Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

  I shudder when I recall the horror of the scene described to me by Frau E,95 one of the main persons sentenced to long terms of imprisonment by the British judge in that iniquitous “Belsen trial”—the scene of the arrest of the German staff of the camp.

  Twenty-five of the women who, at first, had left the camp with one of the SS men in command and had gone to Neuegamme, were treacherously told by the Allied military authorities that they could safely come back to Belsen; moreover, that they were to resume their posts there, and to run the place under Allied supervision. They came back in confidence, only to find themselves immediately surrounded by a crowd of yelling men, with drawn bayonets. Huddled against one another in terror, they saw the narrowing circle move towards them from all sides, nearer and nearer, until the cold, sharp points of steel touched them, scratched them, were thrust an inch or two into the flesh of some of them. They saw the ugly, evil glee on the grinning faces of the Jews and degraded Aryans who accompanied them and helped them in this cowards’ enterprise. For along with the regular British soldiery, the Allied military authorities had sent and were still sending to Belsen, as to every other place in which prominent National Socialists were captured, motor-lorries full of frenzied Israelites. It was to these that Adolf Hitler’s unfortunate followers were to be specially delivered.

  The women were completely stripped and, not only submitted to the most minute and insulting examination in the midst of coarse jeers, but threatened or wounded with bayonet thrusts without even the slightest pretext, or dragged aside by their hair and beaten on the head and on the body with the thick end of the military policemen’s guns, until some of them were unconscious. Needless to say, everything they possessed—clothes, jewellery, money, books, family photographs, and other property—was taken away from them and never given back to this very day. (Frau E was thus robbed of 12,000 marks—the whole amount of her savings from several years of honest hard work—by the British Occupation authorities.) The internees, now set free—and stuffed with white bread, butter, meat, eggs, and jam until half of them burst of indigestion—were given most of the valuables belonging to the German staff. The new masters of Germany, Jews and non-Jews, stole the rest.

  Then, the women were hurled into the mortuary of the camp, a small, cold, and dark room, with a stone floor, and locked in. They were given nothing to lie upon, not even straw, and were not allowed more than one blanket for every four of them. The room contained nothing but an empty pail in one corner, and had no ventilation. The long day dragged on. No food and no water were brought to the prisoners. Now and then, from outside, a sharp, thin shriek, or a loud howl—a distant or nearby cry of pain—reached their ears. They half guessed what was going on from one end of the camp to the other. But they were locked in. And had they not been, still they could have done nothing. The whole place—nay, the whole of Germany—was now in the hands of the Jews and of their vile satellites. There was nothing one could do, save to suffer in silence, and hope that one day one’s comrades would be avenged.

  A long sleepless night followed that atrocious day. And a new morning dawned. Still no one came to unlock the cell. Still no food and no water were brought to the helpless women. The day wore on, as slowly and as horribly as the one before. The same shrieks of pain were heard. Sometimes they seemed as though they came from very near; sometimes they seemed to come from far away. And still the door remained closed. And still not a scrap of bread to eat; not a drop of water to drink—or to wash in. The pail in the corner was now overflowing and useless. And the whole room was filled with its stench.

  The night came, and slowly passed also. The third day dawned. And still no one came to open the door; to remove the pail; and to bring food and water—water especially. Weakened by hunger, their throats parched with thirst, sleepless, and more and more dirty—now sitting and lying in their own filth—the helpless women began to give way to despair. Were they all going to be left to die in that horrid room, that chamber of hell if ever there was one? Perhaps. One can expect anything from Jews newly come to power.

  But the Jews—and their satellites—wanted a more long-drawn revenge; a revenge that would last years.

  Another night dragged on. Then came the morning of the fourth day, and a part of the fourth day itself. At last the door opened. The women were given some food and some water. But only because they had to be kept alive in order that their martyrdom might continue.

  * * *

  Through the famine conditions that had prevailed ever since the destruction of means of transport by the Allies themselves, as I have said, many of the internees were already in a hopeless state of health before the Allied forces set foot in the camp. Most of these died. Many more—who might have been saved, had they been fed gradually, at first on light food—were killed through sudden over-eating, thanks to the senseless kindness of their “liberators.” Plenty of dead bodies were lying about, without mentioning those of the SS warders, whom the British military policemen had tortured and done to death.

  The German women, hardly able to stand on their legs after their three days confinement—and several of them wounded by bayonet thrusts—were made to run, at the point of the bayonets, and ordered to bury the corpses; which they did all day, and the following days.

  Along with the dead bodies of internees, the women recognised those of a number of their own comrades, the warders of the camp, all bearing horrible wounds, some with entrails drawn out. The sharp shrieks and howlings of pain heard during those three days, became more and more understandable. Moreover, these were not the last victims of the invaders’ brutality within the camp area. Frau E and Frau B,96 who both lived through all that I have just tried to describe from their accounts, were the actual eyewitnesses of further nightmare scenes. They saw men wearing the uniform of the British Military Police overwhelm more of the surviving SS warders in struggles of several against one. They saw them knock them down on the floor or upon the heaps of dead bodies, kick them in the face and beat them with the thick end of their rifles till their heads were battered in; or rip open their bellies with bayonets and draw out their intestines while the martyrs were still alive, howling with pain. The ones in British uniform seemed to enjoy the cries, and the groans of agony. For who were those men, still in power but a few days before, now shrieking in pools of blood, disfigured, dismembered, torn to pieces—and mocked? Nazis. In the eyes of the vile Jew, and of those degenerate Aryans—traitors to their own race and a disgrace to mankind—who had accepted to side with him, no torture was vile enough for them.

  Frau E could not retain her tears as she related to me those scenes of horror that haunt her to this day—that now haunt me, although I have not seen them myself; that will haunt me all my life.

  I looked up to heaven—to that eternal blue heaven that contains the Dance of the Spheres, perennial illustration of the merciless Laws that compel the effect to follow the cause. And from the very depth of my heart—with tears in my eyes, I too—I repeated the prayer that had sprung from my lips at my first sight of the ruins of Germany; my answer to all the cruelties committed against those and other National Socialists, my comrades, my friends, the only people I love in this despicable humanity of today: “Avenge them, irresistible Force Who never forgives! Mother of Destruction, avenge them!”

  After they had, under the brutal supervision of the Military Police, buried as many of the dead bodies as they could, the German women were sent back to the narrow room—the former mortuary—that they occupied as a common prison cell. The place stank. The overflowing pail was still there. And for many days more the prisoners were neither allowed to empty it and put it back, nor given another one for the same use, nor given a drop of water. They could neither wash themselves nor wash their clothes. Their hands, reeking with the stench of corpses after each day’s servitude, they could wash, if they cared to, only in their own urine. And with those hands they had to eat!

  Any human beings—any animals, including pigs—would have suffered t
he utmost, if forced to live under such conditions. For all the living abhor the smell of death even more than that of excreta. But if one bears in mind that these prisoners were Germans and National Socialists—i.e., women belonging to one of the cleanest nations on earth, and women whose very philosophy of life stresses, more than any other in the West,97 the care of bodily purity—then one will realise how this life must have been, all the more, a torture to them.

  When at last all the dead bodies were buried, the prisoners were made to clean the lavatories. It was pointed out to them—deliberately, so that they might feel the humiliation all the more—that these were used by the numerous Jews, now masters of the camp. Under the threat of bayonets—as always—the proud Nazi women were ordered to remove the filth with their own hands. Then, and then only, were they allowed to clean their own awful cell, which by this time had become a cesspool.

  * * *

  After all that unforgettable horror and humiliation, at last, came the trial of the prisoners—a disgraceful piece of iniquity like the rest of those trials of so-called “war criminals.”

  Of the 30,000 female internees of Belsen, over half were Jewesses. Out of these were selected the “witnesses” for the prosecution—such “witnesses” that were ready to swear anything in order to have the hated Nazis condemned; such “witnesses” that wanted them to be condemned not because they had done this or that, but only because they were Nazis, and therefore hated. Jews related to or acquainted with the internees were also brought in. And they, too, swore falsehoods.

  Frau E, Frau B, Frau H98—the most kindly, the sweetest women; persons one cannot know without loving them—were condemned to long terms of imprisonment for “deliberately ill-treating” internees. A Jewess whom Frau E had once slapped—and that, not without reason, for she had caught the woman stealing—reported that the accused had made it a habit of beating her. This Jewess—as the other “witnesses” in the disgraceful trial—was not even present at the time the trial took place. All the former internees had been sent abroad by plane by the Allied authorities themselves. The accused were condemned on the sole strength of what the “witnesses” had said before their departure! Democratic justice.

  Frau E had been in service at Belsen since the 13th of February, 1945—i.e., for about nine weeks only. Before that, ever since 1935, she had helped to run the female section of four other camps, and had been, for a time, at the head of one. It is strange, to say the least, that no complaints were ever heard—even from Jewesses—about her behaviour there. As for Frau B, she had not even slapped anybody; and yet the most disgraceful type of anti-Nazi propaganda was circulated around her name, she being characterised as a “blond beast” and so forth. For nothing! For being in Belsen, as a member of the staff, at the time the Allied bombing had severed all connection of the place with the outside world; and, as Frau E and Frau H, for being a Nazi—a real, sincere one. Democratic justice, I repeat; Jewish justice, for the whole prosecution was a Jewish show. Even the interpreters who translated the answers of the accused from German into English (for the trial, as all similar ones, was conducted in English) were Jews. Of the accused, very few, if any—none among the women—knew English.

  From what I hear about unfortunate Irma Grese from women who worked with her, lived with her, knew her personally, she too was no more guilty of all the so-called “crimes” attributed to her, than Frau E was, herself, of “ill-treating” the internees. She was described to me as “a lovely girl.” But like the others, she was there at the time. And like them, she was a National Socialist. And the Jews who accused her, perhaps hated her all the more for being young and pretty. So they succeeded in getting her hanged—as they very nearly succeeded in getting Frau E hanged, so Frau E herself told me.

  And what can be said of the women “war criminals,” of whom I have now the honour of knowing a few, can doubtless be said also about the men, far more numerous, of whom I cannot meet here even one. Every “war criminal” case, from that of Hermann Göring, one of the finest characters of modern Europe, down to that of any rank and file SS man accused of “brutality,” constitutes a shocking piece of iniquity, hatred, and hypocrisy, on the part of the anti-Nazi powers. The suffering inflicted is always either gratuitously imposed, or else, entirely out of proportion with the actual deed of which it is supposed to be a “punishment” and—what is more—outrageously out of keeping with punishments dealt out by British and other Courts for real offences; it is, also, in revolting contrast with the complete impunity that all actual war criminals have enjoyed whenever they happened to be neither Germans nor National Socialists. Frau E was sentenced, in 1945, by British judges, to fifteen years’ imprisonment, in fact, for slapping a thief. Frau B and Frau H were sentenced each to ten years for nothing more grievous. In 1943, a butcher from Calcutta, named Mahavir Kaliar, was sentenced, also by Britishers, to one month imprisonment only, for flaying two goats alive. But goats are not Jews, although they feel pain. And the criminal was an Indian Untouchable—anything but an Aryan and, a fortiori, anything but a Nazi. And those Britishers themselves, and those American “crusaders to Europe” who, through their phosphorus bombing, caused thousands of Germans to be burnt to death, like living torches, their feet stuck in boiling asphalt, those, I say, never stood before any Court of justice at all. How could they? They were fighting in order to deliver the world—including England and America—into the hands of Israel, forever.

  * * *

  But, numerous as they might be, the so-called “war criminals” are but a very small section of the sum total of Germans condemned by our enemies to suffer for the sole reason of their being National Socialists. Moreover, some sort of a charge, however fanciful, was cooked up, some sort of an excuse, however blunt, invented, in order to arrest and try those men and women who came under what is known as “category I.” The much more numerous political prisoners who came under “category II,” were not even arrested under the pretence of any charge other than that of having held some responsible post in the National Socialist Party organisation. Anybody who had enjoyed the slightest authority in “Hitler’s days”—an ordinary Zellenleiter99—could come under that category, provided he had shown, in the discharge of his duties, sufficient zeal to win for himself the hatred of the local Jews (if any) and of the less detectable treacherous German elements. Often, even that was not necessary. The military authorities of the Occupation would just round up all “dangerous”—i.e., prominent—Nazis they could set hands upon, in a given area.

  These people have suffered no less (if not, often, even more) than the so-called “war criminals” themselves, for the cause of the Swastika. Many are still detained in concentration camps without their families knowing, to this day, whether they are alive or dead. (I know the authorities deny this fact. I know they even deny the existence of concentration camps in post-war Germany. But I happen to have met relatives and friends of National Socialists who were never heard of since their arrest in 1945 or 1946—and not merely in the Russian Zone, but in the other three as well. And they have no reason to hide the truth from me, while the authorities have.) Other political prisoners have been set free, but, many of them, in such a state that it seems impossible for them ever to regain their former health and strength. I have met many such ones, day-to-day martyrs of the National Socialist faith for the rest of their lives. And I have had the honour of spending a few days in the company of one, amidst friends. His name is Herr H.100 I shall say something of the deep impression he left upon me, in one of the following chapters. Presently, I shall only repeat the tale of awe which I heard from his lips; the tale of the chambers of hell where he spent nearly three years, a captive of those who hate us. What prompts me to speak of his experience rather than of similar ones of other faithful Germans is, first, that I know this man personally, and also that I look upon him as one of the finest National Socialists whom I have ever met—which is saying a lot.

  Herr H had been Ortsgruppenleiter101 in a town of the pres
ent-day French Zone, ever since 1932. He was arrested by the new masters of Germany—namely the Americans—at the end of May, 1945, for no other reason than that he was well-known as a genuine Nazi. He had never used his power to harm anyone, and there were no grievances against him.

  He was first taken to Diez and there, locked up with thirty other people in a tiny room for two days and two nights, without food or drink or . . . any indispensable commodity; without sufficient space to sit down, let alone to lie down. The prisoners, tightly squeezed against one another all the time, were forced to sleep (if they could) and also to give way to the necessities of nature, in that standing position. And they did not know, of course, for how long they would be left to rot in that room.

  After forty-eight hours, however, they were brought out, and taken, in cattle wagons, to Schwarzenborn near Treysa, in the Rothar Mountain Range. There had been gathered in a concentration camp, nine or ten thousand National Socialists prominent not only on account of their position in the Party organisation, but also by their status in life, their family, their intellectual or professional achievements. Prince August-Wilhelm of Prussia, and the Prince of Waldeck, and many other members of the old German aristocracy were there; and the rank and file prisoners were no common men. (Herr H himself is a very well-known architect.) About two hundred women were there also, some of them expecting children that were eventually born during their internment.