69 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 against 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

70 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.

71 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 elsewhere1—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 men2 and beasts,3 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-one3 sentenced at Nuremberg on the 15th of October 1946. Only through other people have I heard of the physical and moral tortures and daily 1 In my book The Lightning and the Sun (yet unpublished), ch. 1. [The book was published in 1958: Savitri Devi, The Lightning and the Sun (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherjee, 1958)—Ed.] 2 One-third of the population of Bengal—15,000,000 people—were starved to death or permanently injured in their health through the effect of prolonged hunger, from April to December 1943, as all the rice had been requisitioned to supply the British and American troops fighting in Burma. 3 Over one million innocent animals are vivisected yearly, in Great Britain alone. 4 Ten were actually hanged; three put an end to their own lives; seven others are in prison to this day. Hjalmar Schacht alone was acquitted.

72 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,1 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 published2—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 1 Montgomery Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg: A Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Friend Temporarily Abroad (London: Falcon Press, 1946)—Ed. 2 In several English and American magazines.

73 it, nobody would believe me save those who have themselves some knowledge of that extension of Nature which we miscall the “supernatural.”1 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 honest 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 1 Savitri is referring to her dream, on the night of Hermann Göring’s death, of visiting him in his cell and giving him a cyanide capsule, a dream which Sven Hedin suggested may have been a case of “astral projection.” For the full story, see Savitri Devi, And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews, ed. R.G. Fowler (Atlanta, Georgia: Black Sun Publications, 2005), pp. 43-44—Ed.

74 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. I shudder when I recall the horror of the scene described to me by Frau E,1 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, 1 Hertha Ehlert—Ed.

75 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

76 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 overeating, 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,1 who both lived through all that I have just tried to describe from 1 Herta Bothe, according to Goodrick-Clarke (Hitler’s Priestess, 143).—Ed.

77 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 the 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

78 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,1 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 H2—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, 1 At least since the days of ancient Greece. 2 Anna Hempel or Irene Haschke, according to Goodrick-Clarke (Hitler’s Priestess, 143).—Ed.

79 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

80 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 Zellenleiter1—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 1 Cell leader—Ed.

81 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.1 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 Ortsgruppenleiter2 in a town of the present-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 1 Friedrich Horn—Ed. 2 Local Group Leader—Ed.

82 expecting children that were eventually born during their internment. The men were lodged in what had once been the stables of the German cavalry. Three men were made to live, day and night, in the space originally destined to accommodate one horse. They lay upon straw, with no blankets; and they were given, for their daily ablutions, not separate jugs and washstands, not even a common tap of running water (which they could have used in turn), but a long and narrow common trough in which about a hundred of them were forced to wash themselves all together in the same water, like cattle. They were divided into sections of five hundred without any communication between one another. And for the ablutions of each section, the trough was refilled perhaps three or four times. They were put on a diet of systematic starvation; half a plate of thin, watery soup, and two or three hard biscuits about five inches long by two and a half inches wide per day; and then—after two or three months or so—one extra slice of bread which was given to them, not by the Americans (who ran the camp) but by the German population of the neighbourhood. Five per cent of the internees died of hunger during the first fortnight. And that proportion increased, as time went on. Herr H—a tall, strong man, with an immense store of vitality—lost forty-five pounds during the first month. However, the Americans decided to give the helpless prisoners a cup of coffee at midday, and an extra slice of bread. Then came Christmas 1945, that most lamentable Christmas, perhaps, in the whole of German history. The Americans, and especially the Jews among them, knew what the immemorial Winter Solstice Festival, now disguised as the conventional birthday of Jesus Christ, has always meant and still means to the Germans. It would have been a miracle if they had not thought of being cruel to the Nazi inmates of their concentration camps on that occasion. And they did think of it. The ration of the prisoners on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day consisted of half a plate of watery soup only—without even any dry biscuits or bread at all, this time, let alone cakes or oranges or any niceties of the kind. Half a plate of thin, watery, tasteless soup, and nothing else—not a kind word from anybody; not a line from their families, for they were allowed neither to write nor to receive letters, and their families and friends did not even know where they were! The Germans employed in the kitchen, however, managed to put aside six cakes for the internees, out of those they were allowed for themselves. And such was the fear the Americans inspired, that the servants hid those cakes . . . in the lavatory, in order not to be found out.

83 By the end of December, Herr H, who had now lost sixty-five pounds, was no longer able to stand on his legs. He was sent to the hospital attached to the camp. * * * But one should not imagine that American brutality consisted merely in keeping the prisoners on a famine diet that was hardly believable, and under the hellish conditions I have just tried to describe from Herr H’s account. It extended to every dealing of the conquerors and “reformers” of Germany with the hated Nazis. It found expression in the collective punishments they imposed upon the latter, without any grounds, and in the impunity that the warders enjoyed, whatever they might choose to do. Herr H told me, for instance, that the whole camp had once gone without any food or water at all for a whole day, just because a photo camera belonging to an American was missing. The object was found the next day in the pocket of another American, who had stolen it. Still, no extra food was given to the internees as compensation. Another time, an American guard, posted near the place where the prisoners used to go to have their meagre meals, fired for no reason whatsoever—just “for fun”—at one of the Germans quietly eating. The man was killed on the spot. He was an out-and-out good man, Herr H told me, and the father of six children. The guard was never even reprimanded, let alone punished. And these are the people who at Nuremberg assumed the rôle of judges; the people who, to this day, along with their allies, persecute National Socialism in the name of a so-called “more humane” outlook on life!—The vile hypocrites! In February 1946, Herr H was sent to another concentration camp, in Darmstadt. Although he and several of the other internees sent with him were still ill, they were made to travel in cattle wagons without heating and without even straw to lie upon. And, on their arrival, the sick were not sent to hospital but straight to the cells, with the others. The cells contained nothing but bed frames and had neither light nor heating. The mattresses that should have been on the bed frames had been thrown out of doors in the snow, and were covered with ice. They were brought in. The ice slowly melted. And it is on those wet, cold mattresses that the men—including the sick—were forced to lie. Twenty-five shared the same cell as Herr H. Herr H was for two days and two nights shut in that cell, and then was again taken to hospital, where he remained three months. His body,

84 once as strong as iron, had become so exhausted by hunger and hardships that his heart was hardly beating at all. To this day, he suffers from periodical fainting fits and his pulse, which I have myself felt, is slow beyond belief. And there is no hope for him ever to recover. His health is irretrievably lost. One remembers, perhaps, how cold the winter of 1946–47 was all over Europe, and particularly in North and Middle Europe. In Darmstadt, where 40,000 political prisoners were interned, the temperature within the cells was 25 degrees centigrade below the freezing point. And the cells, I repeat, were not heated. And Darmstadt, and Schwarzenborn, were by no means isolated instances of places deserving, in occupied Germany, the name of extermination camps. There were others—there are others, to this day—run with equally Democratic zeal. In such a camp, at Bad Herstfeld, political prisoners captured immediately after the capitulation were made to sleep upon the bare earth, without a roof over their heads whether in fine weather or in the rain, for weeks altogether, with hardly any food. They were forced to walk between double rows of soldiers, to be beaten by each one until they were unconscious—or dead. Camp 2288, run by the British, near Brussels, also in 1945, and containing 40,000 prisoners, was of the same description, from what a British officer, Mr. R, who was there, told me himself.1 Dachau, once, under National Socialist rule, a camp for men mostly convicted for unnatural sexual offences, and world-famous on account of the repeated mendacious allusions to it in the anti-Nazi press and propaganda literature, was taken over by the Allies in 1945. They continued to use it as a concentration camp, with the difference that the internees were no longer sexual perverts, but just Nazis, and preferably men belonging to the Waffen SS. Many of these were afterwards sent to Darmstadt where Herr H met them. And he repeated to me something of the long tale of horror which he had heard from them, and which several of them, whom I had the honour of meeting myself, later on, confirmed. Dachau, after the Allies had taken it over, became a place of torture—not merely of hunger, and cold, and hardships of all sorts, but of deliberate infliction of pain with all the repulsive apparatus attached to it; a chamber of Hell in the fullest sense of the word. And in that hell, the fiends were the Jews, mostly political culprits who had gotten into trouble for their shadowy activities under the National Socialist 1 Mr. R was relieved of his post and forced to leave for having protested.

85 régime, and who were out for an easy and cowardly revenge. All men to appear before Allied tribunals as “war criminals” were selected on the denunciation of Jews, and submitted to torture without any proof of the soundness of the charges brought against them. The tortures varied according to the amount and quality of imagination that the Jews possessed. Many of the victims were forced to lean in a row against a wall, with their feet a yard or so from it, and then struck on the legs with a rod, as hard as possible, so that they fell flat upon their faces, bleeding, and their teeth were knocked out. Others had their fingernails pulled out; or were hung up for any length of time or whirled around the room by a thin, strong rope, or a chain, fixed to their virile organs. The Allies themselves admit it. In his memorandum to the American War Minister Kenneth Royall, the American judge E. Lewy Van Roden states that the men who appeared before the American Military Tribunal at Dachau, charged with “war crimes,” were submitted to all sorts of tortures. “They were kicked, their teeth were knocked out, their jaws broken; they were put to solitary confinement, tortured with burning sticks of wood, starved, threatened with reprisals on their families, and given false hopes of release, in order to extract confessions from them.”1 In Darmstadt and in Schwarzenborn, under the slightest pretexts, the internees were often condemned to remain stark naked in a freezing cold cell for a whole month, being allowed one blanket at night only. Such is the treatment inflicted upon my comrades in the post-war anti-Nazi concentration camps under Allied management, by those darling Jews whom the whole world has been taught to look upon as the innocent and lovable victims of our “monstrous” régime, and to pity, and to champion, but, in reality, all the time—unknowingly—to obey implicitly as a slave. * * * Herr H, to whom I owe the above information and a great deal more, was at last released in December, 1947, after spending nearly three years in hell.2 It is difficult to say how many thousands of other National 1 This appeared in the Rheinisch-Pfälzische Rundschau, a democratic paper of Bad Kreuznach, on 31 December 1948. It was reproduced in French in the Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 1, which was kindly given to me by the French authorities in Koblenz. 2 He died on the 12th of December, 1949.

86 Socialists, once as healthy and able as he, have, like him, become physical wrecks in the same and in other extermination camps all over occupied Germany, and further east, in the unknown penal settlements of the Soviet Union, from which none have come back. It is difficult to say how many thousands have died. In particular, it is difficult to give a picture of that darkest and grimmest of all the varied aspects of the persecution of National Socialism: the martyrdom of the SS men. None is grim enough to be accurate. Whether in occupied Germany, in Russia, or in other countries, it is this splendid élite of the National Socialist forces that has decidedly suffered the most—as could be expected. France is one of the countries where the young SS men, easy to recognise, were deliberately subjected to the greatest hardships: made to lie for weeks upon the cold, damp earth; starved; beaten; tortured. Many were sent to slave labour camps in the French (or Belgian) equatorial colonies, that they might die there of exhaustion coupled with malnutrition, ill-treatment, and tropical diseases. I met one—Herr W1—who, in 1945, after his capture by the French, was sent from Marseilles to Sidi-bel-Abbes with 18,000 others, and from there, through the Sahara Desert under the escort of half-wild Moroccan auxiliaries, to the Belgian Congo. These Africans, alone with the unarmed prisoners in the burning solitude, made it a pastime of firing at them under the slightest pretexts or even under no pretext at all. The French had perhaps taught them to look upon Nazis as the natural enemies of all dark-skinned people—as British propaganda has quite a number of silly Indians. And that, along with an inborn propensity to murder, possibly prompted them. Many of the prisoners who were not killed off in this fashion died nevertheless on the way of malignant fevers. They had no medicine, no opportunity for medical aid whatsoever; no care, save from their comrades. In the Congo, they were parked in a camp, also entirely under the supervision of wild North African and Negro troops, and made to work like slaves in the lead mines twelve hours a day—from dawn to sunset—with water up to their waists and hardly anything to eat. They were not allowed to write or to receive any letters, not allowed to have any books that would have helped to make their lives less wearisome, less gloomy, less desperate, in that hell in which they remained three long years! Of those 18,000 men who had sailed from Marseilles in 1945, only 1 Gerhard Waßner, the young man whose indiscretion led to Savitri’s arrest—Ed.

87 4,800 lived to see the shores of Europe again in 1948; to see Germany in ruins, but also, perhaps—may all the Gods hear me!—to see their comrades and themselves avenged sooner than our enemies expect. * * * Yes, avenged, a hundredfold—not by the human agents, whoever these be who will, one day or the other, again plunge Europe and the whole world in streams of blood; but by the merciless unseen forces in whose play all human agents are but instruments; by the terror which our enemies have brought upon themselves every time they have hurt or insulted one of us. For there exists a Justice, immanent in the very nature of things; an unavoidable Law of action and reaction which measures the punishment to the enormity of the sin, and the enormity of the sin to the greatness of that against which and the value of those against whom it is committed. I have seen the East and the West—visited fifteen countries; spent equally long years of my life in the Near East and in India. And, with the varied memories of those vast and varied lands forever vivid in my mind—the one advantage my strange destiny has given me over most other National Socialists—I say from the depth of my heart: I know nothing, in the modern world, as beautiful as the Nazi youth. Nothing. There are exceptional individuals everywhere among the Aryan and—in the Far East—among some of the non-Aryan races. There are still in India a few real Brahmins who would be fit to represent our mankind at its best before the inhabitants of another planet. But nowhere can one find a collectivity of human beings comparable with this physical and moral élite of Germany: tall, strong, handsome—looking, outwardly, like Baldur the Fair, the best of the Nordic Gods—truthful, reliable, self-confident, brave, and loving; kind to creatures; pious towards Nature; Heathen, in the highest sense of the word; devoted to one another and devoted heart and soul to that living god of our times, Adolf Hitler, and to the everlasting ideal of perfection which he embodies. There is no forgiveness for people who have deliberately harmed such men as these; no forgiveness for people who have starved them, scourged them, disembowelled them, rejoicing in their groans of agony; who have thrown them alive into the chambers of hell. There is no forgiveness either for those who have treated likewise the elder National Socialists, the teachers, the inspirers, the creators of that godlike youth; the fathers and mothers of that unparalleled élite. With

88 passionless exactitude, with smiling detachment, that impersonal, all-pervading Justice of which I spoke will grind them to death. And no amount of money or skill can save them. And what if the irresistible wave of destruction overtakes us, also? Were this just another struggle of material forces it probably would. But this is not. This is, as I have said already, the modern phase of the eternal struggle between the unseen Forces of Life and Light and the equally unseen Forces of death; between the world’s will to live, expressed in the will of its élite to thrive and rule, and the world’s age-old sickness—its tendency towards disintegration, expressed in the will of the parasites, of the weaklings, of the sub-men—of the multifarious scum—to destroy the natural élite and come to the top in its place. And in this, the all-important, the real struggle, we have already won the battle. However much we might appear, at present, powerless and hopeless, utterly crushed, we have already conquered on the invisible plane. We have kept our spirit. Kept it, not in victory—that is easy; that, any worthless fighters can do—but in the very abyss of disaster, humiliation, and agony; in the monotonous routine of prison life, day after day, month after month, for already four years, like Frau E and the other so-called “war criminals” who were not hanged; or like Herr H in the freezing cold cells of the anti-Nazi extermination camps (the proper ones to deserve that name) with nothing to eat; or in torture chambers; or, like Herr W and his comrades, under the Negro’s whip, in slave labour settlements in the burning heart of Africa; or, as thousands, to this day, in the midst of similar hardships in mines in the Ural Mountains, in Siberia, no one knows where. After he had told me that he and the other SS men, prisoners in the same camp, were not allowed to have any books, Herr W added: “But I managed all the same to keep this.” And he produced from his pocket a tiny volume. I read upon the cover Selected Thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche. And Herr W said again: “A few golden words of the author of The Will to Power; that is what sustained me all through these hellish years.” “Yes, words of pride and of power, not words of consolation,” thought I. And, recalling all that the young man had suffered, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of religious elation, as before the rising Sun—the daily victory of Light over darkness. I hailed in my heart that victory of the Nazi spirit, that triumph of everlasting youth—the assertion of that power of the world’s natural élite, that nothing and no one can ever break.