by Savitri Devi
I know that the sayings attributed to a man, either by an admiring devotee in a spirit of praise or by an enemy, in a spirit of hatred, are, more often than not, of doubtful authenticity. Yet, when, while quoted in order to praise the one alleged to have uttered them, they in reality condemn him, or when, while quoted as “awful” utterances, with the intention of harming him, they in reality constitute praise; and when, moreover, they happen to be too beautiful, or too true, or too intelligent for the reporter to have invented them wholesale, then one can, I believe, accept them as authentic or most probably so.
Of the many books written purposely to throw discredit upon our Führer, I have only read one through and through; but that one—the work of the traitor Rauschning, translated into English under the title Hitler Speaks—I read not merely with interest, but with elation, for it is (much against the intention of its author) one of the finest tributes paid to the Saviour of the Aryan race. Had I come from some out-of-the-way jungle and had I never even heard of the Führer before, that book alone would have made me his follower—his disciple—without the slightest reservation. Should I characterise the author of such excellent propaganda as a scoundrel? Or is he not just a perfect fool: a fellow who joined the National Socialist Movement when he had no business to do so, and who recoiled in fright as soon as he began to realise how fundamentally opposed his aspirations were to ours? His aspirations were, apparently, those of a mediocre “bourgeois.” After he turned against us, he did not actually lie; he did not need to. He picked out, in the Führer’s statements, those that shocked him the most—and that were likely to shock also people who resemble him. And he wrote Hitler Speaks, for the consumption of all the mediocre “bourgeois” of the world. As there are millions of them, and as the world they represent was soon to wage war on the Führer, the book was a commercial success at the same time as an “ideological” one265—the sort of success the author had wanted: it stirred the indignation of all manner of “decent” Untermenschen against National Socialism. But one day (if it survives) a regenerate Aryandom will look upon it as the unwilling tribute of an enemy to the greatest European of all ages.
And Hitler’s words about Christianity, reported by Rauschning in the fourth chapter of his book, would be admired—not criticised—in an Aryan world endowed with a consistently National Socialist consciousness, for they are in keeping with our spirit—and ring too true not to be authentic. “Leave the hair-splitting to others,” said the Führer to Hermann Rauschning before the latter turned renegade:
Whether it is the Old Testament or the New, or simply the sayings of Jesus according to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, it is all the same Jewish swindle. It will not make us free. A German Church, a German Christianity, is a distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both. You can throw the epileptic Paul out of Christianity—others have done so before us. You can make Christ into a noble human being, and deny his divinity and his rôle as a saviour. People have been doing it for centuries. I believe there are such Christians today in England and America—Unitarians, they call themselves, or something like that. It is no use. You cannot get rid of the mentality behind it. We do not want people to keep one eye on life in the hereafter. We need free men, who feel and know that God is in themselves.266
Indeed, however clever he might have been, Rauschning was not the man to concoct this discourse out of pure imagination. As many other statements attributed to the Führer in his book, this one bears too strongly the stamp of sincerity, of faith—of truth—to be just an invention. Moreover, it fits in perfectly with many of the Führer’s known utterances, with his writings, with the spirit of his whole doctrine which is, as I said before, far more than a mere socio-political ideology. For, whatever might be said, or written, for the sake of temporary expediency, the truth remains that National Socialism and Christianity, if both carried to their logical conclusions—that is to say, experienced in full earnest; lived—cannot possibly go together. The Führer certainly thought it premature to take up, publicly, towards the Christian doctrine as well as the Churches, the attitude that the natural intolerance of our Weltanschauung would have demanded; but he knew that we can only win, in the long run, if, wherever essentials are concerned, we maintain that intolerance of any movement sincerely “convinced that it alone is right.”267 And he knew that, sooner or later, our conflict with the existing order is bound to break out on the religious and philosophical plane as well as on the others. This is unavoidable. And it has only been postponed by the material defeat of Germany—perhaps (who knows?) in accordance with the mysterious will of the Gods, so as to enable the time to ripen and the Aryan people at large, and especially the Germans, to realise, at last, how little Christianity can fulfil their deeper aspirations, and how foolish they would be to allow it to stand between them and the undying Aryan faith implied in National Socialism.
That Aryan faith—that worship of health, of strength, of sunshine, and of manly virtues; that cult of race and soil—is the Nordic expression of the universal Religion of Life. It is—I hope—the future religion of Europe and of a part at least of Asia (and, naturally, of all other lands where the Aryan dominates). One day, those millions will remember the Man who, first—in the 1920s—gave Germany the divine impetus destined to bring about that unparalleled resurrection; the Man whom now the ungrateful world hates and slanders: our Hitler.
Imprisoned here for the love of him, my greatest joy lies in the glorious hope that those reborn Aryans—those perfect men and women of the future Golden Age—will, one day, render him divine honours.
Chapter 12
THE HOLY FOREST
“Es mag sein, daß heute das Geld der ausschließliche Regent des
Lebens geworden ist, doch wird dereinst der Mensch sich wieder vor höheren Göttern beugen.”
—Adolf Hitler268
“The walls, in this house, are as thin as paper; every word can be heard, especially at this time of the night, when everything is quiet. And the fellow who lives on the first floor is a treacherous swine. Used to pretend to be a National Socialist, once—when it paid. But went and joined the SPD269 as soon as the Occupation started. And now, goes about denouncing us. So be careful what you say.” This is what Herr A had told me, the night before, as I sat by him in a comfortable easy chair after a tiring journey from one end of Germany to the other. “But,” he added, “tomorrow I shall take you to the forest. There, we can talk freely.”
And we were now walking uphill towards the forest. In fact, we were already practically in it. We were only walking farther and farther away from the road—away from possible onlookers, away from possible listeners, possible traitors, possible spies. And I thought to myself, recalling what someone had said in the first German town I had visited: “Indeed this is ‘the land of fear.’ Unfortunate Germany! For how long?”
We walked on and on without talking. I had never met Herr A before. I had come to him recommended by other Nazis from abroad, with whom he was in touch without having, either, actually met them. And all he knew of me was that I had spent long years in India; that I was “in Ordnung,”270 i.e., myself also a Nazi; and that I was prepared to take part, directly or indirectly, in any underground activities aimed at strengthening the National Socialist spirit and undermining the influence of the Occupying Powers in present day Germany. So he had many things to tell me, and I many things to tell him. But we waited.
It was a bright September morning. Through the branches of the trees, still thickly covered with green leaves, the Sun projected patterns of light upon the ground and upon us—patterns that moved, as the breeze stirred the leaves—and birds were singing. The more we walked towards the interior of the forest, the more I felt elated. After the hundreds of miles of ruins that I had been seeing, day after day, ever since I had entered Germany, to find myself in that inviolate sanctuary of peace was refreshing. And the knowledge that Herr A and I were there alone, and that we had come to seek aloofness from the venal treacher
y of man; silence; secrecy; and heart-to-heart communion with each other in our grand, impersonal ideals, made it all the more so. I was aware that the hidden Godhead of the Forest—the unseen, still, invincible Soul of the Land—was our ally. And indeed it was.
A couple of deer ran past gracefully at some hundred yards’ distance from us, and disappeared in the thickness of the trees. I admired the beauty of their flight. I wanted to ask Herr A if, like the English friends who had sent me to him, and like myself, he disapproved of the chase as of all cruel sports, both on moral and on aesthetic grounds. I remembered a Jew who had declared, in a tea-party in Iceland, where I happened to be present, that such sports “should be encouraged” as they provided “a convenient outlet for man’s natural destructive instinct” which was, according to him, “more suitably exercised against animals than against people.” To which I had replied in indignation that, if one’s natural destructiveness must have an outlet, it was far more suitable to direct it against dangerous human beings rather than innocent animals. And when the man had asked me whom I called “dangerous human beings” I had answered defiantly “People like yourself,” setting against me the whole company—Icelanders (anything but Jews) but people with a Christian outlook. I wanted to relate that episode to Herr A. But I did not. I could not bring myself to break the silence. And I felt that Herr A was thinking of things in comparison with which all personal episodes were unimportant. We continued to walk, without speaking, for about half an hour. Dead leaves and dead twigs creaked under our feet.
At last, Herr A spoke. “Nobody can hear us here,” said he. “Now we can talk. Would you like to sit down, or would you mind us going still a little farther into the forest?”
“Let us go a little farther,” said I; “I like walking.”
He asked me a few questions about my background, my childhood, my life as a student, both in Greece and in France; he asked me when and how I had come to National Socialism, and how long I had lived in India, and what I had done there during the war, and how I had come to know the people who had recommended me to him. I replied faithfully. He told me something of his own life and struggle; of his beautiful birthplace, in Sudetenland; of his pious upbringing; of his conversion from Christianity to National Socialism.
“You are right,” he told me, “when you say that the two philosophies can never go together. You had the privilege never to have been a Christian. I ceased to be one in 1933.”
“I was one, outwardly, till 1929.”
“What do you mean by ‘outwardly’?”
“I mean that I used to go to church on Sundays. But I had never believed in the teaching of any Church. I used to go to the Greek Church, not because it was Christian, but because it was Greek; because I had there an opportunity of meeting the other Greeks of the French town where I was brought up, and of hearing Byzantine singing, which I love; and because I knew that the Church, as an organisation, had done a lot to keep Greek nationality alive during the four centuries Greece remained under the Turks. Also because, however sorry I was, at heart, that the Greeks had ever taken to Christianity at all, in the past, I considered that the foreign creed had irretrievably become a part of the national culture of a modern Greek. I don’t think so now. I have not thought so for many years—not since 1929, as I said.
“What did you do in 1929?”
“I spent forty days in Palestine. I wanted to know, not from books but from experience, the birthplace of the religion that had overrun Greece and nearly the whole of the Aryan world. I saw it thoroughly, from one end to the other. I saw the Jews there—the people whom my pious aunt271 (my English mother’s sister) used to call ‘God’s chosen ones.’ Not that I had never seen any before. I had seen many. But it is one thing to meet an occasional Jew in France or in England, or even in Athens, and another thing to see hundreds, thousands of them in a land in which they were already settling twelve centuries before Christ or so; in a land that one can no longer separate from their history. I had never felt myself in such a foreign atmosphere as in those picturesque and dirty streets of the old Jewish quarter of Jerusalem; also as in the very churches of the place, and its sites of Christian pilgrimage. How could people of pure Aryan blood, nay, descendants of the Vikings, like my pious aunt and my own mother, thought I, bring themselves to accept a God said to have chosen such a nation as that one as ‘his own’? How could the Greeks have gotten accustomed to calling him ‘their’ God, even outwardly—for I knew that, inwardly, they had always been far less Christian-like than the English—and that, through a teacher such as Paul of Tarsus, of all men, a hater of life and of beauty? It may well be that his Church had helped to preserve Greek nationality under Turkish domination. But before that, it had ruined the Greek race and what was left of the Greek spirit—as it had ruined the Aryan spirit in all other Aryan countries, more or less. I could no longer lie. I could no longer force myself to believe that this religion was an indispensable part of any national inheritance. There was too much Jewry irredeemably mixed up with it for me to tolerate it any longer. I had always been a Nature worshipper, a Sun worshipper, at heart. I would now be one openly. And I retained this attitude ever since.”
“Why did you go to India?”
“To see a land in which the old Aryan religion had resisted victoriously, to this day, the efforts both of Islam and of Christianity to wipe it out; in other words, a land of Aryan culture, free from the influence of the Jew—so I thought, at least. I had read a few books about the caste system. I could not help feeling a connection between that heroic effort to keep Aryan blood pure (and the blood of every race) in that land of many races, and the amazing survival of the Aryan Gods of old. I wished to see that system at work with my own eyes; to study it. I could not help noticing that the principles that had guided the immemorial Aryan lawgivers in their insistence on purity of blood, in that distant tropical country, were exactly the same as those which the Führer proclaimed in our times—for the first time in the West since decay had set in. I had just read Mein Kampf and was already, in the full awareness of my Aryan pride, a devoted admirer of Adolf Hitler.”
“Did you not wish to see, also, Hitler’s own land?”
“Oh, do not again tear open the lasting wound in my heart! Too many people have done so already, first of all the generous, detached, all-understanding Indian who gave me his name and protection that the British might allow me to leave India in the beginning of the war. I was to go to France. From France, I would have come here. I had introductions; everything I needed. I would have broadcast on behalf of the Propaganda Department, and put all my heart and soul in my messages. But Italy joined the war a fortnight too soon. And so the last Italian ship, which I was to take, never sailed. Of course I should have come before the war. I intended to. I never meant to remain in India more than two or three years—not fifteen.272 But it is not always possible to do as one has planned. And not easy to come from ten thousand kilometres away. When the war once broke out, it was impossible, in spite of all my efforts.
“I have told you what I did during the war. Whatever it might have amounted to, it was nothing compared with what I could have done here.”
“It was the best you could do, in the circumstances. And it was useful. And now you have come to us, and you are welcome. You can also be useful, if you know how to be careful and patient.”
“Still, in former days, I would have seen the Führer.”
“You will see him, one day.”
“So you too believe he is alive?”
“I do not ‘believe’ it; I know it.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I cannot tell you now. But a time will come when you will know.”
“And see him?”
“Surely.”
“And feel his divine eyes rest upon me, be it only for a minute or two! And hear his voice—his own voice—address me!”
“And tell you that he is pleased that
you were among us in 1948, in the darkest days. Yes, why not?”
My eyes brightened at the thought of this happiness. And I blushed. Herr A smiled to me as he would have to a little girl, although I am as old as he, in fact a year or two older. “Don’t I know,” said he, “what you want? I can read your thoughts.”
“Then, you know at least that I am sincere.”
“That, I do! I knew it as soon as you opened your mouth. But sincerity is not sufficient, in times like these. You also have to learn how to wait, how to keep calm, and how to hide your feelings, also, if you do not want to get into trouble one fine day and—which would be worse—to get others into trouble along with yourself. Be careful, very careful. You seem entirely to lack the sense of danger.”
“I was aware of danger when I crossed the border with my trunk full of those leaflets which I showed you; acutely aware of it indeed.”
“Yes. But you forgot all about it as soon as you felt that you had safely come through. You should not forget. Danger is lurking everywhere, in this unfortunate country. People can denounce you for nothing, in the sheer hope of securing safety for themselves. You do not know who is a friend and who is a traitor.”
“But surely no Nazi would harm me.”
“Certainly not. But you do not know who is really a Nazi and who is only speaking as one, in order to trap you. Be careful. Bribery and fear are the weapons of our enemies; powerful weapons. Our proud Germany has become, under the Occupation, the land of fear.”
