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. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. For Baba and Mom Jagdish Purandare and Jyotsna Purandare CONTENTS AUTHOR’S NOTE 1 ENTER THE THIRD REICH 2 IN MEIN KAMPF 3 NATIONALIST? SOCIALIST? CAPITALIST? 4 INDIANS IN THE THIRD REICH 5 ‘WALKING, TALKING’ INDIANS 6 ‘SHOOT GANDHI’ 7 HIMALAYAN AND OTHER ADVENTURES 8 INDIAN ENTANGLEMENTS 9 HITLER AND BOSE 10 ‘THE INDIANS ARE LUCKY’ ENDNOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ‘W AUTHOR’S NOTE ell, 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. T 1 ENTER THE THIRD REICH he 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. O 2 IN MEIN KAMPF ne 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