Hitler and India: The Untold Story of his Hatred for the Country and its People by Vaibhav Purandare

Author:Vaibhav Purandare [Purandare, Vaibhav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

7

HIMALAYAN AND OTHER ADVENTURES

Alittle over a year before the Second World War broke out, a team of Germans wearing muddy boots landed entirely unobtrusively, and almost surreptitiously, along the eastern borders of India. Were the Germans there to scout for spots for a sabotage mission in case peace with England did not work out and a conflict became inevitable? Were they looking at the Raj’s vulnerabilities on one of its most precious territories, or at the possibilities of tying up with some of India’s eastern neighbours for an alliance that might prove to be strategically and tactically useful in the short and medium term? Did they want to gauge the readiness or the mood of the Indian soldiers recruited by the British for the defence of India?

Nothing of the sort, really. The Germans had landed to find out for themselves the exact source of the origin of the Aryan race.

This expedition was the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer or head of the SS, the Nazi force whose insignia of the double thunderbolt had created terror across Germany. Himmler was the chief of all of the German police in the Nazi regime, whose men were in supreme control of the concentration camps which had begun to spring up from the very year in which Hitler had come to power. The first concentration camp had come up in Dachau just outside Munich; their number had gradually increased and they were to gain an unforgettable notoriety in the years still to come.

Right from the beginning, India was very much a part of the Aryan race theory. The Indo-Germanic group of languages had established a philological link, and racial supremacists had come up with their own twisted theories to make the case for a people of ‘superior blood’. Even if Indians had suffered on account of what the racialists termed as miscegenation, might not some remnants of the original be found, at least somewhere close to it, was the question. This is where Tibet came into the bizarre picture. Those who swore by the idea of white Nordic geniuses were either taken in, or at least extremely familiar with, the story of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where apparently the heaven-sent people of the purest blood had lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this island city had allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt. All of God’s rather superhuman gifts to humankind that had somehow survived had supposedly moved on to more secure spheres. The region of the Himalayas was on this shortlist of regions of refuge, and Tibet in particular was one of the all-time favourites because it was famous for being ‘the roof of the world’, as far away from any ‘sinking’ feeling that a race whose rightful home had been swallowed up by the sea could possibly get.

Most of the Nazi leaders were enthusiastic believers in such scarcely credible theories, but Himmler definitely went the farthest of them all. In 1935, he set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe or The Bureau of Ancestral Heritage.

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