90 their gardens full of healthy children; of their youth parades and inspiring Party rallies; jealous of their joy and vitality—of the fact that they had somebody to look up to and love, and something to live for, while the rest of Europe and the greatest part of the world had nothing. And he hated the fortunate Germans and the superman who had brought them such prosperity and such happiness. And, also, he was, himself, out for plunder. For the Jew had forgotten to tell him that that was his department and that, even if his ally did grab some little profit out of Germany’s defeat, the main profit—the permanent profit—could only flow, ultimately, into the pockets of “God’s own people”; that they were to exploit not only Germany, but England and America as well—the whole world—upon the ruins of the hated Nazi system. They, and no others. Had the English and even the French Aryan realised that, perhaps he would not have fought his German brothers with so much readiness. Unless, of course, in him, the hatred bred by jealousy was greater even than the instinct of self-preservation and—widely speaking—tomfoolery over the precious Jews of Central Europe, greater than everything. * * * Some of those who fought Germany during the war are less stupid and more cynical than others. I was introduced to such a one—a Frenchman who now occupies in Saarland an important post in one of the German factories that the French have taken “under control” and who, during the war, played an active part in the French “résistance.” The man professes to detest Democracy, being a monarchist; and he certainly nourishes no illusions about Christianity and the Christian Churches. As for the Jews, he expressed his opinion about them to me in a joke: “Those were surely no gas chambers which your pals used in Germany,” he told me. “They must have been . . . incubators. Why, one has never seen so many ‘Yids’ all about the place as since the end of the war!”1 I burst out laughing, for the joke is an excellent one. But I was astounded to hear it from a résistant. True, this man was as polite as if he had come straight out of the seventeenth century; and the common acquaintance through whom I had met him had introduced me as “a red-hot Nazi.” Still, I could not help thinking that this was going a little too far out of his way to please a lady. 1 A French composer of songs was the first man to make that joke public.

91 “But, apart from any joke,” said I—after I had finished laughing—“if you really do feel as you say about Democracy and about the Jews, then why on earth did you fight us during the war, like an idiot?” “We never fought National Socialism,” replied the man, to my further astonishment, “We only told the fools that we did—to make them join us.” “What did you fight, then?” “Germany.” “After 1933,” said I, “one cannot separate Germany from National Socialism.” “Perhaps. And I am sorry for that. For in that case, National Socialism had to pay the penalty for being German.” “I fail to understand,” said I. “The National Socialist outlook on life transcends Germany and transcends our times. It is—or should be—the outlook of every Aryan conscious of his natural privileges and proud of his race. If one realises this, one cannot fight the Man who has given his nation such an outlook; nor that nation, which is his and which he loves. Adolf Hitler has made Germany a sacred land in the eyes of every worthy Aryan in the world. If, as you say, you do not hate our philosophy, how could you raise your hand against Germany?” “Because she was too prosperous and too powerful, and consequently too arrogant,” said the Frenchman; “because her industries were far ahead of ours; her people healthier, stronger, more disciplined, more warrior-like, and more prolific than ours, and simply had to be our masters—unless we crushed them in time; because her armies had overrun France and were overrunning the whole of Europe; because, in the united Europe that she was about to lead and control permanently, we French people would only have had a third rate place.” I looked at the man in surprise. He had given me the right account of France’s war aims, the account which, in fact, any German would have given me. “Au moins,” said I, quoting Racine, “voilà un aveu dépouillé d’artifice!”1 So you would have liked the leadership of Europe for yourselves, is it not so?” “We wanted, first, our country for ourselves,” replied the Frenchman. “But in reality, you gave it to the Jews, as you yourself admit. Was not a united Europe thriving under Hitler’s strong protection far better than that—even if you people did not occupy in it the first place? Have 1 “At least, here is a confession stripped of artifice!” This is a paraphrase of a line spoken by Hermione in Act IV, Scene 5 of Jean Racine’s Andromaque.—Ed.

92 you the first place now? Can you expect to have it tomorrow? Can you expect ever to have it? Can England herself expect ever to have it again? I hope not!—were it only as a divine punishment for rising against the inspired Leader of our age, mean, short-sighted fools you all are, the whole continent!” said I, retrospectively indignant at the idea of that collective madness that the Second World War represents in my eyes. The answer that came to me was so utterly cynical in its simplicity that it sounded childish—embarrassing in the mouth of a man of forty-five: “Hitler was not French,” said the Frenchman. Yes, thought I, and not English either, but profoundly, passionately German. And it is because you narrow-minded and narrow-hearted people could not forgive him for loving his Germany so; because you could not forgive him for being a part and parcel of his own people at the same time as one of the greatest Aryans of all ages, you turned against him! You preferred to ruin your respective countries yourselves, rather than to see a German save them. You gave them over to the Jews, who hate you, rather than see him, who loved you, rise to the leadership of a regenerated West; rather than renounce, for his sake your petty, selfish claims, your dreams of separate security—each obsolete State behind its obsolete narrow boundaries—your silly belief, as Englishmen, Frenchmen, Poles, Norwegians, Russians, Greeks, that your separate existence as administrative units is worth more than the creation of a higher humanity, Aryan in both the senses of that ancient word: in the sense of “Nordic” and in the sense of` “noble.” Criminal, unpardonable fools! “I admired him,” continued the Frenchman, speaking of the Führer. “I still admire him. No sensible person can help admiring him. But I could not follow him; not after the war broke out; not at the cost of my country’s independence. Had he been French, I would have followed him blindly wherever he led me.” I suddenly recalled my happy home in Calcutta sometime at the close of 1940, when Greece had just stepped into the war. My husband came to me and said: “The Greeks are now routing the Italians, but sooner or later the German army will have to intervene. Mussolini is the Führer’s ally and has to be supported. Maybe the struggle will be a bitter one. Maybe the whole country will be smashed. If so . . . will you still be on our side?” I had looked up to him, rather surprised that he had so little confidence in me as to ask such a question.

93 “Naturally, I shall,” I said. “Why do you ask me? Why do you doubt it? Am I not as devoted to the Führer as anyone can be?” And I had explained my attitude: “Whatever the men at the head of the present Greek Government might say or do, is it not true that National Socialism has brought to life once more—and how brilliantly!—those eternal Aryan ideals of perfection (beginning with physical perfection) that have been the ideals of Greece ever since the Aryan race settled there—ever since the victory of Hyperborean Apollo over the Python, to express history in terms of mythology? Rest assured, I shall never sacrifice the eternal to the transient, the racial values to the narrowly, conventionally national ones; the Aryan, to the narrowly Greek, or narrowly English; or narrowly Indian. I shall always be on our side—on the Führer’s side—whatever might happen.” My husband—that son of the oldest Aryan aristocracy of the Far South which the caste system has kept aloof and pure—was pleased and said: “I know. I only asked to see what you would answer.” I related this episode to the Frenchman. “You are Indo-European,” he replied. “I am just French.” “Unless you and your compatriots and the British and all other Aryans can sincerely feel themselves Indo-Europeans—Aryans—before anything else,” said I, “and accept the New Order as it is, you will have to sink down into slow decay, become Judaised, become bastardised, disappear. The truly Indo-European socio-political philosophy, National Socialism, is the only force that could and still can save what is worth saving in France as in other Aryan countries. But, of course, you can choose decay. You have, in fact, chosen decay.” “Perhaps you are right,” he admitted at last. “But you must agree that it is hard on us to have to choose, as you say, German supremacy or the Jewish yoke . . . while your German pals only have to prefer their own domination to that of the Jews in order to be perfect National Socialists.” “You have to agree,” said I, “that they are purer Aryans than yourselves, as a whole. No man with eyes to see can deny it. And they are the Führer’s people, too.” “I admit that my outlook is, philosophically speaking, neither as consistent nor, especially, as disinterested as yours,” declared the man at last. I laughed. “That is a fine thing indeed for a former French résistant to tell a Nazi in 1949,” said I; “is it not?”

94 * * * I asked this man, who seemed so willing to tell the truth, what he thought of the dismantling of the German factories. “It is an excellent thing,” he replied. “What?” “Surely,” said the Frenchman. “The more factories are dismantled, here in Germany, the more German industry is crippled by us, the more the production of French industry increases in proportion, and the more French goods get a chance to flood the world market, in the place of German ones. Each one of the other occupants argues, on his own behalf, the same as we do—although you might not find many people in high position to tell you so as frankly and bluntly as I have.” “And you call that fair, in Democratic circles?” “That is business,” replied the Frenchman. “Business is never fair. Business means to make money at the expense of one’s rivals, that is all. But, of course, one cannot tell that to the fools, or else they would no longer be willing to play the game. To them, one speaks of ‘Democracy’—just to give them an illusion to stick up for, while, in reality, they help the capitalists of their country to become rich. One speaks of ‘fighting the fascist beast’—so that one might canalise their stupid fury against one’s rivals of dangerously prosperous countries. Business . . . War itself is nothing but that.” I was disgusted. For I knew the man spoke the truth. “And you like that sort of thing?” I asked, without caring to hide my contempt. “Whether one likes it or not, that sort of thing is the world—at least as it has become today,” replied the Frenchman. “Your world; that degenerate, ugly, venal world which we fought to destroy,” said I; “not ours!” And I recalled and quoted those words of the Führer: “Men do not die for business; they die for ideals.” “We National Socialists die for ideals,” I stressed; “those who fought us, fought only for business, you admit it yourself; and for other people’s business at that; for the business of your capitalists, who deceived them. How wonderful! We have every reason to hate the Jews. They are the natural enemies of all that we stand for. But you? Why should you dislike them—if you really do, as you say? Have you not much in common with them, in spite of your different blood? Are they not also just ‘businessmen,’ like yourselves?” “They are our rivals in business,” said the Frenchman. “To us, they are the parasites sapping the life-blood of the finest

95 race on earth,” said I. “Our grievances are different, as are also our ideals.” And I took leave of the Frenchman after thanking him for the light he had thrown (supposing that I needed any) upon the true mentality of those who, at present, occupy Germany and persecute National Socialism. * * * Indeed, “business”—a polite word for plunder, in this particular case—is the keynote of the Allied Occupation in Germany, and the secret that lies behind and explains, directly or indirectly, all the objectionable steps taken by the foreign Powers, from the brutal confiscation of individual German property to the recent Ruhr Statute. The cost of the Occupation alone, steadily increasing since 1945, absorbed, in the British Zone, one third of the total amount of taxes paid by the German people in 1947, and over forty per cent after the Currency Reform of 1948, according to the memorandum which Dr. Weitz submitted to the Military Government in December 1948.1 And this large-scale robbery is by no means restricted to this Zone. The French Occupation costs, proportionately, even more, as the number of occupants (and of occupants’ families) settled in Germany is far greater in comparison with the number of Germans inhabiting the Zone. According to a declaration of General Hepp, head of the Information Department of the French Military Government in Baden-Baden, at a Press Conference in December 1948,2 there were still, at that date, 22,263 houses entirely requisitioned and 25,475 partly requisitioned in the French Zone. And in Baden-Baden alone, where “the occupying power has taken possession of practically all the main hotels,”3 German enterprise, both private and municipal, has incurred a loss of over twenty million Reichmarks, in spite of the compensations given (of which the greatest part was lost through the Currency Reform of 19484). And all this is practically nothing compared to other forms of wholesale, systematic plunder to which the Allies of both East and 1 See the Neue Volkszeitung (Dortmund), 13 December 1948. 2 Reported in the Allgemeine Zeitung (Mainz), 23 December 1948. 3 See Badische Neueste Nachrichten (Karlsruhe), 29 December 1948. 4 Ibid, quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 3, no. 52.

96 West have submitted Germany ever since they set foot in the country: the dismantling of an enormous number of factories; the confiscation or “control” of those factories which were not dismantled, as well as of such private or public enterprises on which depends the whole economic life of the country (such as the shipping concerns on the upper Rhine1); the seizure of German goods under one pretext or another; the shameful policy of deforestation; and, at the close of the year 1948, the Ruhr Statute. The guiding spirit at the back of those confiscations, “controls,” seizures, etc., on the part of the occupying Powers, is a mystery to nobody. They all aim at keeping Germany forever under the economic domination of her victors of 1945. The German newspapers, however, do not dare criticise too openly the robberies of the Military Government of the Zone in which they are printed. For obvious reasons, the impeachment of the occupant of one Zone is only to be found in the papers of another one. And even so (save in the case of Russian controlled papers criticizing the Western Allies’ policy, or of the Western Zone papers criticizing the Russians), it is always a very mild and polite impeachment, springing from an alleged desire to see “truly Democratic principles” govern the life of the country. (The papers, despite the so-called “freedom” granted to them, must show that they have “learnt their lesson,” or else . . . they would be suppressed at once—and prosecuted for “attempting to keep the Nazi spirit alive” under the same Article 7 of Law 8 of the Occupation Statute under which I am, myself, imprisoned here.) Thus, for instance, in its issue of the 24th of December 1948, the Main-Post of Würzburg (American Zone) criticises the seizure by the French of a number of shipping enterprises on the Upper Rhine and of the property of many industrial concerns, some of which have their headquarters in the British and American Zones.2 This step “puts Württemberg and a great part of Bavaria at the mercy of the sweet will of French shipping companies for their coal supply.”3 And the factories that turn out fireproof bricks—an article of primary necessity in the setting up of blast furnaces—“are now compelled to export their 1 See the Main-Post (Würzburg), 24 December 1948. 2 The newspaper names a few of the well-known concerns effected—Franz Haniel, Duisburg-Ruhrort; Rhenania-Rheinschiffahrt, Homburg; Harpener Berghau, Abt. Schiffahrt; Linden-Reederei, Duisburg-Ruhrort; Klöckner Werke, and the Reemtsma cigarette works. 3 Main-Post (Würzburg), 24 December 1948, quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 3, no. 52.

97 products to Lorraine, thus encouraging competition to the disadvantage of the German industry of the Ruhr.”1 Moreover, states the same paper, this step had been prepared carefully ever since the time of the capitulation. From that time, French shipping companies had taken possession of the equipment and ships of the left bank of the Rhine. A “German Shipping Bureau” with headquarters at Mainz, was authorised to requisition the ships and to transfer them to French purchasers. The French- privileged companies, at the time of the Currency Reform, exchanged their capital at the rate of 10 Reichmarks for 8 Deutschmarks, thus realising their present capital of 12.8 million Deutschmarks. The whole coal supply of Pfalz and Württemberg is in the hands of the “Union Charbonnière” which exerts a growing pressure upon the further Bavarian country. The company is now trying to acquire vast grounds at Karlsruhe and at Heilbronn.2 The suppression of the great industrial “cartels” had no other aim but to break the economic power that Germany still possesses, and to forward the interests of the rival French coal mining and iron and steel industries; “to fasten the grip of France upon the economy of the whole country lying between the Rhine, the Main, the Meuse, and the Mosel,” as the above quoted paper puts it. And this is only one instance among many. The Berlin paper Tagesspiegel, licensed by the Americans, criticises the grabbing policy of the French in no less clear although courteous terms, in its first page article of the 21st of December 1948.3 It would be easy, but tedious, to give a long list of German papers of the British and American Zones that do the same. As for the German papers of Berlin and of the whole Eastern Zone, licensed by the Russians, they do not hesitate to accuse the Western Allies of turning Germany into a “colonial country” and to characterise—and rightly so—the entire Occupation Statute of West Germany as a device to enslave the German people permanently.4 Naturally, they forget to speak—or rather are not allowed to speak—of the no less systematic and wholesale plunder of German property by the Russians, and of all the Russian regulations that constitute a no less 1 Ibid. 2 Ibid. 3 Quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 3, no. 52. 4 Tägliche Rundschau (Berlin), 23 December 1948.

98 complete enslavement of the German people in the Eastern Zone, let alone of the vast portions of territory from which the German population has been entirely removed. * * * But the two forms of robbery that have surely been the most bitterly resented by the Germans ever since the beginning of the Occupation and that, to this day, every German cannot but take as open acts of hostility, are the dismantling of the factories and the large-scale deforestation of the country. One must know something of the German labourer’s high standard of technical education and of his genuine interest and pride in his daily work, to realise what an amount of bitterness the Allies are storing against themselves in the hearts of millions of Germans, through that mean policy of thieves which they have pursued since 1945, and are still pursuing, in all the Zones. Even if their orders to remove piece by piece, or to destroy, thousands and thousands of valuable machines, were actuated by the sole desire for “security,” i.e., by the sole fear of seeing a powerful, warrior-like Germany rise again in amazingly short a time out of the utter ruin of today, still I would characterise their policy as criminal. For what right have they, anyhow, to try to keep down a great nation forever, just because it has more potentialities for military efficiency than they? Who are they, that they alone in the world should be armed and ready for war, and others, by no means their inferiors, should yield to them? But that is not even the case. The attitude of the victors, in this matter of plunder, as in the others, is inspired by “a policy of economic competition,”1 to quote the words of another German paper, written precisely in connection with the dismantling of a factory. This is so true that not merely armament factories, but many others, of which the production is entirely affected to peaceful aims—such as the firm Hellige, Morat, and Company of Freiburg, specializing in manufacturing medical and physiological instruments—were also dismantled. On the other hand, the German people—now powerless to act, but not powerless to think and feel—and especially the workmen attached to the factories that are to be dismantled, witness the proceedings with healthy, concentrated bitterness. Over and over again, cases have occurred in which the workmen appointed to take part in the 1 Handelsblatt (Düsseldorf), 2nd week of January 1949.

99 dismantling categorically refused to pull down, piece by piece, the machines that had been in their hands, for so long, instruments of prosperity. Recently—in January, 1949—the 11,000 workmen of the Bochumer Verein factory (which the British insisted on dismantling) sent a telegram to the President of the USA, Mr. Truman, stating that “they would not take part in the destruction of their instruments of labour, even under military pressure.” The further wording of the telegram is full of significance: “One cannot ask us to demolish our own house, and to give bricks and old iron to feed our increasing population. No true German will dirty his fingers by contributing to the destruction of our factory.”1 Proud and sensible words, that were not “nothing but words”; for, a week or so later, began before the British Military tribunal of Bochum, the trial of several workmen of the Sulzbach concern, from Essen, who had refused to take part in the dismantling of the Bochumer Verein factory.2 One can imagine the feelings of these men, tried for not agreeing to lend a hand to the systematic ruin of their country’s economy imposed, under threat of arms, by rapacious foreign capitalists. As millions of workmen all over Germany, they must have looked back, within their hearts, to those glorious days in which they acclaimed the Führer—the maker of Germany’s prosperity—and in which the Führer held out his hand to them, individually, and to their happy children. And if, among them, several had not, in those days, wholeheartedly supported the National Socialist New Order; if, during the war, some had allowed themselves to be deceived by anti-Nazi propaganda, and had expected out of Democracy some greater good than that which our loving Hitler could give them, how they must have regretted their folly! The destruction of Germany’s splendid forests is something even more tragic than the dismantling of her factories. However precious might be highly perfected machines, living trees are still more so. And they—the outcome of Nature’s patient fecundity, not of man’s skill—cannot be replaced in a couple of years even with the help of any amount of money. I have, years ago, expressed in another book what I think of deforestation in itself, apart from any utilitarian consideration from man’s point of view.3 To the extent one does not resort to it 1 Quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 2. 2 Allgemeine Zeitung (Mainz), 17 January 1949. 3 Impeachment of Man, ch. 9, “The Rights of Plants.” The book is still unpublished. [Impeachment was written in 1945–46 and finally published in 1959: Impeachment of Man (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1959).—Ed.].

100 extremely cautiously and sparingly (replacing every tree one fells) and then too, only when one is absolutely compelled to, by some vital necessity, to that extent, I say, I look upon it—whenever and wherever it be—as a crime against the divine beauty and majesty of Nature. Here, in Germany, now, it takes on a still more sinister character. It is not merely the repetition of the stupid sacrilege which countless generations of men have committed every time they have cut down trees for some petty human purpose “not worth it”; for some temporary convenience or satisfaction, without realising what they were doing. It is a deliberate sacrilege, coupled with inexcusable robbery, on a scale that one has seldom seen; a double insult to Nature Herself and to the German people who, in the West at least—and more so after that admirable National Socialist education which the younger ones have received—are perhaps the nation that understands and loves Nature the best; the nation among which the old Aryan cult of the Tree has left the strongest roots. One needs no tedious statistics to become convinced of the enormity of the disaster. One only has to take a trip through the Black Forest—to travel, for instance, from Baden-Baden down to Titisee—and to use one’s own eyes. In a number of places, along the main road, one beholds, right and left, for miles and miles, nothing but empty expanses in which appear stumps of felled trees—thousands of them. That is what the French call “ des coupes à blanc”1—cutting down of a portion of forest until there is not one tree left; until the once thick, living patch of vegetation is reduced to a blank. In any of those “coupes à blanc” one can walk for hours without seeing a standing tree. And it is not true that such devastation can only be found on the border of the main road going south. There are also plenty of “blanks” in the interior of the Black Forest. The contrast with the luxuriant green portions that have not yet been touched, makes the sight of the cut down areas even more heartrending. One recalls the first verse of a fairly well-known French poem: “Les Turcs ont passe la; tout est ruine et deuil.”2 But no; here it is not the Turks; it is only the French themselves—and the British in the British Zone, where the great sacred forest, the Hartz, has suffered no less than the Black Forest in Southwest Germany; and the Americans, and the 1 Clear-cutting—Ed. 2 “The Turks have passed through; all is ruin and mourning” (From “L’Enfant” [“The Child”] in Victor Hugo’s collection of poems entitled Les Orientales [Paris, 1829]) [Trans. by Ed.].

101 Russians, who have wrought equal devastation all over the country, from East Prussia, now a desert, down to the ruined cities of central Germany and of the Danubian region. The Turks would not have done the job so thoroughly. And it is not only the Black Forest and the Hartz, and the forests of North Germany. Wherever one goes, one is bound to see hilltops on which nothing is left of the once glorious green mantle of living woods. The extensive patches of forest that can still be seen, and that one imagines prolonged over the horrid “blanks,” help one to realise (if one has not actually seen it) how beautiful Germany was before the disaster of 1945. The Allies are simply disfiguring the land for the sake of their petty profits; perhaps also for the pleasure of disfiguring it—they are mean enough for that. Wherever one goes, one is bound to see, also, travelling along the railway lines, or waiting in the stations to move on behind another engine, wagons and wagons of wood; whole tree-trunks, heaped upon one another horizontally, or relatively small pieces of wood placed vertically one by the side of the other. And it is not once, it is not twice, it is not “often”; it is every day, and at every time of the day or night. It looks as though the trees of Germany—those trees that the German people love so much and of which they were so proud—are all being deliberately cut down and carried away. The German people can say nothing and can do nothing about it, as much as the daily sight of that systematic plunder and ruin of their country fills them with legitimate indignation. They only know that they have lost the war, and are now disarmed, and cannot rearm themselves as long as the Occupying Powers hold the land. They have lost the war, not through their own fault—most of them have been loyal and enduring, and have done their duty well—but through the fault of the anti-Nazi traitors who helped the coalesced forces of East and West to crush the National Socialist State. And because they are vanquished they must suffer, they, and the very land itself. Vae victis!1 And yet . . . as one walks about in those devastated, those massacred forest areas—those “blanks” where not a tree is left standing—one sees that there are already green leaves appearing on the sides of many of the stumps; new, tender shoots, springing up from between the roots; new trees growing between the old ones in the bright sunshine, from nowhere—from the bosom of the invincible earth. One remembers the fresh green grass, or the creepers with pink and 1 Woe to the conquered.—Ed.

102 white flowers that one sees so often in the cracks of burnt and blasted walls, in the ruins of all the German towns. Here, as there, life continues. No Occupying Power can kill it. Here, as there, patient Nature reasserts herself, after the work of death wrought by the little men, agents of the death forces. And in the German people themselves, too, the will to live—which is the beginning of life—and the will to conquer—which is the beginning of victory—bursts forth already, in the midst of the bitterness of defeat. Under a show of resignation; under apparent adhesion to the professed principles of the victors; under de-Nazification reluctantly and only outwardly accepted for practical purposes, the soul of Hitler’s people watches and waits! “We are waiting for the spark,” said to me, in October 1948, one of the sincerest National Socialists I know in Saarland. * * * That readiness, that expectation, that impatience under the yoke, was manifested recently in the unanimous reaction of the Germans against the Ruhr Statute—the latest device to secure for the Occupying Powers the maximum opportunity of permanent plunder, and to keep Germany down forever. What does the Ruhr Statute amount to? All Germans know, only too well. Yet, it is perhaps worthwhile repeating it here, for those readers of the far-flung English-speaking world, if any, who might have forgotten it by the time this book sees the light—if ever it does. It was decided by the Western Allies, in December 1948, in London, that an international body in which the Germans, when they once more have a Government, will be represented by three delegates, as also France, the USA, Great Britain, and the Benelux, will supervise the distribution of coal, coke, and steel, of which a part will be used for home consumption while the rest will be exported. That body . . . will have, in addition, the right to examine the commercial utilisation of these products. And when the Occupation ends, it will possibly take over the power lying at present with the military governors, in connection with the eviction of former Nazis, the interdiction to reconstitute cartels, and the management of the industries.1 1 Journal de Genève, 1st week of January, 1949, quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 1.

103 Side by side with the international authority, of which the function is essentially economic, will be set up an Allied body of “military security,” “which will see to it that the disarmament and demilitarisation (of Germany) are maintained. It will be the duty of that body to enforce the interdictions and limitations that are to be imposed upon German industry.”1The Office of Military Security is to be constituted in a near future, probably at Koblenz or at Bad Ems. The International Committee for the Ruhr will only really come into function after the end of the Military Occupation. One has no need to be a politician to see at once that this new dictate is anything but “a solution that allows the reconstruction of Germany while giving legitimate guarantees to her neighbours.”2 One has even no need to be more than moderately intelligent to see that it is no step towards a “peaceful and friendly” collaboration between the countries of Western Europe. It is an outrageous document, sealing (in the minds of the Allies, forever) the relegation of Germany not merely to the rank of a third-rate power, but to that of an actual colony of the Western Democracies; to that of a State in which the very standard of life of the people would no longer depend upon their own efficiency or their own social laws, but rather “upon the vote of the competitors of the German economy.”3 Three main features of the Ruhr Statute cannot but strike one’s attention: first, it limits the production of coal and steel in the main German industrial area and controls the use to which these goods are to be put at home and abroad; second, through the Office of Military Security, it aims at suppressing every possibility of a new rise of the National Socialist spirit, i.e., at keeping Germany, politically also, under control; and third, both these outrages to the German nation are to be made permanent. (At least that is what the Allies want.) To us, the first feature constitutes no less than the official sanction of organised plunder on behalf of the Western victors of 1945; the second and the third are attempts to avoid the possibility of the plunder being one day put to an end. Not only is the production of steel in the Ruhr never to exceed 10.7 million tons a year, but, in addition to that, according to article 14 of the Ruhr Statute (to take only one instance), the new international 1 Le Monde, 1st week of January 1949, quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 1. 2 Bulletin de la Semaine, Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 1. 3 Professor Ludwig Erhard, Der Spiegel (Hanover), 8 January 1949.

104 authority is to distribute among the different purchasing countries the output of about 7,000 German enterprises. The Ruhr furnishes the raw material for 80 percent of German exports. The new international authority is given the power not merely to fix the minimum quantities of coal, coke, and steel to be absorbed by German industry, but also to determine the nature of Germany’s exports, which allows it, for example, as regards steel, to eliminate at one stroke all German exportation of dentistry appliances, a rich line that would bring in currency. Provided they agree, the representatives of the Western powers are therefore practically in a position to strangle any line of German exports that would risk becoming a danger to their own economy. Along with this power of control over the German exports, the international authority can also stop arbitrarily all commercial transactions between Germany and the Scandinavian countries, Spain, Italy, and the Southeast of Europe. The Western Allies can therefore also use the Ruhr exports as a means of very effective pressure in matters of foreign politics.1 And, in order to make that total and permanent dependence still more secure, the German concerns would have to send periodical accounts of their activity to the international authority, while the representatives of the latter would have free access to all the factories! If that is not carefully planned plunder, then I ask: What is? Of course—as always, with Western Democrats—it is plunder under the cover of some excuse. (They have not even the guts to be thieves frankly and boldly). The excuse is the same old one—that wearisome, sickening one that has saturated Allied speeches, Allied discussions, and the European press, ever since the end of the First World War: France’s security. Strangle, shackle, weaken, keep down the naturally strong—the healthy, the pure-blooded, the martial, the fit to live and fit to rule—so that those born tired might at last feel “secure”; stifle the representatives of a more virile humanity, so that a few quaint flowers of decadence might bloom at ease, amidst the many weeds of mediocrity, in the thick and soft manure of undisturbed corruption! That is the whole spirit, the whole justification of Democracy, and the secret of its appeal both to the degenerate Aryans of the West and to so many “intellectuals” of the inferior races who, all 1 Der Spiegel (Hanover), 8 January 1949.

105 over the world, re-chew and re-swallow with delight, like docile camels, their equalitarian teachings and their anti-Nazi slogans! That is also the real meaning of French security in this connection; that and nothing else.1 But security is only an excuse. The true motive behind the Ruhr Statute in 1949, is the self-same one which lay behind the Occupation of the Ruhr by the French in 1923—plunder; in Democratic language, “business.” The Democrats say so themselves, when they leave off talking propaganda. The Parisian bulletin on economic affairs, L’Echo de la Finance, puts it indeed very nicely: “It is especially our former enemies’ industrial possibilities that make us feel uneasy. If tomorrow the German steel industry were to oust us from the European market, it would no longer be possible for us to secure for ourselves the currency which, however, we absolutely need. It is not in the military field but in the field of economy that we shall have, henceforth, to measure our strength with our enemies of yesterday.”2 This is spoken clearly enough. It is addressed to businessmen, not to sentimental fools. Is it any wonder if a German paper calls the Ruhr Statute, “a realisation of the Monnet plan which provides for a transplantation of the steel production from the Ruhr into Lorraine,”3 and, if even a Social-Democratic paper such as the Telegraf, from Berlin, writes that “the control foreseen for the Ruhr will discourage and discredit the Democratic forces of Germany, and will again render ‘radical’ the broad layers of the German people”?4 Is it any wonder that the nefarious plot was denounced officially by the directing Committee of the Social-Democratic Party itself as a “temporary solution for the abolition of which” that party will “fight with all its strength”? And if that outrage on the part of the Allied Western Democracies can force even the leaders of the SPD to remember that they are Germans, then, I leave one to imagine what its effect must be upon that great section of the German people—and that intelligent and faithful It is interesting to note here what Der Abend, a Berlin paper licensed by the Americans, says in this connection, in the 1st week of January 1949: “One always speaks of French security, but one forgets that, within the last three hundred years, the French frontiers have advanced more and more towards the east. And who speaks of the security of Germany? Growing generations and generations not yet born are sacrificed to the French Security complex.” 1 Quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 2. 2 Westdeutsche Zeitung (Düsseldorf), quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 1. 3 Quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 1.

106 Aryan minority outside Germany—silent since 1945: the National Socialists. * * * As I have pointed out above, the plan for permanent plunder is completed, or rather buttressed, by a plan for the further persecution and permanent annihilation of National Socialism. But one should have no illusions about the true motives that inspire this plan—or, by the way, that underlie the whole persecution of our Weltanschauung since and already before 1945. They are by no means humanitarian, as simple people believe. They are commercial. They have very little or nothing to do with the way we might have treated the poor darling Jews. On the other hand, they have a lot to do with the way National Socialism pulled Germany out of political and economic servitude after the First World War, and made her the leading Power in Europe. Had the hated Nazis not accomplished that miracle, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler; had they not, out of the hungry, disarmed, demoralised Germany of 1920, made the Greater Germany of 1940—prosperous, victorious, irresistible—then, it would not matter how many worthless parasites were gassed. The clever businessmen of the soft-hearted Democracies would not care; and the sentimental fools who provide the rank and file of the anti-Nazi forces, would not know. The press, the wireless, and the films, would never have told them. The unpardonable crime of National Socialism, in the eyes of its foreign persecutors, is to have made Germany great. And the one feeling that actuated all the steps taken to crush it by the present-day masters of the unfortunate land, is fear—the fear lest, out of this abyss of ruin and desolation, again Greater Germany might rise, to the music of the Horst Wessel Song. They know it can. They know it will, sooner or later. Still, they do all that is in their power to prevent it, so that they might continue to plunder the land a little longer. That is the secret of all their arrangements for the permanent disarmament of Germany, for permanent Allied control and permanent eviction of National Socialists from all posts of importance. The Jews really hate us for all we stand for. They are the ones who hate us for the most natural, the most vital reasons; and who therefore hate us the most. They are the ones who hate us personally, individually; who are capable of any atrocity upon any one of us. That is the reason why they are used by Germany’s enemies as our direct persecutors—as false witnesses in the trials of so-called “war

107 criminals”; as torturers in the anti-Nazi extermination camps. No one could do those jobs as well as them. The Communists—when they are not also Jews—hate us for our philosophy, but without that deadly physical element that makes hatred irreducible. They hate us like Christians hate Pagans (or used to hate them, when there still were Christians), not like mice hate cats. The average anti-Nazis of the West hate us without knowing why; because they have read, printed in black and white, a hundred thousand times, that we are “monsters,” so it must be true. The clever people who have a word to say in the persecution of National Socialism in occupied Germany only hate us because our philosophy is indissolubly linked with Germany’s greatness. In reality, it is Germany they hate—Germany, the least Judaised among the great Aryan nations of the West, and their natural leader; in the meantime (even in defeat!), their dreaded competitor. They always reproach Germany with nurturing a “dangerous nationalism.” What about their nationalism resting, not upon the right of a healthy people to seek more living space, but upon the claims of an objectionable confraternity of businessmen to fill their pockets? Nay, what about their chauvinism—a better name for it—regularly and piously fed by the money of the international Jew? For behind the patriotic French, British, American competitors of Germany in the struggle for industrial, commercial, and ultimately political supremacy; behind those who hate and persecute National Socialism as Germany’s guiding force on the way to greatness, there stands—again!—the international Jew who hates Germany both because of her technical efficiency and her racial consciousness; both as a businessman and as a Jew. The bitterest, most consistent, and most powerful anti-Nazi of all, he is the one who uses the patriotic fears and the commercial greed of the Aryans against National Socialism, as those Aryan renegades themselves, who control occupied Germany, use in their turn the hatred and cruelty and anti-Nazi fanaticism of the rank and file Jews to break at least the bodies of “dangerous” German Nazis, knowing all the time that they can never break their spirit. * * * More than any others, those large-scale thieves now busy making Western Europe a safe place for themselves, are also liars. They do not say: “We are thieves”—who does?—And if they sometimes admit it to one another, or to people whom they think they need not fear—as that

108 Frenchman did, whose conversation with myself I reported at the beginning of this chapter—they cannot possibly admit it before the world, for that would deprive them of the support of the simpletons, who, in modern Democracies, have one vote each like any man or woman, and who are millions. As things stand, the simpletons condone such robbery as goes on in occupied Germany. They call it a “guarantee of security,” of “peace,” of “justice,” echoing the voice of their morning paper, which, in its turn, echoes the interests of the capitalists who hope to edify their country’s permanent prosperity—and first of all their own—upon Germany’s permanent impoverishment. They must continue to call it so. Therefore excuses must be found to justify both the plunder itself, and the indispensable persecution of National Socialism, without which it could not last six months. The better organised the plunder, the cleverer the lies that serve to excuse it. I have already said what I think—what every National Socialist thinks—of the Western Democracies’ insistence upon the limitation of Germany’s industrial output, for the sake of the “security” of Europe, and especially of France. Another mild word for theft, in Democratic jargon applied to German affairs, is “restitution,” “justice.” This is particularly true in the case of all property sold to National Socialists by Jews who left Germany under the Nazi régime. The people who acquired the property have paid for it—not always as high a price as the Jews would have liked, admittedly, but they paid. Now, many of the Jews have come back. And the Allied military authorities, their humble servants, force the new owners to return, without compensation, the houses, land, or other property for which they had given money. That is called “restitution.” The same applies to a great number of objects acquired by Germany in occupied countries during the war, whether they were taken as spoils of war (without hypocritical excuses) or paid for. According to French official information, objects worth two hundred million dollars (eight milliards1 of francs, at the rate of exchange in 1938, forty-two milliards of francs now, or a hundred and twenty milliards, if one takes into account the proportion in which prices have risen in France) were returned to their former owners, in France alone, up till June 1948, naturally without compensation to whoever was in possession of them in Germany.2 Also “restitution.” 1 A milliard is one thousand million, in American terms, one billion.—Ed. 2 Wirtschaftszeitung (Stuttgart), 8 January 1949, quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 2.

109 But there are far lovelier excuses than these; for example the explanations kindly given to me by one of the high officials of the “Bureau de l’Information” at Baden-Baden, during my first interview with him on the 9th of October 1948. The reckless massacre of the Black Forest? Just a very unpleasant necessity!—Not merely a necessity from the standpoint of the Frenchmen’s pockets; not merely a “just” compensation for damages caused in France during four years of German Occupation, but a necessity in the interest of the trees themselves! A disease—so the Frenchman told me—had attacked a certain number of trees, in different areas of the West. And those trees and the trees around them were cut down . . . to prevent the disease from spreading. In other words, the French have perpetrated the mass felling of those trees of which one can see the thousands of stumps in now completely blank areas, all along one’s way through the Black Forest, only in order to “save” Germany’s glorious living ornament! How kind of them indeed! But it is strange, to say the least, that such “kindness” was necessary in all the great forests of the country, and also that the rapidly spreading disease only made its appearance after the Occupying Powers had settled in. As for the commentaries of this same Frenchman on the dismantling of the German factories, they surpass in crooked ingenuity anything that I have heard before or since. Undoubtedly, France and her Allies had dismantled numberless factories for the sake of their “security” and also in order to carry off very useful machinery as a contribution to “war reparations.” But . . . the Germans did not really resent it. At least, the German industrialists did not. On the contrary, in the secret of their hearts, they were only too glad to get rid of their old machines, hoping to replace them as soon as they could by more up-to-date ones! The resentment of the people? The refusal of the workmen to help to dismantle their factories? That was all due to “a pernicious propaganda.” Needless to say, in addition to this, every time they possibly can, the Military Governments of the Occupying Powers publish denials of the little information given in the German papers about their confiscations, their Occupation expenses, and other forms of plunder. But the figures which even they admit are impressive enough.1 1 For instance, the French military government has denied having confiscated more than 300,000 tons of ships on the Upper Rhine (Allgemeine Zeitung [Mainz], 30 December 1948).       Also General Bishop has denied the figures quoted by Dr. Weitz regarding the Occupation expenses in the British Zone. Still he admits that the Occupation expenses amount to one fifth of the total expenses in the budget for the year 1 April 1947 to 31 March 1948, and that excludes all expenses in connection with reparations, compensation, disarmament, prisoners of war, and displaced persons (Rheinische Zeitung, 3 January 1949, quoted in Revue de la Presse Rhénane et Allemande, vol. 4, no. 1). [The French official’s name is Rudolf Grassot. See Chapter 8, pp. 130–36.—Ed.]

110 * * * Along with the lies intended to justify Allied plunder in occupied Germany there are those still greater lies, half-truths, and total suppressions of truth, intended to provide a convenient excuse for the persecution of National Socialism. The main idea behind them all is to make us Nazis appear as monsters of fanaticism and cruelty in the eyes of the whole world. To attain that result, the first step of our enemies is to show—or try to show—that they are, and have always been (even in war time) and cannot but be—being Democrats—well-balanced, kindly people, incapable of such atrocities as ours; “decent” people. They therefore have to suppress all facts that would prove the contrary—and how glaringly! So, to begin with, not a word must ever be said or written—and not a word is ever said, if they can help it—about their atrocities; not a word about all that went on in the torture chambers of Ham Common, a few miles from London, during the war, and in similar ones in other places, in all Democratic countries as well as in Soviet Russia; not a word, either, about the manifold horrors perpetrated upon Germans, also during the war, by that scum of the earth which composed, by the admission of many honest Frenchmen themselves, the bulk of the French “résistance”; not a word for instance, about the rascals who, having caught hold of twelve German officers and tied them up, slowly pressed them to death between the iron teeth of an enormous winepress in a village of the centre of France named Oradour; not a word about the cruelties of all description committed upon Nazis, mostly by Jews, under British, American, or French supervision, after the war, in the anti-Nazi extermination camps of West Germany, or by the Russians, in East Germany and farther East; not a word about Darmstadt and Schwarzenborn, and Herstfeld, and Dachau after it was taken over by the Allies; nor about Galgenberg, near Bad Kreuznach, nor about camp 2288 near Brussels, and other places of hunger and ill-treatment under Allied management, both in and outside Germany, after the capitulation. Woe to him who dares to throw some light upon such facts! The British officer who reported to me the horror of the hunger camp 2288, was forced to resign his post

111 and turned out of occupied territory for having had the honesty to point out the same to the competent authorities. The next step is to harp upon whatever violence we might have resorted to, whether in war or in peace time; to exaggerate it, naturally; and to forget to mention the outrages in punishment or in reprisal by which it was permitted and is justified. The shooting of hostages, in countries occupied by Germany during the war, is one of the familiar themes of anti-Nazi propaganda. The “poor” hostages had not done the deed for which they were shot. Admittedly. But why was the deed done? Why was, for instance, some perfectly harmless German soldier suddenly shot dead, no one knew by whom, while peacefully taking a stroll in a public garden after sunset? Was that fair? And if that was fair—if that was “war”—then why had not the fellow who did it the courage to come forward and give himself up rather than allow a dozen “innocents” to be shot in his place? And who were those “innocents”? Men whom the Germans picked up at random, in the streets? No—save in a few extreme cases in which repeated aggression on the part of the population had exasperated the local German authorities—but people collected from the prisons where they were already detained on account of their proved anti-Nazi activities. Was it not just natural that such ones should suffer, in that circumstance, for the acts of hostility committed by their comrades, when these comrades were not themselves prepared to suffer for their own deeds? As far as I know, there have been, in present-day occupied Germany, no similar acts of hostility against the members of the Allied occupying forces. But had there been, would not the Military Government of whichever Occupying Power have killed any number of hostages in order to reassert its authority? There were sometimes reprisals ordered by the Germans in occupied countries. But why were they ordered? I shall be content with recalling one sole instance—sufficiently eloquent in itself to need no comment—that of the “wiping out” of the village of Oradour, in the centre of France, an episode which has been exploited ad nauseam by the enemies of National Socialism, all over the world, as a major “Nazi atrocity.” (I first heard of it in India; then I saw the “ruins of Oradour” on the screen, in Iceland, among the “actualités”1 projected before the main film, at a cinema show of the Alliance Française, in 1947. But I had already been told in 1946, in France, by a Frenchman, of the real 1 Newsreels—Ed.

112 atrocity that had been perpetrated in the broadly advertised village.) I have mentioned it above: twelve German officers had been slowly pressed to death in an enormous winepress, to the devilish glee of some two or three hundred bystanders. Their legs were crushed first, as they were erect, and some were still alive when the steel teeth, closing in on the upper part of their bodies, at last put an end to their martyrdom. And those twelve men had not even been specially selected for such a horrid fate because of something that they had done to the inhabitants of the place or to other French people. They were tortured for no other reason save that they were officers in the German army—“hated Nazis.” Is it a wonder that the village was “wiped out” after that? It would have been a disgrace had it not been. One knows of the terrible reprisals of the British against the Indians for excesses committed during the Indian Independence War of 1857, or even far more recently, during the disturbances of the last twenty years. Had the Indians treated not twelve officers, but one single British soldier, as the French treated those innocent Germans, it is not only a village but a whole province that the British army would have “wiped out.” * * * But certainly the most popular of all those biased accusations brought against us National Socialists, is that of having “persecuted the Jews.” Those “poor Jews,” all as innocent as lambs, all benefactors of humanity, kind, honest, gifted, disinterested people—God’s own people; what more can they be?—were the defenceless victims of us “inhuman monsters!” Around that lie (for it is a lie) a worldwide anti-Nazi propaganda has relentlessly worked with such skill that it succeeded in turning against us not only millions of simple folk indifferent to “politics,” but also a very great number of the earlier admirers of our régime, in all countries outside Germany. The fact that the lie is a partial truth (like all or most of the greatest lies are) made its success all the more rapid and all the more persistent. There is no doubt that we fought and are still fighting Jewry. And fighting Jewry and “persecuting the Jews” look much the same. Nevertheless, they are not the same. We have fought and are still fighting Jewry in self-defence; nay, in defence of the whole of Aryan mankind. It is not true that we hate Jews “for no reason at all,” or out of mean commercial jealousy (as quite a number of anti-Nazis do) or on account of their “talents.” No. Had the Jews remained in their place, and lived an honest national life in a land of their own, like other races

113 (or even in other people’s land, if they were able to conquer it in fair battle; most races have sought new homes at one time or the other of their history) then, I say, there would have been no mention of them in National Socialist literature. There is no mention of Arabs, although racially, the Arabs and the Jews are both Semites. But the former are warriors, the latter parasites, and, what is more, parasites of this continent. It is because the Jews are dangerous and, apparently, congenital parasites—for they have never been anything else ever since they existed—that there arises, sooner or latter, a “Jewish question” wherever they settle. It is for that reason that, sooner or later, whether in ancient Egypt or in modern Germany, steps have to be taken against them in defence of the race, or races, at the expense of which they live and thrive. It is for that reason that, as champions of Aryan humanity, we have put such stress upon the struggle to liberate Germany and all Aryan nations from the subtle Jewish yoke. That is not “persecuting the Jews.” That is just defending the Aryan people, in their own home, against the pernicious infiltration of a parasitic, alien race. We were—and are—bound to be ruthless in this struggle. One always is, when one is defending one’s life. And this is the struggle in which the very survival of the Aryan race is at stake. Yet, as I have already said, though we might have been ruthless, we were never cruel. The accusation, brought against us all over the world, of deliberately inflicting pain upon Jews for no other reason than they were born Jews, is a blatant lie. 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

114 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.1 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 1 Hertha Ehlert—Ed.

115 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

116 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 supposed 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

117 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.”1 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.2 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 1 Catholic Herald, 29 October 1948. 2 I say “according to official figures,” for in reality nearly 500,000 German civilians were killed in that abominable air raid.

118 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.1 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.2 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 1 Now—in 1952, three years after this book was written—a Commission is investigating on behalf of the “free Democratic nations” into the Katyn case, in order to prove that “the Russians did it” (now that they would like us to join them against them, against their former “gallant allies” the Russians). 2 This—and the rest of the book—was written in Werl after my trial in 1949. The beginning of the chapter and chapters 4–6 were written there during the time I was “on remand.”

119 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

120 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 German1 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 1 Gerhard Waßner—Ed.

121 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. * * * This fundamental shallowness of the Democrats makes the persecution of National Socialism at their hands none the less thorough, but all the more hateful. It is not—as in the Russian Zone—the persecution of a faith in the name of another faith; of truth, in the name of a sincere illusion. It is the persecution of the eternal Religion of Life in its modern form, for the sake of nothing else but vested interests of the lowest order; business interests. Of course, behind those business interests, there is far more. There is the irresistible tendency of a degenerate world towards its doom; the frenzied rush to death of Judaised Europe, at an accelerated speed. We who have long overcome in ourselves that general human tendency; we, the children of Light and Life—the regenerate—joyfully holding out against the current of time, our eyes fixed, beyond the ruins of today and of tomorrow, upon the glory of the new Beginning; we, I say, the only ones in the world who stand in the way of the death forces and defy them, we must be crushed, if the death forces are to triumph forever. And that is the real reason why persecution has been waged upon us from all sides on their behalf. But in the East, those unseen forces have chosen as their vehicle a false Ideology sufficiently deceitful to impress, along with the unthinking masses, quite a number of the best men and women. In the West, they knew, so to speak, that allegiance to vested interests on the part of the clever few, coupled with selfishness, chauvinism, moral cowardice, squeamishness, and gullibility on the part of the many, were enough to inspire and sustain,

122 for any length of time, the persecution of our everlasting Idea. But ultimately, nothing can prevent the triumph of life. Nothing can alter the iron laws that regulate the succession of cycles in time, bringing back an era of resurrection after the worst era of disintegration. One day, with the help of all the Gods—I hope—we shall see to it that the Democrats and even the Communists bitterly regret not having killed more of us. In the meantime, the fact that our enemies’ shallowness has kept some of the most ardent ones of us alive, in spite of their defiant boldness, is a sign from the Gods; a sign that National Socialism is to live, and to become, once more in a relatively near future, the ruling force of the Aryan world.