Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

  For the hundredth time I recalled in my mind my arrival at Saarbrücken, my first evening in the midst of a German family, and those self-same words, which I heard there for the first time: “Das Land der Angst”—“the land of fear.”

  “But,” said I, “the faithful minority, the genuine German National Socialists, they stand erect in the midst of that general terror . . .”

  Herr A gave me a beautiful, proud smile.

  “Yes,” said he, “we, the wide-awake, the steadfast; the true followers of him you love and revere. . . . You have defined us in your leaflets. We are ‘the gold in the furnace.’ The weapons of the agents of the death forces have no power against us.”

  * * *

  I looked up to him admiringly. The words he quoted might have been mine, no doubt. But the pride was his. And so were the hardships endured these three and a half years: the loss of his home and of all he possessed; and his sufferings as a soldier on the front and as a prisoner of war abroad. And it was his indomitable will that had overcome those sufferings, and kept him erect and expectant, strengthened instead of disheartened in the depth of disaster and destitution; ready to seize the mastery of the future at the first opportunity. In his tall and handsome figure walking by my side against the sunlit background of the forest; in his virile countenance brightened by large, deep blue eyes, I beheld a living representative of that golden minority that I love; that I had come to Germany in order to seek and serve; of that minority which is, in my eyes, the real German nation, for whom Hitler dreamed such glory, such power, and such happiness. Herr A was Hitler’s people welcoming me. I had not felt so happy for a long time.

  “Would you like us now to sit down,” said he.

  “Yes.”

  We reclined upon a mat of dead leaves, at the foot of a tree. A ray of sunshine struck Herr A’s ash blond, glossy, wavy hair, and made it shine like gold. His face was stern. His eyes, looking in the distance, were as hard and cold as steel. I too, looked straight in front of me at the play of light and shade in those hundreds and hundreds of trees; at their varied shades of green; at a patch of blue sky, visible through the intricate branches. We were silent for a moment, as though under a spell. I felt the soul of that forest in me. I was a part and parcel of that endless life. And I knew Herr A felt the same. (I have never met a National Socialist who does not feel the same as I do about Nature.) He turned to me and his hard eyes softened. And his mouth, which had expressed up till then nothing but concentrated willpower and pride, smiled faintly. “Are you comfortable?” he asked me.

  “I am happy.”

  “Do you know where we are? In which forest?”

  And without giving me the leisure to answer or even to think, he pursued: “We are in the outskirts of the Hartz, the great sacred forest of all times. It stretches on, from here, for kilometres and kilometres, right into the Russian Zone. Is it not beautiful?”

  “It is.”

  “‘They’ have cut down whole portions of it, the devils. One day, I shall show you: whole hilltops robbed of their verdant, age-old mantle; acres and acres of land, in which you will see nothing but stumps of felled trees. At one time, in their first fury of plunder and desecration, in 1946, ‘they’ were cutting down ten thousand trees a day. And goodness only knows what the Russians have been doing on the other side of the forbidden border—although they have enough wood in their own country without spoiling ours. That is what ‘Occupation’ means.”

  “I know,” I replied: “I have seen some of the damage ‘they’ have wrought in the Black Forest. And believe me, I hate ‘them’ as fiercely as you, although I am not a German. I shall never forget the massacred woods, nor the cities in ruins, nor that splendid faith of ours, for which I lived twenty years, shattered in the hearts of millions. Shattered, and replaced by what? Blank despair—like that which I myself experienced until this year in the spring; for one cannot have loved our ideals and then love different ones. I shall never forget that moral ruin added to the material.”

  Herr A’s cold blue eyes looked straight into me inquiringly. “Have you ever really lost faith?” he asked me.

  “No,” said I. “And yet, in one way, yes. Of course, I never lost my devotion to the Führer, nor my faith in his mission. I always believed, or rather always knew, that one day his principles would triumph, for they are rooted in truth. What is rooted in truth never perishes. But I had given up all hope to see them triumph in my lifetime.”

  “Did you ever give up your willingness to act?”

  “Never.”

  “Why, since you had no hope?”

  “First, because I hated those millions of fools who had obediently swallowed the Jew’s horror tales (which never impressed me, anyhow, and would not have, even if they had all been true) and fought against the Führer. I hated those who have been persecuting his faithful ones ever since the capitulation. I would have given anything, done anything to witness their destruction and to rejoice over it. Then, I realised that the faithful ones were more numerous than I had imagined. Hope came back to me, as I have already related to you. Then, I saw the ruins of Germany and could no longer remain away from here in freedom and security. No. Even if I had still believed that the New Order could not be restored in my lifetime; even if there were no hope, still, I would have come—come, at least to suffer with Hitler’s people, if I could do nothing more useful; come to share their hardships and their dangers; to be persecuted with them. I would have crossed the frontier on foot, clandestinely, from the nearest village in France, if I had not, this time, been granted an entrance permit.”

  Herr A took one of my hands in his, and pressed it, and smiled. “There is no moral ruin for the strong,” he said, triumphantly; “and material ruin does not count, in the long run. I have not only never lost faith in our ideals but, even in 1945 when, a prisoner of war in the USA I was told of the capitulation, I knew that one day we would rise again; and that I would live to witness our second rising, more irresistible, more glorious than the first, and more lasting. I knew then that the Führer was alive. Something told me.”

  The forest continued to breathe and to sing all round us, in grace, in majesty, in the superb indifference of things everlasting. “The felled trees will grow again,” I said. “It might take a long time—a hundred years, two hundred—for the holy Hartz to look like itself once more. But what are two hundred years in the life of the Land?”

  “We too will rise again,” replied Herr A. “Like the divine Forest, we too are eternal. We too have our roots in the soil. The world does not yet know what real National Socialism is. It will, soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “In less than two years’ time—surely in less than three—you will see the beginning of our second struggle for power.”

  “How I wish I could believe you! So soon! Yet, would it not have been better if there had been no capitulation, no disaster? Why, after all, why could we not win this war? Whose fault is it, according to you, that we lost it; that Germany is occupied, plundered, terrorised; that our Hitler’s name is slandered all over the stupid world; that the best men of the Party were killed as ‘war criminals’; that you and I have to come here, miles away from the town, to speak freely?”

  “Ours,” replied Herr A.

  “You mean to say that the Nazis in power were not ruthless enough? I have always said that myself. There would have been no trials for so-called ‘war-crimes,’ had there been no Jews left to bear false witness against our people.”

  “Not ruthless enough, not merely towards the Jews,” observed Herr A, “but towards a number of good-for-nothing fellows who had crept into the Party, and towards the traitors in high position. Not critical, not discriminate enough; not suspicious enough. The facts you told me last night about Rommel’s briefcase are significant. And the other information you obtained abroad about that pack of traitors in the German railway services, sending regular dispatches to the London War Office concerning our troop movements and so forth, while
pretending all the time to be sincere National Socialists, is no less eloquent. We must not blame the Occupation authorities if those rascals now have good posts as a reward for their doings and if they go about denouncing us to increase their income still a bit more. We must blame ourselves for not finding them out in time and ‘liquidating’ them before they did irreparable mischief.”

  “We had,” said I, “a too high opinion of human nature. We were too generous.”

  “Too slack, too stupid, and too self-centred,” replied Herr A.

  “But the Party members . . .”

  “I have told you: there were all sorts of fellows in the Party besides genuine National Socialists,” said Herr A. “Three-quarters of them had not the right spirit. Had it been otherwise, we never would have lost the war.”

  And he started discussing some of the prominent members of the Nazi Government. He was bitter in his criticisms.

  “Look at that creature, Schacht,” said he. “Can you call that a Nazi? The slimiest type of traitor. And to think we tolerated such a man twenty years without being able to see through him!”

  “Capable, but characterless,” said I. “He should have been a Democrat from the start. But he is an exception, you must admit.”

  “I should think so! Still; look at Ley, a man who never should have been in high position. Look at Baldur von Schirach; the reputation he had . . .”

  “I have heard all that,” said I. “Oh, don’t tell me any more! I don’t wish to know. They were both among the Führer’s early followers. And one died a martyr at Nuremberg. And the other is, to this day, in captivity, in our enemies’ hands. Leave them in peace. Whatever might have been their weaknesses, they suffered enough to expiate them a thousand times.”

  “A Nazi should have no weaknesses,” said Herr A. And his bright eyes were as hard as stone. And I felt that he despised me a little for the sympathy I had shown the two men.

  We remained some time without speaking. The many noises of the forest were the same as before: songs of birds and rustling of leaves; the fall of a pebble at the swift passage of a lizard. I saw another couple of deer run past in the distance. But I was neither looking nor hearing with the same restfulness as before—that restfulness without which one cannot remain in touch with the soul of living Nature. I looked up to Herr A once more, and I did not know what to think. “Have you not a good word to say of any of them?” I asked at last; “Not even of Hermann Göring? Not even of Dr. Goebbels, the embodiment of devotion to our Führer?”

  And I thought of Göring’s fine, frank face. And sentences from his speeches at Nuremberg—at the Party rally in September 1935, and, ten years later, before our victorious enemies—came back to my memory; unforgettable sentences, everlastingly true. And I thought of Goebbels’ eloquence also, and of his death with all his family, worthy of the heroic Age; and of Göring’s death in honour and dignity—and in defiance of the iniquitous judgement of our persecutors.

  “Göring was both able and sincere, and I respect him,” said Herr A. “Still”—he added—“. . . too much luxury, too much money . . .” as though this were nearly a disqualification in his eyes. “As for Goebbels, he was undoubtedly one of the best ones,” he said, “although none were perfect—none but the Führer himself.”

  He paused for a while and then addressed me again. “You mentioned the martyrs of Nuremberg,” said he. “Shall I tell you of two among them, the most misjudged, the most hated by the world at large, but worthy men, whom you should admire?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Himmler, and Streicher.”

  Herr A’s choice did not astonish me. In fact, I expected to hear these two names from him.

  “I have never shared the prejudices of the God-forsaken world—or even of many Germans—about these men,” said I. “I remember the passage of Mein Kampf relating how Julius Streicher, in a gesture of unselfish, true patriotism, dissolved his own previous party and asked his followers to join the Führer, in the beginning of the struggle.273 I always liked that generous attitude of his. And I like his uncompromising spirit, also; his one-pointed effort to free this country from the unseen yoke of the Jew; and his last gesture, and two last words—‘Heil Hitler!’—at the tragic hour of death, after going through still more suffering, perhaps, and greater humiliations than the others, at Nuremberg. Poor Streicher! And I know Himmler’s task was a heavy and a thankless one. Yet he did it well.”

  “Right,” replied Herr A. “And have you ever read his little book, Die Stimme der Ahnen? It is not well known; not even published under his own name. But if you can ever get a copy, read it. You will then understand what a man he was.”

  And he added in a lower voice: “A real Heathen; a man you would have been happy to meet. A man who would have understood you, too, for he had the right view of things and hated half measures. So did Streicher, in fact. And so did Goebbels. He too was a man from the people.”

  * * *

  Herr A uttered those last words with particular emphasis. One could feel that, in his estimation, it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a person born and bred in a “bourgeois” atmosphere to make a good National Socialist. For Herr A could not forget the enormous influence of upbringing upon most human beings. He did not speak of the exceptions. “Yes,” he repeated after a pause, “only among the people—the workmen, the peasants; those who know and accept real life—are the qualities of the race to be found, unmarred. The workman is healthier than the ‘bourgeois.’ His blood is purer—in general—and therefore stronger; more valuable. All or nearly all ‘intellectuals’ are perverts in some way or another. All are more or less hopelessly sick. Cut them down, as a class. Suppress classes. They are incompatible with a society dominated by the national (völkisch) ideal which is, before anything else, racial. And the leaders of the people should be men of character and of experience; men who have lived and suffered, and learnt; whose personality has been forged by the Gods upon the anvil of hardship, like that of the Führer—not men of books; theoreticians; men who do not know mankind, and who can neither love it nor hate it.”

  “I have always said that myself,” I replied—strange as it might seem to many, who believe that one’s education determines one’s being, in all cases. “No one is more contemptuous of unthinking ‘intellectuals’ than I. I want people who think for themselves, or at least who trust and follow those who do think—and who really love them. And of all such ones I met, nine out of ten come, as you say, from the working classes.”

  I was perfectly sincere. And Herr A felt it. He gazed at me with warm, understanding approbation, and was silent.

  The birds continued to chirp, and the leaves to rustle, and the Sun to throw moving patterns of light upon the mossy ground and upon our faces. I felt safe, and at rest. All was so beautiful and so peaceful around us. Herr A pressed my hand and smiled at me gently. “Are you happy, here?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” said I. “I love forests. And to know that this one is a part of the famous Hartz makes it all the more lovable to me. I feel on a holy spot.”

  “So you really love our Germany, don’t you? Not merely with your brain, but with all your heart.” And his large, limpid eyes, that could, at times, be so hard, looked at me with tenderness. “You are right,” he added; “see how lovely she is!”

  “She is, indeed,” I repeated. “Yet, it is not her beauty alone that moves me. The whole world is beautiful. But she is my Führer’s land. Her people are his people, whom he loves more than himself, more than anything on earth. And that is why I love them. That is why I came, when all was lost.”

  Herr A again pressed my hand in his and looked at me so gently that my heart ached.

  “You are a woman,” said he, smiling; “a young, loving woman. I know it. How old are you?”

  “Nearly forty-three.”

  “Nearly twenty-three,” replied Herr A.

  “About the age I was,” said I, “when I first realised all that Nation
al Socialism meant to me.”

  “That is to say, all that Adolf Hitler meant and still means to you,” said Herr A mercilessly.

  “Is it not the same thing?” asked I, suddenly flushing crimson.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It is,” he repeated after a pause, “and always shall be. For not only is our Weltanschauung, as you say so well, the modern form of the everlasting Religion of Life and Light—of health, and strength, and beauty—but he is the one modern Man of action in Whom God—“the Heat-and-Light within the Sun,” to use the expression you quoted last night—manifested Himself. I believe that. And so do a few others who understand, who feel the truth.”

  “I believe it too. I know it, because I love Him. And I have never loved anyone in that way, but Gods. Oh,” said I, in a new outburst of enthusiasm, stretching out my arms as though I would reach the ends of the earth, “I wish I could say it freely, write it, proclaim it, stick it on all the walls: ‘Hitler is divine; our glorious, our beloved Führer is the cosmic Soul, the Spirit of the Sun, born for the first time in the West since immemorial Antiquity to stay the decay of creation.’ I wish the world could rise and praise him—and love him—at my voice!”

  “The broad world—nay, his own Fatherland that he so loves—will listen to no one. It will learn the truth as it has always learnt: through bitter experience, through remorse, through despair; through the way of blood and tears. Germany is learning already. As for you, continue to love him and serve his ideals, in small as well as in great things. Continue to love his people. Are you not happy to feel that some of them, however few, think and feel as you do, and are waiting and working with you for his triumph?”

  “Surely I am. And it is a joy for me to feel myself, just now, in this holy forest—away, far away from the impure world created by his enemies; alone with one of his sincere followers.”