by Savitri Devi
I burst out laughing, unable to stop for a minute or two. I had not laughed so wholeheartedly for a very long time. “Splendid!” I exclaimed; “Could not be more splendid! Gosh, I wish I had seen that! In what year was it?”
“In 1942, if I remember well.”
“I was in Calcutta. I know I missed a lot. But that! That alone would have been worth the voyage. I would have enjoyed myself! How did the people take it?”
“The people who were just coming out of church you mean? Why, they enjoyed themselves too. Half of them were laughing as boisterously as you are now after all these years. I stepped in from the street, and went and congratulated my old friend: ‘Well done, Herr W!’ said I. ‘That will teach him a lesson. One can’t let those treacherous fellows go about quacking whatever nonsense they please, especially while we are fighting a war,’ I said. They all agreed.”
“And where is Herr W now? Could I see him?” I asked. “I would love to meet him.”
“‘They’ took him off to a concentration camp in 1945. Since then nobody knows where he is.”
A shadow passed over my face. I thought of that frank advocate of violence in the service of our ideals, spending four years in one of those chambers of hell of which I have tried to give a glimpse in a previous chapter. Four years! And for what? For being what he is—what we all are—a man who had the courage to repudiate once for all the false values that have been forced upon the nobler races of Europe as their “standards of morality” for nearly 1,500 years, and to speak and to act according to the standards of the strong; for being a Heathen in a Christian world. And once more I felt how powerful are the forces against us. And once more I was aware how bitterly I hate them.
I know the story of Herr W is not one that will endear us to our enemies. Most of these will find the incident of the clergyman “horrible”—and find me no less “horrible” for enjoying it. But who cares what they might think? As in the first, so in this second phase of the struggle also, we are not fighting to win their approval, but to reduce them, one day, to submission. I have told the story only in order to show what an abyss gapes between us and the Christian world; to illustrate the clean, brutal frankness of our attitude compared with that of the “decent” people. None of these would have chastised an opponent in broad daylight, before everybody, as Herr W did. No. They would have remained content with being “shocked,” and would have kept silent—even if in power. They would first have made the opponent’s life a misery and then, at the first opportunity, handed him over to hostile authorities, for far worse a treatment than a few slaps and a kick in the pants. That is, in fact, the very way they have behaved towards Herr W himself. I recalled the words of Friedrich Nietzsche on a different subject: “Christianity has not killed Eros”—the god of physical love—“it has only given him poison”—defiled love.174 One could also say about violence: Christianity has not killed physical violence; it has only defiled it—made it indirect, and cowardly, and shameful.
And what powerful, elemental instinct has it not defiled, I would like to know?
* * *
Fräulein E took me to a confectioner’s kept by the Ms—good friends of hers—and introduced me: “You come back at six o’clock, when the shop is closed, and we’ll have a talk. Too many eyes are looking, and too many ears listening, during working hours. Be here exactly in time, and we will be waiting for you,” they told me. I was in time, and remained there the whole evening.
I remember the conversation. And I remember the fine faces of that man and woman who were speaking to me, and the clearness, the assurance, the conviction—and the intelligence—with which they spoke, knowing thoroughly what they were talking about, and their awareness of the eternity of our Idea. “How can these people ‘change’ us, ‘re-educate’ us, as they pretend?” said Herr M, referring to the Democrats. “How can they, now that the Führer has given us something to live for, which is at the same time eternal and understandable; something, the truth of which we need no longer ‘believe’ but can see, in all its glowing clearness, with our own eyes? Every turn of events, since 1945, is showing more and more how right we were—how right we are, absolutely, everlastingly—be it about the Jewish question, the racial principle, the right of the fittest to rule, or any other point. More Germans admit that we are right, now—in the secrecy of their hearts—than perhaps ever did before. But it is refreshing to know that at least some foreigners also continue to uphold the Idea, in spite of our defeat.”
“All Aryans should. But when all Germans did not, from the beginning, although they were told the truth, nay, although they had the privilege of having the Führer in their midst, what can one expect of other Aryans, fed on the lies of the Jewish press?”
“That is true enough.”
We talked for long hours. And for the thousandth time I compared in my mind this aristocracy of pure blood, which is at the same time an élite of character and intelligence—a real élite—with the usually-called “intelligentsia,” those idle traders in empty phrases, hair-splitters, reciters of other people’s prose, whom I know too well. “What a difference!” I thought.
Herr M introduced me to two people who rank among those who ever made the deepest impression upon me: a middle-aged man, formerly an Ortsgruppenleiter175 and now a martyr of our cause, Herr H,176 of whom I already spoke a little in another chapter,177 and a woman in her forties, Fräulein B, also one of the finest National Socialists I know. I was their guest for a couple of days.
I have hardly ever seen even a genuine Indian yogi’s face as supremely beautiful as that of Herr H—calm; radiating light and strength; loving, in an impersonal manner; all-knowing; a face that looks beyond the stupidity and ugliness of this present day world, not to a dream, not to “an” ideal, but to an unshakable certitude—to Reality; that expresses the clear, almost physical awareness of truth, without hatred, without regret, without fear.
His regular features are those of the purest Aryan. Herr H could hardly have been more handsome even as a young man. But it is not the features alone, it is the features and the invisible beaming of that face that cannot fail to impress anyone who is slightly sensitive to the mute language of the man that is, as distinct from the man that seems. When I stepped into the room, I immediately felt in the presence of someone by far my superior, as I probably would have before a genuine contemplative saint. I knew from Herr M that Herr H had spent three years in one, or rather in two, of the worst anti-Nazi concentration camps that are to be found in occupied Germany. I knew that he had, there, become a physical wreck. And I was astounded not to read in his face the slightest bitterness, let alone hatred. And when I told him how I felt about the martyrdom of Germany in general, and the persecution of such people as himself in particular, and begged him to tell me something of his experience of the chambers of hell, for my book, he replied that “thousands of others had suffered even much more” than he.
“It is a pity Herr So-and-so is not here,” he said. “He is one of those unfortunate SS men who fell into the hands of the Allies in 1945, and was interned for months in Dachau. He could tell you something, if you care to gather firsthand information about the atrocities of the Democrats. I shall introduce you to him, when you come back.” But I myself fell into the hands of our enemies before I had the time to “come back.”
Herr H, who is an architect by profession, showed me some beautiful sketches that he had drawn from life, in the camps where he was a prisoner. One was drawn on a rough piece of yellow paper, with bits of half-burnt coal from the kitchen fire. “We were not given any paper or pencils, in the beginning,” he explained to me. And yet the sketch, representing the stables where the internees were accommodated in Schwarzenborn, was executed in a masterly manner. I admired the detached mind—the mind of the real artist—that had guided the hand, in such surroundings, and on the famine diet of which I spoke in former pages. But what I admired the most in Herr H was his serenity; not the serenity of the indifferent or of otherworldly pe
ople, but that of a man whose clear vision can discern, under all the horror of darkest Europe, today and yesterday—under that very horror which has crushed his own body, ruined him, personally, forever—the irresistible action and reaction of superhuman unseen forces, bound to bring about, sooner or later, the New Order for which we stand; the serenity of a Heathen warrior, who is a sage at the same time.
I have always been convinced that National Socialism is far more able to fulfil the higher aspirations of the Western élite than the ill-adapted religion, imported from Palestine, which Europe has foolishly accepted centuries ago. If there ever was a living proof of that fact, it is Herr H himself.
On the wall, I saw the portrait of an exceedingly handsome youth. Herr H watched me admiring it. It looked like him. It could have been him when he was twenty-five. “You see there my only child,” he told me.
“How beautiful he is!” I could not help saying.
“His manly soul was as beautiful as his face,” replied the father. “The typical youth of our new Germany. He is dead, now. Died for Germany and for the Idea,” he added calmly, and proudly.
And Fräulein B, a faithful old friend of Herr H who was also present, praised the young man in her turn. She had known him well.
So Herr H was all alone. Not only his health, but his only son, too, he had lost for the sake of the great impersonal idea of Greater Germany and of resurrected Aryandom. Alone, and living most precariously in one narrow room with a friend, in the midst of a city in ruins. And, by order of the kind-hearted champions of Democracy and “humanity,” not allowed to work as an architect, or to hold any other employment. (His friend was supporting him, with great difficulty.) And yet, he could remain serene and confident, knowing that we are right, and that he has done his utmost for the eternal cause of Truth and for that of better mankind—serene and confident, without the help of any supernatural hopes or consolations; without anything to sustain him, but his faith in the immutable Laws of Life, in the divine mission of his country, in Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Aryan world for all times to come, whether his people, now, be defeated or not. Verses of the Bhagavad-Gita—that age-old masterpiece of the Aryan genius—came back to my memory: “Thy business is with the action alone, never with its fruits. So let not the fruits of action be thy motive,”178 and, “without attachment, constantly perform that action which is duty, for by performing action without attachment, man verily reacheth the Supreme,”179 and, “the wise should act without attachment, desiring nothing but the welfare of the world.”180 And side by side, I recalled the golden words written in the same spirit by our Führer—the words which I was destined, two months later, to quote before my judges, at Düsseldorf: “Our thoughts and actions must not be determined by the approval or condemnation of our epoch, but only by our firm adhesion to a Truth that we recognise.”181
I told Herr H and Fräulein B what I was thinking.
“Yes,” said Herr H, “the old and the new expressions of it are bound to be alike, for the truth upon which our Weltanschauung is built, is everlasting.” He went to a corner of the room, and started displacing a number of things in order to get out and show me the copy of Mein Kampf which he kept hidden there. While he was doing this, Fräulein B showed me a lovely portrait of the Führer carved out in a pendant of transparent, glass-like material. I took the little object piously in my hand, and gazed at it. I know the price of such remembrances of the glorious times, in Germany today. They are nowhere to be found, save in the possession of people who appreciate them. I was therefore all the more touched when Fräulein B told me, “It is yours; you can keep it.” I was overjoyed at the idea of keeping it. But I guessed she had only that one. “And still you give it to me,” I said, “although you met me but an hour ago!”
“You are worthy of it,” she replied; “that, I know.”
“May I never fail to remain so, forever and ever!” said I, as I pressed the portrait to my lips, as a sacred thing.
I thanked Fräulein B from the bottom of my heart for her present, and for the spontaneous confidence she had shown me.
“What makes you think so highly of me?” I could not help asking her, after a while. She replied: “The fact that you too are a born Heathen, like Herr H and like myself.” And she uttered the self-same words which I had so many times uttered in the course of these twenty years; the self-same words which I have repeated in this book because I am more and more convinced of their truth: “Only a thorough Aryan Heathen can make a real National Socialist.”
I wore the pendant ever since, and am wearing it now, in prison.182
We spent the remainder of the day commenting upon some of the most beautiful passages of Mein Kampf—of which Herr H had produced his hidden copy—and I tried to show how amazingly true the main thesis of the book (the racial thesis) appears to me in the light of the little history of the wide world, ancient and modern, which I happen to know. But it is my interpretation of Christianity as “the subtlest Jewish snare ever held out to the Aryan” which bound me the most tightly to Fräulein B.
“Do you know,” said she, “that even as a child I refused to sing the church hymns that alluded to Jehovah or to Israel, on the ground that I was a German and wanted no foreign religion forced upon me? How I understand your nostalgia for the Olympian Gods as well as for your mother’s old Norse ones! How I do!”
“I am glad you do,” I replied. “Only other National Socialists like ourselves have ever understood how important a part that yearning has played in my whole evolution. But fancy that the exact opposite of our attitude is to be found among some European Aryans! Have you heard of a religious sect in England whose members style themselves as ‘British Israelites’?”
“No.”
“Well, such a sect exists. The adherents, mind you, are not Jews—although some, of course, might be mixed. But I know of some who are thoroughbred Englishmen—Celts and Anglo-Saxons; Aryans. Only they try to prove—by the most spurious arguments—that they and the whole English nation are descended from some ‘lost tribe’ of Israel. Pure-blooded Aryans trying to make out that they are Jews; wanting to be Jews! Have you ever heard of such disgraceful nonsense as that?”
“Well,” put in Herr H, “they have been taught for over 1,500 years that the Jews are ‘God’s chosen people.’ Can you blame them? As you say yourself, the original crime lies in the adoption of Christianity.”
“The one before the last of the Twenty-Five Points,” said I, “although it states that the Party as such stands for ‘a positive Christianity,’ advocates ‘liberty for all religious denominations in the state, so long as they are not a danger to it, and do not militate against the moral feelings of the Germanic race.” Alfred Rosenberg has tried to explain what ‘positive’ Christianity means, and it appears to me that he has just reduced it to that basic commonsense morality which any Aryan can accept. But few people seem to be fully aware of all that is implied in the two reservations mentioned in that Point Twenty-Four: ‘any religion . . . so far as it is not a danger to the state and does not militate against the moral feelings of the Germanic race.’ Is any religion that allows marriage between its adherents irrespective of race, compatible with the existence of a State run according to National Socialist standards? And can one say that a religion that teaches that man is born in sin, and that exalts meekness and unending forgiveness as virtues, does not ‘militate against the moral feelings’ of any healthy race, let alone of the Germanic one? I wish to goodness I had been here in the great days; I would have stressed this point before those who were the most conscious of all the mischief Christianity has wrought in the world, and who happened to be at the same time in the Führer’s entourage. I would have tried, at least.”
“And they would have understood you, no doubt, and agreed with you wholeheartedly,” said Herr H. “But they could have done nothing about it yet: the time was not ripe. As for the Party as such standing for ‘a positive Christianity’ which, as you say, Rosenberg took so much tr
ouble to explain, the best explanation for it is just that it was not possible to put it otherwise in February 1920. There was plenty of all-important work awaiting us, which could well be done whatever people chose to think about religion. To attract public attention upon the enormousness of our revolution in the religious and philosophical domain also would have been disastrous at that stage of the struggle. It would have stirred doubts and caused trouble. But after victory was secured and our régime solidly established, we would have gradually brought up the new generations to think for themselves and to realise how incompatible Christianity is, as it stands, with our ideals. However, we lost the war, and thus have to wait still a little longer for this awakening. But it will come, be sure of that. It will come, for our Führer has not come in vain.”
Reluctantly, after two days, I took leave of these new friends. I did not know that I was not to see them again for a long time. We greeted each other: “Heil Hitler!”
“By the way,” said Fräulein B, “do you know how one is to say that in public without being detected?”
“Yes, I do,” I replied. And I repeated the formula which means the same to all those of us who use it, but sounds just empty nonsense to the uninitiated that might be listening.
“So you know it too.”
“Who does not? Fräulein E told me, thinking she was telling me something new. But someone else had already told me last year. I am longing to see those days when we shall be free to greet one another as we please, in public as well as among ourselves.”
“Yes; so am I. And those days will come; our intensity of purpose will bring them back—our selfless action, guided by a one-pointed will. For the time, let us wait. Heil Hitler!”
“Heil Hitler!”
* * *
