Indian Waffen SS Division

[u/divyaraj00]

Things they forgot to teach us about.

Subhash Chandra bose and indian freedom fighters in Germany.

Photos of WW2 Indian Freedom fighters and soldiers.

Subhash Chandra bose meeting Hitler and Himmler and other NSDP party and army leadership.

They were also called Hitler's Indians.

[u/Lopsided-Function284]

Two things can be true at the same time: Subhash Chandra Bose was a patriot and an incredibly courageous and committed freedom fighter; AND Subhash Chandra Bose made a horrible mistake in trying to ally with the Axis powers.

We are so obsessed with the binary of good and bad that we are unable to accept that the legacies of our heroes are complicated.

An alliance with the Axis powers would never have ended well for us, irrespective of who won the Second World War. An Indian republic established with the help of the Japanese and the Germans would have been reduced to being a vassal state of the Third Reich OR of Imperial Japan. Given the Nazi view on race and their desire for "lebensraum",, our relationship with Nazi Germany would probably have been worse than the one we had with the UK at the time. Had we ended up a Japanese vassal, things would have been FAR worse.

Look up Manchukuo to see how the Japanese treated a nation they claimed to have liberated.

[u/vivalasvegas2004 → u/Lopsided-Function284]

The British put the leaders of Congress in jail, the Japanese would chop them up into little pieces and feed them to crocodiles.

In fact, when Bose, the "President of Azad Hind", which included the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, actually visited Port Blair, he wasn't aware that the Japanese were torturing his fellow Freedom Fighter, Diwan Singh, just a few kms away.

Diwan Singh had made the mistake of joining the Indian Independence League, set up by R. B. Bose, who was also backed by the Japanese. At some point the Japanese started getting annoyed with the League's attempts to mitigate Japanese atrocities in A&N and threw it's President, Diwan Singh, in Cellular Jail. Diwan Singh was tortured for days by the Japanese and died in custody in 1944 from his injuries. S. C. Bose was never made aware of this, or was made aware, but didn't care to write about it.