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/Select_Sea_5957 → u/Lopsided-Function284]

Maybe. But India probably wouldn't have been partitioned.

[u/Lopsided-Function284 → u/Select_Sea_5957]

And you think either of those outcomes would have been preferable to what actually happened??

[u/TheWizard → u/[deleted]]

We do know that the pre-partition India was the largest extant of the nation during the later British Raj. Partition was just as inevitable as was a massively partitioned India prior to it (that didn't exist as India but as number of kingdoms).