143 fully realised how sound and everlasting Hitler’s ideas are, his socio-political system appealed, in me, to the artist. And I know of no other system—nay, apart from the immemorial cult of the Sun which I profess, I know of no religion—capable of appealing in like manner to me or to anyone else who, like me, is first and foremost a lover of beauty, and especially of visible beauty; a lover of this earth and of this life, here and now; a worshipper of the body in all its strength, grace, and vitality; a worshipper of Nature in her merciless majesty; a real Heathen. Two words appear over and over again as a Leitmotiv in the few splendid pages that Heinrich Himmler has devoted to our philosophy under the pen name of Wulf Sörensen: “Wir Heiden”—we Heathens.1 They provide the key to our whole outlook. For not only I, but every true National Socialist is a Heathen at heart. And—which is more—every true Aryan Heathen of our times is bound to be a National Socialist. (If inhibited by ‘‘humanitarian” reservations, he or she is no true Heathen.) One does not become a National Socialist. One only discovers, sooner or later, that one has always been one—that, by nature, one could not possibly be anything else. For this is not a mere political label; not an “opinion” that one can accept or dismiss according to circumstances, but a faith, involving one’s whole being, physical and psychological, mental and spiritual: “not a new election cry, but a new conception of the world”2—a way of life—as our Führer himself has said. And it is, essentially, the way of life of those in whose eyes the value of man, which lies in his all-round beauty—in his faithfulness to Nature, that calls on him to surmount humanity—is far more important than that “individual happiness” of which the “bourgeois” make such a fuss; more particularly, it is the way of life of those whose personal happiness is inseparable from the awareness of their rights and duties as Aryans, i.e., of their value in the natural hierarchy of human beings. * * * . . . The axe has mutilated the forests, The slave crawls and prays, where swords once clattered; 1 Die Stimme der Ahnen, a small book of only 37 pages. 2 Mein Kampf, II, i, p. 409; cf. Mannheim, p. 373.

144 And all the Gods of Erinn have departed. . . .1 Thirty years ago, I read for the first time that concise and pathetic description of the twilight of European Heathendom, which a French poet has put into the mouth of an old Irish bard. And I sobbed desperately because I—in 1919—could do nothing to bring back the proud and beautiful Gods of bygone days. From my earliest childhood, I had always been a bitter rebel against the Christian values; a soul to whom the Christian ethics had never meant anything but silliness or perversity—or “pose”; to whom the Christian message meant nothing. And I loved the Gods of the ancient North, as well as those of Greece and of the Aryan East, with passionate, nostalgic love. And I kept within my heart the healthy, warrior-like ideal that they embodied, while despising the dreary humanity in the midst of which I lived—that humanity that tried, through the teaching of Christianity or of the principles of the French Revolution, to impose its wretchedness and sickly benevolence upon me. I was not, then, aware of the dawning of National Socialism in Germany, only a few hundred miles away from my native town. I did not know I was destined, one day, to hail in that inspired Movement the long-delayed awakening of the Aryan Gods within the consciousness of the undying Race that had once created them. I only began to take a serious interest in it ten years later. And yet, at heart, I was already a National Socialist. And my continual conflict with the world around me and both its Christian “humanitarian” and Democratic values—its man-centred, equalitarian values—was nothing else but the conflict of the new Movement itself with those same values, those same traditions, those same principles, outcome of centuries of decay; with that same ugly world, boasting of its incurable sickness and hypocrisy under the name of “moral progress.” Oh, if only I had known that, in 1919! I could have done nothing, for I was a mere thirteen year old girl. But I would have dried my tears, and looked with hope and confidence to the slowly rising Leader beyond the Rhine and to his handful of followers. Instead of mourning for a past that would never come back, I would have sought in the living present and in the future that eternal beauty for which I was 1 “. . . la hache a mutilé les bois, L’esclave rampe et prie, où chantaient les épées, Et tous les Dieux d’Erinn sont parties á la fois.”       —Leconte de Lisle, “Le Barde de Temrah,” Poèmes Barbares [Barbaric Poems] (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, n.d.), p. 70.

145 craving, and spared myself ten years’ more bitterness. * * * As I have said before, National Socialism is not merely the one modern “ism” which is anything but modern; the only political Ideology which is infinitely more than political. It is the only system concerned with social questions and government, with economic and territorial problems, national welfare and international relations, in our times—and perhaps in all times—to which a man or woman who is first and last a lover of beauty and nothing else, can be wholeheartedly attracted; should, indeed, be wholeheartedly attracted. No out-and-out lover of beauty can help feeling bitter, at times, if not utterly dejected, in a world in which, roughly speaking, everything is beautiful and lovable save his own species. And such seemed to be our world, until very recently; until, in fact, out of the hopeless general slush of slowly decaying humanity, new Germany rose, as by miracle, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, a living picture of what the whole Aryan race—the world’s natural élite—could re-become, if only it were willing to follow its true friend and Saviour. And, what is more, for the last four years already, the reborn Nation has stood the terrible test of disaster. She suffered; and there were times when one could believe she had reached the limit beyond which no human beings could keep faith in themselves and in their destiny. And yet, invasion, prolonged occupation, with all its demoralising consequences, hunger, humiliation, de-Nazification: she stood it all and did not lose faith. And the worthy ones among her martyred people are, more than ever, today, a splendid example of what the Aryan race can be, when invigorated anew with the sound doctrine of pure blood and legitimate racial pride. More than ever, the lover of beauty cannot but admire them, and feel happy to have at last found a land where the unchanging beauty of Nature outside man is equalled by the superhuman, all-round beauty of a small section of mankind; a land where a few hundreds of thousands if not a few millions of men and women fulfil the purpose of their race—which is to create a “supermankind”—as surely and as simply as the beautiful beasts of the forest, or the trees, or the distant stars in heaven fulfil theirs. National Socialism has performed that miracle. That new Germany, that stands today erect in the midst of her appalling ruins, a thing of indestructible beauty forever, is entirely Adolf Hitler’s handiwork; the product of that love that led him to the intuitive knowledge of a few

146 eternal truths and to the ruthless application of that knowledge to the complete remoulding of a whole nation. And the miracle is unique. For nothing, save the short-lived application of the Nazi Ideology to government and education, seems ever to have arrested man’s unavoidable decadence, even for a while, let alone to have raised a superior race, once more, towards its forgotten perfection, against the all-powerful current of time. So much so that, if the Western world is one day to rise again, it will have to date its resurrection from the birth of the National Socialist Movement, or at least from the 30th of January 1933, the day Hitler came to power. And if it is never to rise, still it will remain true that the only way to resurrection was once opened to it by our Führer. How is it so? And how is it that so many other political, social, and religious changes have taken place, in this and other continents, without leaving a trace, save upon the externals of life? The answer is simple. The other political movements, even the great religions ancient and modern, have all accepted as a matter of course—or tried to conceal—the tragic fact of man’s physical decay, as though nothing indeed could be done about it, and have striven to cultivate man’s personality, to raise man’s ethical or spiritual level, or even his mere material standard of life in spite of that fact—which is absurd. All recipes for the moral, intellectual, spiritual, or merely social development of a physically decaying humanity are humbug. Like other “quack” remedies, they are, at the most, fit to fill the pockets or to advertise the otherwise worthless names of those who put them forward. If physical decay be irredeemable; if race, even when slightly weakened or vulgarised, can never be restored—if even a little poison can never be eliminated from the racial body—then there is only one solution to the human problem: extinction; only one ideal to be upheld, with utmost vigour: the monastic ideal; only one request to be made, or rather only one order to be given to men and women before they sink to the level of perverse apes: “Cease breeding, and leave this planet as soon as possible!—Die in dignity, while you still perhaps retain enough of your ancestral nobility to feel that death imposes itself as the only tolerable future; death, rather than endless degradation.” If not—if there is hope for man—then salvation should be sought not in the social, economic, moral, or spiritual uplift of the degenerate as they are, but first and foremost in an arrest of degeneracy; in a return to health, without which there is no morality, no spirituality, no beauty, nothing worth living for. It should be sought in a world-wide policy of systematic healthy birth and healthy life but, before all, in a policy of

147 healthy birth and life applied to the natural leading race of the world, the Aryan, of which the decay, if definitive, would mean the greatest disaster from the human point of view. Our Führer has expressed all this far better than I or anyone else can do, in that magnificent Chapter 11 of the first part of Mein Kampf, which contains the kernel of our eternal philosophy. With the stirring eloquence of clear, objective truth allied to unshakable conviction, he has advocated that ruthless policy of purification and strengthening of the Aryan race—that regulation of man’s sexual life with a view to the birth of healthy children of pure blood—which it is the glory of the National Socialist régime to have carried out. It is the only sensible policy, in alternative to that of systematic extinction. And it is the only policy that can—that must—result in the re-creation of a humanity which the out-and-out artist can admire and love without reservations. * * * There is a curious and, in my eyes, a very significant fact in religious history—a fact which nobody, up till now, as far as I know, seems to have noticed. Of the two great religions of India, Brahminism and Buddhism—the two typical products of the Aryan mind in a tropical environment—the former is nothing else but the eternal creed of blood purity and racial hierarchy—our creed—applied to a land of many races; and the latter is the most pitilessly consistent religion of extinction that man has ever conceived at the sight of irredeemable decay. And while, in spite of all attempts to suppress it, from without, or to mar it from within, the race policy embodied in the immemorial caste system, has preserved in India, to this day, an extremely small, indeed, but still worthy blood aristocracy—the southernmost and easternmost outpost of Aryan humanity in the world—the policy of extinction has failed lamentably. For alone, or nearly alone, those individuals of the superior races who adhered to it, carried it out to its end, with all the courage and thoroughness natural to them.1 To the millions of Untermenschen who gradually came to be labelled Buddhists, in the length and breadth of Asia, the great religion of non-violence and chastity soon meant nothing but a mere ritual, and a mythology, 1 It is remarkable that, while most of the first converts to Christianity were slaves or Jews—the non-Aryan, and the least Aryan elements of the Roman world—the first and best converts to Buddhism were Indians of the Brahmin or Kshatriya castes—Aryans.

148 without any bearing upon their lives. No philosophy can teach the Untermenschen to stop breeding. Wherever their number should be kept down, it is the business of sterilisation, not of religion, to see to it. The countless multitude and the poor quality of the professed followers of the most logical religion of extinction in the world, today, after two thousand five hundred years, proves this only too well. The main result of the preaching of a philosophy of extinction on a worldwide scale, would be to reduce in number the superior races, making place for the unrestricted increase of the inferior ones, and their mastery over the whole earth; in other words, to lower the human level and to create, not nothingness, but ugliness; not a world in which beautiful wild beasts would prowl alone in the re-grown forests, over the dust of forgotten towns, but . . . Chinese slums and Indian “bustees.” The philosophy of extinction can therefore only express the individual attitude of those men and women who have lost all hope in life’s possibilities and all interest in material man. It is merely the outcome of one’s personal determination not to contribute to the continuation of a doomed world, not to allow one’s own blood to lose itself into the general stream of decay. It provides no practical solution for the human problem which is, ultimately, the problem of the survival of the superior races. And the struggle for the maintenance or restoration of pure blood—our struggle—remains the only course. As far as I know, this course has been seriously taken only twice in the long history of our race: in ancient India, some six thousand years ago, when the newly settled Aryan invaders from the North, bearers of a culture entirely different from that of the civilised natives, first became aware of the dangers of blood contamination and invented the caste system, or—if it already existed, as some scholars think—remoulded it upon a racial basis,1 in order to keep themselves pure and worthy of their recently acquired overlordship of the southern subcontinent; and in our times in National Socialist Germany. In the first instance, it resulted in the extraordinary preservation of Aryan blood and culture in an immense tropical land—nearly as large as Europe—densely inhabited by four hundred million people of different non-Aryan stocks, from the most primitive Negroid2 or Mongoloid tribes3 to the highly evolved Dravidians. In the second instance, out of 1 The Sanskrit words for “caste” are varna (colour) and jati (race). 2 Properly speaking, there are no Negroid aborigines in India, but there are Australoids who look “Negroid” in a looser sense of the term.—Ed. 3 Such as the Veddas of Ceylon, the Santals of Chota Nagpur, the Nagas, Kashias, Kukis, Mishmis, Abors, and other hill tribes of Assam.

149 the desperate Germany of the 1920s, it raised a fully conscious aristocracy of blood, the world’s real élite, which even a second disaster of far greater magnitude than the first, was unable to subdue or to demoralise. The former, however, is no mean achievement in world history. And one must, perhaps, have lived in a land of many races—and especially in times like ours, when equalitarian teachings have infected the whole of the earth—to realise to its full the greatness of National Socialism. To most Europeans, still devoid of racial consciousness, the eleventh chapter of Mein Kampf (if they have read it at all) means nothing but an expression of “Hitler’s prejudices.” To most of us, it means hardly more than beautiful, uplifting pages, of which the truth can be proved only in the antagonism of Aryan and Jew. To me, it means that, no doubt, and much more. It evokes memories of the few and far apart tropical outposts of the Aryan race; outlandish scenes: a simple and spotlessly clean whitewashed room in a thatched cottage in some village of Bengal (or of South India, where the contrast between Aryan and non-Aryan is still more glaring) and in that room, a white clad man, one of the few Brahmins of the village, hardly darker—and sometimes fairer—than an Italian or many Frenchmen, with generally brown, but sometimes grey or greyish-blue eyes, and the self-same features as any pure Aryan of Europe. And that man quotes to me verses from the Rig-Veda, from the songs that the Aryan bards once sang to the glory of the Gods of Light and Life, the “Shining Ones,” already before the race came to India; the songs in which allusions are made to those wonders of the still cherished distant Arctic Home, the Northern Lights.1 And the modern language he speaks (if in Bengal) is a neo-Sanskrit language, closely related, through its roots, to German and English, Greek and Latin—an Aryan language. And the rites of his religion are those of the hallowed Northerners, and the legitimate pride that he feels as a Brahmin—a member of India’s highest caste—is their racial pride, surviving in the midst of a foreign environment, through the narrow but uninterrupted stream of pure blood, for six thousand years. And I recall, also, the foreign environment, all round the peaceful cottage: the darker men and women of varied racial types, with features entirely different from those of the Brahmin, going along the dusty, burning hot road, with burdens upon their heads or working in the rice fields; or collecting the village refuse—the multifarious levels of hierarchised mankind, from the honoured castes immediately below the Brahmins, 1 See the aforementioned The Arctic Home in the Vedas, by Lokamanya Tilak.

150 down to the meanest “untouchables”; levels that do not correspond to different shades of wealth, but only to a greater or lesser proportion of real or supposed Aryan blood (of which the lower castes are entirely devoid). The culture reflected in the songs of the Rig-Veda, and in the warrior-like philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, which the Brahmin has kept alive, is the only ancient Aryan culture that has resisted victoriously, to this day, the impact of both Christianity and Islam, i.e., the two great religions of human equality, sprung from Judaism. The Aryan who brought it to the tropics kept it, nay, stamped it upon the multitudes of India forever, first because he kept himself—kept his blood—pure against all odds, threatening with the severest penalty—not loss of life, but loss of caste, with all that this means in India—anyone who would become guilty of the sin of interbreeding. And to the extent to which he failed to avoid that deadly sin, the culture has become “fossilised,” to repeat an expression used by the Führer in the eleventh chapter of Mein Kampf; stultified; for all practical purposes dead. During my numerous years in India, how many times have I not remembered whole passages of Hitler’s famous book, at the sight of the living realities resulting from the existence of an Aryan minority amongst a teeming non-Aryan population; at the sight of that traditional reverence of the non-Aryan for the Aryan in the old caste ridden land—reverence expressed in the small things of daily life and in the very spirit of current language: in the fact, for instance, that relatively fair skin is a very great qualification in a marriageable Indian girl of any caste; or that, in all the languages of India, the words arya and anarya have both a racial and a moral connotation, arya meaning “noble” and anarya, “ignoble,” “infamous.” How many times have I not marvelled at the worship of the deified Aryan hero, Rama, by India’s multitudes of all races, to this day! And, standing against a stone pillar, in one of the gorgeous temples of the far South, in the midst of the smoke of incense and the outlandish music of drums and flutes, how many times have I not shut my eyes, and let my thoughts wander back to distant Europe where Adolf Hitler had risen to power and was building up a new civilisation upon the age-old idea of Aryan supremacy! I watched the graceful Indian women walk along the endless pillared corridors, bearing offerings in large brass plates, their black hair adorned with jasmine flowers. Would the golden-haired daughters of the North learn again one day to worship Aryan Gods? All my life I had longed that they would. Anyhow, they were already

151 learning again to revere in themselves and in their handsome, pure-blooded countrymen, the impersonal divinity of the Race. And that was the main thing. The rest would come afterwards. * * * The second historic achievement of the undying Weltanschauung of racial purity, namely the creation of new Germany—or rather the formation of the kernel of new “Aryandom”—is perhaps even greater than the first. Greater, I say, for it is more difficult to revive the spirit of a people after a pernicious foreign system of religious beliefs, philosophy, and ethics, has marred it for over one and a half millenniums, than to keep it alive in the midst of foreign multitudes that have accepted, or at least that respect, nay, reverence, the values that it has created. Greater, also, for that miracle has been realised through the genius and superhuman willpower, and love, of one Man—Adolf Hitler. It is true that, even in its well-known political form, National Socialism is older than most people think; that, as early as 1904—when Hitler was yet only fifteen—Hans Krebs had gathered the best Germanic elements of what the Western Democracies have later christened Czechoslovakia into a party forwarding the same immediate aims, and bearing the same name as the immortal NSDAP, into which it finally merged. But it is and will remain Hitler’s everlasting glory to have stressed before the modern Aryan world the philosophical and—I am tempted to say, however strange that might seem at first to many—the religious contents of National Socialism; to have conceived and proclaimed the Weltanschauung of pure blood not merely from the point of view of tragic emergency, but from that of eternity. And that is why we hail in him the inspired promoter of the Western resurrection, nay, the Saviour of the whole Aryan race. Other German patriots with a right vision of the same political realities, have founded parties. He has created the youth of new Germany; awakened the best elements in the country to a new consciousness; made Germany worthy, in fact, to take the lead of the Aryan world—worthier than ever, now, inasmuch as she has remained faithful to him and his principles all through these years of persecution. Above all, he has forced the most racially conscious among the foreign Aryans to welcome Germany’s leadership, nay, to desire it, and—if they are consistently sincere—to fight for it; as I have once already said before, he has made Germany a holy land in their eyes. Apart from a very few within the National Socialist minority, the

152 Germans themselves do not seem to realise this sufficiently. I have mentioned the splendid youth of new Germany. All great movements put stress upon the training of youth. “Catch them young,” say the Jesuits. National Socialism has not merely “caught them young,” but has striven to create them; to prepare them, not only from childhood, or from birth, but from the very moment of conception, to be the embodiment of the highest idea of all-round manly perfection—of physical health and beauty; of moral health and beauty; of character; of sound and clear intelligence, firmly linked up with the whole of life; the human élite, from every point of view. No other Movement has harped with such insistence upon the fact that all education is a sheer waste of time without the primary physical foundation of a noble body, and that nobility is God-ordained, not man-made, residing as it does in one’s descent not necessarily from a titled ancestor, but surely from healthy ascendants of unmixed Aryan stock. No political movement, and hardly any religion—save the ancient Aryan religion still alive in India—has ever taught its followers so emphatically that the act of life, far from being an amusement, is an all-important, an extremely serious thing; a holy rite, in which two individuals become the actual link between the whole past of the race and its future, priest and priestess of Everlasting Life; an act which the strong, the healthy, the worthy, the men and women without blemish should alone be allowed to perform, if it is not to become a mockery and a blasphemy. To have dared to stress this truth, and, which is more, to have dared to have enforced laws taking it fully into account, in a world that had forgotten it for the last two thousand years; to have had the courage to proclaim that the union in beauty of two young and healthy people of pure blood, whether sanctioned by a ceremony or not, is something commendable, while the marriage of an Aryan to a man or woman of another race or the union of two people of any race (including pure Aryans) if one or both be unhealthy, is a crime, however much the Christian or any other equalitarian, individualistic, and otherworldly faith might condone it; to have emphasised this as a guiding principle in the government of a great state, encouraging the sterilisation of the unfit, the painless elimination of the dregs of humanity, and strongly forbidding all shameful unions whether on grounds of health or of race, that, I say, is something for which a sane world should be everlastingly grateful to National Socialism. The universal blame which, on the contrary, we got for upholding those measures and the conception of life at the back of them, only proves to what a degree of degradation the whole world—and indeed the Aryan race—has sunk, under the long-drawn

153 influence of such a man-centred creed as Christianity and of the ideologies of “liberty” and equality that in fact prolong its spirit, even if they pretend to stand against it, as some of them do. It only proves the enormity of the physical as well as moral decay of the Western world—for only sickly people can sincerely object to drastic measures for the restoration of the health of their own race. This reminds me of the words addressed to me in 1946, by one of the finest Englishmen I know, a sincere National Socialist who had then just been released after six years’ internment under the 18B Act.1 “What can one expect of those millions of imbeciles?” the gentleman said, speaking of the majority of his countrymen. “Who are they, that they could act or think differently? The products of a drunken Saturday night’s lust, most of them; and the remainder a bastardised lot, intermixed with Jews. What can one expect? If one really wants an élite, one has to breed it systematically, as they did in Germany.” Yes, when most men of our times speak of an “élite” they mean what they call a “moral” or “intellectual” élite. We mean an all-round one—and first and foremost a physical one. We know that there is no such thing as a “moral” or “intellectual” élite which is not at the same time physical. There are, doubtless, exceptional individuals who are not physically sound and strong but who, in other ways, might be useful, very useful even, if they possess the right spirit, which is that of sacrifice for something greater than themselves. But these should remain exceptions, and never be allowed to mar the healthy average bulk of the community. In particular, they should never be allowed to breed, however clever or virtuous they might be, if they have not a perfectly healthy body or if they are not racially pure. Had there been no war, or had this war not been lost, the National Socialist régime would be lasting still, unhindered since 1933 and extended by now to the whole of Europe. One can hardly imagine what a beautiful world would have evolved out of the West which we know after fifty, after a hundred years, of such a régime, provided our Führer’s successors abided strictly and firmly by the principles laid down by him. Out of the new policy of sex with a view to natural nobility of birth—blood purity, health and strength—would have 1 Defence Regulation 18B was an “emergency decree” in England sanctioning from the beginning of the war onwards the arrest and internment of anyone suspected of sympathy for National Socialism or “Fascism.” [The internee is probably Elwyn Wright.—Ed.]

154 emerged generations embodying more and more Nietzsche’s ideal of the Superman; human beings, but with Olympian bodies, and a mentality as far above that of the average man of today as the latter is supposed to be above that of the chimpanzee; the human species in its original perfection or—I am tempted to say—a new species; a species of living gods on earth. Was not that glorious result well worth securing, be it through a certain amount of ruthlessness at the early stages of the struggle? To us, it was; to us, it is. And we are ready to resume the same course, at the next opportunity, for the sake of the same ideal. Whatever our Führer achieved in Germany, he brought about not in fifty years, but in six—from 1933 to 1939 (when the war interrupted all constructive planning). Time was too short for one to see the consequences of the policy of healthy, noble breeding pursued by him so consistently. One could only see the effect of the National Socialist teaching upon the people already born—and, most of them, well out of childhood—at the time Adolf Hitler came to power. But that alone was something to marvel at. That alone was already the promising beginning of a new world—the formation of a real élite. It will always remain my one great regret in life, that I did not come back to Europe in time to see the parades of the Hitler Youth through the streets of the German towns, and to be present at the great yearly Party Rallies—at that of Nuremberg, for instance, in September 1935—and to live in the uplifting atmosphere of the glorious days. I have only seen pictures of those days. But I know people who have lived through them. I have spoken to men who were between fifteen and twenty-five at the time, and who, themselves, have stood by the Party Standards on solemn occasions, and have greeted the Führer walking past between two delirious multitudes; men who still now, would give anything, do anything, to bring National Socialism back to power. And I have conversed with their faithful elders too, who were at the time between thirty and forty, or even more. The fact that they have all kept their convictions to this day proves that these were no mere product of youthful enthusiasm, or of “mass suggestion,” as our enemies pretend, but the outcome of something deeper. It proves that one can rely upon those followers of Adolf Hitler. Personally I have never and nowhere met such fine people, both physically and from the standpoint of character. They are the true élite of the world, and curious, incredible perhaps, as this might seem to many of my readers, an outwardly recognizable élite, in most cases. I have often remembered, in their presence, those words—worthy of

155 an ancient Greek—addressed to me somewhere in Saarland, by an SS man, in 1948: “The first duty of a Nazi is to be beautiful.” Strange words, at first hearing, but how true, when one starts to think of all they imply! For no human being, man or woman, can really be “beautiful” without health and strength; and these stand in the background of most of the virtues expected in one who shares our Ideology. I never met one representative of Germany’s faithful National Socialist minority who did not come up to a fairly high standard of manly beauty. And I met many whose appearance reminded one of the Greek gods of old, or—to stick to our times—of the statues of Arno Breker, full of strength, poise, and unaffected grace. I realised how completely that great sculptor’s whole creation expresses the new world that was taking shape all round him, with its new aspirations, its new soul; how, for example, his “Herald” is really the Herald of our New Order, projection, in immortal bronze, of Germany’s living youth. That youth has not died. It has only ripened, during these four atrocious years; more than ever, it has become hardened, self-possessed, invincible. And it has, perhaps, grown still more contemptuous of its inferiors—of that enormous majority of mankind (including millions of Aryans) who had not the inclination, or the brains to think for itself and to admit that we “were right” but preferred to swallow whatever propaganda against us the Jews or their agents dished out to it, in the press and on the wireless, and in cinema shows, and to bring upon itself the chaos that everyone knows. The National Socialist minority watches and waits, in dignified silence, knowing that it will rise and rule once more, when the time comes. Strictly speaking, it is not their physical appearance only that points out its representatives to the attention of the careful observer sitting, for instance, on the opposite bench in a café or in a waiting room. It is the radiance of their personality; the stamp of their worth, as superior men and women, upon their faces; the shine of intelligence and courage in their eyes. And that is true of their elder ones as well as those who were mere adolescents in 1933, and who went through the splendid physical training of new Germany. As I have said before, now that it no longer pays to call oneself a Nazi, those who have remained faithful to our ideals, firm and confident and ready, are those alone whose lifelong aspirations, whose whole personal philosophy could not possibly be anything else but ours: the morally no less than physically healthy, the strong and consistent, the fearless—the very best of the land. And, along with health and race, it is those qualities of character that give their faces such beauty and that make one feel, in their circle, that one

156 is in the presence of men far above the rest of men. In the days National Socialism was triumphant, quite a number of Germans, even in high positions, did not reach that level—otherwise, all would have gone well, and the war would never have been lost. Now, those alone who are at that level remain, ready to form, tomorrow, the real, the invincible Party, worthy to govern the whole earth under Hitler’s leadership, forever. * * * I owe some of the most beautiful of all my memories to my short experience in the National Socialist struggle just slowly beginning again. And these are memories of the people with whom I came in touch; people of all social conditions—students, shopkeepers, workmen, men of liberal professions—and of all levels of education in the narrowly bookish sense of the word, but who form, in my eyes, a real aristocracy; the natural aristocracy of blood and of character, destined (I hope) to supersede the artificial aristocracy of money, position, or learning in our new world. How I love them! We understood one another, whatever our level of education, first because the things we had to say were not, in general, to be found in books, and then, because there were a few basic books which we all had read. We did not necessarily agree on every minor point, nor was each one of us the replica of all the others—as so many of the Communists are, from what I know at least of the non-Russian ones—for he thought for himself; nor had we all come to National Socialism for the same main reasons; each one of us put stress on that which, in the Weltanschauung or its application, seemed to him the most attractive. But we agreed in all that is essential and, as I have said already, we all were—we all are—Heathens at heart, the whole lot of us, the faithful few. (There were, once, quite a number of inconsistent people who believed they could be both true Christians and Nazis at the same time. Defeat—and the subsequent intensive propaganda on the part of the Churches—has mightily helped such ones to recognise the incompatibility of the two philosophies as they stand, and to make up their minds. Had our Weltanschauung remained triumphant without a break, it never would have occurred to them how inconsistent they were—or how “wrong” we are, from a Christian point of view!) I remember—with that nostalgia one feels at the thought of one’s own lost possibilities—a remarkable young German of twenty-three or twenty-four, a student of physics whom I met in the train a month or so

157 before my arrest. I admired the logic, knowledge, and self-assurance with which he was discussing with another student some point about alternating currents, and I stepped into the conversation after asking to be excused for doing so. (I was myself, once, a science student as well as a student of the arts.) We soon discussed other things than electricity, and I met the young man again, and came to know him better. He is a serious youngster, of few words but much thought and intense feelings, and a fine National Socialist, with all the virtues that such praise implies. I met his mother, a most lovable German woman also sharing our ideals, and I envied her for having given such a son to the Movement. His name is Herr F. We were once walking down a steep road, leading from his house to the Rhine, and a great part of the town stretched before us. “You should have seen this place in ‘our days,’” the young man said to me. (The greater part of the town is now in ruins.) “Yes,” I replied, “everything was beautiful ‘then’; was it not?” “It was. And then we had something to live for. We were happy.” He told me how, being then only eighteen, he had won the first prize in a fencing competition extending to the whole Kreis,1 in 1943. “But sports were not merely sports, for us. They were a part of a broader and higher training, of our training as Germans and as Aryans. Competing with one another in strength, skill, and endurance; working hard and well; going on picnics in the countryside, a hundred together, or more, and watching the Sun rise over the hills and woods of our Fatherland; marching through the streets and singing our beautiful manly songs, we were becoming a new people,” he said, “and we knew it; we felt it. We were so happy! Then the disaster came, and all seemed lost irretrievably . . . It was not our fault. Had it depended upon us, the young generation, the Führer would have been world-Führer long ago. But there were traitors among the elder generation.” “I know only too well. But you don’t believe that everything is irretrievably lost, do you?” “Goodness no! No force on earth can kill a healthy nation determined to live.” And his dark eyes flashed as he spoke. I stretched out my hand to him and said: “I wish every German, nay, every Aryan, would speak as you do.” “More than you seem to think, do,” he replied. I asked him what most of his fellow students felt about the two 1 District.

158 dangers, Democracy and Communism. “Who believes seriously in either?” he answered. “The only supporters of the former are those who draw or hope to draw some profit from the occupation—the good-for-nothing people, and those whom we chastised in our time and who now want an excuse to get back at us. The only supporters of the latter are those who have never lived in the Russian Zone.” Herr F had lived in the Russian Zone up till recently. We decided that he would help me to cross the border clandestinely with a friend of his, and to pay a visit to the Eastern part of Germany. On my return, he would introduce me to a group of students with our views, and we could perhaps—cautiously—“start something.” I was arrested before those grand projects could materialise. I remember an elderly saleswoman, Fräulein E—who looks much younger than her age—and whom I also met during a journey. A very expressive face, showing great determination and great kindness (which are seldom found together) and thoughtfulness, also. Pale blue eyes, that can be extremely cold and distant, or brighten up into a flash of sunshine—according to what Fräulein E hears or says, or thinks about. She walked a few steps with me, as we both came out of a railway station somewhere in the French Zone. When I told her I was in Germany to write a book, she stopped and gazed at me. “And you intend to write the truth?” she asked. “Certainly.” “Well, in that case . . .” she said, and broke off abruptly. “What, ‘in that case’?” asked I. She looked at me intently. “I know I should not tell you this,” she continued; “After all, I have only just met you. I don’t know who you are. It might be very foolish on my part—and dangerous for me—to speak. But you look as though you can be trusted. I have been in trade all my life and know faces. Well, I tell you: in your book . . . don’t write about things of which you are not perfectly sure . . . don’t be unfair to National Socialism.” I felt my face brighten. But I tried to control myself. “What prompts you to tell me that?” I asked. “Do you imagine I intend to be unfair to anything or anyone?” “No,” she said. “But many people are unfair without meaning to be, swayed as they are by various prejudices. And so much mud has already been thrown at us—so much!—by all the writers of the world! I only wished to tell you, you being a foreigner, ‘don’t throw any more.’”

159 I admired the woman’s fearlessness—for she did not know me yet. She had only seen my British-Indian passport when I had shown it to an inspector in the train. “Are you a National Socialist?” I asked her. And she is the only person in Germany to whom I ever put that question in such a point- blank form. Her courageous talk had authorised me to do so. Her answer was no less bold. “Yes, I am,” she said. “And so am I,” I replied. “Don’t fear that I might be impressed by lies against the Führer or against us; I have heard heaps, up till now, and spit at those who tell them. My book shall be the impeachment of our enemies.” I was moved beyond words as I spoke. “Can I really believe you?” said Fräulein E, amazed and stopping and looking at me once more. “You, a foreigner, now—when all the world is against us!” “I have no time for that world of monkeys and its supposed ‘opinion,’” I replied. “I know my words are difficult to believe. But you might believe my writing.” And pulling one of my leaflets out of a roll, I took her to a lonely corner in the ruins (we were in a town where there are plenty such corners) and showed it to her. “I wrote it,” I said. She believed me at last, and was visibly moved as she took my hands and told me: “I am happy to have met you, happier than I can say. But, my poor dear child, how dare you go about with all that dangerous stuff?” “No German has betrayed me yet.” “No true German ever will,” she answered. “But still, be careful. ‘They’ might find you out all the same. ‘They’ are probably watching you all the time. Anyhow, it is no use thinking of it beforehand. Come now, and I shall take you to some good friends of mine. They will be glad to make your acquaintance.” “Tell me something about the great days,” said I, as we walked along a half-destroyed avenue. “I wish I had come then.” “You would have been happy in Germany, then. You cannot imagine how lovely it was. Now, look at what ‘they’ have done—our Christian-like enemies; those who came to ‘reform’ us, to ‘re-educate’ us as they say.” And she pointed to one of the streets in which (as in more than one other street of the same town) not a single house is left erect. “Look at that!” said she. “But revenge will come, one day. And then Germany will rise once more out of her ruins and the great days will come back!” Once more, for the millionth time, I admired the invincible Nazi spirit.

160 The woman showed me the ruins of what had once been her shop, at the corner of a main avenue opposite a church. The sight of the church reminded her of a man and of an incident. But before telling me about it, she asked me whether I were a Christian. “I? Goodness no! I know there is nothing so opposed to ours as the Christian philosophy, and I look upon the church as our greatest enemy.” “How right you are! I have always said that too, although many disagreed with me. Then I shall tell you of my friend W, who was a clergyman, but a very peculiar one—a clergyman, and a fighter for the Movement at the same time, if you can picture such a combination of opposites; a man who would throw a priest’s robe over his brown uniform (jack boots and pistol and all) and run to church just in time to deliver a short address. The address was always thoroughly National Socialist in spirit, the word ‘amen’ at the end being practically the only thing in it that indicated that it was delivered from a pulpit. One day, what happened? Another preacher was speaking from the pulpit and my friend W—without his pious disguise, this time—was among the congregation. The preacher, who was a real Christian, not just someone trying to prepare the church-going crowds for the new times, started making certain hints against the régime. My friend W took a writing pad and a fountain pen which he always kept at hand, and noted carefully whatever the man said. Then, he waited for him at the church door, and stopped him on his way out. “‘You made such and such a statement?’ said he. “‘Jawohl, I did.’ “‘You implied that the policy of our Government is “nefarious”? See, I took down such and such words that you uttered.’ “‘I admit I did. But . . .’ “‘There is no “but.” Did you, or not?’ “‘I did.’ “‘And the “undesirable people” to whom you alluded without daring to be too clear, were, I suppose, the Führer and his collaborators?’ “‘Jawohl, they were, if you must know!’ “‘Good! . . . So that’s what you are—you swine!’ “And my friend W gave the fellow a slap that could be heard from the other side of the street. And then another. And another—‘paff! puff!’—and several more until finally he sent him rolling in the dust with a kick in the pants: ‘That will teach you, saying things against the Führer, you good for nothing rascal!’”

161 I burst out laughing, unable to stop for a minute or two. I had not laughed so wholeheartedly for a very long time. “Splendid!” I exclaimed; “Could not be more splendid! Gosh, I wish I had seen that! In what year was it?” “In 1942, if I remember well.” “I was in Calcutta. I know I missed a lot. But that! That alone would have been worth the voyage. I would have enjoyed myself! How did the people take it?” “The people who were just coming out of church you mean? Why, they enjoyed themselves too. Half of them were laughing as boisterously as you are now after all these years. I stepped in from the street, and went and congratulated my old friend: ‘Well done, Herr W!’ said I. ‘That will teach him a lesson. One can’t let those treacherous fellows go about quacking whatever nonsense they please, especially while we are fighting a war,’ I said. They all agreed.” “And where is Herr W now? Could I see him?” I asked. “I would love to meet him.” “‘They’ took him off to a concentration camp in 1945. Since then nobody knows where he is.” A shadow passed over my face. I thought of that frank advocate of violence in the service of our ideals, spending four years in one of those chambers of hell of which I have tried to give a glimpse in a previous chapter. Four years! And for what? For being what he is—what we all are—a man who had the courage to repudiate once for all the false values that have been forced upon the nobler races of Europe as their “standards of morality” for nearly 1,500 years, and to speak and to act according to the standards of the strong; for being a Heathen in a Christian world. And once more I felt how powerful are the forces against us. And once more I was aware how bitterly I hate them. I know the story of Herr W is not one that will endear us to our enemies. Most of these will find the incident of the clergyman “horrible”—and find me no less “horrible” for enjoying it. But who cares what they might think? As in the first, so in this second phase of the struggle also, we are not fighting to win their approval, but to reduce them, one day, to submission. I have told the story only in order to show what an abyss gapes between us and the Christian world; to illustrate the clean, brutal frankness of our attitude compared with that of the “decent” people. None of these would have chastised an opponent in broad daylight, before everybody, as Herr W did. No. They would have remained content with being “shocked,” and would have kept silent—even if in power. They would first have made the

162 opponent’s life a misery and then, at the first opportunity, handed him over to hostile authorities, for far worse a treatment than a few slaps and a kick in the pants. That is, in fact, the very way they have behaved towards Herr W himself. I recalled the words of Friedrich Nietzsche on a different subject: “Christianity has not killed Eros”—the god of physical love—“it has only given him poison”—defiled love.1 One could also say about violence: Christianity has not killed physical violence; it has only defiled it—made it indirect, and cowardly, and shameful. And what powerful, elemental instinct has it not defiled, I would like to know? * * * Fräulein E took me to a confectioner’s kept by the Ms—good friends of hers—and introduced me: “You come back at six o’clock, when the shop is closed, and we’ll have a talk. Too many eyes are looking, and too many ears listening, during working hours. Be here exactly in time, and we will be waiting for you,” they told me. I was in time, and remained there the whole evening. I remember the conversation. And I remember the fine faces of that man and woman who were speaking to me, and the clearness, the assurance, the conviction—and the intelligence—with which they spoke, knowing thoroughly what they were talking about, and their awareness of the eternity of our Idea. “How can these people ‘change’ us, ‘re-educate’ us, as they pretend?” said Herr M, referring to the Democrats. “How can they, now that the Führer has given us something to live for, which is at the same time eternal and understandable; something, the truth of which we need no longer ‘believe’ but can see, in all its glowing clearness, with our own eyes? Every turn of events, since 1945, is showing more and more how right we were—how right we are, absolutely, everlastingly—be it about the Jewish question, the racial principle, the right of the fittest to rule, or any other point. More Germans admit that we are right, now—in the secrecy of their hearts—than perhaps ever did before. But it is refreshing to know that at least some foreigners also continue to uphold the Idea, in spite of our defeat.” “All Aryans should. But when all Germans did not, from the beginning, although they were told the truth, nay, although they had the 1 In Beyond Good and Evil, §168.

163 privilege of having the Führer in their midst, what can one expect of other Aryans, fed on the lies of the Jewish press?” “That is true enough.” We talked for long hours. And for the thousandth time I compared in my mind this aristocracy of pure blood, which is at the same time an élite of character andintelligence—a real élite—with the usually-called “intelligentsia,” those idle traders in empty phrases, hair-splitters, reciters of other people’s prose, whom I know too well. “What a difference!” I thought. Herr M introduced me to two people who rank among those who ever made the deepest impression upon me: a middle-aged man, formerly an Ortsgruppenleiter1 and now a martyr of our cause, Herr H,2 of whom I already spoke a little in another chapter,3 and a woman in her forties, Fräulein B, also one of the finest National Socialists I know. I was their guest for a couple of days. I have hardly ever seen even a genuine Indian yogi’s face as supremely beautiful as that of Herr H—calm; radiating light and strength; loving, in an impersonal manner; all-knowing; a face that looks beyond the stupidity and ugliness of this present day world, not to a dream, not to “an” ideal, but to an unshakable certitude—to Reality; that expresses the clear, almost physical awareness of truth, without hatred, without regret, without fear. His regular features are those of the purest Aryan. Herr H could hardly have been more handsome even as a young man. But it is not the features alone, it is the features and the invisible beaming of that face that cannot fail to impress anyone who is slightly sensitive to the mute language of the man that is, as distinct from the man that seems. When I stepped into the room, I immediately felt in the presence of someone by far my superior, as I probably would have before a genuine contemplative saint. I knew from Herr M that Herr H had spent three years in one, or rather in two, of the worst anti-Nazi concentration camps that are to be found in occupied Germany. I knew that he had, there, become a physical wreck. And I was astounded not to read in his face the slightest bitterness, let alone hatred. And when I told him how I felt about the martyrdom of Germany in general, and the persecution of such people as himself in particular, and begged him to tell me 1 Local group leader—Ed. 2 Friedrich Horn—Ed. 3 In Chapter 4, pp. 81–85.

164 something of his experience of the chambers of hell, for my book, he replied that “thousands of others had suffered even much more” than he. “It is a pity Herr So-and-so is not here,” he said. “He is one of those unfortunate SS men who fell into the hands of the Allies in 1945, and was interned for months in Dachau. He could tell you something, if you care to gather firsthand information about the atrocities of the Democrats. I shall introduce you to him, when you come back.” But I myself fell into the hands of our enemies before I had the time to “come back.” Herr H, who is an architect by profession, showed me some beautiful sketches that he had drawn from life, in the camps where he was a prisoner. One was drawn on a rough piece of yellow paper, with bits of half-burnt coal from the kitchen fire. “We were not given any paper or pencils, in the beginning,” he explained to me. And yet the sketch, representing the stables where the internees were accommodated in Schwarzenborn, was executed in a masterly manner. I admired the detached mind—the mind of the real artist—that had guided the hand, in such surroundings, and on the famine diet of which I spoke in former pages. But what I admired the most in Herr H was his serenity; not the serenity of the indifferent or of otherworldly people, but that of a man whose clear vision can discern, under all the horror of darkest Europe, today and yesterday—under that very horror which has crushed his own body, ruined him, personally, forever—the irresistible action and reaction of superhuman unseen forces, bound to bring about, sooner or later, the New Order for which we stand; the serenity of a Heathen warrior, who is a sage at the same time. I have always been convinced that National Socialism is far more able to fulfil the higher aspirations of the Western élite than the ill-adapted religion, imported from Palestine, which Europe has foolishly accepted centuries ago. If there ever was a living proof of that fact, it is Herr H himself. On the wall, I saw the portrait of an exceedingly handsome youth. Herr H watched me admiring it. It looked like him. It could have been him when he was twenty-five. “You see there my only child,” he told me. “How beautiful he is!” I could not help saying. “His manly soul was as beautiful as his face,” replied the father. “The typical youth of our new Germany. He is dead, now. Died for Germany and for the Idea,” he added calmly, and proudly. And Fräulein B, a faithful old friend of Herr H who was also

165 present, praised the young man in her turn. She had known him well. So Herr H was all alone. Not only his health, but his only son, too, he had lost for the sake of the great impersonal idea of Greater Germany and of resurrected Aryandom. Alone, and living most precariously in one narrow room with a friend, in the midst of a city in ruins. And, by order of the kind-hearted champions of Democracy and “humanity,” not allowed to work as an architect, or to hold any other employment. (His friend was supporting him, with great difficulty.) And yet, he could remain serene and confident, knowing that we are right, and that he has done his utmost for the eternal cause of Truth and for that of better mankind—serene and confident, without the help of any supernatural hopes or consolations; without anything to sustain him, but his faith in the immutable Laws of Life, in the divine mission of his country, in Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Aryan world for all times to come, whether his people, now, be defeated or not. Verses of the Bhagavad-Gita—that age-old masterpiece of the Aryan genius—came back to my memory: “Thy business is with the action alone, never with its fruits. So let not the fruits of action be thy motive,”1 and, “without attachment, constantly perform that action which is duty, for by performing action without attachment, man verily reacheth the Supreme,”2 and, “the wise should act without attachment, desiring nothing but the welfare of the world.”3 And side by side, I recalled the golden words written in the same spirit by our Führer—the words which I was destined, two months later, to quote before my judges, at Düsseldorf: “Our thoughts and actions must not be determined by the approval or condemnation of our epoch, but only by our firm adhesion to a Truth that we recognise.”4 I told Herr H and Fräulein B what I was thinking. “Yes,” said Herr H, “the old and the new expressions of it are bound to be alike, for the truth upon which our Weltanschauung is built, is everlasting.” He went to a corner of the room, and started displacing a number of things in order to get out and show me the copy of Mein Kampf which he kept hidden there. While he was doing this, Fräulein B showed me a lovely portrait of the Führer carved out in a pendant of transparent, glass-like material. I took the little object piously in my 1 Bhagavad-Gita, 2:47. 2 Ibid, 3:19. 3 Ibid, 3:25. 4 “. . . unser Denken und Handeln soll keineswegs von Beifall oder Ablehnung unserer Zeit bestimmt werden, sondern von der Verpflichtung an eine Wahrheit, die wir erkannten” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 435; cf. Mannheim, p. 394).

166 hand, and gazed at it. I know the price of such remembrances of the glorious times, in Germany today. They are nowhere to be found, save in the possession of people who appreciate them. I was therefore all the more touched when Fräulein B told me, “It is yours; you can keep it.” I was overjoyed at the idea of keeping it. But I guessed she had only that one. “And still you give it to me,” I said, “although you met me but an hour ago!” “You are worthy of it,” she replied; “that, I know.” “May I never fail to remain so, forever and ever!” said I, as I pressed the portrait to my lips, as a sacred thing. I thanked Fräulein B from the bottom of my heart for her present, and for the spontaneous confidence she had shown me. “What makes you think so highly of me?” I could not help asking her, after a while. She replied: “The fact that you too are a born Heathen, like Herr H and like myself.” And she uttered the self-same words which I had so many times uttered in the course of these twenty years; the self-same words which I have repeated in this book because I am more and more convinced of their truth: “Only a thorough Aryan Heathen can make a real National Socialist.” I wore the pendant ever since, and am wearing it now, in prison.1 We spent the remainder of the day commenting upon some of the most beautiful passages of Mein Kampf—of which Herr H had produced his hidden copy—and I tried to show how amazingly true the main thesis of the book (the racial thesis) appears to me in the light of the little history of the wide world, ancient and modern, which I happen to know. But it is my interpretation of Christianity as “the subtlest Jewish snare ever held out to the Aryan” which bound me the most tightly to Fräulein B. “Do you know,” said she, “that even as a child I refused to sing the church hymns that alluded to Jehovah or to Israel, on the ground that I was a German and wanted no foreign religion forced upon me? How I understand your nostalgia for the Olympian Gods as well as for your mother’s old Norse ones! How I do!” “I am glad you do,” I replied. “Only other National Socialists like ourselves have ever understood how important a part that yearning has played in my whole evolution. But fancy that the exact opposite of our attitude is to be found among some European Aryans! Have you heard of a religious sect in England whose members style themselves as 1 The pendant was later discovered and destroyed while Savitri was imprisoned at Werl (Defiance, p. 548).—Ed.

167 ‘British Israelites’?” “No.” “Well, such a sect exists. The adherents, mind you, are not Jews—although some, of course, might be mixed. But I know of some who are thoroughbred Englishmen—Celts and Anglo-Saxons; Aryans. Only they try to prove—by the most spurious arguments—that they and the whole English nation are descended from some ‘lost tribe’ of Israel. Pure-blooded Aryans trying to make out that they are Jews; wanting to be Jews! Have you ever heard of such disgraceful nonsense as that?” “Well,” put in Herr H, “they have been taught for over 1,500 years that the Jews are ‘God’s chosen people.’ Can you blame them? As you say yourself, the original crime lies in the adoption of Christianity.” “The one before the last of the Twenty-Five Points,” said I, “although it states that the Party as such stands for ‘a positive Christianity,’ advocates ‘liberty for all religious denominations in the state, so long as they are not a danger to it, and do not militate against the moral feelings of the Germanic race.” Alfred Rosenberg has tried to explain what ‘positive’ Christianity means, and it appears to me that he has just reduced it to that basic commonsense morality which any Aryan can accept. But few people seem to be fully aware of all that is implied in the two reservations mentioned in that Point Twenty-Four: ‘any religion . . . so far as it is not a danger to the state and does not militate against the moral feelings of the Germanic race.’ Is any religion that allows marriage between its adherents irrespective of race, compatible with the existence of a State run according to National Socialist standards? And can one say that a religion that teaches that man is born in sin, and that exalts meekness and unending forgiveness as virtues, does not ‘militate against the moral feelings’ of any healthy race, let alone of the Germanic one? I wish to goodness I had been here in the great days; I would have stressed this point before those who were the most conscious of all the mischief Christianity has wrought in the world, and who happened to be at the same time in the Führer’s entourage. I would have tried, at least.” “And they would have understood you, no doubt, and agreed with you wholeheartedly,” said Herr H. “But they could have done nothing about it yet: the time was not ripe. As for the Party as such standing for ‘a positive Christianity’ which, as you say, Rosenberg took so much trouble to explain, the best explanation for it is just that it was not possible to put it otherwise in February 1920. There was plenty of all-important work awaiting us, which could well be done whatever people chose to think about religion. To attract public attention upon the

168 enormousness of our revolution in the religious and philosophical domain also would have been disastrous at that stage of the struggle. It would have stirred doubts and caused trouble. But after victory was secured and our régime solidly established, we would have gradually brought up the new generations to think for themselves and to realise how incompatible Christianity is, as it stands, with our ideals. However, we lost the war, and thus have to wait still a little longer for this awakening. But it will come, be sure of that. It will come, for our Führer has not come in vain.” Reluctantly, after two days, I took leave of these new friends. I did not know that I was not to see them again for a long time. We greeted each other: “Heil Hitler!” “By the way,” said Fräulein B, “do you know how one is to say that in public without being detected?” “Yes, I do,” I replied. And I repeated the formula which means the same to all those of us who use it, but sounds just empty nonsense to the uninitiated that might be listening. “So you know it too.” “Who does not? Fräulein E told me, thinking she was telling me something new. But someone else had already told me last year. I am longing to see those days when we shall be free to greet one another as we please, in public as well as among ourselves.” “Yes; so am I. And those days will come; our intensity of purpose will bring them back—our selfless action, guided by a one-pointed will. For the time, let us wait. Heil Hitler!” “Heil Hitler!” * * * I could speak of other representatives of that Aryan élite in which I salute the forerunner of a higher—healthier, stronger, better, more beautiful—mankind, and the hope of the world. For I have met many more in the course of these few months. And I have come in contact with one or two here, in this prison, among the political prisoners—in spite of all efforts on the part of the authorities to keep me apart from them—and . . . strange as this might seem, among the members of the German staff also. (These are not “supposed” to have anything in common with our Ideology. But many more people share it than the authorities think, among those who are the least expected to.) However, the few instances which I gave, especially the two last ones, are enough to illustrate what I mean by an all-round élite.

169 Almost the only Aryans today within the pale of the Indian caste system, the Brahmins, are styled by the members of the other castes as “bhu-deva,” or “gods on earth.” Some of them, but extremely few, are worthy of that title. It is here, in ruined Germany, among the genuine National Socialists of the dark days of trial, that I have met men and women who are, in the full sense of these words, glowing instances of the eternal greatness of the master race—living “gods on earth.” I have often tried to imagine what our world would look like if National Socialism, rising again, were not only to hold its own in Europe but to dominate the whole planet, for centuries. Along with an absolute separation of races, there would be an accepted racial hierarchy, the purest Aryans being naturally at the top, in other words a “caste system” extending to the whole of mankind—“each man in his place” according to the divine decree of Nature, the will of the Sun, to quote one of the oldest hymns that can be ascribed to any individual author with certainty1; something like that which we see in India to this day, but on a far wider scale and—if Germans or any other Northern Europeans are to manage the world—something infinitely better organised. And no more of those international religions of equality but a worldwide return to the different national heathendoms with, at the most, above them all—uniting not merely all human beings, but all life, each creature at its level—the worship of the Life force embodied in the Sun. How I would welcome such a world! And when I recall that splendid German National Socialist minority which I love and admire, I cannot help wishing, from the bottom of my heart, to see it one day rule the earth in its length and breadth. More than ever now, it is worthy to rule. More than ever now it is worthy to be called, by the rest of mankind, a minority of “bhu-deva”—“gods on earth.” 1 The Longer Hymn to the Sun by Pharaoh Akhnaton of Egypt, circa 1,400 BC.