Romain Hayes,Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany – Politics,Intelligence and Propaganda,1941–43

Reviewed by: Stefan Ihrig, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, Israel

Subhas Chandra Bose was one of Gandhi’s rivals for political power and leadership in the late 1930s and 1940s. In a rather desperate bid for leadership he reached out to Hitler and Mussolini. At first he did so on visits but then ended up staying in Berlin in the early 1940s. Romain Hayes tracks Bose’s stay in Germany as well as his thoughts about the Nazis and the Italian Fascists, their policies as well as their potential as allies for India. While the book is immensely important in correcting the cult and myths around the ‘Netaji’ in India and is a significant contribution to Indian twentieth-century history, it is also noteworthy for the history of Nazism, the Third Reich and of World War II.

In seven fascinating chapters Hayes traces Bose’s attempts to get first Italy and then Germany into his camp. At one point Hayes judges that Bose was ‘prepared to do just about anything to liberate India’ (46). It appears as if strategic considerations rather than ideology were the guiding momentum in what unfolds in the pages of this book. German plans for India, or rather for an invasion of India, only began to emerge when Hitler was pondering what to do after a successful conclusion of Operation Barbarossa (39). In the end, the protracted failure of Barbarossa led to a non-materialization of all (possible) Nazi policies on India. The progress of the war also led to Japan gaining the initiative and ultimately to Bose (apparently) dying in Southeast Asia. Personal antipathies led to a warm relationship between the anti-British Ribbentrop and Bose, which of course had only limited impact given Hitler’s wish to reach an agreement with Britain. Ultimately, the only tangible results of Bose’s stay in Nazi Germany were the establishment of a Free India Centre in Berlin active in anti-British propaganda and the training of Indian POWs as Indian detachments in the German war machine. Bose’s continued lobbying for Hitler to publicly take back his negative remarks on the Indians in Mein Kampf failed, as did his attempts to expedite a forceful Tripartite declaration on India.

But beyond realpolitik and the progression of the war there was a very specific German and Nazi background to the topic, largely neglected by Hayes. The Nazis were certainly not forced to make up their mind about India suddenly after Bose came to Berlin as Hayes somewhat suggests (147). Indeed Hitler’s remarks on the Indians in Mein Kampf already point towards a specific ‘Nazi tradition’ in relation to India. There Hitler attacked certain ‘childish’ fantasies in ‘folkish circles in 1920–21’ about the Indian nationalists, their tactics and possible successes (Mein Kampf, London 2001, p. 601). Hitler’s objections to Germany learning from the Indians were mainly racially motivated. But apparently these fantasies had also taken root in Nazi circles as Hitler felt the need to address them repeatedly in his career, notably many years later in an article in the Illustrierter Beobachter (7 September 1929). India had been in the news during the formative years of early Nazism and had been integrated into the major political topics and debates of the time. In the early post-World War I years it had often been placed alongside Germany together with other ‘victim nations’ in a German nationalist press bent on showing how evil and imperialist the Entente powers still were after the Great War was over. When Hayes cites Third Reich propaganda on the ‘rape of the eastern’ or ‘smaller nations’, these were also echoes of, if not direct quotes from early Weimar anti-Entente media discourse about the ‘Entente rape of nations’. In this discourse the Germans, Indians and others – most notably the Turks – shared a common fate of oppression at the hands of the Entente, but both the Indians and the Turks began to take their fate into their own hands much more quickly than the Germans, to the astonishment of German nationalists. When Hayes mentions that Bose was surprised by the appreciation for Gandhi in Berlin (45), this could have also been an echo of such earlier pro-Indian and pro-Gandhi Nazi tendencies. Ribbentrop’s reluctance to dismiss Gandhi’s non-violent tactics out of hand (43) also makes more sense in this context. And even though Hayes mentions Hitler’s anti-Gandhi reproach aimed at Otto Strasser (4) in passing, he neglects this wider context, which could not only have added immensely to the overall narrative of the book but might also have offered a more explanatory context for Bose’s very limited success in Berlin, despite all the sympathetic reactions from his German counterparts.

Strangely enough it is only in the last paragraphs of his book that Hayes points out that the ‘most troubling aspect of Bose’s presence in Germany is not military or political but rather ethical’ (165). He then goes on to discuss Bose and the ‘darker side of the Nazi regime’ (166) on merely two and a half pages and in a rather apologetic fashion. Is it really enough to claim that had Bose been exposed to the ‘darker side’ of Nazism, ‘he would have reacted with revulsion’ (166)? From the beginning Bose had reservations about Nazism. Still he sought to ally himself with Hitler. Is a reference to Bose’s ‘protected’ life in Berlin really enough to absolve him of making multiple deals with the devil? It rather appears that Bose’s reservations about the Nazis and his alleged pro-Soviet sympathies would have equipped him rather well to see so much more of Nazism’s dark side than is recounted here. The need to excuse Bose on this point is not entirely convincing after reading through the previous 170 pages of Hayes’s book. Nonetheless it is a fascinating read, and one which enriches our understanding of the various histories it touches upon.