Ludwig Alsdorf (1904-1978) is primarily remembered as a scholar of ancient and medieval India. This paper examines a little known aspect of Alsdorf's career: his role as an expert of modern India in Nazi Germany. Alsdorf, who was in India from 1930 to 1932, joined the NSDAP and a few of its subsidiaries after 1933. Political contacts as well as his claims of having "first-hand experience" of India secured Alsdorf writing assignments that aimed to fulfil the regime's political objectives. In return, he gained professional advancement and the reputation of being an authority on modern India. This paper reviews Alsdorf's trajectory within the NS state by focussing on the following aspects: the ways in which Alsdorf offered his knowledge of India to the Nazi regime; the material and symbolic resources that he received in return; the relative importance of political affiliations, professional networks and academic accomplishments for Alsdorf's career; the "politics of the past" practised by Alsdorf and some of peers after 1945; and the (re)presentation of the "uses" of Indology in the "Third Reich" and in the Federal Republic of Germany by Alsdorf and his colleagues. This paper reviews Alsdorf’s trajectory within the NS state by focussing on the following aspects: the ways in which Alsdorf offered his knowledge of India to the Nazi regime; the material and symbolic resources that he received in return; the relative importance of political affiliations, professional networks and academic accomplishments for Alsdorf’s career; the “politics of the past” Alsdorf’s political utility, manifested through the strategic deployment of his knowledge of modern India, was rewarded by various centres of power in the National Socialist state with improved professional prospects and greater influence. Finally, this article looks at the “politics of the past” which Alsdorf engaged in. This entailed a retrospective refashioning of his trajectory during the Nazi period, which helped his rehabilitation in the post-war West German academia. The issue is not only about purely linguistic questions, but also about the problem of the original home of Indo-Germans which enjoys national political significance today.” 24 For Hoffmann, Indology was synonymous with the study of Aryanism and the question of the “original homeland” of the Aryan people, which provided political capital to the Nazi regime. For Franz Taeschner, professor and director of Oriental Studies at the University of Münster and an expert on Islam, the usefulness of Indology was related primarily to Germany’s prestige in the world. This series published books on different countries written by reputed scholars to “educate” the German people in world political affairs so that they could understand their “historical tasks,” as an article in the Nazi mouthpiece Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte claimed (Rudiger 1941 : 74–75). It is likely that Alsdorf was chosen since he had demonstrated his knowledge of modern India through his work for the Foreign Affairs department of the Deutsche Dozentenschaft . This influential work propounded a binary narrative of fair skinned Aryans invading India and subjugating the dark skinned aboriginals, who were allegedly physically and intellectually inferior (Roy 2016 : 218). The political message of Indien was in tune with Nazi propagandistic overtures towards various British-ruled countries, deploying anti-British nationalism and indigenous insecurities. Alsdorf used such tropes by denouncing the British in India due to their “unrestrained brutality and cruelty which has also shocked us in Ireland and Palestine” (Alsdorf 1940 : 61). Alsdorf justified Nazi racial politics while castigating British colonialists as racist. Indien was deemed to be of “exceptional political importance” by the Nazi party and its second edition was prepared at the “Führer’s personal interest.” 34 The success of the book ended all doubts about Alsdorf’s commitment to Nazism with a finality that his manifold political gestures had failed to attain. More importantly, it demonstrated his “political usefulness” for the “Third Reich.” Conversely, Alsdorf’s position as a member of the academic elite who possessed first-hand knowledge of India imparted an unique intellectual authority to the book. 39 The memoranda written by Alsdorf provide an idea of which aspects of contemporary India were considered “politically significant” by the German government. Particularly important were the opinions and activities of the leaders of the INC. Apart from Gandhi, whose personality and political ideology towered over the party even after he formally renounced his membership, Alsdorf regularly reported on other prominent Congress politicians as well. Alsdorf kept watch across the political spectrum on both the left and the right of the centrist faction that dominated the INC. His obituary mentions his early academic works related to Jainism and discusses his prolific academic writings after 1945 (Bruhn 1990 : 5–13). His wartime writings on modern India are acknowledged only through a few innocuous lines (Bruhn 1990 : 6). An editorial note in the same volume mentioned that the three books on modern India written by Alsdorf were meant to provide information to Nazi political circles. However, he “did not make any concessions to the ideology of the Third Reich (Bruhn et al. 1990 : ix).” In this way, the political significance of Alsdorf’s writings on modern India was expunged. Ludwig Alsdorf, German Indology and Indian Anti-Colonialism This article has examined Ludwig Alsdorf’s role as a scholar serving Nazi political goals, for which he received professional advancement. It has also studied the complicated relationship between institutional and “practical” knowledge and the Nazi state as far as the academic discipline of Indology is concerned. Alsdorf deployed his knowledge of India to fulfil a set of cultural political aims of the Nazi government.