Hitler and his Hand in the Freedom of India
Adolf is a character much reviled in the West. Most people there talk only of his "crimes" and opine that he did no good at all. This is a biased view and one that should never be followed. In India many people have a different perception of Hitler and now some historians have concluded that perhaps Hitler did have some effect on the freedom of India.
I am reminded of a small incident when I was very young. My grandfather would relate tales to me as to how he and his friends secretly listened to Nazi radio broadcasts at night and exulted when they heard of the advance of the German army. When Tobruk fell, a few of his friends and and he got together and celebrated the victory of the German army with a small drink of wine in the dead of night. Those were the days of the Raj and it was forbidden to listen to Nazi radio broadcasts. He also remembered listening to the broadcasts of that great India war time leader Subhash Chandra Bose, promising to free India.
I relate this to state that the Indian people were not against Hitler per se and as I have already pointed out many are veering to the view that Hitler lost the war but he so emasculated England that he reduced it from Great Britain to Little Britain. The fact is Churchill won a Pyrrhic victory and lost the where with all to control " the brightest jewel" in the British empire. In fact within 2 years of the end of the war, the British packed up and left India. Mind you, it was not because of the Satyagraha movement of Gandhi, which in any case was going on for 30 years, but the reality that the Indian army and Navy were now suspect and could not be used to control India. Much of the credit must go to Subhash Bose who sided with the Axis powers. His meeting with Hitler in May 1942 was thus a watershed in world history. Bose who was under house arrest escaped to Germany via Moscow and was greeted by Von Ribbentrop the German Foreign Minister and a government in exile was recognised by Japan and Hitler.
A weakened England after the war tried to control India , but the Indian Navy mutinied in 1946 and all Officers were shot dead( mostly British). Units in the India army also resented the show case trial of 46 of their comrades in the Red Fort on charges of waging war against the king. The British had hoped that the trial would be like the Tokyo Tribunal, but here popular resentment was articulate against the trial and though the men were court-martialed and given stiff prison sentences, the writing was on the wall that the days of the Raj was over.
Churchill now decided that British troops must be sent to India, but England had no troops to control India and the USA refused to intervene. The British economy was in shambles and rationing was on in the UK.. The people were struggling and then Churchill was defeated and Clement Attlee came to to power. He at once realised that the British could no longer hold India by force as the Indian army was now in a different mood. Many units of the army had mutinied and England had no troops to control India . Worse was the economy as the UK was now bankrupt., The man who reduced the UK to this state was Adolf Hitler. Even in death Hitler saw to it that English victory was bitter. English rule that in 1938 looked good for another 200 years , collapsed inside 2 years after the end of the war.
The war was thus a factor and Hitler and Japan a bigger factor in the demise of British rule. Hitler will remain a figure of importance in world history, but for his fight and the emasculation of the UK, Indians would perhaps still have been singing " God save the Queen".
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