There were a lot of newspaper reports in those days about a certain Subhas Chandra Bose, who was trying to organize Indian soldiers from the British army who had been captured in North Africa into a legion to serve the German war effort. At first the Indian Legion was a unit of the Wehrmacht, the German army, but it later became part of the SS. Subhas Chandra Bose, born 1897, was one of the leaders of the Indian independence movement, along with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1938 he was elected President of the Indian National Congress (INC). He was Nehru's main rival in the INC leadership. While Bose argued that the best way to achieve independence was to form an alliance with the Axis powers, Nehru took the view that independence could not be achieved against the power of Great Britain but only by working with Britain. Bose died in a plane crash in 1945. (In other versions he died in a submarine.) After the war the British tried several officers of the “Jai Hind” (Bose's movement) before a military tribunal on charges of treason, high treason and desertion. But they were acquitted. Subhas Chandra Bose is still very popular in India. They said that Bose had even been received by Hitler. Pictures of the first “Jai Hind” volunteers were published in the newspapers. Among them were a lot of dark-skinned Indians who hardly looked any different from me.

Now I understood Nazi racial policy even less than I had before. On the one hand non-white people were persecuted, and on the other they were welcomed with open arms if they joined the war on the side of the Germans. What were the selection criteria? Other people were asking the same questions. The commentaries and editorials provided the answer: irrespective of their appearance, Indians belong to the Indo-Germanic race, and their language, Sanskrit, goes back to the language of the Aryans, and so they are Aryans too. Period! By this criterion the Sinti, so-called “Gypsies”, must also be “authentic” descendants of the original “Aryans”. Their language also goes back to Sanskrit.