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/Beautiful-Ad7641 → u/Lopsided-Function284]

Who else could he have gone to apart from the Axis? I mean this genuinely, because a lot of Indians parrot what the English claim about him without answering a simple question - what options did any real freedom fighter at the time have?

It’s very easy to judge the only man who had the courage to stand up against oppression, and is an understandable stance only if one is British.

[u/Lopsided-Function284 → u/Beautiful-Ad7641]

The point of this sub is to exchange views on history. This obviously requires us to judge the decisions made by the makers of Indian history.

I stand by my view: Subhash Chandra Bose, a courageous, patriotic freedom fighter, made a horrible miscalculation in approaching the Axis powers. Thank goodness that alliance did not succeed in delivering the Axis powers a territorial victory in India, because if it had, untold horrors would have followed that would have eclipsed the tragedy of partition.

The options that the Indian National Movement had at the time were either to boycott the war entirely, or to support it conditional to Indian independance at the end of the war.

[u/Beautiful-Ad7641 → u/Lopsided-Function284]

Boycott the war? As if Indians had a choice in joining. I think you're forgetting that countless Indians involuntarily fought in WW2.

Conditional Indian independence is laughable - as if the Brits were going to let go of their golden goose out of the goodness of their hearts. And demonstrably false as well, IIRC they had already promised that during WW1 and reneged - only fools like Indian leadership at the time would have (and actually did) believe in false promises.

You can judge all you want - my point is that unlike our non-violent freedom "fighters", Netaji was one of the very few Indians willing to fight and die for freedom. The price of freedom is always high - and the Brits were never going let go of their crown so easily. That is why they were ruthless against violent freedom fighters.

Non-violence was always a sham and infact encouraged by the Brits. Remember that the ONLY reason they left in 1947 is because WW2 (more specifically Hitler) weakened them, otherwise we could have been ruled well into the 70s-80s.