by Savitri Devi
Savitri did, however, have a remarkable memory. Even in old age, she was able to quote her favourite passages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf from memory, including the page numbers. Her memory also suffices to account for her quotes from Racine’s Andromaque, which she had committed to memory as a child, as well as her quotes from Leconte de Lisle, Victor Hugo, Akhnaton’s hymns to the sun, Wulf Sörensen’s (Heinrich Himmler’s) Die Stimme der Ahnen (The Voice of the Ancestors), and other works. Furthermore, in Defiance we learn that Savitri had a number of books with her in prison: the Bhagavad-Gita, Gottfried Feder’s Das Programm der NSDAP (The Programme of the NSDAP), H.R. Hall’s The Ancient History of the Near East, Herbert H. Gowan’s An Outline History of Japan, a Mythology of Ancient Britain (perhaps Charles L. Squire’s The Mythology of Ancient Britain and Ireland), an Art and Civilisation of Ancient America, two books on Mongolian history35 (Harold Lamb’s The March of the Barbarians36 and Ralph Fox’s Genghis Khan37), and the aforementioned New Soldiers’ Songbook. Moreover, Savitri mentions that she had copies of and extracts from the periodicals she cites in Chapter 7 with her in prison.38 Finally, she mentions that the passages she quotes from Winston Churchill’s War Memoirs in a footnote to Chapter 339 were copied from an issue of Life magazine given to her by a fellow prisoner.40 So it is quite conceivable that Savitri also had access to the other titles she quotes in Gold while in prison. Of course Savitri probably checked her citations from memory against the originals once she left prison, and she added at least two notes,41 but her claim that Gold was written in prison is essentially true.
After her release from Werl on 18 August 1949, Savitri entered the French occupied zone to visit friends in Koblenz. On 21 August, she left Germany for France where she took up residence in her home town of Lyons. But instead of immediately publishing Gold, Savitri first wrote and published Defiance. It was Savitri’s custom to write the Forewords to her books last. The Foreword to Defiance was written in Lyons on 29 August 1950.42 Defiance was published in 1951 in Calcutta by Savitri’s husband A.K. Mukherji. Savitri then turned her attention to Gold and Lightning. She recorded that chapters 6 and 7 of Lightning were written in Lyons in 1951 and 1952, but the book was not finished until 21 March 1956 in Hanover,43 after many more adventures in Germany, some of which Savitri chronicled in Pilgrimage and Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess.44 The Foreword to Gold was written in Lyons on 21 August 1952. The book was published later that year in Calcutta by A.K. Mukherji.
ON THE PRESENT EDITION
The first edition of Gold in the Furnace contains many errors and stylistic inconsistencies. Savitri attributed these to the fact that the book was printed in India while she was in France, unable to oversee production. Page proofs were apparently sent to her, but she gives no indication they were ever received.45 In truth, Savitri also needed the services of a good copy editor.
My goal as editor was to make the minimum number of editorial interventions necessary to bring Gold into accord with proper English and contemporary stylistic canons. Following Savitri’s use of British English, I have corrected errors of spelling and grammar and made the style consistent throughout. I corrected a few “foreignisms”: unidiomatic diction and syntax based on French and German, the languages that Savitri was using regularly while writing Gold. I corrected errors of diction, e.g., “enormity” where “enormousness” was meant, “ostensibly” where “ostensively” was meant, “specially” where “especially” was meant, etc. I strayed from my minimalist approach in Chapter 4, where I changed the tense of part of Savitri’s account of her conversation with Sven Hedin to impart greater immediacy. I preserved Savitri’s sometimes eccentric capitalization practices without trying to make them consistent.
The subtitle, “Experiences in Post-War Germany,” does not appear in the first edition, but it translates the subtitle of the 1982 German translation of Gold, “Erlebnisse im Nachkriegsdeutschland.” Since Savitri was in constant contact with the translator, Lotte Asmus, while the book was in preparation, it is reasonable to assume that Savitri approved of the subtitle.
Regarding punctuation and capitalization: Savitri did not merely use commas and semicolons to organize information on a page, but to indicate dramatic pauses in imaginary speech. She indicates quite a few pauses, which seems ironic to anyone who actually heard her speak, for she spoke quickly and without pause. Nevertheless, I have maintained her punctuation practices. There are six exceptions to this. First, I “updated” the use of hyphens, for example in “to-day” and “to-morrow.” Second, I regularized the use of commas before conjunctions. Third, I removed a few commas that seemed to be obvious strays, conforming neither to accepted usage nor to Savitri’s style. Fourth, I eliminated commas and, in a couple of cases, semicolons that were adjacent to dashes. Fifth, Savitri enclosed every instance of the word “de-Nazification” in “scare quotes.” Although it pains my editorial conscience, I did not follow this practice when the repetition seemed tedious and excessive. Finally, there were several sentences that were difficult to read and understand because commas and semicolons had sprouted between virtually every word. I weeded out just enough punctuation to make these sentences readable.
I have translated all quotations in French and German or looked up existing translations. I have cited standard translations of French and German works, even where the translation is mine. Where possible, I have supplied complete citations for books and articles mentioned. Finally, where useful, I have provided editor’s notes, which are clearly marked as such.
I encourage those who wish to check my editorial labours against the original to contact me at the Savitri Devi Archive (www.savitridevi.org), and I will provide them a photocopy of the first edition at cost or a PDF free of charge.
I judged a third edition of Gold necessary because of problems with the second edition, published by Historical Review Press, most notably the omission of two entire pages of text. I would have preferred the entire printing scrapped and a corrected version printed. That was not done, hence this third edition. In the end, it was all for the best, because preparing this new edition has given me the opportunity to discover and correct a number of my own editorial mistakes, thus bringing this edition into closer correspondence both with Savitri’s original and my own editorial principles.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank all who made this new edition of Gold in the Furnace possible: Colin Jordan for supplying a copy of Gold that had belonged to his ex-wife Françoise Dior, the copy that I scanned for this and the previous edition; Beryl Cheetham for supplying a copy of the dust jacket for Gold hand-painted for her by Savitri herself in 1961; M.H. for the cover photo and the 1948 photos of Savitri in Germany and Sweden; J. for the images of pages from Savitri’s 1940-1950 passport; Fr. Genesthai for his advice on editorial matters; and John Morgan and D.A.R. Sokoll for carefully reading the page proofs. Special thanks are due Gabriella Anelauskaitė for her help with the dust jacket/cover.
Beryl Cheetham was Savitri’s friend for more than twenty years and was especially helpful to Savitri during the last year of her life, when, with failing health and fading eyesight, she travelled around France and Germany living on the charity of friends and comrades. Beryl’s contributions to this new edition of Gold go beyond the back jacket/cover, for she has been indispensable to my research on Savitri Devi. Therefore, for her help to Savitri and to me, I wish to dedicate this new edition of Gold to her.
Savitri in Alfeld an der Leine, Lower Saxony, 5 December 1948
FOREWORD
In 1948, I was able to enter Germany for the second time thanks to the military permit granted to me by the Bureau des Affaires Allemandes (in Paris) on the ground that I was going there to gather the necessary information for writing a book. This book is none other than the present one (ironical as the fact might be, from the standpoint of the temporarily victorious Democracies). Its Introduction and three first chapters were already written when, on the 20th of February 1949, I was arrested on accou
nt of “Nazi propaganda,” and the rest of it was entirely written in my cell in the Werl prison. It owes its publication, nay, its very survival as a manuscript, to a miracle, or rather, to a hardly believable series of miracles, of which I have related the extraordinary story in detail in another book of mine, Defiance,46 written after my release.
All I wish to express here—four years after the actual writing of this book—is, once more, my boundless gratitude to the invisible Powers for having saved it as miraculously as if They had, indeed, pulled its pages, untouched, out of the fire. All I wish to express is my confidence in Their patient, passionless, impersonal Wisdom—in that Wisdom that uses everything for the greater glory of persecuted higher mankind and for the triumph of the Truth and Beauty it embodies. Those Forces which saved this book and brought it to light in spite of all, will bring my comrades and superiors back to power and, through them, save what is worth saving in the West, one day. Thus do I at least interpret the meaning of this miracle of Theirs in my favour.
Heil Hitler!
SAVITRI DEVI MUKHERJI
Lyons (France)
21 August 1952
Savitri’s visa to pass through Denmark on “The Unforgettable Night” of 15-16 June 1948.
INTRODUCTION
“Age after age, when justice is crushed, when evil rules supreme, I
come; again I take birth on earth to save the world.”
—The Bhagavad-Gita47
“Ein ganzes Volk, eine ganze Nation fühlt sich heute stark und
glücklich, weil in Ihnen diesem Volk nicht nur der Führer, weil in Ihnen diesem Volk auch der Retter erstanden ist.”
—Hermann Göring48
Gods—i.e., divinely inspired supermen—are not born on earth every day, nor every century. And when they do come, and live and act in their miraculous manner, not every man, not every nation recognises them. Blessed is the nation who follows to the bitter end the divine men born in her midst, and who, whether in victory or disaster, clings to their spirit! That nation will triumph over the forces of death, in the long run, and thrive in beauty, strength, and joy, while the rest of the ungrateful world lies in waste at her feet.
Thirty years ago, one could have believed that the days of the Gods were over forever; that the promise given to the world in the Book of books—the Bhagavad-Gita—was never again to be fulfilled; that mankind, day by day more degenerate, more bastardized, stupider, sicklier, uglier, had become incapable of producing an Individual worthy of carrying out a divine mission on an international scale. Both in the East and in the West, even the superior races were, or seemed to be, in full decay, nay, completely exhausted; nearing their end.
But the message of the triumph of life, over and over again—God’s promise—can never fail. The words spoken by the world’s eternal Sustainer, no one remembers when, in Kurukshetra:49 “I come again . . . ,” were not spoken in vain. They hold good for all times, and for all lands in which a truly noble race, however tired, however overwhelmed by the darkening shadow of death, is still alive enough to bear witness to their accomplishment; to marvel and to adore; and to rise at the bidding of the returning Saviour. “When justice is crushed, when evil rules supreme”—when all hope seems irretrievably lost—the Saviour is already there, waiting, unnoticed among the crowd; ready to reveal Himself.
At the close of the First World War, out of prostrate Germany, rose the Man destined to infuse a new strength and a new pride, to breathe a new joyful life, not only into his own people, but into the racial élite of the whole world; the greatest European of all times: Adolf Hitler. Alone, with no other riches but the love of his great heart, an indomitable will, and the intuition of things eternal; with no other strength but the compelling power of truth; with no other help but that of the invisible Gods, whose Chosen One he was, he accomplished what no man could have even dreamed. Not only did he raise Germany out of poverty, servitude, and demoralisation—out of the dust—once more to the rank of a great Power, but he made her the herald of a splendid idea of everlasting and universal scope. For a few brief years—until international Jewry succeeded in stirring against him the forces of the stupid majority of mankind—he was able to show the world the masterpiece of his creative genius: a super-civilisation, materially perfect, and, at the same time, inspired with a faith in the superior values of life, conscious of life’s true purpose, as no other had yet ever been, even in Antiquity; the first step towards the New Order in Europe, forerunner of a new “age of truth” in the evolution of the world; that glory that was National Socialist Germany.
Had Germany emerged victorious from the Second World War, and imposed Hitler’s dream upon the whole of the earthly sphere—or had there been no war, and had the Idea conquered ground slowly and steadily, through the sole strength of its appeal to the natural aristocracy of humanity—what a wonderful place this planet would have become, in less than a generation or two! We would then have witnessed the intelligent rule of the best, over a world organised according to that selfsame spirit in which the fair, strong and wise conquerors—the Aryans, or “noble ones”—organised India (that land of many races) in the far-gone days when the Nordic pride was still vivid in their hearts, along with the memory of their distant Arctic home.
We would have seen the natural hierarchy of human races—and individuals—part and parcel of the natural hierarchy of beings, ordained by the Sun, restored and maintained, stressed by law, exalted, in a reinstalled natural religion, wherever, in the words of the Bhagavad-Gita, “the corruption of women has brought forth the confusion of castes”; a truly “new earth and new heaven”; the rebirth of the world under the Sign of the Sun.
Men were too stupid and too vulgar to feel the beauty of that dream. The world—the Aryan race itself, at large—refused the gift of Hitler’s love and genius, and repaid him with the darkest ingratitude. Few of the great Ones have been so mercilessly vilified as he, by their worthless contemporaries. Not one has been so utterly misunderstood, so systematically betrayed, and, above all, so widely hated.
Now—outwardly at least—the agents of disintegration have had their way. Proud and beautiful National Socialist Germany lies in ruins; hundreds of Hitler’s most active collaborators are dead; thousands are living, in captivity, a life worse than death. And the millions who acclaimed him only a few years ago with an enthusiasm amounting to adoration, are now silent. “Es ist das Land der Angst”—“this is the land of fear”—were the words addressed to me in Saarbrücken, in 1948, as the summary of the whole situation in occupied Germany. And no one knows where Hitler is, if still alive.
Yet, the National Socialist creed, based upon truths as old as the Sun, can never be blotted out. Living or dead, Adolf Hitler can never die. And sooner or later, his spirit must triumph.
This book is addressed to all his true followers, whether in or outside Germany; to all those who, in 1948, cling to the National Socialist ideals as steadfastly as they did in 1933 and in 1940.
But it is specially addressed to the German ones—to those who kept their faith in our Führer under the streams of fire and phosphorus poured down on them, from the Anglo-American planes, night after night, for five years; to those who continued to love and revere him in the midst of the atrocious post-war conditions imposed upon them by his enemies—under humiliations of all sorts; under persecution; and in hunger; in concentration camps, or in the bleak desolation of their ruined homes—in spite of all the frenzied attempts to “de-Nazify” them at all costs; to the men of gold and steel whom defeat could not dishearten, whom terror and torture could not subdue, whom money could not buy: the real Nazis, my comrades, my superiors—for I have not had the honour of suffering materially for our ideals, as they have—the only ones, among my contemporaries, for whom I would gladly die.
I thank all the friends who, in or outside this country, have helped me in my endeavour to prepare, along with them, the resurrection of our New Order.
I cannot also help thanking those of our
enemies who, without knowing what they were doing, have so kindly made it possible for me to come to Germany. They too—for once—acted as instruments of those unseen Forces that are already clearing the way for the ultimate triumph of the Swastika.
Heil Hitler!
SAVITRI DEVI MUKHERJI
Alfeld an der Leine (Niedersachsen)
3 October 1948
Chapter 1
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SWASTIKA
“Thou hast set every man in his place. Thou hast made them different in
form and in speech, and in the colour of their skins. As a divider, Thou hast divided the foreign people.”
—Akhnaton50
“Out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of castes; out
of the confusion of castes, the loss of memory; out of the loss of memory, the lack of understanding; and out of this, all evils.”
—Bhagavad-Gita51
“Alle großen Kulturen der Vergangenheit gingen nur zugrunde, weil
die ursprünglich schöpferische Rasse an Blutvergiftung abstarb.”
—Adolf Hitler52
A Movement such as National Socialism, destined to appeal to millions, does not attract every one of its adherents for the same reasons. That matters little, as long as the Movement is triumphant. Then, the more the better. Even the fellow who joins the Party for the material advantages he hopes to get out of it, can be made use of. And his children, at any rate—provided they be of irreproachable blood—can be trained into better Nazis than himself.