Gold in the Furnace Read online

  * * *

  I crossed the Belgium frontier without difficulty. The train now carried me on towards Ostend, towards the sea.

  Still standing in the corridor, I was singing an Indian hymn to Shiva, the Creator and Destroyer—the very hymn I had sung, over a year before, in Iceland, on the slopes of burning Mount Hekla, when I had faced in the night the majesty of the volcano in full eruption. At regular intervals, mighty subterranean roarings then answered my song. Now, I felt as though the noise of the redeeming war—the voice of that irresistible coming Vengeance that I had invoked—was answering me. Out of further ruins—the ruins of the whole world this time—the people who had not betrayed me, Hitler’s beloved people, would one day rise again, the Voice said.

  On the evening of that day, the 16th of June, 1948, I was back in London. A few weeks later, the Gods had granted me my wish. I was again in Germany, having entered the French Zone with over six thousand more leaflets—printed ones; and larger ones too—also written by me. My new life, or rather the period which stands as the culmination of my whole life, had begun.

  Savitri with unidentified friends (the man may be Elwyn Wright), Stockholm, May 1948

  Chapter 5

  “DE-NAZIFICATION”

  “Woe to him who assails thee!

  Thy City endures,

  But he who assails thee falls.

  The sun of him who loves thee not goes down, O Amon!”

  —From a hymn to Amon80

  “Jeder Versuch, eine Weltanschauung mit Machtmitteln zu bekämpfen,

  scheitert am Ende, solange nicht der Kampf die Form des Angriffs für eine neue geistige Einstellung erhält.”

  —Adolf Hitler81

  In all times—ever since the primaeval Golden Age in which the right conception of life and the right religion of truth prevailed all over the world—there have been great struggles of ideas, religious wars under one form or another. One of the oldest known is the struggle between the perennial Solar religion reorganised as a State cult by the Pharaoh Akhnaton, and the Egyptian religion of Amon, in the fourteenth century before Christ. This war—World War number two—was also a religious war (along with an economic one, as are necessarily all wars planned and waged by plutocratic States). It was fought as bitterly as any religious war of old can have been. And it presented the same phenomenon of a minority of people (on each side) standing against the country to which they were expected to belong, for the Ideology dear to their hearts—in England, and even in France (which is still more remarkable), a National Socialist minority which longed for Germany’s victory because Germany was fighting for the Aryan cause (just as there were, in sixteenth century England, Catholics who desired the victory of Spain because Spain represented the cause of the Roman Church); and, on the other hand, a minority of German Democrats and Communists who desired—and helped to bring about—the victory of the United Nations. Ideologies have always soared, and always will soar, above frontiers.

  But there ends all the analogy between this recent conflict of ideas and the other European ones, whether in the Middle Ages or in Modern times. This conflict of the two allied forms of Democracy versus National Socialism has nothing in common, fundamentally, with any ideological war among Christians. It is, on the contrary, after many, many years, the first phase of the resumed struggle between the very spirit of Christianity and that of undying Heathendom; between the cult of suffering humanity and the joyous, ever-young, and pitiless philosophy of the Sun; the man-centred conception of the world and the life-centred; between the age-old international spirit of Jewry (which asserted itself in turns in Christianity, in Social Democracy, and in Communism) and the Aryan spirit; the national spirit, identified, not with the superstition of frontiers but with the religion of Race, i.e., with the Religion of Life in all peoples of Indo-European stock—something far more full of meaning than any quarrel about two conflicting interpretations of the same foreign Bible.

  And while the minorities which, on both sides, stood for their faith against their country in the religious wars among Christians can be, and should be, accused of treason from a national point of view, the Aryan minorities who, in England, in Norway, in Holland, in France, and elsewhere, worked for the victory of Germany during this war, can certainly not be. For they set up, above the conventional conception of nationhood, not a still more flimsy conception of the Unknown, but the positive, the natural, the living reality of the Race, apart from which nationhood itself loses all its substance. From the strict, but enlightened, national point of view, no less than from the broader racial standpoint, the traitors, in every Aryan nation, were not they, but the ill-advised majority who believed, and the criminal leaders who carried on, the anti-German propaganda—the people who waged war against the champions of their own cause, the defenders of their own race, thus willingly or unwillingly playing into the game of the alien Jew. As for the anti-Nazis of German blood, they are, of course, the most unpardonable of all the traitors who worked against their race in this war, all the more so that they had every opportunity of knowing and of understanding (if only they cared to) the real nature of the issue at stake.

  Now that this first phase of the renewed age-old struggle has ended with our disaster, it was only to be expected that the victorious supporters of both forms of Democracy would try to wipe out every trace of us, and to prevent us from rising again. And they are trying; in fact, trying hard. There has never been, in the history of the world, such a desperate attempt to crush any ideology—save, perhaps, 3300 years ago, the persecution of the Religion of the Disk under Tutankhamon, and especially under Horemheb, in Egypt. “Woe to thy enemies, O Amon,” intoned the priests of the Egyptian god in Karnak, as they solemnly cursed the memory of the inspired King, Akhnaton, Living-in-Truth, “Woe to thy enemies, O Amon! Thy City endures, but he who assailed thee falls!” And the Man who had stood for the Philosophy of the Sun against the philosophy of vested interests, was henceforth known as “that heretic” or “that criminal,” until, within a few years, his following had ceased to exist, and his very name was utterly forgotten.

  The one modern counterpart of that most radical, most systematic and merciless of all persecutions in Antiquity (including the better known and more spectacular ones of the early Christians under several Roman emperors) is the persecution of our Weltanschauung in present-day occupied Germany: “Entnazifizierung,” as they call it—“de-Nazification.”

  But in spite of the parallelism,82 the result might not be exactly the same. For although National Socialism itself is undoubtedly the modern expression of the self-same perennial Philosophy of Life and Light; and although its enemies are the self-same slaves of the perennial money power, in modern European garb, its persecuted supporters—the undaunted Nazis of 1948 and 1949; the real ones—are of an entirely different mettle than the time-serving adherents of the ancient solar state cult of Tell-el-Amarna83; as far above them, in fact, as pure gold is above clay (and bad quality clay at that).

  * * *

  There is one way of thoroughly getting rid of an Ideology, namely, to kill off all its supporters, and to bring up the new generation in the admiration and reverence of a rival Ideology. And even then, one is never quite sure that the condemned Weltanschauung will not one day spring up again, from no one knows where. With unsurpassed ruthlessness, the first Shoguns of the Togukawa Dynasty practically succeeded in uprooting Christianity from seventeenth-century Japan. Yet, nothing could prevent some Japanese from taking an interest in that religion in the twentieth century. And long before, Charlemagne had done his best to blot out Heathendom in ninth-century Germany—and had succeeded, with all the display of barbarity one knows. Yet he could not—nobody could—prevent the awakening of the spirit of eternal Germanic Heathendom in National Socialism, in our times.

  But people who set out to kill ideas are, in general, nowhere near as thorough as either the Saxon slayer, in the West, or iron-handed Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu, in the Far East. First of all, because the opp
osite idea in the name of which they act does not, as a rule, mean all that much to them. Secondly, because, in their unqualifiable vanity, they seldom realise that philosophies, religions, socio-political systems which they dislike, might have supporters to whom they are dearer than anything in the world—far dearer than anything which they (the persecutors) profess to love is to them. In all such cases, the attempt to uproot the idea misses its aim, however horrible a form it might occasionally take.

  Apart from that, as I have said before, the success—or failure—of persecution does not depend upon the quality of the persecutors alone. It depends as much—and, in most cases, still more—upon the courage, the tenacity, the single-mindedness of the persecuted; upon their power of dissimulation, also: their capacity to lie brazenly to their enemies while remaining, at heart, loyal to themselves and to their ideals—which, in times of emergency, is also a virtue.

  The people who establish statistics about the progress of de-Nazification in Germany since 1945, and the people who study them—and especially those who conduct the whole show—have a tendency to forget these truths of all times.

  * * *

  Ever since the enemies of the New Order have acquired mastery over German territory, National Socialism has been systematically persecuted in its homeland, both by the Russians, in the name of Communism, and by the Western Allies, in the name of Democracy; more radically, perhaps, by the Russians, only because (give the devil his due!) the latter, being themselves more earnest about their own hateful Weltanschauung than the Westerners about their principles, take us—their only irreducible opponents—more seriously.

  The aim of both gangs is to suppress our philosophy as a living force. Their methods are also, fundamentally, the same; the methods of anyone who ever attempted to blot out an ideology in any epoch; the exploitation of fear and need—terror and bribery—also the exploitation of ignorance and weakness—“persuasion,” applied to those who happen to be too young or too ill-informed, or too congenitally stupid to be able to form an opinion of their own.

  As everyone knows, the first step of the new masters of Germany was to send to their doom, as “war criminals,” as many of us as had played—in the National Socialist organisation, or in the struggle against Jewry, or simply on the battlefield, in the defence of Germany—a part too prominent to be quickly forgotten. Former ministers of state, Gauleiter, generals, governors of countries occupied by Germany during the war, people who had done nothing more than their duty, thoroughly and selflessly, as one should, were hanged, or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment (often to imprisonment for life) by tribunals pretending to deal out “justice” while being, in reality, but the instruments of a vengeance that had not the guts to call itself such; the vengeance of hypocrites and cowards, mean and cruel as cowards are bound to be.

  The same sort of “justice” was exercised in the Russian Zone, with the only difference, perhaps, that there it was not disguised under such a thick layer of humanitarian nonsense. It was summary, brutal, passionately destructive—the glaringly barbaric vengeance wrought by highly organised primitives on their overpowered superiors. It was openly dealt out to us because we were Nazis—and not, outwardly, because we had “sinned” against “mankind” but, in reality, because we were Nazis. Those Germans who had held any sort of position in the National Socialist hierarchy, and who were not lucky enough to be killed outright, were deported no one knows where: to places beyond the Ural Mountains; to slave camps in the heart of High Asia—out of touch with the rest of the world—to toil for the rest of their lives under the whip.

  That would not de-Nazify them—any more than the humiliations, the hardships, the ill-treatment inflicted upon their comrades in the Western Zones would the latter. But it would keep them out of the way—for a long time at least; the Russians hope “forever.” Along with the measures applied in the Western Zones, it would help to de-Nazify Germany and the world by keeping less important people away from the influence of the “dangerous” ones. So our persecutors think.

  * * *

  Apart from brutal force, the advocates of de-Nazification use another weapon: economic pressure. They first do all they possibly can to deprive people, known as or supposed to be National Socialists, of the means of earning a living. And then, more and more, they offer new jobs to people with a National Socialist past who are willing to be de-Nazified. They even offer to reinstall them in their former posts, in the rare cases in which these have not already been given to notorious anti-Nazis as a reward for their war-time treacheries.

  To be de-Nazified consists in going through the proceedings of a de-Nazification court and in paying a sum of money, after which one is looked upon—by the occupation authorities—as though one had never been a Nazi. Needless to say that, in the three Western Zones, all people who, thanks to some exceptional luck, have been allowed to retain a post in spite of their former connection with the National Socialist Party, are compelled to undergo that formality if they care at all to remain in office. In the Eastern Zone, I am told, no such a show is put up, for the simple reason that there are no persons in office who ever were, at one time or another in their lives, even distantly connected with National Socialism.84

  Sometimes, the penalty for having been a member of the NSDAP—or just somebody sincerely interested in social welfare, who took a more or less active part in the truly admirable work sponsored by the Party in that field—does not go so far as losing one’s job, but consists in a degradation in one’s professional hierarchy, and in a subsequent reduction of salary, regardless of years of honest and efficient service. This is—among thousands of others—the case of Fräulein W, a woman with thirty-four years of service to her credit in an office of the German Railway, somewhere in the now denominated “French” Zone. She has been brought down to the rank of a beginner, with a pay of 116 marks a month instead of the 360 marks she formerly earned. And why? Just for having attended women’s meetings during the grand days, and for having devoted a little of her time to the babies of her country. And I would not even call the lady a National Socialist—not by any stretch of the imagination! She is far too much of a pious Christian to deserve that glorious title.

  Entnazifizierung—de-Nazification—has upon the lives of totally unconcerned people, in Germany, unexpected bearings. It has been, for instance, ever since it was imposed, the cause of a disastrous lowering of the level of education. As soon as the Occupying Powers took over the country, all schoolmasters who were listed as Nazis or reported as such, were turned out of employ (and not permitted to work at all in their own line) unless they could prove that they had been “forced” to join the Party while being, at heart, as anti-Nazi as the Occupying Powers themselves. But, with very few exceptions, all schoolmasters of any worth were convinced National Socialists. As a consequence, all of a sudden, there were practically no schoolmasters left in Germany. For the whole year following the capitulation, the schools and colleges were shut. The Occupying Powers did not care. Why should they? The children and the young people were the sufferers. And they were only Germans—the heirs of that New Order that the United Nations so much wanted to crush. A year without schooling would do them good—until the Occupying Powers would be ready to stuff them with their new democratic propaganda.

  After that, up to the end of 1947—in some places up to 1948—the children were granted an hour or two of schooling a week (a few new schoolmasters had somehow been secured; and some of the old ones, whose past was not too damnable in the eyes of the Occupying Powers, had been after consideration allowed to remain). At the end of 1948, and in 1949—four years after the capitulation—school-going children between six and thirteen in the British Zone (in the region of Hanover) enjoy still only an hour or so of schooling a day. That is the negative side of Germany’s “re-education”—Entnazifizierung.

  Another aspect of the same is the prevention—according to Article 7 of Law 8 of the Occupation Statute—of any attempt to keep alive “the military and t
he Nazi spirit” in occupied Germany. I was myself arrested in Cologne, on the 20th of February 1949, for violating this regulation; and this chapter, as well as the end of the former one, was written in prison while awaiting my trial. In fact, ever since my entry into Germany, I had been doing nothing else but “Nazi propaganda,” and not merely under the crude form which, in the end, caused my arrest. This crude form consisted in distributing leaflets and sticking up posters bearing the sacred sign of the Swastika and calling the German people to remain firm in our National Socialist faith—firm in the certitude that they are the first Aryans re-awakened to racial consciousness and racial pride, and that they deserve freedom, plenty, and power; firm in the certitude that the agents of the forces of death cannot keep them down forever. I had stuck up several such posters in a town of the French Zone on the 30th of January—the sixteenth anniversary of the day National Socialism rose to power—and a few days later, I had been distributing similar leaflets in Cologne. That constitutes a crime—for which the maximum penalty is death—in the eyes of those who, so they say, fought six years to secure, all over the world, and especially in Germany, the “freedom of the individual”!