Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

  The Jew’s attack on Germany—already before the war, through propaganda—had no other meaning.

  But the purpose of the short-sighted Aryan of England and elsewhere in accepting to become the Jew’s allies against the champions of his own race, was quite different. Either he was a sentimental idiot galloping off to deliver the Israelitish darlings from the clutches of the Nazi “monsters,” or else . . . he was just jealous of the prosperity of his German brothers, jealous of their productive factories, of their reorganised army; of their growing influence; of their splendid “Autobahnen”; of their clean, spacious, sunny workmen’s houses with modern kitchens and geraniums on the windowsills; of their gardens full of healthy children; of their youth parades and inspiring Party rallies; jealous of their joy and vitality—of the fact that they had somebody to look up to and love, and something to live for, while the rest of Europe and the greatest part of the world had nothing. And he hated the fortunate Germans and the superman who had brought them such prosperity and such happiness.

  And, also, he was, himself, out for plunder. For the Jew had forgotten to tell him that that was his department and that, even if his ally did grab some little profit out of Germany’s defeat, the main profit—the permanent profit—could only flow, ultimately, into the pockets of “God’s own people”; that they were to exploit not only Germany, but England and America as well—the whole world—upon the ruins of the hated Nazi system. They, and no others. Had the English and even the French Aryan realised that, perhaps he would not have fought his German brothers with so much readiness. Unless, of course, in him, the hatred bred by jealousy was greater even than the instinct of self-preservation and—widely speaking—tomfoolery over the precious Jews of Central Europe, greater than everything.

  * * *

  Some of those who fought Germany during the war are less stupid and more cynical than others.

  I was introduced to such a one—a Frenchman who now occupies in Saarland an important post in one of the German factories that the French have taken “under control” and who, during the war, played an active part in the French “résistance.” The man professes to detest Democracy, being a monarchist; and he certainly nourishes no illusions about Christianity and the Christian Churches. As for the Jews, he expressed his opinion about them to me in a joke: “Those were surely no gas chambers which your pals used in Germany,” he told me. “They must have been . . . incubators. Why, one has never seen so many ‘Yids’ all about the place as since the end of the war!”107

  I burst out laughing, for the joke is an excellent one. But I was astounded to hear it from a résistant. True, this man was as polite as if he had come straight out of the seventeenth century; and the common acquaintance through whom I had met him had introduced me as “a red-hot Nazi.” Still, I could not help thinking that this was going a little too far out of his way to please a lady.

  “But, apart from any joke,” said I—after I had finished laughing—“if you really do feel as you say about Democracy and about the Jews, then why on earth did you fight us during the war, like an idiot?”

  “We never fought National Socialism,” replied the man, to my further astonishment, “We only told the fools that we did—to make them join us.”

  “What did you fight, then?”

  “Germany.”

  “After 1933,” said I, “one cannot separate Germany from National Socialism.”

  “Perhaps. And I am sorry for that. For in that case, National Socialism had to pay the penalty for being German.”

  “I fail to understand,” said I. “The National Socialist outlook on life transcends Germany and transcends our times. It is—or should be—the outlook of every Aryan conscious of his natural privileges and proud of his race. If one realises this, one cannot fight the Man who has given his nation such an outlook; nor that nation, which is his and which he loves. Adolf Hitler has made Germany a sacred land in the eyes of every worthy Aryan in the world. If, as you say, you do not hate our philosophy, how could you raise your hand against Germany?”

  “Because she was too prosperous and too powerful, and consequently too arrogant,” said the Frenchman; “because her industries were far ahead of ours; her people healthier, stronger, more disciplined, more warrior-like, and more prolific than ours, and simply had to be our masters—unless we crushed them in time; because her armies had overrun France and were overrunning the whole of Europe; because, in the united Europe that she was about to lead and control permanently, we French people would only have had a third rate place.”

  I looked at the man in surprise. He had given me the right account of France’s war aims, the account which, in fact, any German would have given me. “Au moins,” said I, quoting Racine, “voilà un aveu dépouillé d’artifice!”108 So you would have liked the leadership of Europe for yourselves, is it not so?”

  “We wanted, first, our country for ourselves,” replied the Frenchman.

  “But in reality, you gave it to the Jews, as you yourself admit. Was not a united Europe thriving under Hitler’s strong protection far better than that—even if you people did not occupy in it the first place? Have you the first place now? Can you expect to have it tomorrow? Can you expect ever to have it? Can England herself expect ever to have it again? I hope not!—were it only as a divine punishment for rising against the inspired Leader of our age, mean, short-sighted fools you all are, the whole continent!” said I, retrospectively indignant at the idea of that collective madness that the Second World War represents in my eyes.

  The answer that came to me was so utterly cynical in its simplicity that it sounded childish—embarrassing in the mouth of a man of forty-five: “Hitler was not French,” said the Frenchman.

  Yes, thought I, and not English either, but profoundly, passionately German. And it is because you narrow-minded and narrow-hearted people could not forgive him for loving his Germany so; because you could not forgive him for being a part and parcel of his own people at the same time as one of the greatest Aryans of all ages, you turned against him! You preferred to ruin your respective countries yourselves, rather than to see a German save them. You gave them over to the Jews, who hate you, rather than see him, who loved you, rise to the leadership of a regenerated West; rather than renounce, for his sake your petty, selfish claims, your dreams of separate security—each obsolete State behind its obsolete narrow boundaries—your silly belief, as Englishmen, Frenchmen, Poles, Norwegians, Russians, Greeks, that your separate existence as administrative units is worth more than the creation of a higher humanity, Aryan in both the senses of that ancient word: in the sense of “Nordic” and in the sense of` “noble.”

  Criminal, unpardonable fools!

  “I admired him,” continued the Frenchman, speaking of the Führer. “I still admire him. No sensible person can help admiring him. But I could not follow him; not after the war broke out; not at the cost of my country’s independence. Had he been French, I would have followed him blindly wherever he led me.”

  I suddenly recalled my happy home in Calcutta sometime at the close of 1940, when Greece had just stepped into the war. My husband came to me and said: “The Greeks are now routing the Italians, but sooner or later the German army will have to intervene. Mussolini is the Führer’s ally and has to be supported. Maybe the struggle will be a bitter one. Maybe the whole country will be smashed. If so . . . will you still be on our side?”

  I had looked up to him, rather surprised that he had so little confidence in me as to ask such a question.

  “Naturally, I shall,” I said. “Why do you ask me? Why do you doubt it? Am I not as devoted to the Führer as anyone can be?” And I had explained my attitude: “Whatever the men at the head of the present Greek Government might say or do, is it not true that National Socialism has brought to life once more—and how brilliantly!—those eternal Aryan ideals of perfection (beginning with physical perfection) that have been the ideals of Greece ever since the Aryan race settled there—ever since the victory
of Hyperborean Apollo over the Python, to express history in terms of mythology? Rest assured, I shall never sacrifice the eternal to the transient, the racial values to the narrowly, conventionally national ones; the Aryan, to the narrowly Greek, or narrowly English; or narrowly Indian. I shall always be on our side—on the Führer’s side—whatever might happen.”

  My husband—that son of the oldest Aryan aristocracy of the Far South which the caste system has kept aloof and pure—was pleased and said: “I know. I only asked to see what you would answer.”

  I related this episode to the Frenchman.

  “You are Indo-European,” he replied. “I am just French.”

  “Unless you and your compatriots and the British and all other Aryans can sincerely feel themselves Indo-Europeans—Aryans—before anything else,” said I, “and accept the New Order as it is, you will have to sink down into slow decay, become Judaised, become bastardised, disappear. The truly Indo-European socio-political philosophy, National Socialism, is the only force that could and still can save what is worth saving in France as in other Aryan countries. But, of course, you can choose decay. You have, in fact, chosen decay.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” he admitted at last. “But you must agree that it is hard on us to have to choose, as you say, German supremacy or the Jewish yoke . . . while your German pals only have to prefer their own domination to that of the Jews in order to be perfect National Socialists.”

  “You have to agree,” said I, “that they are purer Aryans than yourselves, as a whole. No man with eyes to see can deny it. And they are the Führer’s people, too.”

  “I admit that my outlook is, philosophically speaking, neither as consistent nor, especially, as disinterested as yours,” declared the man at last. I laughed.

  “That is a fine thing indeed for a former French résistant to tell a Nazi in 1949,” said I; “is it not?”

  * * *

  I asked this man, who seemed so willing to tell the truth, what he thought of the dismantling of the German factories. “It is an excellent thing,” he replied.

  “What?”

  “Surely,” said the Frenchman. “The more factories are dismantled, here in Germany, the more German industry is crippled by us, the more the production of French industry increases in proportion, and the more French goods get a chance to flood the world market, in the place of German ones. Each one of the other occupants argues, on his own behalf, the same as we do—although you might not find many people in high position to tell you so as frankly and bluntly as I have.”

  “And you call that fair, in Democratic circles?”

  “That is business,” replied the Frenchman. “Business is never fair. Business means to make money at the expense of one’s rivals, that is all. But, of course, one cannot tell that to the fools, or else they would no longer be willing to play the game. To them, one speaks of ‘Democracy’—just to give them an illusion to stick up for, while, in reality, they help the capitalists of their country to become rich. One speaks of ‘fighting the fascist beast’—so that one might canalise their stupid fury against one’s rivals of dangerously prosperous countries. Business . . . War itself is nothing but that.”

  I was disgusted. For I knew the man spoke the truth.

  “And you like that sort of thing?” I asked, without caring to hide my contempt.

  “Whether one likes it or not, that sort of thing is the world—at least as it has become today,” replied the Frenchman.

  “Your world; that degenerate, ugly, venal world which we fought to destroy,” said I; “not ours!”

  And I recalled and quoted those words of the Führer: “Men do not die for business; they die for ideals.” “We National Socialists die for ideals,” I stressed; “those who fought us, fought only for business, you admit it yourself; and for other people’s business at that; for the business of your capitalists, who deceived them. How wonderful! We have every reason to hate the Jews. They are the natural enemies of all that we stand for. But you? Why should you dislike them—if you really do, as you say? Have you not much in common with them, in spite of your different blood? Are they not also just ‘businessmen,’ like yourselves?”

  “They are our rivals in business,” said the Frenchman.

  “To us, they are the parasites sapping the life-blood of the finest race on earth,” said I. “Our grievances are different, as are also our ideals.”

  And I took leave of the Frenchman after thanking him for the light he had thrown (supposing that I needed any) upon the true mentality of those who, at present, occupy Germany and persecute National Socialism.

  * * *

  Indeed, “business”—a polite word for plunder, in this particular case—is the keynote of the Allied Occupation in Germany, and the secret that lies behind and explains, directly or indirectly, all the objectionable steps taken by the foreign Powers, from the brutal confiscation of individual German property to the recent Ruhr Statute.

  The cost of the Occupation alone, steadily increasing since 1945, absorbed, in the British Zone, one third of the total amount of taxes paid by the German people in 1947, and over forty per cent after the Currency Reform of 1948, according to the memorandum which Dr. Weitz submitted to the Military Government in December 1948.109 And this large-scale robbery is by no means restricted to this Zone. The French Occupation costs, proportionately, even more, as the number of occupants (and of occupants’ families) settled in Germany is far greater in comparison with the number of Germans inhabiting the Zone. According to a declaration of General Hepp, head of the Information Department of the French Military Government in Baden-Baden, at a Press Conference in December 1948,110 there were still, at that date, 22,263 houses entirely requisitioned and 25,475 partly requisitioned in the French Zone. And in Baden-Baden alone, where “the occupying power has taken possession of practically all the main hotels,”111 German enterprise, both private and municipal, has incurred a loss of over twenty million Reichmarks, in spite of the compensations given (of which the greatest part was lost through the Currency Reform of 1948112).

  And all this is practically nothing compared to other forms of wholesale, systematic plunder to which the Allies of both East and West have submitted Germany ever since they set foot in the country: the dismantling of an enormous number of factories; the confiscation or “control” of those factories which were not dismantled, as well as of such private or public enterprises on which depends the whole economic life of the country (such as the shipping concerns on the upper Rhine113); the seizure of German goods under one pretext or another; the shameful policy of deforestation; and, at the close of the year 1948, the Ruhr Statute.

  The guiding spirit at the back of those confiscations, “controls,” seizures, etc., on the part of the occupying Powers, is a mystery to nobody. They all aim at keeping Germany forever under the economic domination of her victors of 1945. The German newspapers, however, do not dare criticise too openly the robberies of the Military Government of the Zone in which they are printed. For obvious reasons, the impeachment of the occupant of one Zone is only to be found in the papers of another one. And even so (save in the case of Russian controlled papers criticizing the Western Allies’ policy, or of the Western Zone papers criticizing the Russians), it is always a very mild and polite impeachment, springing from an alleged desire to see “truly Democratic principles” govern the life of the country. (The papers, despite the so-called “freedom” granted to them, must show that they have “learnt their lesson,” or else . . . they would be suppressed at once—and prosecuted for “attempting to keep the Nazi spirit alive” under the same Article 7 of Law 8 of the Occupation Statute under which I am, myself, imprisoned here.)

  Thus, for instance, in its issue of the 24th of December 1948, the Main-Post of Würzburg (American Zone) criticises the seizure by the French of a number of shipping enterprises on the Upper Rhine and of the property of many industrial concerns, some of which have their headquarters in the British and American Zones.114
This step “puts Württemberg and a great part of Bavaria at the mercy of the sweet will of French shipping companies for their coal supply.”115 And the factories that turn out fireproof bricks—an article of primary necessity in the setting up of blast furnaces—“are now compelled to export their products to Lorraine, thus encouraging competition to the disadvantage of the German industry of the Ruhr.”116 Moreover, states the same paper, this step had been prepared carefully ever since the time of the capitulation. From that time,

  French shipping companies had taken possession of the equipment and ships of the left bank of the Rhine. A “German Shipping Bureau” with headquarters at Mainz, was authorised to requisition the ships and to transfer them to French purchasers. The French- privileged companies, at the time of the Currency Reform, exchanged their capital at the rate of 10 Reichmarks for 8 Deutschmarks, thus realising their present capital of 12.8 million Deutschmarks. The whole coal supply of Pfalz and Württemberg is in the hands of the “Union Charbonnière” which exerts a growing pressure upon the further Bavarian country. The company is now trying to acquire vast grounds at Karlsruhe and at Heilbronn.117

  The suppression of the great industrial “cartels” had no other aim but to break the economic power that Germany still possesses, and to forward the interests of the rival French coal mining and iron and steel industries; “to fasten the grip of France upon the economy of the whole country lying between the Rhine, the Main, the Meuse, and the Mosel,” as the above quoted paper puts it.

  And this is only one instance among many. The Berlin paper Tagesspiegel, licensed by the Americans, criticises the grabbing policy of the French in no less clear although courteous terms, in its first page article of the 21st of December 1948.118 It would be easy, but tedious, to give a long list of German papers of the British and American Zones that do the same. As for the German papers of Berlin and of the whole Eastern Zone, licensed by the Russians, they do not hesitate to accuse the Western Allies of turning Germany into a “colonial country” and to characterise—and rightly so—the entire Occupation Statute of West Germany as a device to enslave the German people permanently.119 Naturally, they forget to speak—or rather are not allowed to speak—of the no less systematic and wholesale plunder of German property by the Russians, and of all the Russian regulations that constitute a no less complete enslavement of the German people in the Eastern Zone, let alone of the vast portions of territory from which the German population has been entirely removed.