2-611-952 - Keystone Archives/Heritage Images

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel inspecting troops, France, World War II, c1944. Inspecting a troop of mixed soldiers of the Indian Legion on the Biscay coast. Rommel (1891-1944) was one of the foremost German generals of the Second World War. The Indian Legion was a unit of Indian soldiers raised in Nazi Germany in 1941. It was originally conceived as a force to liberate India from British rule by Subhash Chandra Bose, the Chairman of the Indian National Congress who escaped British house arrest in India and fled to Berlin in 1941. Initially attached to the German Army, in August 1944 it was transferred to the Waffen-SS. The Legion's troops were drawn from Indian students resident in Germany and from prisoners-of-war from British units captured by the Germans under Rommel's command during the North Africa campaign.