Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany

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On the morning of 3 April 1941, 'Orlando Mazzotta', a man posing as an Italian diplomat, walked up the steps of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. The Under-Secretary of State, Dr Ernst Woermann, immediately received him and listened carefully as he spoke of establishing a government-in-exile and launching a military offensive. The government he had in mind was Indian and the target of his offensive was British India.

'Orlando Mazzotta' was in fact Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian leftist radical nationalist and former President of the Indian National Congress who had escaped a few months earlier from Calcutta. Bose is one of India's national icons, practically on a par with Gandhi, a hero of anti-colonial resistance against the British who established the Indian National Army in order to recruit Indian soldiers to fight the imperial power. His activities in Nazi Germany – particularly taking into account their inevitably highly controversial implications – merit scrupulous, scholarly and detailed study, yet even today almost everything published on the subject has been suffused with hagiography. This book is the first to focus exclusively on Bose's interactions with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Hayes's objective is to reveal a lesser known aspect of Nazi foreign policy and to challenge and provide an alternative to Gandhi-centric portrayals of the Indian independence movement. His book is augmented by a fascinating selection of hitherto unpublished photographs.