Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

  Herr A gazed at me more tenderly than ever, and spoke in a low, caressing voice: “I too am happy with you in this solitude, united to you in the love of all I adore and stand for and live for. There is no link like that one. Had you been a little different, I would have perhaps tried to bring you nearer to myself. But I shall never do so; for you have been put aside to live for gods alone.”

  “My husband always said the same.”

  “A wise, very wise, and noble man,” said Herr A.

  We were silent for a few minutes and then, overwhelmed by the feelings that had been roused in me, I suddenly said in a low voice, with such appealing gentleness that I was myself surprised at the sound of it: “You must have seen ‘him.’ Have you ever had the privilege of speaking to ‘him’? Oh, do talk to me about ‘him’!” Herr A understood—knew—that I meant: about Adolf Hitler.

  “I have seen him and greeted him several times, but only spoke to him once,” he said. And his face was beaming with a strange light, as though inspired.

  “Do tell me!” said I.

  “Well, it was in Berlin, long ago—before his coming to power. He had just been addressing a meeting and spoke individually to many people. I was then a student, and I had been attending the meeting with other students. We went up to him, some eight or ten of us. And he shook hands with each one of us, and spoke to us in turn. He told us that he relied upon us; that we were to be the builders of new Germany. But it is not so much his words that impressed me, as it is himself, especially his eyes. ‘His divine eyes,’ you said. You are right: large, deep blue, magnetic eyes, he has; eyes that look straight into one’s soul or straight into infinity; full of heavenly light. No one could see those eyes and remain unmoved. No one could hear his warm, convincing, compelling voice; no one could behold his countenance—stamped with unbounded willpower; brightened with the holy radiance of inspiration; softened with kindness—without loving him. No one—at least no German—could come in close contact with him even once, even for five minutes, and not become his follower.”

  He paused a minute, as though lost in a dream, or watching some inner vision. The words he had uttered would have thrilled me anywhere. But there, in the midst of the sacred forest, the Hartz, they took on a beauty, a solemnity that lifted me above myself and above the world, to the realm of the eternal.

  But Herr A was again speaking—speaking freely in this sanctuary of peace where no profane ears could hear us, no enemy watch us; where we lay, for a while, outside the pale of persecution: “Yes,” he was saying, “you are right, entirely right: Adolf Hitler is National Socialism; He is Germany; He is the Aryan race; the ‘god among men’ as you write in your paper; the living Soul of the race—our Hitler!”

  He was no longer the same man. He was transfigured, as though the very spirit of the forest and of the blue sky had entered him, overshadowing his individual spirit. And I too, probably, looked more than myself. He took my hand in his, and I looked up to him with tears in my eyes.

  * * *

  We remained a long time without speaking, absorbed in our feelings, in tune with each other through the great One who filled our consciousness; in tune with the majestic trees, with the soul of the Hartz, the soul of all woods, abode of silent, inexhaustible strength and life—with the invincible soul of the Land he so loved. Ascending the pure blue sky, the Sun shed his rays more and more directly upon the treetops above our heads.

  At last, Herr A spoke: “You told me last night,” said he, “that you are a worshipper of ‘the Heat-and-light within the Sun,’ of the Energy that is Life; in other words, that you are a Heathen like myself and like the few others of us who really know the meaning of what we profess to stand for. Have you never longed to see the spirit of our philosophy exalted in a public cult?”

  I thought I had heard the self of my youth, of my childhood, of always—my eternal self—speaking to me in the Führer’s sweet language.

  “I have longed for that all my life,” said I, “and travelled all my life in search of its nearest equivalent, without really finding it.” (I nearly said: “I have longed for that all my lives, and sought it in all the countries of this and other planets, without yet finding it.”)

  Herr A looked at me intently and spoke: “The public cult of Life and sunshine, as you have dreamed it,” said he, “will flourish here in Germany, the cradle and the stronghold of National Socialism—during your lifetime and mine. One day, somewhere on the edge of this very forest, men will behold the temple of the new Soul. I have planned it; and I shall build it after we are free once more; after ‘he’ comes back; in other words, after the new soul awakens in earnest and takes consciousness of itself.”

  He was silent for a while, and spoke again. (“Was it he, Herr A, or was it more than he? Was it the consciousness of the future, was it reborn Germany speaking to me through him?” thought I.)

  “The new Aryan soul that will pray and sing and dream in the temple of Life, is now slowly taking shape,” he said; “the collective soul that will uphold the Religion of Life and Light, the one religion that can minister to the aspirations of man in a permanent National Socialist State. I shall describe to you the temple as I have conceived it. I have hardly ever spoken of this to anybody. But you will understand me, I am sure.”

  “I hope so.”

  And he unfolded before me his beautiful dream. He described to me a splendid structure of granite, against a hill, in the midst of the woods. He evoked, before my eyes, the altar of the Sun—a huge cubic monolith bearing the holy Swastika, the Sign of the Sun, in the centre of a broad open platform, reached by a monumental staircase from within the temple, and upon which fire, lit directly from the sun rays through a convergent glass or crystal, would burn day and night—and the stately services to which the warrior-like sound of trumpets would call the population, not at ten or eleven o’clock, but at sunrise and sunset, on ordinary Sundays, and on the great festive days of the Sun—the equinoxes and the solstices—natural, regular landmarks in cosmic life, and on the great national anniversaries, landmarks in the history of the race, days on which the people have taken consciousness of their greatness in some great action.

  And I listened to the wonderful conception, more and more moved as Herr A spoke. I was a Sun worshipper all my life, and I was all my life a National Socialist—knowingly, for the last twenty years. And I had been aware all the time, at the bottom of my heart, that the everlasting Religion of the Sun and the modern Weltanschauung of power and beauty, of purity of blood, bodily perfection and mental virility—the eternal and the modern philosophy of the Swastika—were the same. And all my life I had dreamed of a modern cult expressing this fact. And lo, at last, a man was telling me that my dream would become a living reality, at least that it would inasmuch as that depended upon him; and that man was none other but one of the faithful National Socialists in downtrodden, persecuted Germany. I felt as though, through Herr A, her worthy son, it were Germany herself speaking to me in her martyrdom: “Trust Me, the Führer’s Nation; The Power of the Sun, Whom you worship, will again raise Me from the abyss. And I shall make your dream a reality from Ocean to Ocean. I shall establish the cult of strength and joy—of youth—all over the subdued world!” And the words of one of our beautiful Nazi songs came back to my mind: “. . . for Germany belongs to us today, and tomorrow the whole world.”274

  I gazed at Herr A. “I have never heard of any conception as beautiful as this,” said I sincerely. “When did you first think of this ‘German temple’ of yours?”

  “In 1936.”

  “And what did you do about it then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But why? Why did you not try to bring the scheme into being, under the great One who would have understood it and appreciated it better than anybody else?”

  “But he would have been the only one to understand it and appreciate it,” said Herr A.

  And I recalled what my wise husband had told me sometime in early 1941—and then, not fo
r the first time: “There is one man, and one alone, in the wide world, who would fully understand and appreciate your conception of religion and life, and that is . . . the Head of the Third Reich. You should have gone straight to him instead of coming and wasting your time in the East.”

  And the old sadness, and the old feeling of inexpiable guilt again made my heart ache. The knife was again thrust into the unhealed wound.

  But Herr A spoke once more. “The time was not ripe, then,” said he. “It is not ripe now. But it will soon be. It will be, when the German people have walked to the end along the way of blood and tears, and learnt to value that which so many of them considered lightly.”

  “And what did they consider lightly?” I asked.

  “Hitler’s words, Hitler’s love, Hitler’s spirit,” replied Herr A. “They are only now beginning to realise what a man lived in their midst; lived for them alone.”

  “But would not the public cult of Life, as you understand it so well, would not your ‘German temple’ as you planned it in your mind, have helped them to realise all that?”

  “No. The new soul must slowly emerge out of unconsciousness before it can express itself in a public cult. It must emerge out of new dwellings, new schools, new factories, new centres of physical training, new life. The ever-burning high altar of the Sun, bearing the sacred Sign both of Life and of National Socialism, can only be the culmination of the future city in which the new life will be an everyday reality, accepted as a matter of course. We were gradually building that splendid new life, when the vile Jew stirred up the whole world against us, and forced war upon us.”

  And he described some of the features of the world that would have been if National Socialist Germany had not been defeated in 1945—of the world that will come into being tomorrow, one day, never mind when, if, with the help of the invisible forces that govern all things, we succeed in imposing our will upon men.

  I was beaming with elation. “You have described,” said I to Herr A, “that which, all my life, I have dreamed and longed for, thought impossible, and regretted never to see: modern civilisation at its best, modern industry in all its efficiency, in all its power, in all its grandeur; modern life with all its comforts and, along with that, the eternal Heathendom of the Aryans; the religion of living—physical and supra-physical—perfection, of ‘God residing in pure blood’ to repeat the words of Himmler; the religion of the Swastika which is the religion of the Sun; efficiency and inspiration; iron discipline coupled with enthusiasm; work, a parade; life, a manly hymn; military schools and up-to-date dwellings in the midst of trees; blast furnaces and Sun temples. That is the super-civilisation according to my heart. That is, that always was my conception of true National Socialism applied in practice. And to think that I had to come to defeated, downtrodden, martyred Germany, to find at last someone to express the same dream even better than I ever have!”

  “Only through the experience of disaster and oppression, through years of martyrdom, could Germany grow to realise to the full the greatness of her Saviour and of all He stands for, and prepare herself to follow Him in absolute faith. She cheered Him, formerly, in the sunshine of victory, and her devotion was skin deep. Where are they now, those millions, whose lifted arms and joyous faces can be seen in the pictures of 1933 and 1935? Where are they? But now, the increasing thousands who long to shout ‘Heil Hitler’ from the bottom of the abyss, although they are not allowed to do so, mean it, with all their hearts. They will adore the holy Swastika, symbol of Life, in the Sun temples of the future. They will build the new world—the Golden Age world—which Hitler wanted.”

  “But could not that have happened without all this misery?”

  “No. Only bitter experience teaches nations, as it teaches individuals.”

  “What would have happened, according to you, if by chance we had won this war?”

  “Herr Schacht would still be Finance Minister of the Reich. And more millions of good-for-nothing people all over the world—some of them not even pure Aryans, strictly speaking—would be calling themselves National Socialists, without having anything in common with our beautiful way of life; without understanding the basis of it. The system would perhaps be in the process of decay through corruption from within. And once it collapsed (for it surely would have, in time) it could never have flourished again. A system that becomes rotten from within never does. Christianity, for instance, never will.”

  “And now?”

  “Now the world at large thinks us dead. Let people believe it! It is better to be alive, and believed dead, than dead or dying, and believed alive. It is even sometimes expedient to be thought dead. The more our enemies believe us so—the more the Occupying Powers are convinced that they have succeeded in ‘de-Nazifying’ Germany—the better for us. The more they believe us incapable of rising again, the freer we are to take consciousness of our strength, and to organise ourselves, and to get ready. The more silence, the more oblivion there is around us, the easier it is for us to move about in peace, and to do what is needed of us in these times of trial, of suffering, and of preparation.

  “We are few. But we have never been so alive as we are now—never so convinced of the absolute justice of our cause, of the absolute soundness of our principles; never so aware of the greatness of all we stand for.

  “Wait. And learn how to work in silence, in effacement, forgotten by others, forgetting yourself. Learn how to live, faithful to our ideals, without speaking of them. Learn how to live for our Führer alone, without stirring when you hear men either praise or condemn him. Remain proud and worthy of being a National Socialist, without letting the hostile or indifferent world know that you are one. Then, and then alone, you can be useful in our ranks.”

  “But when shall I see, at last, the triumph that our comrades deserve, if I don’t? And that new world which you say is nigh? When shall I witness the public cult of life among the regenerate Aryans?”

  “In less than ten years’ time. And you will see the beginning of the new rising in less than two, or at most three, if I am right. Great changes are to take place sooner than people think.”

  * * *

  Thus we conversed, lying in the moss at the foot of the trees, in the sunny solitude of the holy forest, in communion with those living trees, with the birds, the deer, the Sun and sky above; with the maternal earth on whose bosom our bodies lay—Germany’s earth.

  I often wish I had hearkened more strictly to Herr A’s words of prudence and wisdom. I would not now be here, in jail, but would still be useful—and in many more ways than one. Still, as Herr A said, “people learn through experience alone.”

  But I remember that warm September day spent in the Hartz, as a moment of beauty that nothing can alter—one of those unforgettable contacts of mine with the invincible soul of Germany.

  We had been sitting there for who knows how many hours, when at last Herr A said: “It is perhaps time for us to go. My wife will be waiting for us.”

  “Let us use and enjoy the freedom of the woods yet five minutes longer,” said I; “let us stand and sing any one you like of our old songs, as we would have, in former days, after a meeting of the NSDAP. No political gathering could have made me feel in tune with Germany’s living élite more vividly than I have here, today, through your contact.”

  “You are right,” said Herr A. “I too, feel the solemnity of this moment; your devotion represents, in my eyes, the homage of the whole Aryan race to our Germany.”

  So we stood, with our right arms outstretched towards the Sun, in that green solitude, the symbolical two of us—he, the Führer’s compatriot, and I, the Aryan woman from far away, the first fruits of the Race’s reverence and love. And we sang the Horst Wessel Song. The manly tune and words that once accompanied the march of the German army across Europe, filled the grand sunlit stillness of the holy Forest, abode of peace.

  And we were calm, although intensely happy, in the awareness of the eternity of all we stand for.


  Chapter 13

  ECHOES FROM THE RUSSIAN ZONE

  “So ist die marxistische Lehre der kurzgefaßte geistige Extrakt der

  heute allgemein gültigen Weltanschauung. Schon aus diesem Grunde ist auch jeder Kampf unserer sogenannten bürgerlichen Welt gegen sie unmöglich, ja lächerlich, da auch diese bürgerliche Welt im wesentlichen von all diesen Giftstoffen durchsetzt ist und einer Weltanschauung huldigt, die sich von der marxistischen im allgemeinen nur mehr durch Grade und Personen unterscheidet.”

  —Adolf Hitler275

  “. . . die Frage der Zukunft der deutschen Nation [ist] die Frage der

  Vernichtung des Marxismus . . .”

  —Adolf Hitler276

  I have never visited the Russian Zone of Germany—unfortunately. I wish I had. I would have, in fact—or would have at least tried to, on the sly—had I not been arrested in the British Zone before I could put my project to execution. And it is perhaps just as well—from the standpoint of my possible usefulness in the future—that I was arrested on this side of the “iron curtain” rather than on the other.

  But I have met quite a number of people who have been in the Russian Zone, and some who actually live there. And I can never forget the impression they left upon me. The first one I encountered was a young woman, tall and beautiful, dressed in a very simple dark blue coat, and bearing an expression of infinite anxiety upon her face. She sat by my side in a train leaving from Hanover, and we started talking to each other. Her father, she told me, was a German, her mother a woman from the Baltic States, a Lithuanian, I believe. Her father had known Sven Hedin. We talked about Sweden—where she had lived for a time—and about that great friend of Germany and of the Führer. Then, all of a sudden, after a long pause, she asked me: “Do you believe in the power of thought?”

  “I do,” I replied.

  “Then, think of me intensely this evening at about eight o’clock,” she said. “I shall then be on the border.”