by Savitri Devi
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It would be superfluous to expatiate in detail upon the numerous laws promulgated under the Third Reich for the protection and welfare of the labourers and small traders. In a book like this, which is by no means a technical study but just a profession of faith, there is no point in doing so. Moreover, it would be impossible for me, here in jail—systematically deprived of books and kept out of contact with the other political prisoners—to obtain the precise references which I would need for such a task.227
But the Land Reform is something too important not to be mentioned with some comments. And our Communist opponents have stressed too much in their propaganda, all that has been done in Russia and in Russian sponsored areas for “the welfare of the peasant,” for me not to say something of our efforts in the same line.
Point Seventeen of the Party Programme had laid down, already as early as 1920, the spirit and the main features of the Land Reform: “We demand a Land Reform suited to our national requirements; the passing of a law for confiscation, without compensation, of land for communal purposes; abolition of interest on land loans, and prevention of all speculation on land,”228 an explanation of which was given by the Führer on the 13th of April 1928.229 A more detailed account of the policy of National Socialism as regards land and agriculture is to be found in the Party Manifesto of the 6th of March 1930, in which the reasons why farming “did not pay” in Germany before the creation of the Third Reich, are analysed, and the new land regulations set out. These regulations, like the rest of the laws that were promulgated by or under the inspiration of Adolf Hitler, were intended to free the people—here, the peasants—from the grip of the capitalist exploiter under any form, be it the selfish middleman between the farmer and the consumer—the middleman whose extravagant profits did not allow the peasant any decent living—or the moneylender, or the commercial concerns that sold to the peasant what he required in order to carry on his work efficiently, and that were, in Germany before 1933 as in many other countries, mostly owned by Jews. They gave every facility, every possible encouragement and help, every freedom to the peasant provided that he was a German and that he worked “in the national interest.” For the land being “a home, as well as a means of livelihood,” only members of the German nation, i.e., people of German blood, were allowed to possess land in Germany, which is only natural.
“The National Socialist Party stands for private ownership,” the Führer has said on several occasions, in particular, in his declaration of the 13th of April 1928, explaining the attitude of the Party with regard to the agriculturists. And no Nazi has ever contested—as the Communists have—the right of the individual to possess property (land or anything else) and to transmit it to his children. But, “to the right to hold property, however, is attached the obligation to use it in the national interest.”230 And, in the case of land, special courts were set up to enforce this obligation. And a farmer who, through bad farming, according to the judgement of those courts, was not acting “in the common interest,” could be expropriated with a suitable compensation.
Land, under the Third Reich, could in no way become the object of speculation.231 The law concerning expropriation without compensation, “for communal purposes,” as stated in Point Seventeen of the Party Programme, was, in fact, directed, in the Führer’s own words, “against the Jewish companies given to speculation on land.”232 Whoever owned land had to cultivate it himself, or to give it up (in exchange of a compensation, whenever the land was acquired legally) for the settlement of other farmers willing to cultivate it. The State had a right of pre-emption on every sale of land, in order to see to it that no land should thus become, for somebody, the source of an unearned income. It was also strictly forbidden to pledge land to private moneylenders.233 And necessary loans for cultivation were granted on easy terms by associations recognised by the State, or by the State itself. And the dues to the State were to be paid according to the extent and quality of the land. There were no hard and fast rules regarding the amount of cultivation expected from each farmer.234 It depended largely upon local factors concerning the land itself. Laws of inheritance prevented the subdivision of land, or the accumulation of debt upon it.235 Finally, the middleman’s business was transferred to agricultural associations,236 under State control. And everything was done to raise the farming class, not only economically but also educationally.
These few details are enough to show that the National Socialist land policy was not only in no way less conducive to the peasants’ prosperity than that of the Communists (as our opponents of the Red Front like to pretend) but, indeed, far more so. It thoroughly protected the peasant’s interests without curtailing anything of his right to own private property and to inherit it, as well as to buy and sell. It left him an immense amount of initiative in the management of his own affairs, while safeguarding the interest of the community through strict State control wherever that was necessary. Nay, that very State control was, at the same time, the surest protection of the peasant against possible exploitation by clever money-makers. For what I said about the other laws and regulations foreseen in the Party Programme already before Hitler’s rise to power, is also true of those concerning land and agriculture: they were not just laws “on paper,” but were enforced. Indeed, no régime—not even the Communist—was as drastically opposed as ours to the grip of the money-makers on the land, and as ruthless in its endeavour to break it. Many of the “poor Jews” interned during the time it lasted, especially in Eastern Germany, were prosecuted not “just for being Jews,” as simple people are inclined to believe, but for dabbling in shadowy speculations on land, or lending money to farmers at exorbitant rates of interest, and so forth; for being, in one word, the exploiters of the people. Once freed from them and from their imitators, the German peasant no less than the labourer of the towns was able to work with the feeling that it was “worthwhile”; that he and his family, and the people at large, of whom he was a part, would draw the maximum benefit from his toiling year after year. Young people of all social conditions—sons and daughters of manual labourers, of professors, of generals, of humble shopkeepers, of men in high office—would come regularly and help him in the fields as members of the Arbeitsdienst, and make him realise more and more that he and they, he and the townsfolk, were one blood and one people—one nation. The joyful, hopeful, self-confident atmosphere of the towns spread to the countryside as well, in spite of the concealed, though thoroughly organised opposition that a great number of ecclesiastics set up, in many places, against National Socialism, taking advantage of the peasant’s ignorance or of his acquired prejudices.237
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Another most positive contribution of the National Socialist régime to the renaissance of Germany—and of Europe—lies in its effort to cleanse the press, as well as all forms of art and literature, and to build a new healthy and beautiful culture upon the ruins of the decadent, pseudo-culture of the capitalistic world; its effort to raise the moral as well as intellectual and aesthetic standard of the adults, no less than of the young men and women. No aspect of National Socialist rule (save, perhaps, our struggle against Jewry) has been more bitterly and more foolishly criticised, not only by our deadly opponents but by “public opinion” in the world at large. And yet that stubborn fight for truth, and for the triumph of whatever is the healthiest and the best in the Aryan race, is something of which every Nazi can be proud—even if, for the time being, we failed.
Without a thorough purging of the press, no renaissance would have been possible after 1933—no renaissance ever will be possible. For, so long as the journalist writes just to get paid—regardless by whom, and on behalf of whom, and for what ulterior purpose—and not because he feels the urge to enlighten or uplift his readers, then, I say, the “clever” ones, of whatever race or creed, who are in control of the money will remain, also, in control of people’s minds and, to the extent the “masses” have a say in national and international affairs, in control of the
destiny of nations. For the reading masses are foolish—pre-eminently gullible—and the knowledge of the conventional symbolism of script has never made them less so. On the contrary, it has given them the dangerous illusion of free thought while enslaving them to the written word more than they ever had been to any tangible power. No one has pointed out more brilliantly—and sarcastically—than our Führer the evil influence of that self-styled “intellectual” or “enlightened” press, controlled by Jewish money. “The Frankfurter Zeitung,” states he (and this is only one instance among many), “always writes in favour of fighting with ‘intellectual’ weapons, and this appeals, curiously enough, to the least intellectual people.”238 “It is just for our semi-intellectual classes that the Jew writes in his so-called ‘intelligentsia’ press.”239
There were only two ways of dealing with the plague: either eliminate the press altogether, or else, use the incurable propensity of the newspaper readers to believe all that is printed for the triumph of the National Socialist Idea, by allowing the papers to print nothing but what was conducive to the strengthening of the new spirit, or at least, what was in no manner opposed to it. Of the two courses, the second was undoubtedly the easiest at the same time as the most profitable. One cannot teach people to think for themselves in a day. But if, while they are learning to do so, they must have something to believe, let that be the truth rather than lies. So the second course was taken. The press was not eliminated, but controlled, as foreseen by Point Twenty-Three of the Party Programme demanding, “legal warfare against conscious political lying and its dissemination in the press.”240 All editors of newspapers in German and their assistants had to be “members of the nation,” i.e., to be of German blood. Papers in other languages, or even foreign papers in German, could be published with the permission of the Government. But no non-German was allowed to influence the German press, either financially or otherwise, the penalty being (if any such transaction was found out) “the suppression of the newspaper and the immediate deportation of the non-German concerned with it.”241
It is easy to criticise such a policy, advocating the “right of the individual to express himself freely,” and what not. But one should first realise that, had a similar national press policy been applied in England (from the English point of view, that goes without saying) England never would have declared war on Germany in 1939; there would have been no bombardments, no ruins, no millions of dead—nothing of that immense misery that everyone deplores—but a happy Europe in which the two great Aryan nations, Germany and England, would have collaborated in a friendly spirit for the welfare of both of them and of the whole Aryan world. Such a result—at least I believe—would have been well worth obtaining at the cost of a little less liberty to lie. And then, also, I cannot help knowing that those Democrats who blame us for not having allowed the German papers to publish propaganda against our views, when we had power, are the self-same people who have been persecuting us for the last four years, on the sole ground that our outlook on life is diametrically opposed to theirs; the self-same people who sentenced me to three years’ imprisonment for writing and spreading “Nazi propaganda.” Their “liberty of conscience” and their “right of the individual to express himself” are the most ludicrous humbug—so coarse and clumsy that anyone gifted with a shadow of common sense can see through it. The least said about those lies the better.
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Along with the cleansing of the press took place the thorough purging of art and literature, in order to forward the growth of a healthy national culture, such as was really impossible in the enervating atmosphere that modern capitalism has created. This was also laid out, in principle, in Point Twenty-Three of the Party Programme: “We demand legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation, and the suppression of institutions which militate against the requirements above mentioned.”242
The world, accustomed by its whole education to call any cleverly written rubbish a manifestation of the “intellect”—encouraged to do so by the Jewish press, as one can well imagine—and trained to admire “intellect” above everything, burst out in loud indignation when, on the evening of the 10th of May 1933, in the presence of the Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels—one of the finest, sincerest, and most intelligent National Socialists who ever lived—the students of Berlin made a public bonfire of a lot of books, mostly but not all written by Jews, which came under the ban as decadent or pernicious literature. “What!” cried out the foreign press, “Going back to the intolerant fanaticism of the Middle Ages? Returning to barbarity! Burning books! How outrageous!” The newspaper-reading apes of the whole so-called civilised earth echoed the indignation. The more smeared they happened to be with cheap “learning” and the more puffed up with unjustified “intellectual” pretences, the more horrified they were at the news of the paper and printing ink holocaust, the more they ranted against Dr. Goebbels, against the Führer, against the German students and the Nazi Party, and (whenever they had the opportunity) against the isolated non-German Aryans, like myself, who understood the meaning of the holocaust and greeted it with cheers.
The same frantic outcry was heard when the Third Reich banned as decadent, and dangerous to the moral health of the German nation, all the queer, sickly, distorted productions on canvas or out of stone which, before Hitler’s rise to power, used to pass as “art.” And still greater horror was expressed when doctors and professors of Jewish origin, and German “intellectuals” whose outlook was too obviously opposed to the National Socialist way of life, were dismissed from service. It reached its highest pitch, as one would expect, when a sufficient number of rich Jews, whom the Nazi Government had magnanimously allowed to leave Germany with all their money and valuables, settled in England, in America, in India, all over the world, and nourished the anti-Nazi propaganda more lavishly than ever.
Yet, it was an artificial indignation—as artificial indeed as any parrot’s lesson. For half the people who took part in the world-wide chorus against the “Nazi persecution” of “art and culture” had not the faintest idea of the meaning of these two words. They just called “art” whatever was advertised to them as such in the Sunday editions of the daily papers dealing with Miss So-and-so’s latest “psychological” novel and Mr. So-and-so’s exhibition of oil paintings. The other half would simply have detested the sight—or the sound—of most of the stuff banned in Germany, had they seen it, or read it, and would have cried out wholeheartedly: “A jolly good thing it was banned!” had they been sure nobody would have overheard them. They joined in the parrots’ chorus only because they were afraid of being taken for “rustics”—“barbarians”—if they did not.
The truth is that whatever was banned was really not worth keeping. The truth is also that, in the domain of art and culture as in all others, we National Socialists did not only ban, and forbid; and destroy. We also created. In fact, we only destroyed in order to be able to create, with the collaboration of a reborn people, untrammelled by unhealthy examples and depressing memories. And nothing would have served our propaganda so much, perhaps, as a series of double art exhibitions all over the world: in one hall, all the bizarre specimens of ultra-modern art which we banned—unnatural curves, contorted shapes, nightmarish expressions; queer human faces, supposed to be all the more rich in deep hidden “meaning” that they appear the more insane or idiotic to the unprejudiced eye—and in the other . . . the finest works of Arno Breker. And an explanatory notice addressed to the sincere observer: “We have come to destroy that, in order to create this.” That would have been Nazi propaganda indeed! And of the best kind. I wish such a double exhibition had been organised in every town of the world where there was a German Consulate.
What can be said, in this connection, of painting and sculpture, is no less true of music and literature. But many will say, “What about science? No civilised government can ban ‘scientific’ publications—and persecute a scientist like S
igmund Freud, on racial grounds. And banish Einstein, one of the greatest brains of all times.”
Yes, I know; Freud and Einstein, the two instances that are automatically brought forth to damn us, every time the question of our attitude to “culture” arises. It is curious how few people are in a position to speak of these two scientists, even when they use their names as weapons against us. Millions have read some of the works of Freud (or some extracts from them) it is true, but only for the sake of vicarious sexual excitement—not out of thirst for scientific information; not as one should read them, if at all. As for Einstein, however fashionable it might have been to talk about his “theory of relativity” in the 1920s (when “simplified” explanations of it were to be found even in ladies’ magazines), nobody but a handful of highly specialised mathematicians and physicists can boast of understanding his scientific innovations. All that lay people know is that he is “a great brain”—which is undoubtedly true. And we are barbarians for not appreciating such greatness, when it happens to manifest itself in a Jew.
There is a fundamental error, a thorough misconception, at the root of this attitude to us. It is not true that we do not recognise or appreciate such intellectual greatness as that of Einstein, in a Jew. We recognise it wherever it might be. But that is no reason why we should allow a Jew to hold a professorship in a German University—(or in a University in any Aryan National State, at that) any more than we would a Chinese or an Arab with similar qualifications. If nationality be, first and foremost, a matter of race (as it undoubtedly is) and if, as is natural, only nationals of a country, i.e., people of that country’s blood, should be allowed to occupy responsible posts there, then surely no Jew should be permitted to retain such a post, whether it be in the educational line or in the government, or elsewhere, in an Aryan country. The world should understand that there was, in our attitude, no personal hostility towards Einstein as a scientist. There was just the fact that we could not betray both the letter and the spirit of the Party Programme for the sake of anybody. And the “intellectuals” should blame us all the less as, science being above frontiers, it matters little, from their point of view, whether the “theory of relativity” be expounded from Berlin, New York, or Jerusalem.
