Here is the second installment of selected letters from Savitri Devi to Matt Koehl.
We wish to thank Matt Koehl of the NEW ORDER for preserving these letters, photocopying them for the Archive, and giving us permission to publish them.
—R. G. Fowler
Alix, par Lozanne
5 May 1982
Dearest Commander,
I have no words to thank you for your kind letter and for the latest issue of The National Socialist. Nothing—not even my immediate departure from this place (with its “neon” lights in the corridor from 6 a.m. which hurt my poor half-blind eyes—the room doors here being made of glass)—not even finding an independent room-kitchen of my own, where I could cook my own food—like in New Delhi—prepare for myself a cup of real Greek coffee (the sugar cooked and boiled with the coffee powder), and the fact of being away from this atmosphere of sick old women—nothing I repeat could have given me as much joy as your outstanding, objective, and brilliant article: “Hitlerism, the Faith of the Future.”
Powerless, condemned to non-action (for I can only walk with the help of a stick or a frame, and write with much strain, and am cut off from all daily contact with comrades ever since I was foolish enough to leave New Delhi and the one “Gleichgesinnte” [sympathizer] I had there [the “French” woman—in fact half German and half Norman—of whom you know]), I got from you, through your prophetic vision of tomorrow (and your passionless description of today) and immense, more than personal surely, but also personal feeling of victory—for every triumph of Hitlerism (and every defeat of the outdated Near Eastern myth that I hated all my life) is also my triumph, and my sweet revenge, for its dishonest victory over the Gods of our race—the Germanic ones as well as the Hellenic and Roman ones.
I read your article with tears of delectation and wild joy. For a time I lost sight and consciousness of this old women’s “home” and felt all around me, spreading over the old and new continent and the smoking ruins of the Old Order, those I called for with all my heart in 1945. And from their midst I felt the strong, unfettered youth of tomorrow (or of some day in the future, never mind when) rushing forth with my own War cry—or its equivalent—“Hitler or Hell!”
I’ll be dead and forgotten for decades—and perhaps centuries—yet I’ll be alive (we’ll all of us be alive) in the new, and very old, the eternal atmosphere of our Führer’s “New” Order (not so “new” as it looks!)—“unsere neue Auffassung, die dem Ursinn der Dinge entspricht” [our new order, which corresponds to the original meaning of things] (Mein Kampf). Our spirit—His spirit (see Mein Kampf, German edition, 1935, page 507)—will inspire the new Sturmabteilungen [Storm Troops]: “It is Christianity that brought into the free world of Antiquity the spirit of spiritual terror . . . Now terror can only be broken through greater terror”—terror in the service of cosmic truth and everlasting natural values, against terror in the service of lies.
Did I ever have the opportunity of telling you how—and where, of all places—I became, in 1929 (nineteen twenty-nine), conscious of my allegiance to our Führer? I was in Greece, preparing one of the two books that anyone has to write who wants the highest doctor’s degree (Doctorat diplôme d’Etat, different from “Doctorat de université”—the former alone giving one, if a French citizen, which is not my case, the right to teach in a French University). I always had, from earliest childhood, hated the Christian values: love of all human beings, of any race, any state of health, any character; indifference to animals and trees—which I love; forgiveness, etc. But I liked the Greek Orthodox Church (where I had been christened) for its pageantry and especially for the fact that it was it that, during the long night of Turkish rule (1453-1830)—and even longer if one includes the many Hellenes that were not included in the narrow boundaries of 1830, had “kept the Greek people together.” The church was the continuation of Byzantine Christendom, and why my logical English mother (descended from Jütland Vikings) asked me, now and then, “Why do you go to church at all, since you regret [the loss of] the old Gods, and look upon the dogma as ‘rubbish’?” I used to reply: “Out of faithfulness to Byzantium, the Seat of Greek culture for over 1,000 years.”
In Greece, the contrast between the ruins of Heathen days and the churches always impressed me. At last, early 1929, I was decided to underline that contrast and oppose Christianity, but—out of honesty—I first wanted to experience what sort of an impact on me the birthplace of the Christian faith would have: Palestine, in those days under British rule.
I joined, as a third-class passenger, a Greek pilgrimage going there for a stay of forty (40) days and a little more: we were to sail, via Rhodes Island, in early April and come back, via Cyprus, late in May. Third class women passengers were lodged in Saint Dimitri’s monastery, in a large room near the belfry. I was 23. Had followed (in the papers) the NS movement in Germany with great interest and sympathy; had been most sorry, in November 1923, that the rising Leader had not been able to seize power (I had then been 18 years old), but I must be honest and confess that my main motivation was—ever since 1915—hatred of the Allied Powers, for the disgusting way they had treated Greece: landing of the French in Thessaloniki in 1915, blockade of Greece by the British for 10 months or so, 1916, after blaming the Germans in 1914 for marching through “defenseless little Belgium.” I naturally looked upon the Versailles Treaty as a piece of infamy, the only just treaty after WWI being that of Sèvres—10 August 1920—although it did not give Constantinople (old Byzantium) to the Greeks (the British had promised it both to Greece and to the Russians during the war, as they had Palestine both to the Arabs and to the Jews).
We landed in Jaffa. I was at once aware of the typically “near Eastern”—Semitic—atmosphere, in contrast with even that of Greece—where the Orient is alive in many details of everyday life—and where the people traveling to Italy (let alone France or England) say “I am going to Europe.” We went “up to Jerusalem” in cars and there it began: I saw—then and throughout the pilgrimage—marks of pious enthusiasm (or servility?) that utterly shocked me: old widows and young maidens, matrons, old and young men (even men!) lie flat on their bellies and kiss the earth of the “holy” land wherever they were told that Jesus or any of the persons closely associated with him “had passed.” And although I kept quiet, my inward reaction was violent: “Holy Land, my foot! As though, for a Hellene, there could be any foreign land holier than Greece—or for a Frenchman or a Germany any land holier than France or Germany! And this land—stolen from its original inhabitants the Canaanites by a pack of bloodthirsty invaders that all civilized Antiquity, from Egyptians and Babylonians to Romans included utterly despised!”
And I thought of the spiritual grip of that near-eastern desert people, on the noblest nations of the West. I remembered masterpieces of European art inspired by Jews of the Bible—Michelangelo’s “David” and “Moses”—and, long before, the Old Testament scenes on splendid stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals. Who shall free us from the ubiquitous, unseen master of Europe, from Greece to Iceland: the Jews—whom our fathers, unfaithful to their own Gods, accepted, through bribery (mostly) in the South, through fire and the sword in the North, slowly (the Prussians were still Heathens in the fourteenth century AD. So were the Lithuanians)?
And suddenly it dawned on me: “That German Leader still struggling against the Versailles Treaty . . . in his eyes important as it be, that side of his struggle is not the main one. He wants to free his people and all those of the same broad “Indo-European” stock, from the not merely economic but cultural and spiritual Jewish bondage. Maximo (the Greek shortening for my original name Maximiani, Maximine in French), are you so dull as not to have understood that yet?”
And the logical answer to this, on a street of Jerusalem where I was walking about alone outside the time the “pilgrims” were expected to gather: “If so it be, ‘He’ is not only the Germans’ Führer; He is mine—ours—also!”
I went back to Greece. Tried to speak. Met a few individual admirers of Emperor Julian (360-363 AD) like myself, but hit my head at every step against the statement: “Greece owes the fact that she kept her national integrity in spite of over 400 years of Turkish rule to the Orthodox Church.”
I longed for a civilization centered on Aryan Gods. There is only one—multiracial, it is true, but in the only sense multiracialism is tolerable: a pyramid of separate races and racial shades, that are, thanks to an immemorial Caste system forbidden to interbreed (and even to interdine) and the Aryan, separate too, of course, at the very top. I do not think that there are more than 20 million real fair-skinned Aryans in the roughly 1,000 million or more inhabitants of “India,” both “Pakistans” (East and West), and Ceylon. Few, you may think. I say “many” (if one remembers that Aryans came to Northwest India in several waves, of which the most recent was sixty centuries (6,000 years) ago—contemporary of oldest pre-dynastic Egypt.
I went to India—knowing nobody there—in 1932 (came back for one month in 1935 to take my Doctorate degree, and went back at once). I joined, as soon as I discovered one, an Indian (Hindu) organization fighting Christian and Muslim missionaries, and Communism. Its founder, Satyananda Swami, agreed I should speak of the Führer to Aryan Indians. He held Him to be an Incarnation of the God Vishnu—of the Hindu Trinity! I worked for years with this organization. Met A.K. Mukherji on 9 January 1938. He gave me his name on 29 September 1939. Died on 21 March 1977.
On Saturday—in three days’ time—I’ll be, as for the last 37 years, fasting from sunrise to sunset in memory of the disaster (8th May 1945).
What you say in your wonderful article about the necessity of the disaster, so that the “new” Idea might come through and conquer free from all traces of the Old—is very refreshing. If that be the case, of course, we should not look upon the awful recent past—the collapse of the Third German Reich—in the same mournful way.
Yet, I am with all my heart and soul looking forward to the collapse of The Order in whose name the Third Reich was—is still—so widely hated and slandered. I am longing to see the former great Allies, or their successors and admirers—the successors of those arch criminals of Yalta—at each other’s throats.
It is so dull here—comrades so seldom come.
In September (or when?) is the yearly Congress of the NSWPP? I believe I thought of something: The Movement is in great need of money I read in White Power. I can see badly, can walk only with the help of a frame or stick, but I still have all my head and can speak. Do you believe that if it were possible for me to go (as cheap as can be) to the USA and lecture there from place to place for the NSWPP, I could gather enough money both to pay for my passage (of course) and to give the Movement a few thousands?
It would be so satisfying if I could be still good for something in spite of my disability! I need—and categorically refused any—neither doctors nor treatment. They are against my life principles: whoever is (like me) no longer fit to go about healthy and strong and in possession of all his or her natural means, should be left to die. No hospitals either for me under any circumstances! I was dragged to one here, by force, by the French police on 14 January 1982 but declared from the start that I rejected any medicine (save the “Pilocarin” drops for my eyes) and was left in peace—and given the strictly vegetarian food I insisted upon (I never ate meat in my life) and pretty little of it, as I always ate very little, and one course only.
My torture is neon lights (here also) and radios and TV which I simply hate. I never had such appliances at home. My mother was the only tenant in a five storey building to have neither. Only during the war, Mr. Mukherji and I would go and listen to the German news and the Führer’s speeches on the German radio, which in British India was an “offense” punishable by imprisonment. But nobody ever reported us.
I begged the Indian Ambassador in Paris (wrote to him) for an Indian passport to go back to New Delhi as India does not accept people with foreign passports who are over 75 years old, and would send me back if I tried to go. But I have not had an answer—not yet at least.
Thank Robert Günter for his flattering review of The Lightning and the Sun, but please tell him not to describe me as a “post-war National Socialist” which I am not. The books I wrote on NS subjects, Gold in the Furnace (1948-49), Defiance (1950), Pilgrimage (1953), The Lightning and the Sun (1948-1956), For Ever and Ever (1953, not printed), Impeachment of Man (1945, printed only in 1959 or 60), Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess—The True Story of a “Most Objectionable Nazi” and . . . Half-a-Dozen Cats (1957-58) are all post-war—although my first book after my two Doctoral “theses”—L’Etang aux Lotus, impressions of India—was written in 1935 (printed in 1940) and sufficiently obvious for an adversary to have discovered my true faith through it.
I wrote in 1937 a book called A Warning to the Hindus and dedicated it not to any Indian but to the memory of Emperor Julian (360-363 AD) and a later one in 1940 Non-Hindu Indians and Indian Unity and books about Sun worship as understood through Pharaoh Akhnaton of Egypt (fourteenth century BC): Akhnaton’s Eternal Message, a pamphlet (1940)—Joy of the Sun (1942)—A Son of God (1942-45)—Akhnaton: A Play (1947) and an unfinished story of Tyrtaios the Athenian begun in 1960 or so—unfinished for lack of finding Tyrtaios’ War Marches written for Spartans in about 670 BC.
Until the collapse of the Third Reich there were plenty of people more qualified than I to write about the excellence of National Socialism. I raised my voice when all was apparently dead—in the invincible feeling that what is rooted in eternity can never die.
Do excuse me, dearest Commander, for this long letter, badly written with a paralyzed hand. (I just cannot use my healthy left hand to write with, however much I tried to.) Excuse me for speaking so long about my old experiences both of Palestine and India. But it is ironical for a young girl who being of mixed nationalities had nothing to fall back on save her unmixed Aryan race, to become awake to Hitlerism in Jerusalem, of all places!
And my message to the Hindus, “Don’t do what opportunist leaders (Constantine in 313, Chlodwig the Frankish king in 498) did in Europe. Stick to your Gods!” I did not say because of the presence of many from the non-Aryan masses: “the Gods we Aryans brought here 6,000 years ago from the hallowed North.” To give that message, I say, was to me such a joy—be it only a “second best” for I should have liked to speak of “return to Aryan religion through Hitlerism in Europe.”
It must have been in 1937 or so, in East Bengal, I lectured to crowds before endless rice fields, in the shade of coconut thickets. People came on foot in the burning sun from far-away villages to hear the “memsahib” [White lady] defending Hindu Gods and values. In one of these lectures I translated into Bengali our Führer’s words: “Jede große kultur der Vergangenheit ging nur deshalb zugrunde weil die ursprunglich schöpferische Rasse am Blutvergiftung abstarb” [Every great culture of the past perished only because the original creative race died of blood-poisoning] (Mein Kampf, 1935 edition, page 324).
I had purposely not told whose the quotation was—in order to see the effect.
At the end of my speech an old, fair-skinned, grey-eyed Brahmin—a priest in some village temple, probably—came and spoke to me: “Those words you quoted against caste-mixing were wonderful!” he said. “Out of which of the Shastras (i.e., the oldest sacred writ in India) did you quote them?”
To the man’s amazement and to that of the listeners gathering around us, I said: “Out of a modern ‘Shastra,’ written in 1924!” And I added: “You heard of Adolf Hitler, the German Leader?”
“Yes.”
“These are his words.”
“Then he is a Hindu, not a Christian. There is a Christian mission in our village—English missionaries. They preach all castes (i.e., races) should mix like ‘kulshun’ (rice and vegetables mixed up). Is that why the British, people say, are turning against him although He wants no harm to them?”
Another time, in early 1939, I spoke of Him as I often did, and of Emperor Julian, of Hypatia (370-415 AD)—lynched by a Christian mob in 415 in Alexandria, and of Wittukind the Saxon. It was in Assam, near Sadya, only 15 miles or so from the Chinese border—on the frontier of the Yellow world. I felt as though I were avenging them all. Those were lovely days.
With admiration and regards,
Heil Hitler!
Savitri Dêvi Mukherji