Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

I could speak of other representatives of that Aryan élite in which I salute the forerunner of a higher—healthier, stronger, better, more beautiful—mankind, and the hope of the world. For I have met many more in the course of these few months. And I have come in contact with one or two here, in this prison, among the political prisoners—in spite of all efforts on the part of the authorities to keep me apart from them—and . . . strange as this might seem, among the members of the German staff also. (These are not “supposed” to have anything in common with our Ideology. But many more people share it than the authorities think, among those who are the least expected to.) However, the few instances which I gave, especially the two last ones, are enough to illustrate what I mean by an all-round élite.

  Almost the only Aryans today within the pale of the Indian caste system, the Brahmins, are styled by the members of the other castes as “bhu-deva,” or “gods on earth.” Some of them, but extremely few, are worthy of that title. It is here, in ruined Germany, among the genuine National Socialists of the dark days of trial, that I have met men and women who are, in the full sense of these words, glowing instances of the eternal greatness of the master race—living “gods on earth.”

  I have often tried to imagine what our world would look like if National Socialism, rising again, were not only to hold its own in Europe but to dominate the whole planet, for centuries. Along with an absolute separation of races, there would be an accepted racial hierarchy, the purest Aryans being naturally at the top, in other words a “caste system” extending to the whole of mankind—“each man in his place” according to the divine decree of Nature, the will of the Sun, to quote one of the oldest hymns that can be ascribed to any individual author with certainty183; something like that which we see in India to this day, but on a far wider scale and—if Germans or any other Northern Europeans are to manage the world—something infinitely better organised. And no more of those international religions of equality but a worldwide return to the different national heathendoms with, at the most, above them all—uniting not merely all human beings, but all life, each creature at its level—the worship of the Life force embodied in the Sun. How I would welcome such a world! And when I recall that splendid German National Socialist minority which I love and admire, I cannot help wishing, from the bottom of my heart, to see it one day rule the earth in its length and breadth. More than ever now, it is worthy to rule. More than ever now it is worthy to be called, by the rest of mankind, a minority of “bhu-deva”—“gods on earth.”

  Chapter 10

  DIVINE VENGEANCE

  “Figure-toi Pyrrhus, les yeux étincelants,

  Entrant à la lueur de nos palais brûlants,

  Sur tous mes frères morts se faisant un passage,

  Et de sang tout convert, échauffant le carnage.

  Songe aux cris des vainqueurs; songs aux cris des mourants,

  Dans la flamme étouffés, sous le fer expirants.”

  —Jean Racine184

  “Was folgte, waren entsetzliche Tage und noch bösere Nächte—ich

  wußte, daß alles verloren war. Auf die Gnade des Feindes zu hoffen konnten höchstens Narren fertigbringen oder—Lügner and Verbrecher. In diesen Nächten wuchs mir der Haß, der Haß gegen die Urheber dieser Tat.”

  —Adolf Hitler185

  It was in Bonn on the Rhine, hardly more than a week before my arrest.

  I had walked into a café to have a cup of hot coffee, and especially to find a relatively peaceful corner in which I could sit and write, undisturbed as long as the owner of the place would allow me to stay. And there, I made the acquaintance of a comrade unlike most of those whom I had met up till then, in Germany or elsewhere; of an awe-inspiring elemental force in human garb—a typical beer hall “tough.”

  He was sitting at a table drinking with another man. I could not help noticing him as I walked in. He looked like one of Hermann’s warriors disguised in shabby modern workman’s clothes. His head and shoulders were those of an aurochs of the Germanic forests of old. In his pale, greyish-blue eyes shining under bushy eyebrows; in his broad forehead; in his red square face, in his thick mouth, half-hidden under a fiery blond moustache, and in his powerful chin there was strength, and will, and thoughtfulness too, no doubt. But not the will and thoughtfulness of “a” man—of an individual; rather those of a whole multitude just awakening to consciousness; of a mighty, primitive, silent, invincible multitude of which he was the mouthpiece.

  The other man, with more regular features but a far less expressive face; better dressed, and less boisterous—less “barbaric”—looked, by his side, like an individual; an average individual of the dying world of today. In this rough one, lived the soul of the ancient Hercynian Forest, and the soul of the happy German factories of the days of resurrection; “the old and the new,” I thought; “the Germany that never died.”

  I much wished to talk to the man. But, of course, I did not. I only sat as near as I could to his table instead of taking a place in the corner. I ordered a coffee, took out my things, and started scribbling the beginning of a paragraph. It is the man who talked to me—as though his instinct had told him he should.

  “Writing your school task, Madam?” he called out to me after a while, over the heads of half a dozen other customers. I looked up and smiled.

  “I am too old to write school tasks; am I not?” said I, jokingly.

  “Then, it must be love letters,” replied the man. I laughed, this time, wholeheartedly.

  “Goodness no!” said I. “I never wrote love letters. It is only a book.”

  “Oh, oh, a book! What sort of a book?”

  And without giving me time to answer, he asked again: “Do you mind if we come and sit at your table?”

  “Surely not. You are both welcome.”

  So the two men got up, took their beer with them, and sat by me. As they were coming, I could see that the one who had spoken to me was as tall as I had presumed. But one of his legs was maimed. The aurochs was a wounded one. And there was, to me, something heartrending in the sight of that huge strong body that had been broken.

  “What are you drinking with us? A glass of beer?” said the man, as he and his companion sat down.

  “With thanks.”

  “And now,” he continued, “tell us what your book is about.”

  “Germany today,” I replied.

  At once the expression changed on the rough, red, square face. In the man’s eyes, I read an earnestness that had not been there before.

  “Were you here in the beautiful time—before the war?” he asked me.

  “Alas no. I wish I had been,” said I. “But I was not.”

  “If you have never seen those grand days, then you cannot realise all the difference with now. And you cannot write about present day Germany.”

  The man was probably right, I thought. And once more, as I recalled in a flash those glories that I have not seen, my heart ached with a feeling of inexpiable guilt. Once more, the knife had been thrust into the old wound. Yes, why had I come so late?

  I looked at the man sadly and said: “It is true that I was not here then. I have never seen either the magnificent yearly Party rallies, or the parades of the Hitler Youth through the streets; nor have I heard the Führer’s own voice address the German people (save on the wireless). All these years, I was ten thousand kilometres away—in India. But I have studied the Movement as much as one can from far. And I also had, directly, ample news from here that most people were not lucky enough to have. My husband was the owner and editor of the only National Socialist periodical in India, The New Mercury, a fortnightly publication to which every German in the country was to subscribe, by order of the German Consulate in Calcutta. The magazine was banned as early as 1937.” (I could say that much without betraying anybody’s secrets or my own; for these were all known facts.)

  The man gazed at me with immensely increased interest. His eyes sparkled.

  “Oh, oh,” said he, to his companion, “have you h
eard this? By Jove, it is worth hearing!”

  And, turning to me before the other one had had time to put in a word, he said: “Of course, in that case, it is a little different. You are not one of those foreigners who come over here either to exploit us or to pity us—a plague on them! And even if you had not the privilege of being here in the grand days, you know the truth.”

  “Don’t I!”

  “And you tell the truth, in that book of yours?”

  “I hope I do.”

  “And what is your dominant impression of Germany as you see it today? Do you like us?”

  “I admire you,” I replied, with the spontaneity of conviction: “I admire you—the real, faithful Germans, I mean—even more than I did in glorious ’40; even more than I did in ’42, when I was waiting to welcome your armies in Delhi after what I had expected to be a triumphal march through Russia.”

  The man’s face brightened into a most sympathetic smile.

  “You are right,” he said, “quite right. We are good people: hard-working, honest, kind, and peace-loving. We never wanted this war. It is those swine from abroad who forced it upon us. You know that, don’t you? And we would have won, too. For although we love peace, we fight well, when we must. We would have won, had it not been for the traitors.”

  “I know. Three times the Führer offered England an honourable peace, and his collaboration in the building of a happy Europe. And three times she refused—obeying the orders of her masters, the Jews. I know it is no fault of yours. And . . . can I speak still more frankly? Will your friend here have no objection?” I said, alluding to the other man sitting at our table.

  “He? Surely not. He is an old comrade. With us you are perfectly safe.” I hoped I was. One never knows. But I spoke.

  “I can never get accustomed to the sight of the ruins.” said I. “Wherever I go, they cry out to me the story of the martyrdom of the great nation that could have arrested the decline of the superior races; saved the whole world. And the more I think of that, the more I hate those who, in or outside Germany, have worked to bring about the disaster.”

  “You mean the Jews?”

  “The Jews, undoubtedly. But still more, those Aryans who believed the Jewish lies, or who allied themselves to the forces of international Jewry for petty motives of their own; all those who, in or outside Germany, betrayed National Socialism or fought it openly.”

  “And of all, whom do you hate the most?”

  “The traitors of whom you yourself spoke a while ago: those who, in spite of being pure-blooded Germans, have secretly worked against the Führer during this war and who, now, sit in high positions, thanks to the conquerors’ protection.”

  “Good! Well said! Yes, those are the rascals that must go first, when the day of reckoning comes.”

  “I am waiting for that day.”

  “And I! And not only I—millions!”

  And the man’s eyes suddenly hardened, and I saw in them a flash of ferocity—which I welcomed. “At last,” thought I, “here is someone with whom I need not bother to moderate my style. Here is someone who will follow me to the end; someone whom the sight of that deep-seated Mediterranean barbarity of mine—that lingering trace of the immemorial non-Aryans who flourished before the Greeks and Latins on the shores of the Inner Sea—would not frighten; a Northerner who, once stirred, could match any Southern European in cold-blooded violence.”

  And I smiled.

  * * *

  The man swallowed his glass of beer, ordered another one, and then turned again to me.

  “So you have seen what those rascals have done to our poor country, haven’t you?”

  “I have seen Hamburg,” I replied; “I have seen Hanover, Frankfurt, Essen, Cologne, Koblenz, Saarbrücken; I have seen Stuttgart and Ulm. And I know the towns of the Russian Zone—Berlin, Dresden, and the others—are in the same state; that it is everywhere the same.”

  “Have you seen Düren?”

  “No.”

  “It is my native town. Not far from here. Between Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle. Can you imagine how many innocent people, men, women, and children, they killed there in one single night with their confounded phosphorus bombs? Twenty-two thousand! And not killed outright, mind you. No, but burnt alive—stuck, and literally frizzled to death, in the melting tar of the streets all ablaze, all but a few. I was there—on leave from the army—and had a narrow escape. I saw that hell with my own eyes, and will never forget it. It was on the 16th of November 1944. You should see the place now: a heap of ruins. Like the rest of Germany.”

  “I will never forget,” he again said, after a pause: “and never forgive.”

  And again, I caught in his eyes that flash of elemental ferocity.

  I smiled faintly, recalling in my mind the ever-vivid memory of my first journey through Germany, of my first glimpse of those ruins of whole cities, and of my appeal to the implacable Force Who rules the Universe with mathematical harmony—to the Inaccessible One,186 deaf to the voice of pious fear or tardy remorse: “Mother of Destruction, avenge this country!”

  “Yes,” said I, to the man, in a most sincere outburst of feelings very similar to his although they sprang from a different source, “I too shall never forgive those rascals their cruelty and their vile hypocrisy; their sitting as judges over so-called ‘war criminals,’ at Nuremberg, after having themselves done this—as though this were not a war crime far more horrible than all their alleged charges against National Socialism. I shall never forgive them their smugness, their pretences of righteousness, their lies about ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ coupled with their fanatical mania of ‘re-educating’ all those who do not believe as they do. Who are they to re-educate people, anyhow? Who are they to talk of morals, and ‘humanity’ and what not?”

  “So you hate them just as I do, don’t you?”

  “Yes, just as you do—if not still more.”

  “But you say you were in India. You have not suffered what we have suffered here. You have not seen that hell.”

  “No; but I thought of it all the time. It haunted me. I travelled from place to place not to think of it, and could not. And then came that nauseating trial—that crime, if there ever has been one. As soon as I came back to Europe, I heard them congratulating one another over it, as though it had been an act of justice—the swine! And that is not all. The savage destruction of that National Socialist Germany which I had looked up to for twenty years; the hanging of the finest men of Europe as “war criminals,” even that fades away before the one thought which I can never cast aside: the thought of what they would have done to my Führer himself—the one among my contemporaries whom I have ever worshipped—if they had been able to lay hands upon him. I shudder at the idea . . .”

  “Yes; the devils!” replied the man. And his eyes blazed. “But,” he added in a whisper, to be heard of me alone. “Don’t fear: he is alive—and in excellent health.”

  “I know,” said I.

  “And he is coming back,” continued the man, in a still lower whisper. “When the Day of divine Vengeance dawns, you will see him.”

  “Perhaps—if the Gods judge me worthy,” I replied. And my face beamed. “See him! See him at the head of the promised Last Battalion—the ‘Third Power’”—said I, recalling both spoken and printed words that had given me new life and new impetus, even after my coming to Germany. “But where is that mysterious ‘Third Power’? Do you know?”

  The man’s eyes took on an expression of superhuman ferocious joy. His face became beautiful and terrible, like that of a war god of old. “I am the ‘Third Power,’” said he, with exultation, without even caring this time to lower his voice; “I am the Last Battalion; I am the divine Vengeance that will descend upon those rascals like the lightning, and finish them forever—both the Western lot and the Eastern lot, which is even worse; I, and millions like me. Don’t expect it from abroad. No, it is here—unseen, unsuspected, but waiting, ready to strike at the first signal. It is here, and
it will come from here. It will rise out of Germany’s own soil, from a thousand places at a time, like the lava of a thousand volcanoes, that nobody can hold back, and it will roll all over Europe in waves of flame and fire before they have time to turn around. The hatred of the Nation who had done no harm to them, and whom they have tortured and humiliated, gagged, and robbed and cut to pieces—and reviled—in the sole hope that they would enjoy the earth alone; that hatred is the ‘Third Power,’ I tell you. There is no other.”—“And we need no other,” he added, emptying his glass, “That will finish them.”

  “Unless the atom bomb finishes the whole earth before,” put in the other man sitting at our table. It was the first time I had heard him say something.

  “The atom bomb will do a good deal of our dirty work for us,” replied the first speaker. “Don’t worry, my friend; the swine will use it on each other without bothering to waste it on us—it is too expensive. We will only step into their game when they imagine they are about to end it. And watch then, what happens, atom bomb or no atom bomb! Watch, for it will be worth seeing. Not like 1940, oh no! Much better!”

  And his heavy shoulders shook with a loud, defiant laughter. And his eyes gleamed with that ferocious joy that I am said to radiate, at times, when speaking or thinking of our enemies’ future abasement. I was looking at him with the admiring interest of a beautiful woman looking at herself in a mirror. Yes, that rough, uncouth, outspoken man would understand my indignation at the thought of all the sufferings imposed upon those who think and feel as I do. He would never tell me—or tell others—that I am “awful.” What a relief to meet such a one after three years of contact with squeamish humanitarians of all degrees of falsity!

  The man ordered three more glasses of beer, insisting that I should have one too, and then pursued:

  “Much better, yes! I was then in France, with the army. I marched down the streets of Paris and under their famous ‘Arc de Triomphe.’ Those were splendid days. I marched right through the country, down to the Spanish frontier. I enjoyed myself. We all did. We ate. We drank. We had a fine time. Grand days, I tell you! But we behaved as gentlemen. We did harm to nobody. More still: our iron discipline protected the vanquished against possible excesses on our part. In Lyons, I saw one of our soldiers shot for having helped himself to a wristwatch adorned with diamonds, in one of their shops. We kept order among ourselves. And we brought order to the countries we ruled. We were generous and merciful to the conquered—until, of course, they started killing us by the dozen in the streets, after sunset, for nothing at all. Then, we just had to take steps. Who would not have? We lost the war. Many of us failed to get out of France as quickly as we would have liked to, and fell prisoners to the French. I was one among them—and wounded. You should have seen how they treated us! Worse than pigs!”