Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

  Many—in fact, far too many—Jews were living free and prosperous under the Third Reich. And those who left Germany, left—unfortunately—with all their property. I have met such ones in London. They used their property to stir up hatred against National Socialist Germany in foreign lands. Now that they have nothing to fear, they boast of it. Those who remained free in Germany were, after a time, made to wear a yellow “star of Israel,” so that one might at first sight characterise them as Jews, even if there were any doubt about it from their appearance. Why do so many of them seem to find that regulation outrageous? I do not know. They should have been glad to wear their own star. Or are they themselves, at heart, conscious of their natural inferiority and ashamed of being Jews? One would think so. I would only be too glad if our enemies, now in power, were to ask me to wear a swastika. In fact, I bitterly resent their not allowing me to wear one openly, at least here in Germany.

  The Jews who were interned in concentration camps were all there for something more than for merely being born Jews. Like the Germans, or Poles, or Czechs interned with them, they all had, in some way or another, acted or propagandised against the National Socialist régime. They were treated as any irreducibly hostile elements—whether or not actual conspirators—would be under a strong and earnest Government that knows what it wants and with what mission it came to power. They were deliberately standing in the way of the creation of .that glorious resuscitated Aryandom that we were—and are—striving for, at the cost of immense sacrifices. Were we to pat them on the back and set them free, and tell them: “Work against us as much as you please, old fellows; we don’t mind”? In a thousand years’ time, in a racially conscious world in which responsible, enlightened breeding coupled with the complementary system of education would have made practically all men and women accept National Socialism as a matter of course; when this present struggle, visualised in its historical aloofness, would have appeared as the heroic foundation of the established civilisation, then, perhaps, we might have done so. But not now; not within the first decade after coming to power; nor within the second, nor the third, nor even the tenth. We could not afford it. No young Movement can afford to tolerate opposition. It is, for it, a matter of life or death.

  But I repeat: though ruthless, we were not cruel. There may have been, here and there, cases of individual brutality. Who denies it? Any party that counts its members by hundreds of thousands is bound to include some people who happen to be brutal by nature. But, if so, in the present instance, these people were brutal in spite of being Nazis, not because they were Nazis as our enemies pretend. And any gratuitous act of brutality on their part, whenever detected, was severely punished. That was told to me, among others, by a woman who held an important post in the management of five concentration camps in turn under the Third Reich, and who therefore should know what she is talking about; a woman, moreover, who, knowing fully well how little I really care, at heart, to what extent such acts took place and how far they were discouraged, had no reason whatsoever to hide the truth from me.140 And if I repeat, here, what I know to be true, it is by no means in order to excuse my superiors in the eyes of the Democrats. Our right to rule rests upon physical and moral strength alone—upon racial and personal value—not upon “whitewash.” No. If I repeat what I know to be true, it is only because it is true. Indeed, we do not care what the Democrats and Communists—and the vast non-political majority of mankind—think of us. But on the other hand, we expose the lies that form the kernel of all popular anti-Nazi propaganda on the sole ground that they are lies.

  We do not deny that there were gas chambers in some of the German concentration camps, under the Third Reich. They might have been an unpleasant necessity, and an unaesthetic one; instruments of execution are never pleasant or pretty. Yet, they were a necessity. But first, the people who met their death in them were all sentenced for some serious offence for which that particular penalty was foreseen; they were not “innocent” people, guilty only of being Jews (otherwise there would not have been a Jew left in the whole country in 1945, and goodness knows how many thousands there still were). Second, while the soft-hearted Democrats purposely prolonged the agony of the martyrs of Nuremberg for half an hour—and think nothing of it—an execution in a gas chamber took not more than fifteen or at the most twenty minutes, and sometimes less. And the condemned were unconscious long before that time was over. The information was given me by a comrade who had himself acquired it from repeated personal experience. Finally, there were extremely few gas chambers in Germany. There were five in Auschwitz; there was one in Lublin. But there were none in Ravensbrück until November 1944, when one was built. There were none at Krakow, none at Belsen, none at Buchenwald, although these were important camps. There were none in a dozen of the other camps, equally important, and none in the minor camps, while the gullible victims of anti-Nazi propaganda willingly imagine one in every place of internment.

  Along with the gas chambers, the next things to become world-famous thanks to our enemies’ lies are the crematoria. Cremation—the age-old typically Aryan form of disposal of dead bodies—was encouraged by the National Socialist State all over Germany, for everybody, not merely for the inmates of the concentration camps. And there were—and there are still—crematoria everywhere, as there are in England, in many places. There only were special crematoria attached to concentration camps in case a sufficient number of probable executions would render them necessary. In Auschwitz, there were five; in Lublin one. There was not one in any of the camps in which there were no gas chambers. And—what our enemies always omit to say—wherever they did exist, crematoria were for the dead, never for the living. To assert that internees condemned to death were thrown alive into the furnace is the most shameful lie—and our enemies know it as well as we do. Nobody, Jew or non-Jew, was ever burnt alive by order of any National Socialist authority. That is the sort of thing the Christian churches once did (and would probably do again, were they to enjoy the same unlimited power as they did in the sixteenth century). Whatever our enemies may say, it is not like us to indulge in such atrocities. And those who have purposely cooked up and circulated that lie all over the world in order to discredit National Socialism; those who, at least for the time being, have won a war with such weapons, are vile cowards, all the more criminal if they have not even the excuse of being Jews. I repeat: had any subordinate put a live Jew into the fire, he would have acted upon his own initiative and not under orders and, when detected, would have been punished with utter severity. I know it from people who have worked for years in more than one concentration camp, and who are more than sufficiently sure of my unshakable loyalty to our system to tell me the truth, whatever it be.

  But why waste one’s time to prove the fundamental dishonesty of all this anti-Nazi propaganda, when one or two eloquent facts would suffice?

  I was shown in January 1949, in an issue of the American illustrated magazine Look, an article relating the supposed life of Frau Ilse Koch, the woman accused of having had lampshades made out of the skin of dead internees from German concentration camps. Even if this were true, by the way, I fail to see why it should be looked upon as such a “crime,” and punished with life-long imprisonment. The alleged internees were, after all, dead; and they were not killed for the sheer purpose of having their skins. But is it even true? The American paper showed photographs of tattooed skins supposed to be those out of which Frau Koch had had her lampshades made. Many of those skins were decorated with pictures of women wearing hats. Strangely enough—to say the least—all those hats were in the fashion of the 1920s! The people from whom the skins were supposed to have been taken all died between 1940 and 1945. I repeat: it is strange. And the whole story looks like a cleverly plotted propaganda tale. But it is difficult—very difficult—to work out a tissue of lies so cleverly that some detail does not, sooner or later, betray the nature of the whole scheme.

  This appears even more glaringly in the instance of the faked film sup
posed to represent the “horrors” of the German camp of Buchenwald. In Kassel—where every adult German was forced to see the famous film—“a doctor from Göttingen, watching the film, saw himself on the screen, looking after the victims. He had never been to Buchenwald, and could not recall the incident in which he figured. So he took a colleague to see the film, to help clear up the mystery. The latter suddenly recognised the incident. It was part of a film taken after the raid of the 13th of February 1945 on Dresden, where in fact the doctor had been working.”141 This was reported in the Catholic Herald of the 29th of October 1948. Now, whatever one might say for or against the Catholics, one thing is certain: nobody can accuse them of being pro-Nazi. On the contrary; as I have said in the beginning of this book, they are, along with the Communists, the bitterest and most consistent enemies of National Socialism, and therefore have no interest whatsoever in exposing our enemies’ lies. If still they expose them, and as strongly as one can see in the above report, it must be that really they exceed the limits of accepted dishonesty.

  But the bitterest and most shocking irony of all, perhaps, in the concoction of lies just mentioned, is that the non-existing “Nazi atrocities” in the faked film were made up out of scenes from that perfectly real atrocity of the Allies themselves: a savage air-raid by British and American bombers upon a town crowded with refugees for whom there were no adequate shelters; a raid during which 27,000 people were killed, and over 30,000 injured, according to official figures.142 If that is not an insult to the most elementary decency, then what is?

  The only explanation is that, in the eyes of the Allies, nothing was horrid enough to advertise us as “monsters.” The Jewish and Assyrian atrocities of old, unfortunately for them, could not be filmed. Failing that, the second best could only be their own latest performances in Germany.

  Many other similar lies can be pointed out, such as, for instance, that well-known accusation brought against us of being the authors of the famous mass-execution of Poles in Katyn. We believe the Russians are the authors of it. The point has already been the object of endless controversies and, after the glaring proofs of Democratic dishonesty which I have just quoted, it is hardly necessary to repeat, here, the arguments in support of our thesis. Personally, I do not think it matters much who did what. The Democrats have thrown the blame of the “Katyn massacre” on us only because the Russians—of whom they are now afraid—were, then, their “gallant allies.” “Gallant allies” must never commit “mass murders,” or even resort to mass executions. At least, never officially. And when they do, then they must be white-washed . . . always at the expense of the enemy. Shivering and shaking in their shoes at the news of the advance of the “Russian roller,” were those very same Western Democrats, our persecutors of today, to seek our help tomorrow, the world would at once witness the practical implications of that truth. The “Katyn massacre” would become a Russian atrocity overnight.143 And any other of our alleged “horrors” would quickly be attributed to its real authors or else either dismissed or “white-washed.”

  . . . Until, of course, we ceased to consider such an unnatural alliance as this expedient and therefore worth prolonging.

  * * *

  Slander is our enemies’ main weapon. And their main allies, human weakness and human stupidity. Without those, they would have achieved nothing—not even with the help of all the Jewish money in the world. Money can only buy weaklings and fools. They would have achieved nothing through that “humanity” of which they boast so loudly. For it does not exist. What the Euro-American Democrats would like people to take for “humanity” in their dealings with their opponents—and in particular with us—is just shallowness. They are not as ruthless as we, not because they are “better” than we (they are far worse), but because they do not believe in that which they profess to stand for, as we do in our eternal Weltanschauung. Nine times out of ten their alleged Christianity is but the cult of vested interests—“business” again—and their Democracy is bunkum ten times out of ten.

  They have now sentenced me.144 And they tell me that, had I been tried in the Russian Zone instead of in the British, I would have got thirty years’ hard labour in Siberia instead of three years’ imprisonment at Werl. Do I not know it? And had I been called upon in a Nazi state to pass judgement in the counterpart of my own case (supposing I were a judge), it is not three years nor thirty that I would have given anyone guilty of having distributed 10,000 anti-Nazi leaflets and of having stuck up posters in prominent places against all I love. I would have given him (or her) a death sentence straight away—especially if the person were a sincere idealist like me and had spoken in Court as clearly and fearlessly as I have. For such people are the only real enemies of any cause that stands in the way of theirs. I take them seriously. I know they should be taken seriously. I know it, being one such person myself. The Communists know it, for they too, however misled, are at least earnest. The Democrats do not know it; will never know it; cannot know it—cannot realise it—for they are not earnest. To them, the system of ideas and values in the name of which they persecute us is just “politics,” and “politics” are a separate department of life—not life. To us, the system of ideas and values for the sake of which we are persecuted is life; our whole life; ourselves and more than ourselves. It is the greater life of the Race, nay, the greater life of endless Creation, which gives ours its meaning. And the Man who embodies it—our beloved, our revered Führer, living or dead—to us is a living man; an everlasting Man, not merely a “politician,” not merely the head of a party, not merely the founder of a faith, but the exponent in our times of the eternal Religion of Life, more specially on the socio-political plane but also on all planes. For that and for him, no sacrifice is too great, no action too drastic. Nothing and no one that is an obstacle to its and to his triumph can be too ruthlessly removed. We are therefore not afraid to suffer. Nor do we hesitate to inflict suffering—if it be necessary.

  The Communists, strange as this might seem to us, feel about Marxism somewhat like we do about our Weltanschauung. They know what they want. (I speak, of course, of the intelligent ones.) Every time I met one, and especially a German (I have never met a real Russian one), I have respected his sincerity and consistency, and regretted that those fine qualities were not put to the service of a better cause; of our cause, in fact. I hated him, perhaps—for, the greater his personal value, the greater the loss and also the danger that he represents from our standpoint. But I took him seriously. And he took me seriously, knowing fully well what he could expect from me under different circumstances. The Democrats never take us seriously until we actually hit them on the head. That is the whole secret of their pretended “leniency” and “humanity.” They believe it is possible—even relatively easy—to de-Nazify us. And they try—in many cases, admittedly, using methods of intimidation, but in many cases also using the subtle bribery of “kind treatment.” It takes, with people who, like them, are not earnest; with people whose political life is nothing but an advantageous “career” or an exciting show. It does not take with us. We see through it. If we are not taken seriously, we can only feel insulted—or amused, according to our mood—until the time comes for us to demonstrate by our actions how foolish our enemies were to imagine they could induce us to forget or to forgive.

  * * *

  I was arrested here, in Western Germany, after indulging in National Socialist propaganda, undisturbed, for over eight months. And had it not been for the clumsiness of a young German145 with whom I had been seen (and whose arrest, consequently, caused mine) I probably would still be free. They tell me that, in the Russian Zone, under similar circumstances, I would not have remained free for eight days. And I believe it. Again, not because the Democrats are “more humane” than the Communists, but just because they are more shallow. Politics do not mean, to them, all that they mean to our real enemies, and to ourselves.

  One of the very few out-and-out anti-Nazis whom I met in Germany was a man—a German
—travelling in the same railway compartment as myself between Baden-Baden and another place in the French Zone. The train halted several hours in Baden-Oos. Being practically alone and having nothing else to do, we talked. The man, who had nothing to fear from me under the protection of the French Military Government, was frank enough to tell me, after two hours’ conversation, that I reminded him of the “worst type” of Nazis of whom he “hated the sight” in the days of our power. “I have spoken too much to the wrong person,” thought I. But I remained calm and replied that, if the ideology which means everything to me was really as repellent to him as he said, the best thing he could do now was to go and report me. I even added that I would surely consider it my duty to report him, if ever I met him again in a future National Socialist Europe.

  The man’s answer was eminently democratic. Admittedly, said he, he disliked that “arrogant and aggressive” racism of mine; admittedly, he could not understand how any foreigner could “idolise such a man” as Adolf Hitler; yet, in his eyes, each person was “entitled to hold the views he or she liked.” Moreover, he “could not be bothered” to miss his connection for the pleasure of getting a “harmless fanatic” into trouble. That was the true explanation of his not running to denounce me, in spite of all the hatred he professed for my views; that and not “humanity.” The fellow did not hate me enough to go out of his way for the pleasure of harming me. He did not hate me enough because he did not take me seriously. He could take none of us seriously, now that we no longer have the power to get him or his precious family into trouble. He did not love his own ideology enough to take it seriously; otherwise, he would have thought it was worthwhile to miss a train in order to defend it against any sincere enemy, however “harmless.” The few Communists whom I have met would have reported me, under a Communist Order, to the Communist authorities. But they hate the Western form of Democracy nearly as much as we do. They had a reason not to interfere with me in the Western Zones; an ideological reason, not a personal one.