by Savitri Devi
But I was arrested before I could go back. I never saw the lady again. She must have read about my case in the daily papers—or heard of it on the wireless: “Sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for Nazi propaganda . . .” And she probably thought: “Not surprising.”
* * *
But all these people, whether hundred percent National Socialists or not, had always been sympathetically inclined towards our régime; they were, at least, never hostile to it. Yet, there seem to be, in the Russian Zone no less than in Western Germany, quite a number of men and women who previously hated National Socialism but who, now, bitterly regret they did not support it with all their might. I repeat: I have not lived in the Zone. But I can assert that there are many such Germans among those who come across the border, whether with the intention of remaining in the Western areas, or on short periodical visits.
I shall recall one instance only: that of a young woman whom I met at the “Catholic Mission” in the Hanover station. This woman could hardly have been more than thirty—thirty-five at the most. She had a frank, pleasant face. She told me she was living in the Russian Zone. I introduced myself as a writer, and told her of my intended journey over the border in order to complete my book on Germany.
She gazed at me with genuine interest and said: “Don’t go! It is only courting trouble. You don’t know what a life we live, over there.”
“That is just what I would like to see for myself,” I replied.
“The knowledge is not worth the risk,” she answered. “You might never come back. You are English, aren’t you?”
“Half-English.”
“Whatever you be . . . You are not a Communist?” she asked.
“Anything but one!”
“Well, in that case, don’t go! They will seize on the slightest pretext to charge you with espionage on behalf of the Democracies and to send you off to some place whence you will never return.”
“But I am no Democrat either!” said I. And then, realizing that I had perhaps spoken too much, I added: “I take no interest whatsoever in politics. As a writer, I am only concerned with men and women and their lives.” The lie was a clumsy one. But she did not seem to notice it.
“If you care for people’s welfare, you should take interest in politics,” she replied. “But think twice before you support or fight any movement—weigh the pros and cons carefully.” And she added in a low voice: “Never do what I did. I betrayed my country without knowing what I was doing.”
I suddenly had a glimpse of the whole tragedy of that woman’s life. She was one of those thousands whom I had hated so intensely; one of those of whom I had so often said: “They should all have been ‘liquidated’ in time.” But I controlled my feelings, looked at her with curiosity, and answered enigmatically:
“Many have betrayed their country without knowing what they were doing during this war, and not only among the Germans. And they have betrayed the Aryan race, which in my eyes is worse.”
The woman looked strangely into my face and asked me, hesitatingly: “Are you also one of them?”
“Oh, not I!” I burst out in protest—I could nearly say “in indignation.” “I knew where my duty lay. And there lay my heart also. I was on the right side from the beginning—years before the war.”
“I see you are interested in politics after all,” said the woman, with a pinch of irony. But her face soon became serious, nay, sad, once more.
“You were on the right side without being a German,” she resumed, “while I . . . Oh, had I only known!”
“Is it indiscreet to ask what you did?” said I.
“I fought against Hitler,” she replied; “I was in an underground organisation whose aim was to undermine his power and to bring about his downfall. We were deceived into believing that he was the cause of the war and the original source of all our misfortunes—he, our saviour! Oh, had I but known!”
Every word of hers was like a knife-thrust into my heart. With implacable clearness, I pictured that woman busying herself with shadowy propaganda against the inspired Leader whom I so loved; I imagined her secretly informing the Russians of whatever she knew of his efforts to defend Germany (as so many other traitors had informed the Western Democracies)—doing her best to bring about the ruin of the National Socialist Order, the downfall of all I admired, revered, praised, defended, all those years. Did she perchance fancy that her tardy remorse would efface that criminal past of hers in my eyes? I hated her with bitter hatred. And my first impulse was to say: “Well, remain, now, under the darling Communists whom you yourself called and longed for, and enjoy them to your heart’s content! You don’t know how glad I am to behold that distress upon your face. You are not the first one I see—nor the last, I hope. I am only sorry I cannot meet the whole lot of you, one by one, and enjoy the sight of each one’s present-day misery. The Third Reich, which you betrayed, spared you. May those for the sake of whom you betrayed it not spare you, but slowly grind you out of existence, you and all the other wretched anti-Nazis! You don’t deserve to see the daylight!”
But I did not utter these words. I only felt them spring from my heart in indignation and hatred, as I gazed at that woman.
She was pretty, and well-built. She looked healthy. Under a broad, intelligent forehead, her two large grey eyes were fixed upon me, while the curls of her glossy reddish-brown hair moved in the wind. There was such a depth of despair in those eyes that I shuddered. But still, I hated her.
Then, in a flash of imagination, I recalled the stern and beautiful face of the Man she had betrayed—and probably reviled in speech, countless times—the Führer’s face, as sad as hers, but of a different sadness; a face conscious of the tragedy of the whole world led to its ruin by its own folly, and its enemies’ lies; conscious of the eternal tragedy of better mankind exploited by the clever rogues of an inferior nature, but aware, also, of the endless potentialities of the misled Aryan; the face of the Saviour who hoped because he loved, and who stands above defeat because he knows the everlastingness of the truth for which he fought. And I felt as though He stood between us—He, our loving Hitler—and was saying to me: “Don’t crush her still more under the weight of your indignation. Don’t hate her! For my sake, don’t! Whatever she might have done against me, she is one of my people. Help her to come back to me.”
Tears filled my eyes; and I was a while without speech. Then, I said slowly: “What is done is done. But the endless future is there, before you. Germany is not dead; will never die. Tell me: what would you do now—tomorrow, next year—if the Führer came back?”
“I would stand by him fanatically, in the new struggle, glad if an honourable death cleansed me of my shameful past activities,” she replied, her eyes also moist with tears. And she added with entreaty: “I know you can hardly believe me. You don’t trust me. You look upon me as a traitor, which I am, or rather which I was. But if you could realise what agony I have lived, all these four years, you would believe me. And you would not hate me.”
A tear slowly rolled down one of my cheeks.
“Who am I,” said I, “to hate you? I have no right to do so. As an Aryan and as a lover of truth, I came from the other end of the world to bear witness to my Führer’s greatness in this martyred Land. And you are one of his people. And you love him—now. Don’t you?”
A flash of unearthly joy brightened her pale face—the joy of unexpected redemption.
“I do!” she replied passionately.
I took her to a place where nobody could watch us and asked her: “Would you like to do something for him?”
“What can I do, now? It is too late.”
“It is never too late, as long as the spirit is alive. Listen: can you distribute a few of these among the men and women across the border who, like yourself, once fought against National Socialism, but now repent for what they have done?”
And I took out of my bag a bundle of leaflets wrapped up in a fashion magazine.
She read one and a
sked me: “Who wrote this?”
“I.”
“And you are sure he is alive?”
“Practically sure. I know it from several sources.”
“Oh,” said she, with infinite yearning, “if only you were right! I shall take as many of those leaflets as you can give me, and distribute them among my friends.”
“Are you not afraid to cross the border with them?”
“No. I am never searched now. The guards know me. Moreover, they know I have worked against all this in bygone years. But they do not know how I regret it.”
I gave her the whole bundle. “Good luck to you,” said I.
“I shall never forget our meeting in this station,” she replied. “I hope to see you again, one day, if I am not caught and sent to Siberia to work till I am dead. I don’t think I shall be. But one never knows. Well, if I am, I shall expiate my past.”
“Don’t look to the past,” said I; “look to the future—for we have a future. I assure you we have. Auf wiedersehen!”
She looked at me as though she wanted to say something more. She turned her head right and left to see whether anybody was paying attention to us from a distance. Then, she lifted her right hand in the ritual gesture, as I would have, myself, in a lonely place, in the presence of someone of our views.
“Heil Hitler!” she said.
It was perhaps the first time in her life that she greeted anyone sincerely with those words and that gesture. I replied with the same gesture, repeating the forbidden, sacred words: “Heil Hitler!” And I recalled in my heart the Führer’s sentence: “One day, the world will know that I was right.”
And I was filled with an immense joy, as though I had played a part—a tiny part—in the making of a new Germany, more strongly, more genuinely united than ever under the sign of the Swastika.
* * *
I have said so before: they can dismember Germany, terrorise her people, starve them, humiliate them, vilify them in the eyes of a world of charlatans and imbeciles; they can forbid the Horst-Wessel-Lied, and all the other songs of the glorious days; forbid the Nazi salute, and all external manifestations of love for Adolf Hitler. They can never kill the Nazi spirit, or the German soul—the first national soul awake in an Aryan nation, foreshadowing the birth of the future soul of Aryandom. Let them maintain four ‘Zones’ in the place of the one Reich—as long as the invisible Powers allow them to do so. Four Zones there might be but, still one people, one heart, one German consciousness and—whether alive or dead, in the flesh—one Führer, of whom nobody speaks (in public at least) but of whom everybody thinks and whom, more and more, everybody reveres.
To the unsympathetic foreigner come to occupy their country and to try to “convert” them, the Germans might show but an extreme outward politeness, and an absolute indifference to the fate of National Socialism and of its Founder. But the intelligent occupants themselves are not deceived. A French official in Baden-Baden, Monsieur P, once told one that a paper in Cologne had published an article discussing the question whether the Führer is alive or not. “There was a ‘queue’ waiting to buy the paper on that day,” said he. “There would be! There is nobody but Hitler in their minds.”
And, as soon as the Germans are really in distress, their thoughts automatically rush back to him, “not only the Leader of his people, but their Saviour,” as Hermann Göring once said.277 In the dark days of hunger and destitution, in Treves and several other towns, I was told, one found the two forbidden words written upon the walls: “Heil Hitler!” as though to say: “Yes, in ‘his’ time we were happy, while now . . .” And during the tragic blockade of Berlin, the crowd from the starving Western sectors, roused by prolonged hardships, did not oppose Communist power with newly learnt Democratic slogans. No. Those dead words, corresponding to nothing whatsoever in the German heart, if ever learnt at all for the sake of immediate expediency, were forgotten in the twinkling of an eye. And on the 13th of September 1948 the crowd marched to the Brandenburg Gate singing the Horst Wessel Song, and tore down the flag of the Hammer and Sickle shouting “Heil Hitler!”—despite the terrible penalties that awaited all those on whom the Russians managed to lay hands.
“Heil Hitler!” is the cry of Germany’s heart to this day, in whatever “Zone” it be.
* * *
The feeling of bitterness and resentment that one encounters in those who live in the Russian Zone is partly due, no doubt, to the hard conditions of life that prevail there. But it is also, and more still, due to the knowledge of the thoroughness and stability of Communism, compared with Democracy; to the consciousness of its hold on a large section of mankind, and its irresistible expansion. The Germans of the Western Zones—I mean, not the docile slaves of the Jews, but the genuinely intelligent and wholeheartedly German people, i.e., the National Socialists—might be persecuted: not allowed to air their views freely; not allowed to greet one another publicly in the former manner, or to have pictures of the Führer on the walls, in their own houses; not allowed to hold certain posts, or even to work at all, if they are known to have been prominent or at least enthusiastic members of the NSDAP in recent years. Yet, they are too intelligent not to realise the weaknesses of Democracy; not to see how shallow, how inconsistent, nay, how childish is the “philosophy” upon which it lies, compared with ours; not to think: “Such a system cannot last. It carries in itself the germs of its own destruction. Its very inconsistency—or rather its hypocrisy—is its death-warrant.” The Democrats, even when they persecute us, are too stupid for us not to despise them, as I have already said many times. The naïveté with which they proceed to “reform” us would be sufficient to make anybody laugh. We know what they want us to say. We say it. And we are amused to see how readily they believe that we really mean it. We deny (outwardly) whatever we can of the acts of ruthlessness—the so-called “war-crimes”—attributed to us, letting the simpletons remain convinced that, if only we believed that such “crimes” really took place, we would be the first ones to renounce National Socialism. And when we see how firmly convinced they are of our fundamental “humanity”—when we see how readily they take all but the most obviously, the most blatantly thorough amongst us for lovers of half-measures like themselves—we think: “What fools!” As though we ever cared—as though we care, now—what acts of violence took place for the sake of our triumph; as though we mind a little ruthlessness, when it is expedient! In you, our persecutors of today, what revolts us is the hypocrisy, not the violence; the way you find excuses for your crimes, not your crimes themselves; the spirit in which you do things, not the things you do—not even your atrocities upon us; we would understand those, if only you called them acts of vengeance and not acts of justice. You don’t know us! You never will. Continue to lull yourselves into believing that you have “converted” us—“awakened” in us the natural “humanity” that our “monstrous” Nazi education had silenced for a while—you bumptious imbeciles, you self-styled “crusaders to Europe,” and keep on being fooled, as long as we judge it expedient to nod our heads at your sermons! Tomorrow—next year, the year after—when our opportunity comes again, we will show you fast enough how silly of you it was to judge us by your own standards. We will teach you what Nazis are, if you do not know by now! In the meantime, keep your illusions.
In the Russian Zone, things are different. There—from what I imagine from my few contacts with Germans who live there; for I repeat: I have not lived there myself—persecution seems to be not only more ruthless (it is ruthless enough in Western Germany) but more intelligent, and more difficult to avoid. The Communists know that we are as one-pointed, as purposeful, as uncompromising as themselves, and that therefore they cannot trust us, whatever we might tell them. They might try to “convert” a few of the younger ones among us. But they do not try for long. They do not believe in wasting their time. They either subdue us materially, and terrorise us into silence, or “liquidate” us. They understand us better than the Democrats ever will, and cons
equently, dislike us without reservations. As I said before, they, and not the Democrats—not the men spontaneously drawn to half-measures—are our real enemies.
The National Socialists of the Russian Zone realise that only too well. And at times, under the heel of those real enemies, so well organised and so strong, they experience a feeling of dejection verging on despair. We have lost this war. We all know that. But in the West of Germany, many of us still believe that the Democracies and the Bolsheviks won it together. In the Russian Zone, we are all convinced, for the last four years, that the Bolsheviks alone are the victors.
Moreover we feel—and that, not only in the Russian Zone, but also in the areas under Franco-Anglo-American control, and outside Germany—that we are, with Communism, in the presence of something altogether out of proportion with Western Democracy; of something grim and formidable, not the last sign of life in a dying world, but the swelling tide of a new, great wave in the history of man. And we feel—we know, from our intuition of history (and those of us who possess a sound historical background know it all the more definitely from logic as well as intuition)—that this new great movement in the evolution of man is unavoidable. We could not stop it. The Democracies will still less be able to do so. Nothing can stop it. It has to come, whether one likes it or not, just as, sooner or later, night has to take the place of daylight. We know this is the last leap of mankind along its age-old, fated path towards disintegration—unavoidable doom. We know that doom must come, before resurrection. We—the children of resurrection—can do nothing, before the world has trodden the path of death to its very end. We can only be ready and wait—“hope and wait,”278 as the Gods, through my humble agency, told the German people. There is nothing else to be done. Our time of grand outward activity lies in the past and in the future. At present, we can only watch—keep our spirit alive—and pray; keep ourselves in contact with one another and with the eternal Source of our inspiration: the truth we stand for, and the godlike Exponent of that truth, our Führer, living forever, whether he be materially alive, or dead and immortal; somewhere on earth, or in Valhalla.
