by Savitri Devi
“I have heard accounts from other prisoners, especially from some of those who had served in the Waffen SS, and who happened to be captured at that time,” said I.
“Yes, those—our finest boys—they handled worse than any account can possibly describe. How many of them never came back from their hellish concentration camps or their slave labour settlements in the middle of Africa? How many of them, after being ‘liberated,’ were forced to sign contracts for years of service in their ‘foreign legion,’ and sent off to Indo-China and other places to die of tropical diseases? God only knows. But set them aside. We fared badly enough, we common soldiers of the Wehrmacht. I would tell you all that I went through personally, if this place were not closing at three o’clock and if it were not now nearly a quarter to three.
“Well, they kept me till the end of 1948. It is only three months since I came back home. And the oppression I have seen here—whatever be the ‘zone’—I don’t believe the world has ever seen before; not in Europe, at any rate. Nice ones to talk of ‘liberty’ and ‘justice,’ these damned Democrats! They have tied us down, hand and foot, so that we cannot move; and gagged us, so that we cannot protest, while they plunder our country right and left, carry away our factories piece by piece, cut down all our woods, take our coal, our iron, our steel, whatever we have, and make people believe, on the top of it all, that we are the cause of the war—the confounded liars!
“But I tell you, the day of reckoning is coming; that grand day that you and I, and our friend sitting here, and thousands of others are awaiting; the day when we shall see those Johnnies run for their lives, in every ‘zone’ whichever it be, and curse their destiny for ever having brought them to Germany; the day when you will see the ‘Third Power’ at work; when I shall be in Paris once more. But I shall not be the same man. And Paris will be in ruins. So will many other places that we spared this time. We will spare nothing and nobody, next time. We will show these rascals what the kind, peaceable, harmless Germans can become, when exasperated by years of inhuman treatment. Yes, they used to call us ‘sales Boches,’ and we just laughed, as one laughs at children’s naughty pranks. This time, we will not laugh. Oh, no! I, at least, will not laugh!”
And suddenly raising his voice, and rolling before me eyes that were those of a wounded wild beast maddened with pain, or those of a Stone Age war god athirst for blood—inspired eyes, in which the lust of murder (as old and as strong as the lust of copulation) shone in all its barbaric splendour—he said: “I shall spare none of these bastards, this time, when I go back as a conqueror. But I shall cut the throat of each and every one I catch, do you hear?—like that” (and, in a horrible gesture, he passed the back of his hand across his own throat three or four times) “and I shall watch their eyes beg me for mercy, and shall remain as deaf as stone and as hard as stone; I shall watch life slowly leaving them while I look straight into their faces, until the end. And that will still be kindness, compared with what I have seen them do to us, in 1944 and 1945.”
I gazed at that outburst of elemental fury in a man of my own race and of my own ideals, with that mixed feeling of religious awe and elation that had once possessed me while I stood on the slippery deck of a ship, in the midst of a storm on the North Sea, or by one of the lava streams at night on the slopes of erupting Mount Hekla.
I half closed my eyes, and smiled to bitter memories which, one day—I now knew—would seem to me like the recollection of a nightmare in the glory of daylight: the tragedy of Nuremberg; the tragedy of all Germany in ruins; and all the horror of the relentless persecution of National Socialism, of which I had seen a little, and heard a lot more. And I remembered that I had called for divine Vengeance, during my very first journey through the martyred Land. “Goddess colour of the stormy Ocean and colour of the starry night, Dark Blue One, Mother of Destruction,” I thought, as I looked at the frightful face in front of me, “hast Thou answered my call? Art Thou Thyself gazing at me through these ferocious eyes, promising me Thy slow, exact, passionless vengeance, for all those I love?”
I recalled in my mind Hekla’s thick lava, moving at the rate of three meters a day, and burning everything on its way. Equally slow was the gradual swelling of that mighty ocean of hatred against the persecutors of all I stood for; equally slow, and equally irresistible, and equally indiscriminate in its divine, impersonal destructiveness. But that ocean was conscious, to some extent. Through each one of its molecules, it could speak to me—as it did now—and I could speak to it. It understood me. For, although I stood above it, when I liked, I still was, myself, a part of it, and knew its language, and could make its rolling waves rise and rush forth at my voice.
I held out my hand to the terrible, simple-hearted “tough,” and smiled once more—not merely, this time, to the abstract idea of divine vengeance, but to him. “Right!” said I, “quite right! Oh, you don’t know how much I am in sympathy with you! But don’t forget to ‘liquidate’ these damned anti-Nazis out here, before you proceed to chastise the outer world. They are the first cause of the loss of the war, and the originators of all Germany’s sufferings.”
“Certainly! You don’t imagine that we are going to leave any of these traitors behind, do you? No fear! They will get what they deserve all right.”
But the man’s eyes softened as he took my hand in his big, rough, strong hands. He looked at me with a face in which the murderous expression had completely vanished, giving way to a frank, kind, almost affectionate smile. And, turning to his comrade, he said—while still holding my hand in his—“I like this woman. She speaks the truth.”
“And writes it!” I replied, laughing.
“Yes, I had forgotten about your book.”
“I am not speaking only of my book,” said I. “I am speaking of these. Now I know that you will not betray me, I suppose I can show you one—and give you one (or more) if you are interested . . .”
And I produced from my bag a paper about twelve inches long by eight inches wide, one of the five thousand leaflets—my latest supply—of which I had already distributed the greatest number. “But,” said I, “be careful that nobody sees you reading it.”
“That’s all right! Don’t fear.”
He unfolded it, saw the large swastika filling about a quarter of the page. “Oh oh! Here is something!” he said. He cleverly turned over the portion of the paper bearing the sacred, and now most dangerous Sign and read the printed writing:
German people,
What have the Democracies brought you?
During the war, phosphorus and fire.
After the war, hunger; humiliation; oppression;
dismantling of the factories;
destruction of the forests;
and now—the Ruhr Statute!
But, “Slavery is not to last much longer.”
Our Führer is alive, and will soon come back with untold power.
Resist our persecutors!
Hope and wait.
Heil Hitler!
S.D.
“By Jove, it is true—could not be more true!” said the man. “And you wrote that?”
“Yes.”
“And what does ‘S.D.’ mean?”
“My initials, standing for Savitri Devi. My full name is Savitri Devi Mukherji.”
The man laughed, “Written and signed, eh! That’s splendid.” “You can have a look at this,” he added, turning to his friend and handing the paper over to him. And to me, he said in a whisper: “It is a dangerous game you are playing, my dear lady. Beautiful, but dangerous. Only pray you don’t get ‘pinched’ one of these days. And now . . . another glass of beer, won’t you?”
“But . . .”
“Yes, yes, you must have one; to the success of your mission; to the return of the great days; to his return . . .”
“Right.”
“Waiter, three more beers!”
“But we are closing,” said the waiter.
“Never mind! Come along! It will not take five minut
es.”
The waiter hurried back. The man paid. We lifted our glasses, speaking in a low voice:
“To the destruction of the enemy!”
“To the resurrection of Germany!”
“To Adolf Hitler, Weltführer!”
I felt tears rising to my eyes as I uttered these words, recalling in my mind the happy time when I was expecting to see the German army break through at Stalingrad, and march through High Asia into India, along the old Conquerors’ Way, uniting the whole of the Aryan world.
“What are you thinking about?” the man asked me.
“About the glorious days.”
“They will come back,” said he, putting one hand on my shoulder; “Or rather, I should say, greater days will come; the New Order but . . . no traitors this time, and no Jews.”
The waiter came up to us, “We are closing,” he said; “I am sorry.”
“Would you like to have more of my papers?” I asked the two men.
“I would like a couple of them,” replied the one who had hardly spoken up till now. I gave him a few.
“How many have you got?” asked the other man.
“I do not know. I had, originally, five thousand. But I have distributed quite a number already. I might have a few hundreds left.”
“Five thousand are very few for all Germany,” said he. “Use them sparingly. This one you gave me is enough. A thousand people will read it. Dozens will copy it and distribute it in their turn.”
We got up. We shook hands.
“By the way,” the man said at last to me, “I did not think of asking you your nationality. In spite of your foreign accent, I completely forgot you are not a German. What are you?”
“An Aryan,” I replied with a smile. “Is that not sufficient?”
“Yes, it is.” The man also smiled.
“Heil Hitler!” said I, in a whisper, as we parted, without daring to lift my arm in salute, as we were in a public place.
“Heil Hitler!” replied the two men.
* * *
Since then, I have often recalled the more than human force concentrated in that man; the bitterness, the resentment, the hatred of a whole people that has suffered beyond measure, and that he embodies. Yes, that is the force we will let loose upon this half-ruined continent, next time.
Vox populi, vox Dei. That rough, sincere German, fundamentally good but roused to murderous violence by excess of foul treatment, is the German people. Through his voice, the blood of the unknown thousands of Germans martyred for the love of the Nazi Idea since 1945, cries for vengeance. It is a divine voice. In it, rings the spell that will bring down the whole structure both of Democracy and of Communism. Nothing can silence it, nor weaken its magic power.
Chapter 11
THE CONSTRUCTIVE SIDE
“Denn was hier verkündet werden mußte, war eine neue
Weltanschauung, und nicht eine neue Wahlparole.”
—Adolf Hitler187
“Der Nationalsozialismus ist eine Weltanschauung, die in schärfster
Opposition zu der heutigen Welt des Kapitalismus und seiner marxistischen und bürgerlichen Trabanten steht.”
—Gottfried Feder188
Carved out in Pentelicus marble above the Ionic colonnade of the “Gennadios Library,” in modern Athens, one can read the words: “Hellenes are all those who share our culture.” I do not remember and have not, here in prison, the opportunity to find out which not exceedingly ancient Greek internationalist first wrote that foolish sentence. But I am pretty sure it is the utterance of one of those many—far too many—idle thinkers, improperly styled “philosophers,” of the Alexandrian or perhaps even of the Roman period, i.e., of the time Pagan Greece was already decadent. No Greek of the classical days would have been so silly as to believe that any human being, provided he could speak Greek and quote Greek poets, and exhibit Greek manners and acquired tastes, could be called a Hellene. Even the rough, illiterate, but intelligent and manly Greeks of the darkest days of all in the evolution of the Greek people—the days of the Turkish domination—knew better than that, for they were anything but decadent. Unfortunately, it is not classical Greece, but that internationalised, levantinised, brilliant but enervated Greece of Hellenistic and still later times that influenced Rome, and, through Rome, Europe. And, unfortunately also, in addition to this unhealthy influence, came a still more pernicious one, namely that of Christianity. Still more pernicious, I say, for in the new religion, the false doctrine of the equal possibilities of all men was not only broadened, but strengthened; sanctioned on the ground of alleged superhuman authority.
It is no wonder that, when Europe ceased to be pious without ceasing to be foolish, she started seeking for the equivalent of that equalitarian inspiration which Christianity had so long given her, once more in decaying Hellenistic thought. America followed Europe, with a vengeance. Of all possible quotations from ancient Greek thinkers, the one that the super-Democrats of the New World found the most fit to figure above the pillars of the Library of the Archaeological School run by them in Athens, is precisely the one which I recalled at the beginning of this chapter. An anticipation, I suppose, in their minds; and an encouragement, also. From the depth of a past that is not very remote, but that looks so, in the eyes of a hotchpotch community hardly two hundred years old, the voice of the Greek-speaking internationalist (who might have been anything but a pure Greek himself, if he lived at the time I presume) tells them: “Yes, provided he has become familiar with the works of Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato, even a ‘Yank’ can become ‘a Hellene’—somewhat as a Pole, or an Armenian, even a Jew, settled in the USA, who speaks English, reads American papers and American novels, and enjoys American films, becomes ‘an American.’ Why not? It is culture that makes nationality. In other words, it is what one knows and what one is accustomed to think that makes what one is.”
Christianity—as all other-worldly religions based upon revelation—had gone a step further. It had set up the idea that it is what one believes that determines, finally, what one is. And still today, strictly speaking, in the Christian conception, community of culture itself is overshadowed by the idea of common allegiance to moral and metaphysical dogmas. Any man, provided he believes in salvation through Jesus Christ with all its implications, is—in theory at least—according to it, to be treated as the equal of any other man who believes the same, to the extent that he can marry and give his children in marriage in that other man’s family, whatever be his race and the state of his health. Culture comes second. But I say: “In theory at least”; for, to most people, it is still a real or supposed “community of culture” that is the more important factor of Democratic equality. Community of religious beliefs comes in, with pious individuals, as a part of the cultural link.
But, if Christianity never succeeded in uniting all men and mixing all races on the basis of common beliefs about the other world—if, for instance, to this day, it has not been able to break down the colour bar in the countries where it exists—its slow and steady influence has succeeded in making many of those who believe in “equality through culture” extend to all mankind, even to obviously inferior races, the possibility of sharing with the Aryan, sooner or later, “a common culture.” This distorted attitude is at the back of the deplorable mania of “educating the natives,” of the most non-Aryan colonial countries, along European lines. And I repeat: no man of Aryan blood could probably ever have brought himself to believe—as our Democrats and Communists do—that any people (of whatever race) can, “through education,” imbibe the modern culture of Western Europe, if centuries of Christianity had not subconsciously prepared him to do so, by teaching his fathers that all souls are equal in the eyes of the Christian God, and that souls count, not bodies.
The fact that, by civil as well as, in the case of coreligionists, by religious law, everywhere in the world save in caste-ridden India, in primitive societies admitting strict sexual “taboos,” and in countries in which an effective colou
r bar exists, anybody can marry anybody, only proves how powerfully the great international religions of equality—Christianity and Islam, both sprung from Judaism—have prepared the ground for the modern Democratic outlook, the logical outcome of which is, ultimately, Communism. The most democratic and cosmopolitan ancient Greek, for whom Hellenism meant just Hellenic culture, detached from Hellenic nationality and race, would never have gone to that length. He would never have admitted that a Chinese, for instance (highly civilised as he may be, in his own style) or an African, could “participate in Greek culture” however well he might be able to quote Homer by heart. And he would have been shocked at some of the marriages that take place in modern Europe. Humanity has greatly degenerated since the influence of Jewry—through Christianity, in the whole world, and through Islam, in the Near and Middle East and in Africa—has added itself, on an unprecedented scale, to the already existing forces of disintegration. But the root of the decay lies in the attitude expressed in the old sentence which I quoted above, i.e., in the attitude that consists of underestimating or altogether neglecting the basic physical factor in culture as well as in nationality. What one knows, and even what one seems generally to think and to do, does not determine in any way what one is. On the contrary, it is one’s physical background that determines one’s intellectual and moral tendencies and the real meaning of what one thinks and does and chooses to remember or forget. And more than one’s economical or geographical milieu, one’s physical background is one’s total ancestry—one’s race; one’s blood.
