Gold in the Furnace Page 5
Not one, not ten or twenty, but all the German towns were submitted to that systematic destruction by the enemies of the New Order—“crusaders to Europe,” as the American lot call themselves. That was to punish the German people for loving Adolf Hitler, their Leader, their Saviour, and their friend. That was also to punish Adolf Hitler for loving the German people and the Aryan race at large more than anything in the world; for having dared, for their sake, to challenge the might of the unseen Jew behind the screen of world politics. The rascals who planned and carried out that inhuman bombing knew that the surest way to torture him was to inflict that terror and that suffering upon his helpless people. They smashed Germany so that he might see it smashed. They burnt thousands of Germans alive—stuck in the boiling mud of the streets they had no time to cross, or roasted in the cellars where they flocked for shelter—so that the thought of their horrid deaths might haunt him day and night. They reduced the whole country to heaps of smoking ruins, so that he, poor great One, might suffer, even more than the men and women that the phosphorus bombs affected materially.
The most effective devastators of all times, the Assyrians in Antiquity and the Mongols in the Middle Ages, were pretty thorough in warfare; nearly as thorough, in fact, as the airmen who poured fire and brimstone over unfortunate Germany, only yesterday. But even they did not display such a fiendish will to exterminate a whole enemy population. The Mongols definitely spared, as potential concubines and slaves, the desirable women, the useful craftsmen, and the children not taller than the wheel of a cart. The airmen of the United Nations spared nobody. The only people who, in olden times, proved to be as enthusiastic mass murderers as they (to the extent the technique of ancient warfare permitted) are the Jews. One has but to re-read, in the Bible, the monotonous but instructive accounts of the conquest of Canaan by that self-styled “Chosen People”—accounts of unbiased Israelitish source, all of them—in order to understand what I mean. But even they never mingled, with their hatred towards a hostile nation, such stubborn, fanatical, and yet methodical hatred for one great Individual. That remained to be done, in this war, by the Aryans and semi-Aryans in the pay or under the influence of their modern descendants.
And who was that hated man, Adolf Hitler? Not only the first one who had striven to give back a collective consciousness and pride to the whole of the Aryan race, outside Germany as well as within; not only the one who, after doing all he possibly could to avoid war, had three times offered England an honourable peace; but the man who had spared the remnants of the fleeing British Army at Dunkirk, and refused to invade England and pursue his victory, still believing, in his loving heart, that England would understand the sincerity of his gesture, renounce her frenzied anti-German policy, and help him to build a beautiful world upon the ruins of the sole enemy of better mankind: the money power of the international Jew.
That is the one against whom they let loose all the savagery stored within them for centuries.
Today, as one walks through the bombed streets of Hamburg, Cologne, Koblenz, Berlin, or any German city; or even as one beholds, from the windows of a railway carriage, those miles and miles of ruins in whatever part of the country it be—charred walls of which the torn outlines stick out against the grey or blue sky, or the glow of sunset, as far as the eye can see; impossible piles of twisted iron, disjointed stones, and blocks of cement, heaped over endless waste spaces where life once flourished, where men once were happy; where the Führer held out his hand to little children less than five years ago—as one sees that, I say, and as one recalls in one’s mind the inferno that preceded and caused such appalling devastation, one does not only think of the glorious pre-war days and feel: “That is what they did to kill new Germany!” One also evokes another, and quite different picture: the muddy beach of Dunkirk, and the pitiable survivors of the British Expeditionary Force gathered there, in the late spring of 1940, tattered and torn, wounded and hungry but, above all, scared out of their wits like hunted animals; the roaring sea before them, the German divisions behind them, rain and lightning and the dark night all round them; awaiting in terror the only fate that seemed likely to befall them: death. It would have been so easy for the victorious German Army to step forth and kill them all off—and put an end to the war. Oh, so easy! But orders came from above, to the bewildered generals and the soldiers on their onward march; orders from that Man whom England was fighting, but who was not fighting England; from the generous, loving, trusting German Führer, who recognised no enemies in the misled Aryans who composed the bulk of the British Army: “Leave several kilometres between them and the German Army,” in other words, “Spare them! Allow them to wait undisturbed for their ships, and to reach the coast of England safe and sound.”69 Whatever the German High Command might have felt towards the defeated aggressor, orders were orders. The remnant of the British Expeditionary Force was allowed to live and go home; allowed to recover and fight again.
One remembers, I say, that episode of the Second World War as one beholds the ruins of all the German cities, the plight of men and women in the overcrowded areas still fit to live in, and all the misery, all the bitterness, consequent of that devilish bombing. Streams of fire, tons of phosphorus, relentlessly poured over his people for five years, these were England’s thanks to Adolf Hitler for having shown mercy to her soldiers in his hour of victory. These were the thanks of the United States of America for his orders not to shoot the parachutists captured on German soil. These were the thanks of the unworthy Aryans both of Russia and of the West to the Man who loved them, as a race, and who had dreamed for them an era of glory and prosperity, side by side with his own people, in a world freed from the tyranny of the money system.
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Under that continuous terror, the German people suffered, at first with the hope that the ordeal would soon be over, that victory was at hand; and then, more and more, as months passed and no sign of betterment appeared, with no hope. The traitors, as I remarked in the preceding chapter, became bolder and bolder. And disaffection grew among the ordinary folk who could not understand how anything—including unconditional surrender—could possibly be worse than what they were enduring.
In May, 1945, when Germany did actually acknowledge defeat, very little seemed to remain of the splendid spirit that had lifted the country so high between the two World Wars, and in the early part of this war. From East and West, hostile armies every bit as greedy, brutal, and hateful as each other—every bit as “anti-Nazi,” whether professing to uphold the Marxist ideology or the more hypocritical or sillier form of Democracy—rushed forth to occupy disarmed Germany. The bulk of the tortured Nation looked at them coming, with the tired resignation of those who have reached the limit of what it is possible to suffer.
The eastern gang raped all the women they could catch; stole everything they fancied; drove millions out of house and home in order to replace them by Russians, Poles, or Czechs. The western gang, while behaving with perhaps a little less savagery as regards women, was hardly better in other respects.
The French kicked people off the trains under the slightest pretext—I have seen one of them do it now, three years after the end of the war, and can well imagine them in 1945. They also stamped about the streets ostensively loaded with edibles, in front of the starving population. They brought their families over, to occupy the best remaining houses and to be fed and fattened at the expense of exhausted Germany. The British and the Americans did much the same. They gave people anything between fifteen minutes and an hour to leave their flats and go wherever they liked—wherever they could—when they wanted comfortable lodgings. Usually, they would turn the flats into pigsties in a couple of days, and carry off whatever objects they found desirable when they moved. They built a shockingly luxurious “victory club” in the midst of the ruins of Hamburg and, like the Russians, tore down all the likenesses of the Führer from public buildings, burnt all the National Socialist literature they could set hands upon, and pursued with
systematic hatred all those whom they knew—or believed they knew—to be National Socialists.
Whatever might have been their professional efficiency, none of these were allowed to retain the positions they had formerly held. Most were not permitted to work at all. Thousands were arrested, imprisoned, savagely tortured, sent to concentration camps, or to their doom. Among these were Hitler’s closest collaborators: the members of the National Socialist Government, the generals of the German Army, the leaders of the SS regiments and of the Youth Organisations—some of them, the finest characters of modern times. For weeks and weeks, months and months—in fact, for over a year and a half—the all-too-famous Trial of 1945-46, that most repulsive of all the parodies of justice staged by man since the dawn of history, dragged on. It ended, as everyone knows, by the ignominious hanging, in the slowest and cruellest possible way (each execution lasting about twenty-five minutes), of men whose only crime was to have done their duty without having succeeded in winning the war. And that atrocity took place in what was left of the old mediaeval city which, only a few years before, had been witnessing the glory of reborn Germany in the splendid pageantry of the annual Party rallies: Nuremberg.
When, between the two wars, a couple of Italian Communists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were tried and executed in the United States of America, a wave of indignation rose from the four corners of the earth. Placards were posted on all the walls, and public demonstrations were held in all the large towns of Europe to protest against the condemnation of the two martyrs of Marxism. In 1945, 1946, and 1947, no such feelings stirred God-forsaken Europe (or the God-forsaken world, at that) in favour of the twenty-one victims of the Nuremberg Trial, or of the thousands of other National Socialists labelled by their persecutors as major or minor “war criminals,” and condemned as such by the bogus Allied tribunals in occupied Germany. No—even in the neutral illegality of the trials, in a few people’s casual comments on current events and, perhaps, in one or two booklets—and those, worded as mildly as possible. And on the other hand, either the boisterous glee of triumphant savages at the sufferings inflicted on their captured enemies, or else the still more revolting smugness of self-righteous rogues and fools; the patronizing lectures of self-appointed reformers of mankind, hoping that after such historic “justice,” the Germans would at last “learn their lesson,” i.e., renounce National Socialism and toe the line with their victors’ ideology like good little boys; talks on the wireless about the gradual return of the German people to the “ideals of Christian civilization,” now that the Nazi “monsters” were dead.
How I remember that silly, vulgar, cruel, positively nauseating gloating of English-speaking apes of varied breeds over one of the greatest crimes of history, and that hypocrisy in addition to it all! Never, perhaps, could one feel more keenly what a curse the very existence of Christian civilization was. Pagans would not have disgraced themselves to that extent. We would certainly not have behaved in any like manner, had we won the war—we whose aim was to resurrect the proud Pagan spirit among the Aryans of the whole world. We might have crushed all opposition out of existence, but we would have neither made a farce of justice in order to condemn our enemies nor tried to convert them to our philosophy. Oh, no! For we know how to kill, and we know how to die; but we do not know how to lie in order to justify our actions in our own eyes and in other people’s. Our only justification is the triumph of National Socialism—the organisation, now, on this earth, of a harmonious hierarchy of human races led by a race of real earthly gods. We need no other. Our enemies—with, I must say, the exception of the Communists, who are as thorough and sincere as ourselves in their way—persecute us in the name of “morals” in which they do not believe. We despise them from the bottom of our hearts. We despise them more than we can ever hate them. Maybe we lost this war; or, to be more accurate, weaklings and full-fledged traitors—ersatz Nazis and downright anti-Nazis—lost it for us. But we would prefer to perish forever, even in men’s memories, having remained ourselves to the end, rather than to rule the world and resemble our victors. We would prefer to perish, and leave in the dark infinity of time, as a flash in the night, the unrecorded fact of our brief and beautiful passage, rather than to acquire a single one of their democratic “virtues.”
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But the National Socialist soul—the Aryan soul, quickened after nearly fifteen hundred years of slumber—is not prepared to die again. Purified by untold suffering, erect, invincible, it gleams—when one takes the trouble to appeal to it—in the eyes of every German worthy of the name; it expresses itself in silent gestures, in whispers; in a superhuman will to live and once more to conquer; in a splendid defiance of torture and death; a reaction to persecution which, even from the mere aesthetic point of view, has hardly any parallel in world history.
In 1945, torn and desolate Germany, overrun by hostile armies, plundered by rapacious occupants, insulted by a whole cowardly world, could do nothing, say nothing, hardly think anything. Like a boxer temporarily knocked out in the ring, she was stunned. Cases of mass suicide, as well as of large scale deportation to Siberia were reported from the Russian occupied areas, while hungry, completely destitute, packed like goods in cattle wagons (or worse), the whole German population of East Prussia and of Sudetenland—over 18 million people—uprooted by the Russians and by the Czechs, poured into western and southern Germany. All over the country, arson and outrage were taking place on a scale unheard of for centuries. The mere fact of a house being or having been occupied by Nazis was a sufficient excuse for all the criminal elements of the neighbourhood to rush to it for loot, knowing they could now do so with impunity. No man or woman known to be a sincere follower of Hitler was safe in the street or indoors. In a twinkling of an eye every external sign of the National Socialist régime was being effaced by the invaders aided by the Jews of Germany.70 In offices, in cafés, in the ruined railway stations, in every public place, members of the occupying forces, with the help of the few rascals on the spot, were busy tearing down all likenesses of the Führer, with ferocious glee. Every blow they struck, every thrust of knife or sword into cardboard or wood, every tearing up of paper, every desecration of the reminders of the glorious days or of the holy sign of the Swastika, was to them a new assertion of their victory over National Socialism.
The sincere Nazi who happened to pass by, powerless—the one among thousands in whom hunger and hardships had not temporarily silenced all idealism, in those atrocious days—felt his eyes fill with tears and his heart with rage. He had already witnessed, that day, a dozen scenes of similar vulgarity, and many others before. He had seen, at the stalls, the headlines of the now Allied-controlled papers announcing the latest arrests of prominent National Socialists. He had heard the nearest “bunkers” in the countryside being blown up one after the other as detested remnants of the power of the Third Reich. He had seen the soldiers of the victorious democracies march up and down the streets and their officers walk in and out of the Club erected in haste in the midst of the ruins of his town. He knew that for months—perhaps for years—such scenes would be common occurrences, such news daily news, and such an atmosphere of persecution and depression, of fear and hate, the “normal” atmosphere of his proud Germany. He knew there was now no hope, no immediate future for all he loved and stood for. And he turned his head aside not to see the picture of Adolf Hitler trampled in the mud, and the repulsive glee on the faces of the victors of the day.
Still, whatever might have happened, whatever was yet to happen—whether National Socialism was one day to reassert itself or not—he would never, he could never withdraw his allegiance to the everlasting Idea on which the Führer had tried to build a truer civilisation and a more beautiful humanity. On the contrary, never had the greatest European of all ages seemed so great to him, perhaps, as now, visualised from the depth of disaster, from the midst of persecution, and of worse than persecution; from the midst of the apparent apathy of his very own people, in whose millions five y
ears of savage bombing and now hunger and destitution had killed all but the elementary animal reactions to food and warmth, every desire but the desire to be left in peace and to suffer a little less.
The faithful young man hastened home. He came to a block of houses in ruins, went down some steps, reached the only inhabitable room left in the surroundings: the cellar, in which he lived with a friend. The place had at least the advantage of being lonely—away from unwelcome onlookers and listeners ready to inform against any true National Socialist. He opened the door, and shut it carefully after him. Then, lifting his right arm—in May, 1945—he greeted his comrade as in the days in which they both marched side by side in the ranks of the Storm Troopers: “Heil Hitler!”
In the silence of the cold, damp, and desolate room, in which there was nothing to eat but a few boiled potatoes from the day before, the two mystic words of love, pride, and power resounded clear and triumphant. The comrade, rising to his feet and making the same gesture, repeated them in answer, now as then, now as always: “Heil Hitler!”
Hail, invincible Germany! Hail, undying Aryan youth, élite of the world whom the agents of the dark forces can starve and torture, but never subdue! That unobtrusive profession of faith of two unknown but real Nazis in 1945 is itself a victory.
It is not the only one.
In the winter of that same awful year 1945—or was it in the beginning of 1946? The eyewitness who reported the episode to me did not remember—a train passed through Saarbrücken, carrying off to different concentration camps in occupied Germany several thousand German prisoners of war whose sole crime was to belong to that élite of the National Socialist forces: the SS. The young men, squeezed against one another, had been standing for goodness knows how many hours in the dark freezing cattle wagons, without food, without water, without the most indispensable human commodities. They were going towards a destiny worse than death; towards the very chambers of hell—and they knew it. And yet, although no one could see them (for the wagons were completely closed save for a narrow slit at the top) one could hear them. They were singing—singing the glorious song of the SS legions in defiance of their horrid present conditions and of the still more horrid future awaiting them. As the train rolled past, well-known words reached the silent and sullen crowd gathered on the platform—an echo of the great days of National Socialism and, in the midst of Germany’s martyrdom, the certitude of indestructible might and, already, the promise of the new rising, never mind when, and how: “If all become unfaithful, yet we remain faithful . . .”71 Every bystander was moved to tears. And so was I, when now—nearly three years later—the fact was brought to my knowledge.