Adolf Hitler and India
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Hatred for Indians
Vaibhav Purandare, August 17, 2021: The Times of India
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 April 17, 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.”
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.”
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”. 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. 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”.
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”. 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”. 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. 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”.
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.
Extracted with permission from Hitler and India: The Untold Story of His hatred for the Country and its People (published by Westland Non-Fiction)
