Loading Now

Explaining the shifting alliances of World War II – Firstpost

Explaining the shifting alliances of World War II – Firstpost



On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. A week later, on May 8, the Germans formally surrendered. The war in Europe was over. All across France, people marched in celebration of “liberté”. On the same day, the local Algerians marched in the town of Sétif in French North Africa, demanding independence. The French authorities called in the air force. Over the next few days, at least 6,000 Algerians were massacred. So where was the “liberté” for them?

Almost everyone in India knows that Netaji went to Germany to take help from Adolf Hitler. Does that make Netaji a “Nazi collaborator”? Most Indians would say no. We would say that Netaji was just fighting for India’s independence. But how will we explain this to a foreigner? If joining hands with Hitler does not make you a Nazi collaborator, then what does?

To make sense of this, we have to think about how Netaji would have seen the Second World War. Germany was Britain’s rival. For generations, Indian nationalists had looked towards the Germans for help. During the First World War, they had hatched what came to be known as the Hindu-German conspiracy. It was a plot to bring down the empire through a revolt in the British Indian Army, from Lahore to Singapore. Netaji was simply doing the same thing during World War II. From his exile in Japan, Rashbehari Bose had written to Savarkar about the opportunity to liberate India with outside help. Savarkar showed these letters to Netaji, when the two met in Bombay in 1940. By the time Netaji arrived in Tokyo in 1943, Rashbehari Bose and others had formed the Indian National Army. Netaji then took charge of the organisation.

The challenge then is this. Where is the Indian view of the war? While they call it a “world war,” others look at it only from a European point of view. And the European version makes the Europeans look good, as much as possible. In their story, Hitler comes out of nowhere. He fools the Germans and makes them do terrible things. So all other Europeans get together and fight a war against Hitler. After the war, the Germans quickly realize their mistake. And thus the Germans become good and noble Europeans again.

But the real story is a lot more complicated. For one, we can barely tell who was on which side during the war. Were the Communists fighting against Hitler? For the first two years of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was actually an ally of Hitler. The affinity between Communists and German imperialists is nothing new. The Soviet revolution of November 1917, including Lenin himself, had been funded by the German imperial government. But the Communists had to switch teams in 1941, when Hitler suddenly broke their pact and invaded the Soviet Union.

But the Communists were by no means the only ones playing the game of constantly shifting alliances. We are told that France was one of the victors of the war. But that is mostly made up. From 1940 to 1944, France was ruled by a pro-Nazi regime, with a dictator rather similar to Hitler. In Philippe Pétain, France had its own fascist dictator. France also deported Jews to Nazi concentration camps. The fascist government of France had been recognised by everyone from the United States to the Soviet Union, and even the Vatican.

Especially the Vatican, in fact. Hitler and Mussolini were just two of several Catholic dictators in Europe at the time. There was the fascist Pétain in France, Franco in Spain, Schuschnigg in Austria, Salazar in Portugal, and Pavelic in Croatia. And all of them had some kind of arrangement with the Catholic Church. In Slovakia, the dictator Josef Tiso was a Catholic priest himself. In Croatia, the fascist Ustase murdered half a million Serbs and forced hundreds of thousands of people to accept Catholicism. In 1929, Mussolini had personally handed over control of Vatican City to the Pope. The crowning achievement of the Vatican was its accord with the Nazis in 1933, after the Catholic Party voted in German Parliament to make Hitler dictator. The Vatican’s ambassador to Nazi Germany was crowned the next Pope.

Why was the Catholic Church doing this? Because they saw fascism as a bulwark against Communism. As a result, these dictators were quite popular in other parts of the world with large Catholic populations. Such as in Ireland, where the Irish Republican Army collaborated with Nazi intelligence. The Kennedys, who were both Irish and Catholic, were sympathetic to Nazi Germany. In Canada’s Catholic and French speaking province of Quebec, there was a strong support base for the ideals of Franco and Mussolini. As a student activist, Pierre Trudeau, the future prime minister of Canada, had led one such fascist youth organisation.

But the goodwill for Hitler and Mussolini was not limited to Catholics. Mussolini had been in power since 1922, and Hitler since 1933. During this period, both enjoyed a large following on the world stage. Many of the infamous Nazi race science theories, including segregation and mass sterilisation, did not begin in Germany. They were developed by American thinkers in the early 20th century. From there, they became popular among European elites. The prince of the Netherlands joined the Nazi party. One of the most embarrassing episodes in British history is the mad scramble to stop their own King Edward VIII from joining hands with Hitler after leaving his throne!

Other members of the British aristocracy who were admirers of Hitler included Lord John Reith, the founder of the BBC. Popular authors such as P G Wodehouse and public intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw were equally supportive. The lyrics of the wildly successful 1934 musical ‘Anything Goes’ provide a glimpse of popular culture at the time: “You’re the top! You’re Mussolini.” Even across the Atlantic, Mussolini had an admirer, in President Roosevelt himself!

The attitudes towards fascism did not change completely even after the war began in 1939-40. When the Americans landed in North Africa, they appointed an admiral from Pétain’s fascist government to run the French colonies. In place of Mussolini, they propped up Badoglio to rule Italy. Another fascist who had been responsible for the genocide of 1,50,000 Africans in Libya and Ethiopia. Can there be good fascists and bad fascists? If you ask the Americans, yes. Also if you ask the Communists, who promptly joined the government of the fascist Badoglio.

By 1944-45, the Germans were clearly losing the war. And almost everyone who had been with Hitler was claiming to have fought against him in some way or another. Romania, France, Hungary, Finland, everyone. Even Austria, though it was Hitler’s own country of birth. By then, the world was divided into two new camps, a Soviet camp and an American camp. And whichever superpower you signed up with would believe your story. Even East Germany claimed to have been fighting against Hitler all along. They put that in their school textbooks. As for West Germany, their new President had personally voted in Parliament to make Hitler the dictator of Germany. But now, he too was “clean.”

Today, we often speak as if Nazism and Fascism are exactly the same thing. But they were two separate political forces, who formed an alliance in 1939. Before that, they had often been bitter enemies. For example, in 1934, when the Nazis assassinated Engelbert Dollfuss, the fascist dictator of Austria. Finally, in 1938, the Nazis managed to overthrow the fascist government in Austria and take power. Ironically, Hitler’s effort to take over Austria had been supported by the Left wing social democrats. Mussolini and his fascists were furious. But they realized it would be better to forget all about it and form an alliance with Hitler anyway.

After the war, the fascists were mostly left alone. Franco continued to rule Spain till 1975. Salazar’s Portugal was welcomed into NATO at its founding in 1949. The head of the Catholic Church during the fascist regime in Croatia was honored at the European Parliament in Brussels even in 2o23. On the other hand, the Nazi government in Germany was removed. This was despite objections from Churchill, who had planned to join hands with remnants of the Nazi government to fight a new war against the Soviet Union.

This is the recurring theme of the 1930s and the 1940s. Alliance, war, betrayal, and then alliance all over again. In these conditions, imagine trying to judge Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who was just trying to free his country of 330 million people from colonial rule.

There is also a lesson here for Indians today. The great war was just another chapter in the power struggles between expansionist global forces: Communism and the empires in the Christian and Islamic world. During the First World War, the Ottoman Turks had allied with Germany and Austria. But before that, the Ottomans and the Austrians had been enemies for five hundred years.  Hitler himself was an ardent fan of Mustafa Kemal, the father of modern Turkey.  As part of its power struggles, America has allied with radical Islam before, such as in Afghanistan, against the Communists in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, America became an enemy of radical Islam. But as the wheel of history keeps turning, they are likely to ally with each other again. Perhaps we are already seeing this in our neighborhood in Bangladesh.

Who always suffers in this unending power struggle between Christian, Islamist and Communist forces? People like us Hindus. And the Jews. This might explain the natural sympathy that many Indians feel for Israel. If that was not enough, these global forces pounce on us with insulting labels from their own power struggles and factional fights.  They constantly accuse Indian nationalists of being “fascists” or “Hindu Taliban.” Incidentally, they do the same to those who long for a Jewish homeland. But terms like “fascist” do not apply to the Indian context. Apparently, Hindus should not express their sense of nationhood because of factional fights between Catholic authoritarians in Europe, radicals in the Muslim world, and Communists.

Because what is “fascism,” really? It is a conservative Christian political force. Sometimes, they are allies of Communists against other Christian empires. Sometimes, they are allies of Britain and America against Communism. And what is Taliban? Sometimes an ally of Western liberals, sometimes their enemy. What could Hindus possibly have to do with this?

The shaming of Bose as a “Nazi collaborator” follows a similar path.  Indians are supposed to bear the moral burden for the unending power struggle between Christians, Islamists and Communists. And we should never let that happen.

Abhishek Banerjee (@AbhishBanerj on “X”) is an author and columnist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.



Source link

Post Comment