels’.

 

Indian revolutionaries first engaged with Hitler in 1920-21, when the Nazi party took birth exploiting the troubled times in post-Versailles Germany. Hitler was skeptical to every effort by the Indians to team up with his party in their bid to defeat the British rulers. He refused to accept the assessment that the British empire was crumbling and deemed it to be wishful thinking. He was certain that Britain could lose India only in two ways: if it either fell victim to racial degeneration within its own administrative machinery or if it is compelled to do so by the sword of a powerful enemy. Both were thought to be impossible. As a corollary he held that colonized nations are inhabited by racially inferior people. Hitler described the Indian revolutionaries as ‘gabbling pomposities’ and ‘inflated Orientals’ in Mein Kampf, carrying in their head fanciful notions about their country’s independence from Britain. There were many Indian students in Germany who had enrolled for higher studies and industrial training. They were flabbergasted in 1926 when a bunch of Indians were displayed as ‘exhibits’ in the Berlin Zoo alongside other animals and birds. This clearest case of racial scorn exemplified the Nazi attitude to India.

 

Purandare includes more details of the interaction between Hitler and the Indian community both in India and Germany. Hitler discussed about the Indian situation in a private meeting with Lord Irwin in 1936. Irwin had taken up senior positions in British government after officiating earlier as Viceroy to India. He advised Irwin to ‘shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members, and if that also does not suffice shoot 200 and so on until order is established’. In 1935, Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws outlawing sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. Any sign of love or romance between and Indian and a German was a punishable offence as Indians were not deemed to be Aryans. Even then, strident anti-British revolutionaries strived for a consensus with Germany. Calcutta University expressed its willingness to introduce Mein Kampf as a textbook for post-graduate students of political economy if Hitler deleted all anti-India passages in the book. Hitler’s office promptly replied that the Fuhrer won’t grant permission to change of soften the wording since these were ‘fundamental considerations’ of the Nazi racial ideology. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in mid-War was to conquer it and exploit its resources like a colony in imitation of what the British were doing to India.

 

A critical part of the book deals with how Bose managed the Nazis and their malicious ideology. Till the War began, Hitler always wanted to emulate Britain and make colonies for Germany elsewhere in the world. He did not permit any activity which would put unease on his relations with them. Consequently, Indian activists found it impossible to elicit even a cursory statement from Hitler sympathetic to Indian independence. However, after the war started, Germany hosted Bose to utilize the propaganda potential to embarrass the British. Bose swallowed his pride many times to get German help for his fight for India. At first, he refused to start anti-British propaganda unless Germany gave an assurance regarding freedom of India which Hitler was not prepared to do. A deadlock ensued and Nazis seriously considered shifting Bose to a neutral country but he budged eventually. A pact with Hitler was not welcomed enthusiastically by any group and a significant section of Indian nationalist press responded to Hitler’s mid-War overtures to India with sarcasm. Bose anyhow decided to use the string of early successes the Nazis had achieved in the initial phases of the War for a worthy purpose. Bose met Hitler only once and the interaction was dominated by a long monologue by Hitler. The only silver lining to emerge from this disappointing meeting was an offer to transport Bose to Asia in a German submarine. The Indian National Army was constituted from Indian POWs who took their customary oath on initiation in the names of both Hitler and Bose.

 

The book is an excellent one for reading pleasure because of the commendable style of diction. The book is rather short at only 177 reading pages, but compensates for its size with a wealth of previously unknown facts. The author could have given some more information on how the Nazis found the ancient Hindu symbol of swastika so attractive as to coopt it as the party’s icon. As a result, the swastika is conceived as a symbol of evil across the world, but in India it is an innocuous one, used since the ancient past.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star