210 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
prisoners- of- war being held since early 1941 in a camp at Annaberg,
near Dresden, before Netaji himself came to persuade them to switch
their allegiance to the cause of free India. The ac tual recruitment had
to await the transfer of the majority of the prisoners taken in North
Africa, who were being held in Italy, and a formal decision by the Ger-
man war of fice to permit the raising of an Indian legion. Once this
permission came, toward the end of 1941, a second and larger training
camp was established at Frankenberg, later moved to Königsbruck,
in Saxony. The Legion at Frankenberg was under the Reserve Forces
headed by General Fromm, who, like Trott, would later be executed for
his involvement in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
Recruitment into the Indian Legion was entirely voluntary. The pro-
cess began slowly, in December 1941 and January 1942, with the non-
commissioned of fi cers among the prisoners doing their best to prevent
the ordinary soldiers from enlisting in the legion. The call of pa tri otic
duty met with obstacles: the soldiers had taken an earlier oath to serve
their British masters, and they were concerned about the well- being of
their families in India. It required all of Bose’s powers of persuasion to
create the nucleus of India’s army of liberation.^22 The fact that the In-
dian civilian population in Europe was quite small also made it dif fi-
cult to bridge the gap between anticolonial politics and the military
mentality. In the end, no more than four thousand of the nearly seven-
teen thousand Indian prisoners- of- war in German and Ital ian captivity
agreed to join the Indian legion.^23
The Free India Center was formally inaugurated on November 2,
1941, at Liechtenstein Alee 2, in the Tiergarten area of Berlin. The
green, saffron, and white tricolor of the Indian National Congress
was adopted as the national flag. The image of a springing tiger, remi-
niscent of the eigh teenth- century anti- British warrior Tipu Sultan of
Mysore, replaced the charkha (“spinning wheel”) in the middle, though
Bose would revert to the Gandhian symbol in Southeast Asia. After
in de pen dence, both the charkha and the tiger would give way to the
Asokan chakra (“wheel”), evocative of the ancient Maurya Empire. A
Tagore song—“Jana Gana Mana Adhinayak Jaya He,” seeking divine
benediction for India—was chosen by Netaji as the national anthem;
this choice would be ratified by the Indian government after in de pen-