Adolf Hitler is rightly remembered as one of the darkest figures in modern history. His rise to power, his ideology of racial supremacy, the atrocities of the Holocaust, and the global war he unleashed led to destruction on a massive scale. For Europe and the Western world, he is the ultimate symbol of evil. But when we shift our lens toward the colonized world — the billions living under brutal European imperialism — history begins to look more complicated. For them, Hitler wasn’t the only villain. In fact, the war he started inadvertently created the very cracks that would lead to the collapse of the colonial empires.
Before World War II, most of Asia, Africa, and parts of the Middle East and the Caribbean were under European rule. Britain, France, the Netherlands, and other imperial powers controlled vast territories, enriching themselves through centuries of exploitation, violence, and resource extraction. The British Empire, for example, ruled over 400 million people and extracted trillions in wealth from India and other colonies, all while maintaining strict racial hierarchies and suppressing dissent. These powers built their empires not through benevolence, but through bloodshed — through wars, massacres, famines, and forced labor. This domination was often justified by a claim to moral and racial superiority.
When Hitler launched his campaign of conquest in Europe, his actions were condemned by the very powers that had done similar things — but outside Europe’s borders. Hitler’s ideology of racial supremacy horrified the Western world, yet those same nations had long imposed racial hierarchies on their colonies. Hitler’s invasions of Poland and France drew global outrage, yet the British and French had done the same to vast parts of the world and faced little moral reckoning for it. What separated Hitler from the colonial powers was not necessarily his actions, but that he turned those same ideas and methods back onto Europe itself.
Ironically, Hitler’s war significantly weakened the European colonial empires. Britain and France were devastated economically and militarily by the conflict. Their resources were stretched, their global dominance challenged, and their control over colonies severely shaken. Once-proud empires found themselves relying on colonial soldiers to fight their battles, while promising reforms and future freedoms they had no intention of delivering. After the war, they no longer had the strength or legitimacy to suppress independence movements rising across the colonized world.
Across Asia and Africa, nationalist movements saw their chance. In India, the independence struggle gained unstoppable momentum, leading to freedom in 1947 — just two years after the war. In Indonesia, Vietnam, Algeria, Ghana, and dozens of other countries, similar movements erupted. The chaos and exhaustion caused by Hitler’s war opened a door — and the colonized walked through it. While Hitler never intended to free anyone, the world he helped break made it possible for the oppressed to fight for their own liberation.
More importantly, the war shattered the myth of European superiority. Hitler’s genocide and militarism exposed what racial supremacy really meant — not just in Germany, but everywhere it had been used to justify power. The difference was, in Europe, it was condemned; in the colonies, it had long been accepted. After World War II, it became harder for colonial rulers to speak of “civilizing missions” or “moral duty” without exposing their own hypocrisy.
So, from the perspective of colonized nations, Hitler was indeed a villain — but not the only one. Those who claimed to fight him in the name of freedom had denied that same freedom to others for centuries. The Allies claimed moral superiority, but their own histories were soaked in the blood of empire. The truth is, colonized people were trapped between two forces: a rising fascist power and declining colonial ones. Neither fought for their liberation. Yet, ironically, the conflict between them created the conditions that made independence possible.
This isn’t about glorifying Hitler. His crimes are undeniable. But it is about telling the fuller story — one where colonial powers are not treated as heroes simply because they won a war, and where the long-suffering voices of the colonized are not left out of the historical narrative. The end of colonialism was not a gift from benevolent empires or a side effect of global peace. It was a result of struggle, strategy, and seizing opportunity in the aftermath of empire’s fall — a fall that Hitler, unintentionally, helped accelerate.