by Savitri Devi
“I hate from the depth of my heart those who place such a choice before you and thousands of others,” I said. And I meant it. And I mean it.
Fräulein S looked at me with a sympathetic smile. “We all do,” she said. “But we must not take them and their mad regulations too seriously. They will not be here forever, anyhow. Germany cannot be kept down indefinitely; you know that as well as anybody. And who will care for their blasted “de-Nazification” once they are gone? In the meantime, we have to submit—outwardly; to play the game with them, the monkeys’ game, “Affenspiel”; “cette singerie,” she added in French. “That is indeed the right name for it in all languages.”
For all I know, the person who thus spoke less than two months ago is de-Nazified by now. And the authorities in charge of the “re-education” of the Germans believe that they have won a victory—made an extra convert to their detested Democracy—while in reality they have only added a little more bitterness to the bitterness already prevailing throughout the country, and earned a little more contempt from one extra individual.
The story of Fräulein S is by no means unique. It is the story of practically every de-Nazified German, man or woman. I have related it from the beginning and in detail, only to show that one should not hasten to brand as “turncoats” the great bulk of those Germans who consent to play the confounded comedy imposed upon them as an alternative to starvation.
* * *
The only cases—rare, I hope—in which de-Nazification results in no bitterness are those of people who never were National Socialists, although they might have been, at one time, outwardly, members of the NSDAP.
For long years, I was simple enough not to believe in the existence of such creatures. I well knew—from my own experience and from that of a few other non-German Aryans wholeheartedly sharing Adolf Hitler’s ideals—that it was possible to be a Nazi without being a Party member. But I had to come to Germany in order to believe that the reverse was also possible, namely that people could be—and far too often were—Party members without being Nazis. (It appears to me, now, that it was much too easy to become a Party member. And all those time-servers, pretending to be National Socialists only because it then paid to pass off for one, have played no small part in the disaster of 1945. Out of their ranks sprang the least detectable, and therefore the most dangerous, of the traitors who brought about Germany’s ruin, and postponed the triumph of National Socialism in the world.)
Such people can get de-Nazified without qualms of conscience. And tomorrow, they can turn to Communism or to anything else that “pays.” They are of no use to any party; of no help to any cause. Let them go over to the democrats! A little scum more or less in that gang will not make much difference. It is also safer for them than becoming Communists. There, they would perhaps not be given a chance to turn their coats once more. The leaders of our bitterest opponents purge their party. Our generous Führer had too much confidence in the Germans who came to him; he loved them too much, to suspect treason. He did not purge his Party as often and as drastically as safety demanded. Now, the Gods are purging it for him. And the various forms of pressure exercised upon us by the machinery of de-Nazification are, along with other, less ludicrous means of persecution, a detail in the implacable scheme of the Gods.
After these atrocious years, never must the old Party rise again as it was. No. The surviving followers of Adolf Hitler must emerge out of the trial reduced in numbers, no doubt, but purified, strengthened in quality; comprising only the hundred percent genuine National Socialists and not a single one of the others. That is the will of the Gods. And that is the one great lesson of a defeat brought about by long-drawn treachery. And the one great hope, the one glorious promise that brightens our lives in these days of humiliation.
In the meantime, what really matters is not to accept or to refuse to be de-Nazified on paper; to lie to our oppressors and laugh at them, or to defy them openly. What really matters is, whether in mockery or in defiance of the organised anti-Nazi forces, to remain equally firm in our principles, equally faithful to our Führer, equally impervious to all obvious or subtle anti-Nazi influences, until the day dawns for us to rise and conquer once more.
Chapter 6
CHAMBERS OF HELL
“They shall lay hands on you and persecute you, deliver you up to the
synagogues and into prisons, being brought before kings and rulers for My name’s sake.”
—The Gospel according to Luke 21:12
“Alle Verfolgungen der Bewegung und ihrer einzelnen Führer, alle
Lästerungen and Verleumdungen vermochten ihr nichts anzuhaben.”
—Adolf Hitler87
The relentless persecution of National Socialism in occupied Germany since 1945 is characterised, above all, by the hatred with which it is pursued—hatred of our philosophy of life, no doubt, and also hatred of our persons. This is a trait which, if not entirely new, had not, at least for centuries, distinguished an ideological struggle.
Much is made, in usual European histories, of the persecution of the early Christians by the Roman authorities, for the Western world is—or was, for a very long time—a Christian world. But, whatever else they might have done, the Roman authorities did not hate the obstinate men and women whom they sent to death in the circuses. They rather despised them; looked upon them as strange fanatics. They could not understand why the customary lip-homage to the divinity of the Emperor constituted such a crime in their eyes. When they had them tortured, it was to extract from them some confession or some denunciation, not for the sheer pleasure of applying torture.
The men of the Holy Inquisition did not hate the “heretics” whom they handed over to the “secular arm” to be burnt at the stake. On the contrary, they loved them—in their strange, very strange way. They loved their souls, in Christ and in the holy Church, as it was their duty, and hoped till the end for their conversion, and prayed for God’s grace to enlighten them, while the bodies were burning.
The furious reformers of the French Revolution killed off their opponents by the thousands, after a rapid trial or no trial at all, without bothering to torture or to humiliate them, save in a few special cases. They too, did not hate them. They only wanted to get rid of them.
And we, National Socialists—we whom the whole world accuses of all possible and impossible crimes, now that we are no longer in power—we never hated anyone in our grand days. We were ruthless, yes; we had to be. But we never were cruel, whatever the liars might say. We killed, if we were forced to, but with detachment, and as quickly and cleanly as possible. We never inflicted pain, unless it was absolutely necessary, for State reasons. And then we never considered it a pleasant necessity.
Our persecutors have, countless times, inflicted pain upon us, without it being in any way a State necessity from their point of view. They have starved us, beaten us, tortured us and compelled us, at the point of their bayonets, to undergo the worst possible humiliations, for the sheer delight of knowing that we felt the hunger, the pain and the insults, and that we suffered—we the strong and the proud; the hated Nazis—for the sheer delight of feeling that we were now in their power, and that any ill-treatment could henceforth be meted out to us with impunity. Maybe, they have treated me a little better—either because I happen to possess a British-Indian passport, or because their democratic conceit does not allow them, even now, to realise how deeply and passionately Nazi I am; or because they know I can speak, and are afraid of what I might say, when free once more, and wish to placate me beforehand. But rest assured, my kind and considerate British custodians, that any amount of exceptional treatment with which you may favour me, now—and for which, I suppose, I should be grateful—will never induce me to forget what I know of the martyrdom of my comrades and of my superiors, at your hands and those of your allies; and never lessen the bitterness of my resentment; and never silence my call for retribution.
* * *
Why has such savage hatred been stirred aga
inst us—nay, systematically cultivated, all these years? For two main reasons: because we endeavoured to free the Aryan world from the yoke of international Jewry, and because we claim to have, as Aryans and as National Socialists, greater duties, greater responsibilities, and greater rights than other human beings, whether these be members of the lower races, forever our inferiors whatever they do, or Aryans like ourselves, but not yet racially conscious. It is that which the world takes as a personal insult and will not forgive us. For this is a Jew-ridden world; and, in the West at least, to a very great extent, a bastardised world—thanks to a religion that has never raised an objection to unwholesome marriages, provided they be blessed by the Church. And the half-Jew, the quarter-Jew, the one-eighth Jew—the fellow who, more often than not, has Jewish blood without knowing it—sides irresistibly with the anti-Aryan forces against us. “Blood is thicker than water”—in most cases.
And many pure-blooded Aryans also side against us—alas!—and against the vital interests of their own race, thanks to the unnatural, anti-racial outlook which they have acquired from a Christian, Democratic, or Marxist education, and from the Jewish press and literature, and learnt to hold as natural and commendable. They might not be fundamentally cruel—real Aryans seldom are—but they add their voice to the clamours of the Jewish and Judaised portion of mankind. They put their fine inborn qualities to the service of the ideologies of disintegration, thus indirectly helping our persecutors. And sometimes they too torture and insult us—their blood brothers and natural friends—shame on them! The Englishmen and Americans who organised the phosphorus warfare against Germany—and still less the airmen who carried it out—were not all half-Jews or quarter-Jews. Nor were all those who staged the Nuremberg mockery show; nor all those who tortured our unfortunate SS boys, or stuck the points of their bayonets into the flesh of captured Nazi women. Nor had all the Russians who committed similar atrocities upon us the excuse of being half-Mongolians. But they were all prompted by some outlook, some doctrine, or some ideology of Jewish import. The Jew was, and still is, at the root of that untold hatred with which half the world or more has been pursuing us already before and during the war, and more than ever since 1945—since it became profitable as well as fashionable to be our enemy. It is the Jew’s own hatred. That is why it is so bitter and so cruel.
* * *
In the spring of 1945, on German soil overrun from all sides by invading armies; and already before that, in every country formerly occupied by Germany, as soon as it was clear that Germany could no longer hold out against the combined pressure of East and West, began, in all its horror, that long-drawn trail of unheard-of brutalities: the persecution of National Socialism.
At first, it took the form of a general outburst of mass violence—of looting of Nazi property, of murder and outrage—seasoned with varied individual atrocities, from the beating to death of wounded or tired German soldiers unable to leave the accursed country in time (as happened over and over again in France) to the tearing to pieces or burning alive of local National Socialists, Germans or “collaborators” of other nationalities, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the two countries in Europe who, in hatred of us and in barbarity, managed to outdo even France—which is indeed an achievement! Then, it became more and more official, organised, backed by military authority, and was finally sanctioned by law, at first in the trials of the so-called “war criminals” and then, in a less spectacular form, in the Occupation Statute.
I have already written in this book—and elsewhere88—what I think of the bogus tribunals set up in occupied Germany by Germany’s victors, to judge and condemn as “war criminals,” and hang, transport, or imprison all National Socialists who formerly held any high position in the country. I shall not repeat here how repulsive is the very idea of that so-called “justice,” put forward by people whom their own conduct towards Germany alone, during and after the war, would reduce to silence, if they had any shame at all; by people who, after the atrocities which they tolerate or support, both in their colonies and at home, on men89 and beasts,90 as a matter of course, should refrain from censuring the Chinese, Assyrian, and Carthaginian horrors of old, let alone our clumsy, amateurish acts of violence. What I only wish to denounce—apart from the vile hypocrisy that underlies all those trials of so-called “war criminals”—is the cruelty which inspired every one of their proceedings, from the arrest of the accused to the final sealing of their fate at the end of a rope or in a prison cell.
I have never had the honour of meeting any of the Twenty-one91 sentenced at Nuremberg on the 15th of October 1946. Only through other people have I heard of the physical and moral tortures and daily humiliations to which they were submitted to the very end. The one episode which Montgomery Belgion—an Englishman and an anti-Nazi—reports in his book Epitaph on Nuremberg,92 about the treatment inflicted upon one of the men on trial, during his imprisonment, is revolting enough to brand Germany’s victors forever with the mark of infamy. Julius Streicher, says he, had asked for some water to drink. A number of rascals among his custodians—doubtless mostly Jews—all spat in a basin, and then, forcing open the unfortunate man’s mouth with crooks, one of them poured the spittle into it, while the others held him down as still as they could. They then mocked him saying that, if the beverage were not to his taste, he could drink the contents of the lavatory.
However much a Jew might hate the former Gauleiter of Franconia and editor of Der Stürmer—one of the greatest fighters in the struggle against the Jewish yoke—still nothing can justify such behaviour as this. Nothing can even explain it, save a mean, cowardly, typically Jewish hatred. A man might wish to kill the sworn enemy of his race. And surely Julius Streicher himself had wasted no superfluous pity upon the Jews. But it takes a worm, with a dirty, perverted imagination, to think of such a revenge as this.
Perhaps less mean and dirty in itself, but proceeding, nevertheless, from the same sickening cruelty, is the final scene of that darkest drama of our times: the hanging of the Ten martyrs. The executioner had been specially flown over from America. One can well imagine what sort of a man he was: one of the same type as those American airmen who were heard in a train, in England, laughing and joking about the “grand fires” they had lit in their trip “over” Germany; a fellow who detested Nazis without even knowing why—because it was the thing everybody did, in Roosevelt’s silly USA—and who enjoyed torturing. The creature did his job only as such a one as he could do it: he hanged his victims as slowly as he could, and made them suffer as much as it was possible. Each execution took about half an hour, and the photographs of the martyrs’ dead bodies—which were published93—reveal an unusually painful agony.
However, I repeat, I have not come in contact with any of the Twenty-one, during or immediately after their trial—save, perhaps, with one, but in such an extraordinary manner that, were I to mention it, nobody would believe me save those who have themselves some knowledge of that extension of Nature which we miscall the “supernatural.”94
But on the other hand—thanks to the immortal Gods and to the British authorities of the Occupation—I have had the honour of speaking to more than one of the so-called “war criminals” imprisoned here, with me, at Werl, in Westphalia. Along with its many obvious drawbacks, prison life has some advantages of which the greatest, to me, is, undoubtedly, the opportunity of obtaining first-hand information (nowhere else available) about those facts that constitute, in themselves, the best impeachment of our persecutors. I thus improved my knowledge about that all-too-famous item of anti-Nazi propaganda: the German concentration camps under our régime, and about the equally all-too-famous trials of so-called “war criminals” connected with them.
* * *
Belsen—to take one instance among many—was not the place of horror that the average uncritical swallower of propaganda imagines. That, I knew, before coming here. And—although I did not need to be convinced even then—this was told to me in France, in 1946, by the first hones
t anti-Nazi whom I met there, a Frenchman who had himself been interned three years in the ill-fated concentration camp. Only such internees as deliberately rebelled against the discipline, “les récalcitrants,” were, said he, roughly brought to order. The others, the great majority, were kindly treated. And this is all the more to the credit of the staff that the number of people in charge of the place was, in proportion to the number of internees, amazingly small. (Twenty-nine women only were responsible, at least during the last weeks of the war, for the good management of the whole female section of Belsen, comprising about 30,000 internees. With so much to do they could be excused even if they had, at times, lost their temper.)
It is only in early April 1945, that Belsen started to become a place of hunger both for the internees and for the staff, not through any fault or neglect on the part of the staff or of the German food-supply, but through the sole action of the Allied Nations themselves—through the ceaseless bombardment by the Anglo-American planes, which had completely disorganised all transport services in Germany and which had, in particular, smashed to pieces whole trains carrying provisions and medical aid to the camp. The vanguard of the invading troops—in this instance, British—found the camp in a state of famine. And instead of blaming themselves and the RAF and the war in general, they immediately threw the whole burden of responsibility upon the unfortunate German staff. It was so easy! The men and women in charge of the camp were, of course, all out-and-out National Socialists—the men all members of the SS. What a lovely opportunity to inflict upon them all manner of torture with the blunt excuse of dealing out “justice,” and then, either to hang them as “major war criminals” or else to let them rot in prison any number of years, so that the world might never hear what they have to say! But truth will come out, sooner or later. It cannot be suppressed forever. It cannot be suppressed even for long without, one day, suddenly bursting forth in a murderous explosion. The gullible people of all countries have heard enough of “Nazi atrocities,” real or faked. The Gods have sent me here so that I might supply them—at last—with a little first-hand information about anti-Nazi ones—only too real—and British ones in this particular instance no less than Jewish ones under British supervision, if that can add to their interest.