Thousands of Indians fought for the Nazis.
In the spring of 1941, the leader of the militant anti-British Indian liberation movement, Subhas Chandra Bose, went to Germany to seek support for his cause. This resulted in the creation of the Indian Legion of the German army. Made up of some 2,000 captured Indian soldiers who had fought for the British in North Africa, they hoped to be sent to liberate India. At its largest, the Legion numbered around 4,500.
For much of the war, they did not see action and were kept for purely propaganda value. But in 1944, they were handed to the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi party, with whom they eventually saw limited combat. While Indian nationalists sought Nazi help, they did not align with fascism. Hitler believed that British rule in India was justified on racial grounds, so unlike other “foreign legions” of the SS, it was an alliance of convenience rather than of shared values.