There is a file sleeping on the shelves of the British Library on the Euston Road. It is a document from the India Office, the administrative heart of British rule in India, one of the files of Indian Political Intelligence. Close attention was paid to enemies of the Raj and a network of informers and intelligence officers sent reports of conspiracies and rebellion from across the globe.
File 6303/22 contains a surveillance report on what it calls the ‘Conference of Orientals at Munich’. It claims a group of anti-imperialist freedom fighters – from India, Ireland, North Africa, Turkey and Syria – met in a suburban Munich villa in December 1922. Their purpose: to plot coordinated and violent uprisings across the British Empire. Their host: ‘the Extremist leader of the Germans in Bavaria’, Adolf Hitler.
Joshua De Cruz will look at the file in detail and attempt to answer the many questions it poses – questions about Hitler’s early political career, networks of resistance across continents, and patterns of political violence.
Up Next in Season 1
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Women and the Vote: Was 1918 the End ...
1918 is hailed by all as one of the most significant years in providing democratic citizenship for the people of the United Kingdom, when Parliament approved that women could vote in a general election for the first time. Of course, this was a limited success since only certain women aged 30 and ...
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Psychiatric Asylums: From Haunted Pas...
Psychiatric Asylums were the main form of mental healthcare in the UK for over a century. These large buildings located on the urban fringe were set up as places of refuge, only to become urban legends of maltreatment and abuse, reviled by many. From the 1960s there was a policy of mass asylum cl...
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Mothers, Housewives and Secret Agents
France 1944, a lone aircraft deposits an individual by parachute into the cold darkness of Nazi occupied Europe. Highly trained in the art of sabotage, disguise and subterfuge, they are a crack shot with a pistol and trained to kill with their bare hands. The figure lands rather ungraciously, rem...
