Was Hitler interested in India’s ancient spiritual culture? If yes, then why was he so hateful towards Jews?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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question was Hitler interested in India’s ancient spiritual culture if yes then why did he why was he so cruel towards Jews and other groups of people I have heard that Hitler sent a group of his scientists to India to search for means for making the astras that are mentioned in the Indian scriptures is this true answer that Hitler was interested in Indian Indian literature and was unmistakable and in this Hitler was not an exception he was just a manifestation of the overall trend of Germany’s interest in India when the Europeans came to India they discovered that India had its own ancient culture and literature which were in its own way equal to if not better than the culture that were culture and literature that had come up in Europe especially in terms of literature the Europeans were critical of Indian culture because they saw it was filled with deity worship and they couldn’t comprehend it they thought it was idolatry which is strongly condemned in the Abrahamic religions but as far as the literature was concerned and the language Sanskrit was concerned the sophistication the depth the beauty the scope of Sanskrit was so impressive that Monier Williams and Max Muller and most of the early pioneers of Sanskrit study they were immensely impressed and they said that Sanskrit is actually in many ways better than both Latin and Greek which were the ancient languages of Europe so they started exploring where did this ancient and magnificent language come from and not only was Sanskrit superior but also seen that Sanskrit had many similarities in terms of word roots and word formations to Latin and Greek so some theorists came up with the idea that that there was some other civilization from which both the European civilization and the Indian civilization had come up and this was called as the Proto-Indo-European civilization PIE or it is also called as the Aryan civilization because the Aryans were a race that was exalted in the Rig Veda and the Rig Veda has extremely fine Sanskrit and historians consider Rig Veda to be the oldest of the Vedas so now once this theory came up of the Aryan invasion theory that India was ruled by primitive people earlier called the Dravidians but later on the Aryans came and conquered India and they civilized India and those same Aryans also went to Europe and they became the forefathers of the of those who founded the Greek and the subsequent Roman civilizations so in this way through this theory they tried to create some sort of relationship now the European scholars who were sponsored by the European government did this because they wanted to promote their imperial interests that means by telling Indians that actually we are like long lost brothers and we have developed science and technology and we will help you develop they wanted to make British rule in India more acceptable but anyway once the Aryan invasion theory came up then the question came up naturally and forcefully that where were these ancient people who ruled who actually were the forefathers of both the Europeans and the Indians where were they living what was their homeland and then various countries in Europe started claiming that we are the homeland that we are that ancient race from whom whole of humanity practically has come about although these claims were not founded on much research but they immensely titillated the egos of the respective nations who came up with those claims and eventually Germany Germany which had suffered a humiliating defeat in the first world war and had suffered further because of what was considered by the Germans an extremely and unfairly harsh treaty of assails so German national ego was extremely squelched at that time and Hitler came up with the idea that the Germans were the original Aryans and through this he tried to restore the national pride of Germans and he came up with his theory that we are the people who have originally populated the whole world and we are meant to populate the whole world we are meant to rule the whole world and his whole idea of Nazi ideology was the offspring of his belief that we are the Germans are the original Aryans and in his own way he came up with the notion that the Jews and other such gypsies and other such groups have opposed the rise of the German race to glory and therefore that German race should be eliminated so thereafter the German race was German nation whole became galvanized by Hitler’s systematic and poisonous ideology and its propagation and the whole nation arose to try to conquer Europe and the whole world thereafter now and in that process he killed a lot of Jews because he felt that Jews if removed then there will be no obstacle or the major obstacle for Germany’s rise to glory will be eliminated now yes he was interested in Indian culture and Indian literature specifically but his interest in Indian literature was not to find out its spiritual essence it was to get some further evidence to bolster his claim that the Germanic race was the proto-Indo-Aryan race and now whether he actually sent the searchers specifically to find any of the astras that are mentioned in the Vedic literature that is best left for historians to debate and certainly he being belligerent wanting to fight and win would have been eager for any advantage that he could have got and he would have been definitely interested in gaining the astras to what extent he actually considered them literally possible in today’s times and what efforts he made to actualize it that is something which is debatable but it’s undeniable that he definitely had an interest in Indian culture sorry in Indian literature more specifically not so much culture and unfortunately his interest was not in the spiritual side of the literature it was only in the racial side because his idea was our race is the greatest race and in fact when Bhaktasiddhanta Thakur’s disciples went to preach first to Europe and then to Germany and then they preached in Montreal, they set up a sanctuary in Montreal and they initially received a good reception because the Germans were interested in Indian things but eventually one of Hitler’s advisors intellectual advisors he read some of the writing he read the transcripts of the talks of Bhaktasiddhanta Thakur’s disciples that had been delivered in various places in Germany and those talks clearly emphasized the spiritual side that we are not the body we are the soul and therefore whatever race we belong to doesn’t matter and he was and this German advisor felt very strongly that this was completely against the teachings of Nazism which wholly emphasized the race and from that point onwards the German government became quite hostile to the Gaudia devotees who were trying to share Gaudia Vaishnavism there in Germany so he was never really interested in the spiritual wisdom so the essential spiritual wisdom is trans-racial is trans-bodily it’s trans-worldly in fact trans-universal it takes us beyond the body to the soul it takes us beyond all the material universes beyond all of material existence to the spiritual world so Hitler was definitely not interested in that he had his own distorted view of history and to support that self congratulatory view of history he wanted to interpret Indian literature accordingly and his interest in that sense would not have led to any spiritual elevation for him neither he nor his followers were open-minded enough to go beyond their trans-racial designation to go beyond their racial designations and eventually because of the severe opposition from the from the from the Nazi rulers and further because of Bakhtansh Raku sudden departure in 1937 and the rising tensions of the war the Gaudia mission in Germany which initially seemed to have very bright prospects fizzled out and it did not attain much success till eventually Prabhupada’s disciples later on after coming to Europe and starting Krishna Consciousness through George Harrison and others in England then went to Germany and established it in a solid footing there.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.