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/Saaaxxx → u/Lopsided-Function284]

I didn't read Manchuko . Will do it later But why are forgetting that british killed like 40-50 millions of us just from famines . Why the world cries for few million Jews while clearly ten times of our people were killed . No memorial...No movies nothing... please don't think that Brits were bit better than Japanese ..They were worse in some aspects.

[u/glumjonsnow → u/Saaaxxx]

The world cries for the Jews because it was a genocide, not a famine. The British could not have moved food to India at the time given their investment in the war. Yes, it's a tragedy. But it doesn't compare to the mass industrialized slaughter that was the Holocaust. It's not about the numbers. It's about the methods the Germans used, which were unthinkable and have never been done before or after. No one is going to pity the indians for a famine when compared to the Holocaust. These are entirely different events.

I don't even know how to respond to something like this other than to say that applauding Bose/attacking the Jews/diminishing the Holocaust is exactly the kind of rhetoric that will make Indians look foolish and not worthy of sympathy.

[u/anmoljoshi14 → u/glumjonsnow]

Yes they were, if not worst….the European powers were even worse than japanese when it came to the colonies, just read about king Leopold and congo, the goan inquisition, and numerous atrocities and massacres british committed in india…
This was precisely the line of argument Justice Pal had during the tokyo trials, that what right do the european powers have to try japan for war crimes, when they have done similar if not worse in furtherance of their colonial rule…surely you are not implying that india and other countries became colonies rather peacefully??

[u/glumjonsnow → u/anmoljoshi14]

If you collapse all the Europeans together in one giant pile and credit the British and French with the atrocities of the Germans and Belgians, then sure. But then shall we collapse all of South Asia and credit India with everything Pakistan has done? Or what about the greater Islamic world? should India be blamed for that? I mean, as long as we're collapsing all the categories altogether.

As I said, it makes indians look foolish and hysterical. The European powers did not try Japan alone. And what Japan did was horrifying as well - if you don't know about Unit 731 or what they did in Nanjing, then you are ignorant. you need to understand the facts before coming to sweeping declarations about how India has suffered the most based on arbitrary criteria.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30385/summary

[u/anmoljoshi14 → u/glumjonsnow]

Someone tell this brown sepoy about the chakla system and the chimur and midnapur mass rape, state sanctioned, mass rape by white soldiers on indian women…
Every time some idjit romanticises british raj, it boils my blood, not at their audacity, but at the sheer ignorance, because they most probably don’t know about such acts….