In the final months of the Second World War, as his unit retreated in the face of Allied advances with barely a shot fired, Karl Hoffmann, the German linguist and SS officer, developed a ritual.
Once a day, he would put on breezy swing records from the 1920s and dictate magazine articles in bad Urdu while caressing the hair of his typist, a fervently Nazi corporal from Hamburg.
Such was life in the “Tiger” legion, a chaotic and largely ornamental body of roughly 3,000 soldiers from British-ruled India who had mostly been captured in the North Africa campaign and recruited to the Wehrmacht.
