Hitler's secret Indian army
23.09.04, 23:52 GMT
By Mike Thomson
BBC News

In the closing stages of World War II, as Allied and French resistance forces were driving Hitler's now demoralised forces from France, three senior German officers defected.

The information they gave British intelligence was considered so sensitive that in 1945 it was locked away, not due to be released until the year 2021.

Now, 17 years early, the BBC's Document programme has been given special access to this secret file.

It reveals how thousands of Indian soldiers who had joined Britain in the fight against fascism swapped their oaths to the British king for others to Adolf Hitler - an astonishing tale of loyalty, despair and betrayal that threatened to rock British rule in India, known as the Raj.

The story the German officers told their interrogators began in Berlin on 3 April 1941. This was the date that the left-wing Indian revolutionary leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, arrived in the German capital.

Bose, who had been arrested 11 times by the British in India, had fled the Raj with one mission in mind. That was to seek Hitler's help in pushing the British out of India.

Six months later, with the help of the German foreign ministry, he had set up what he called "The Free India Centre", from where he published leaflets, wrote speeches and organised broadcasts in support of his cause.

By the end of 1941, Hitler's regime officially recognised his provisional "Free India Government" in exile, and even agreed to help Chandra Bose raise an army to fight for his cause. It was to be called "The Free India Legion".

Bose hoped to raise a force of about 100,000 men which, when armed and kitted out by the Germans, could be used to invade British India.

He decided to raise them by going on recruiting visits to Prisoner-of-War camps in Germany which, at that time, were home to tens of thousands of Indian soldiers captured by Rommel in North Africa.

Volunteers

Finally, by August 1942, Bose's recruitment drive got fully into swing. Mass ceremonies were held in which dozens of Indian POWs joined in mass oaths of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

These are the words that were used by men that had formally sworn an oath to the British king: "I swear by God this holy oath that I will obey the leader of the German race and state, Adolf Hitler, as the commander of the German armed forces in the fight for India, whose leader is Subhas Chandra Bose."

I managed to track down one of Bose's former recruits, Lieutenant Barwant Singh, who can still remember the Indian revolutionary arriving at his prisoner of war camp.

"He was introduced to us as a leader from our country who wanted to talk to us," he said.

"He wanted 500 volunteers who would be trained in Germany and then parachuted into India. Everyone raised their hands. Thousands of us volunteered."

Demoralised

In all 3,000 Indian prisoners of war signed up for the Free India Legion.

But instead of being delighted, Bose was worried. A left-wing admirer of Russia, he was devastated when Hitler's tanks rolled across the Soviet border.

Matters were made even worse by the fact that after Stalingrad it became clear that the now-retreating German army would be in no position to offer Bose help in driving the British from faraway India.

When the Indian revolutionary met Hitler in May 1942 his suspicions were confirmed, and he came to believe that the Nazi leader was more interested in using his men to win propaganda victories than military ones.

So, in February 1943, Bose turned his back on his legionnaires and slipped secretly away aboard a submarine bound for Japan.

There, with Japanese help, he was to raise a force of 60,000 men to march on India.

Back in Germany the men he had recruited were left leaderless and demoralised. After mush dissent and even a mutiny, the German High Command despatched them first to Holland and then south-west France, where they were told to help fortify the coast for an expected allied landing.

After D-Day, the Free India Legion, which had now been drafted into Himmler's Waffen SS, were in headlong retreat through France, along with regular German units.

It was during this time that they gained a wild and loathsome reputation amongst the civilian population.

The former French Resistance fighter, Henri Gendreaux, remembers the Legion passing through his home town of Ruffec: "I do remember several cases of rape. A lady and her two daughters were raped and in another case they even shot dead a little two-year-old girl."

Finally, instead of driving the British from India, the Free India Legion were themselves driven from France and then Germany.

Their German military translator at the time was Private Rudolf Hartog, who is now 80.

"The last day we were together an armoured tank appeared. I thought, my goodness, what can I do? I'm finished," he said.

"But he only wanted to collect the Indians. We embraced each other and cried. You see that was the end."

Mutinies

A year later the Indian legionnaires were sent back to India, where all were released after short jail sentences.

But when the British put three of their senior officers on trial near Delhi there were mutinies in the army and protests on the streets.

With the British now aware that the Indian army could no longer be relied upon by the Raj to do its bidding, independence followed soon after.

Not that Subhas Chandra Bose was to see the day he had fought so hard for. He died in 1945.

Since then little has been heard of Lieutenant Barwant Singh and his fellow legionnaires.

At the end of the war the BBC was forbidden from broadcasting their story and this remarkable saga was locked away in the archives, until now. Not that Lieutenant Singh has ever forgotten those dramatic days.

"In front of my eyes I can see how we all looked, how we would all sing and how we all talked about what eventually would happen to us all," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3684288.stm

It ain't really secret, lol. Azad Hind Fauj actually liberated north-eastern part of India, and were almost at the frontier of Bengal (today, would be Bangladesh).
If Bengal fell, the Raj would fall, because Calcutta was capital of British India.

Actually, work was quite easy for the Azad Hind Fauj. Their ranks only swelled exponentially in numbers. Bengalis, Punjabis, Pashtuns were the original groups in the Azad Hind Fauj, the entire British Indian army was ready to switch sides immediately as the Azad Hind Fauj came in.

By the way, Azad Hind Fauj's literal translation would be Free Indian Legion, but Bose named it Indian National Army. Today's army still carries the same name, a tribute to the martyrs that had almost liberated India.

Also, if Bose had succeeded, India wouldn't have been Partitioned, left-wing revolutionaries don't believe in religious non-sense.

It is funny that he allied with the Nazis though. It is somewhat good that the Nazis failed, I would rather have had Britain win the war in give India its independence, than Germany doing so and carrying out genocide in India.

http://india_resource.tripod.com/hist-2nation.html

Just deleted.

funny, thats the same way we thought of you.

From an Indian standpoint, these men(the volunteers) should be considered heros to their nation.

They placed there true loyality with their motherland, and not with the racist British Empire, which exploited and "raped" their nation for several hundred years.







...I Don't Want To Start Any Blasphemous Rumors...

...But I Think That God’s Got A Sick Sense Of Humor...

The rather amuseing thing is that Hitler has no intention of allowing a free India, he was perfect prepared to allow Bose to cause troble but his vision of the post war world would not allow for the destruction of the British Empiere. He would have keept it in a tight orbit around Nazi Europe but not dismantled it. Bose was nothing more then a tool to keep the Brits distracted

"As things turned out, however, the Indian Legion came to a rather sad end. First, the Russians stopped the German advance at the battle of Stalingrad. This, combined with the defeat at El Alamein, meant that the Germans would be unlikely to get anywhere near India. Second, after Bose left Germany in 1943, the Legion was left without an effective leader to look Out for them. They were absorbed into the German army and deployed in France. Now they knew they weren't going to be fighting for India's freedom, and their morale and discipline disintegrated. Many deserted, some joined the French resistance, and the rest disappeared in the chaos of the German retreat.

Bose's biggest frustration in Germany had to do with diplomatic recognition. He wanted Germany to officially recognize India as independent, and him as the leader of a government in exile. This the Germans refused to give him. The reasons lay partly in apathy, partly in the Master Race mentality, and partly in the peculiarities of Hitler's vision of the post-war world.

Hitler was not entirely comfortable with the idea of helping Indians - whom he saw as racially inferior - to defeat the British. The British were Aryans, after all. In his own way, Hitler admired the English, and through much of the war he continued to hope that he could come to some kind of an understanding with Britain: essentially, that Germany would get a free hand in Europe, and England would get to keep most of its empire. He was perfectly willing to use Bose to make trouble for the British, but he had no long-term interest in India's future, one way or another."

Among other evils which being unarmed brings you it causes you to be despised - Niccolo Machiavelli

http://www.savethebritishforces.org.uk

Drk said it all, actually, I was reading Mein Kampf, Hitler is very pro-British, for its very white supremacist policies in the world, and he says that he does not wish for India to be freed from British rule very specifically.

Bose was a great man fighting for a great side, but he took help from the wrong guys, or we can also say, that the British were racist colonists, that coincidentially got embroilled in a war with fellow white racists.

http://india_resource.tripod.com/hist-2nation.html

If you read the 3rd book of Mein Kampf (the Mein Kampf published then and today only contain 2 books, the 3rd was not published until the 1960s), his hope for the future was an alliance with Italy and Great Britain. Pretty much the whole book is on that.

Henrik

KING WITHOUT THE CROWN

Late on the night of January 16, 1941 Subhas Bose dressed as a maulvi with a beard, fez on head and long coat. He was driven out of a house in which he was on remand and escaped to Dhanbad. He had assumed the name of Mohammed Ziauddin. From Dhanbad across UP, Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, he entered Afghanistan as a Muslim pilgrim. He made contact with the Italian legation, took an Italian name — Orlando Mazotta — and was smuggled out to Soviet Russia. From Moscow, he was flown to Berlin in April 1941. It was from Nazi Germany’s radio that the world heard that Subhas Bose had thrown in his lot with the Axis powers – Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and monarchist Japan under military dictatorship.

Bose was neither a communist nor a fascist. He was single-minded in his quest for freedom for India and was willing to join any power at war with India’s British rulers. To him, the means of doing so were of marginal importance; what mattered was the end. That put him at variance with the two men who mattered most in India’s struggle for freedom — Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi was the king-maker. He had his differences with both Nehru and Bose. But in the end he decided to put the crown on Nehru’s head. Why?

This is the theme of Reba Som’s latest book, Gandhi, Bose, Nehru: And the Making of Modern Mind. Reba has published many books on Indian politics. She is the wife of Himachal Som, Indian ambassador to Rome and mother of Vishnu of NDTV. She is an exotic beauty and has as beautiful a voice as a face. Her cassette of Rabindra Sangeet was released last year.

Gandhi had a common bond with Bose and a firm attachment to Hindu faith and tradition. However, Bose’s Hinduism was quite different from Gandhi’s. Gandhi was a Vaishnavite, a strict vegetarian, teetotaller and propagated non-violence. Bose was a Sakta, worshipper of Kali and Durga. Being an upper middle-class bhadralok Bengali Kayastha, he was a meat-eater. This often created problems for the Bose household when the Mahatma came to stay with them in Calcutta. They had to get a herd of goats which were first examined by Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai. He peered into their faces and chose one with a chaste look before she was milked for Bapu’s breakfast.

Bose also did not believe in passive resistance; few Bengalis did. For them fight for freedom required use of bombs and pistols, as had been used by Bengali terrorists of the Anusilan Samities and the Jugantar Party. Bose’s mentors were not Gandhi but Vivekananda, Aurobindo and C.R. Das. He believed in building corps of men and women volunteers who were physically fit, putting them in military uniforms and disciplining them like soldiers. More than this, Bose took on Gandhi’s candidates at Indian National Congress elections and won. He had to pay the price for his audacity. Nehru was careful enough never to get into confrontation with Bapu and became his favourite son.

Nevertheless, when Bose arrived from Germany and surfaced in Japan to re-organize the Indian National Army, he became India’s hero number one. Nehru kept his cards close to his chest and refrained to comment on Bose and the INA, till he was sure that Bose had been killed in an air crash in 1945. He cashed in on the people’s enthusiasm for the Azad Hind Fauj and addressed mammoth meetings all over the country, defending officers of the INA against charges of treason. He was a more astute politician than Bose.

One of the “ifs” of recent Indian history is what would have happened had Bose arrived in India as a conqueror for freedom? There is little doubt he would have put Nehru out of the picture. His great strength were his Hindu roots but without any anti-Muslim prejudices displayed by many of our Hindu netas of today. Bose was not an obscurantist; he was forward-looking and would have speeded up modernization of the country because by temperament he was also dictator.

Reba Som’s book makes fascinating reading. The issues she deals with are now of academic interest but nevertheless compel the reader to fantasize where India could have got under the leadership of a dynamo like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.



http://india_resource.tripod.com/hist-2nation.html