Soldiers from India fought bravely for Britain, a country it owed nothing, during the second world war. While I didn’t know this, it’s not too surprising that there was a subset of Indian soldiers who allied themselves with the Japanese in an attempt to drive the British out of India. I say this isn’t surprising for a few reasons. With something like a billion people, you can find a large number who would be willing to support almost anything. A dislike of an occupying force leads to sometimes unpalatable alliances. Finally, if you’re a prisoner of war of the Japanese, or trapped in Japanese-controlled Asia, then fighting a battle outside of the main thrust of the war might have seemed a pretty decent option, whoever it may have appeared to help.

What’s new to this (so new I can’t find a reference in Wikipedia, which almost means it didn’t happen) is that as well as the ‘Indian National Army’ in Asia there was the ‘Free India Legion‘ in Europe, made up of Indian soldiers captured by the Germans. They fought briefly in Holland and France, before being captured and sent back to India. The FIL was founded by Subhas Chandra Bose, who, after seeing that Hitler really wasn’t a stand-up kind of guy, went to Japan to found the INA.

Indian Nazis – sounds like a bad science fiction comic, don’t you think?

I recently watched a documentary about the stripping of Jewish wealth by the Nazis running up to and early in the second world war. One of the companies it looked at is Fromms, currently the second largest condom manufacturer in Germany* and at one time the largest. In 1916 Julius Fromm invented a way to make seamless condoms. Until that time condoms were moulded, which made them both thick and seamed (ribbed, but not for your pleasure). In fact, and brace yourself for this, they were sufficiently resilient that they were reusable.

By 1938 it was obvious to Fromm that it was time to leave, so he put his business up for sale for a million Reichsmarks – somewhat less than the business was worth, but not a terrible deal. Perhaps because all the potential purchasers also knew that change was coming he was unable to sell ‘legitimately’, and in the end was forced to sell to Hermann Göring’s godmother, Baroness Elisabeth von Epenstein. Let me repeat that; Hermann Göring’s godmother used to be Germany’s biggest condom manufacturer.

(*i.e. they are the second biggest company. I have no information about the size range that they offer.)