By 1942, there were many Indians in the POW camps of the Germans. These Indians were fighting in the British Army against the Germans. Subhash Chandra Bose visited Germany at that time and organized a Free India Legion army by converting these POWs into soldiers swearing allegience to Hitler. But later Bose abandoned them and moved to Japan. .
Finally, by August 1942, Bose’s recruitment drive got fully into swing. Mass ceremonies were held in which dozens of Indian POWs joined in mass oaths of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. These are the words that were used by men that had formally sworn an oath to the British king: “I swear by God this holy oath that I will obey the leader of the German race and state, Adolf Hitler, as the commander of the German armed forces in the fight for India, whose leader is Subhas Chandra Bose.”
I managed to track down one of Bose’s former recruits, Lieutenant Barwant Singh, who can still remember the Indian revolutionary arriving at his prisoner of war camp. “He was introduced to us as a leader from our country who wanted to talk to us,” he said. “He wanted 500 volunteers who would be trained in Germany and then parachuted into India. Everyone raised their hands. Thousands of us volunteered.” [Hitler’s secret Indian Army. (via World in the times of Sridhar)]
They were being used by Subhash Chandra Bose, who equally believed that India should of joined Japan in fighting the British in Burma, naively thinking that Japan would act as liberators, but in reality they would’ve traded one colonial power for another. Bose, whatever his contributions to India’s independence, was a crackpot.