-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
Hitler's Priestess — Savitri Devi, The Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism
Nicholas Goodricke-Clarke©1998
New York University Press
www.nyupress.nyu.edu
ISBN 0-8147-3110-4
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Another fine one from, Mr. Goodricke-Clarke. Highly Recommended
Om
K
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10
THE ODESSA CONNECTION
The complete and utter defeat of the Third Reich, the exposure of its crimes
and atrocities, and the accompanying programs of denazification and
reeducation of the German people combined to vilify Adolf Hitler and National
Socialism throughout the Western world. After 1945, Savitri Devi had
exchanged her former isolation in India for the marginal role of a die-hard
Nazi agent in occupied Germany and elsewhere in Europe. In the late 1940s and
early 1950s she was an obscure figure inhabiting a twilight world of
bewildered Nazis filled with bitterness, revanchist ideas, and wild hopes of
Hitler's return. We have seen her distributing leaflets amid the ruined
cities of the fallen Reich, meeting secretly with small conventicles of
unrepentant Nazis, and offering comfort to fellow prisoners at Werl, war
criminals' widows, and other devotees of the defeated idol. The quixotic and
sectarian nature of her postwar activity is highlighted further by her
pilgrimage to Austria and Germany in 1953. Throughout this tour she regularly
invoked the gods and performed solitary rituals at such places as the
Nuremberg rally grounds and the Externsteine in a passionate if desperate
attempt to reverse the Allied defeat and urge the resurrection of an Aryan
Germany.
This situation of isolation and helplessness was soon to change. Through her
reckless and outspoken advocacy of Hitler's cause, she was becoming known in
clandestine Nazi circles. She had undertaken her one-woman propaganda crusade
in the British zone of occupied Germany without the involvement or knowledge
of any Nazi support organization, much to the frustration of several
interrogators following her arrest. But the story of her mission and
imprisonment soon spread among the inmates of Werl prison and she became a
trusted comrade of these and other detainees following their release from
Allied prisons. Many of these new friendships offered her an introduction
into the political organizations dedicated to a nurturing and revival of
Nazism. Above all, this network of Nazi organizations was itself growing and
becoming more securely established at the time of her release from Werl.
Once denazification had been sacrificed to the Allies' fresh interest in
wooing the Germans for the Cold War against the Soviet Union, new political
parties began to spring up in Germany that owed much of their inspiration to
National Socialism. One of the earliest was the Sozialistische Reichspartei
(SRP) founded in October 1949 and led by Otto Ernst Remer, who had been
promoted to general following his role in foiling the bomb plot of
disaffected high military and aristocrats against Hitler on 20 July 1944. In
the May 1951 Land elections the SRP polled 11 percent of the vote and won
sixteen seats in the Lower Saxony diet. The Nazi affiliation of the SRP was
manifest in Remer's trenchant attacks on the Americans, whom he accused of
constructing fake gas chambers at Dachau to discredit the Germans, and on the
Adenauer government together with the "criminals of the 20 July." Such overt
Nazi political activity was deemed illegal under the Basic Law of the newly
founded German Federal Republic and Remer was sentenced to three months'
imprisonment. The Karlsruhe supreme court declared the SRP unconstitutional
in July 1952 and the party was banned. Meanwhile Adenauer's Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) and other parties scrambled to pick up the 367,000
votes of the outlawed SRP, and the CDU succeeded in boosting its share of the
vote in Lower Saxony from 17 to 33 percent. However, considerable numbers of
SRP voters and supporters were not long in expressing their nostalgic Nazism
through a successor party, whose activities were in the ascendant by the time
Savitri Devi returned to Germany in April 1953.
The Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) traced its origins to a merger of two small
far-right parties first launched in the aftermath of defeat in November 1945.
After 1952 the DRP was the most influential electoral force on the extreme
right with some sixteen thousand paid-up members, a few seats in the Land
diets, and about half a million votes across the country in federal
elections. Led by Adolf von Thadden, the DRP boasted such former celebrities
of the Third Reich as Werner Naumann, a former Nazi secretary of state and
Hitler's choice to succeed Goebbels;
SS General Wilhelm Meinberg; a number of Wehrmacht generals; and the
Luftwaffe ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel. However, the DRP was only the most prominent
of the neo-Nazi organizations that flourished in Germany during the 1950s.
According to the Ministry of Interior's annual report on neo-Nazism, there
were at least a hundred parties, leagues, movements, and associations, each
claiming a Nazi succession, and whose total membership amounted to about
eighty thousand persons in 1954. While the great majority of former Nazi
supporters, careerists, and businessmen made their way in the new Germany
under the auspices of the CDU—Adenauer had several former Nazi ministers in
his own government-it was a hard core of Hitler faithful and inveterate Nazis
who joined the political fringe of the far right. After her return to Germany
in 1953, Savitri Devi made numerous contacts in this revanchist and nostalgic
milieu of Nazi diehards.
Foremost among these was Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel (1916-1982), whom she
frequently visited at Hanover and came to know well. The son of a village
pastor in Silesia, Rudel had been fascinated by airplanes and flying from an
early age, and joined the expanding Luftwaffe in 1936 during Hitler's buildup
of the armed forces. By the spring Of 1938, the newly developed Stuka dive
bombers were rolling off the production lines in readiness for Germany's
blitzkrieg campaigns, and Rudel volunteered to train as a Stuka pilot. At the
time it was an unfashionable choice, for most of the young Luftwaffe bloods
wanted to be fighter pilots, but it was the foundation of the Rudel legend.
>From the outbreak of war onward he was almost constantly engaged on bombing
missions in Poland, in the Balkans, and above all in the campaign against the
Soviet Union. He was the first pilot ever to sink a battleship, the Soviets'
Marat, and also dispatched 2 cruisers, one destroyer, 70 landing craft, and
more than 500 Russian tanks. By January 1945 he had 2,530 wartime operational
flights to his credit and was regarded as Germany's greatest war pilot ever,
and possibly the foremost air ace of all time. He was the first and only
recipient of Germany's highest military decoration specially created for him
by Hitler in December 1944—the Iron Cross with Golden Oakleaves, Swords, and
Diamonds.
Rudel believed that "an officer has a vocation in which he does not belong to
himself but to his fatherland and to the subordinates committed to his
charge.... [H]e must therefore ... show an example to his men without regard
for his own person or his life." He was not known to have taken any leave and
when in April 1945 he lost his right leg below the knee, he returned to his
unit and continued flying immediately after surgery. Rudel's military
achievements and his reputation for courage and patriotic self-sacrifice were
a living legend among the German public during the war. This legend enjoyed
an even wider appeal because Rudel was not a member of the Nazi Party nor
identified with any other political organization of the Third Reich. He was,
quite simply, a hero of the fatherland for whom loyalty, duty, and obedience
were the ultimate virtues. His bravery was also recognized by the enemy.
After the German surrender, he met top pilots of the Royal Air Force in June
1945 at Tangmere to discuss operational tactics and technical matters. One of
them, Group Captain Douglas Bader, wrote in his foreword to the
English-language edition of Rudel's war memoir Stuka Pilot (1951) that he was
a gallant chap and wished him luck.
When Rudel received his unique Iron Cross from Hitler in person, the Fuhrer
had praised him as the greatest and bravest soldier the German people had
ever produced. Nor was this mere rhetoric. Hitler had boundless admiration
for Rudel. He regarded him as the paragon of German soldierly virtue whose
courage and devotion to Germany were unaffected by the political jockeying,
placemanship, and hunger for power that permeated the party and the political
organizations. According to Hitler's architect, Hermann Giesler, Hitler
wanted Rudel to succeed him as Fuhrer when the time came. His youth, his
qualities of leadership, his powers of communication, his ability to remain
calm and logical under stress, his unquestioned character, crowned by his
wartime record, all combined to make him a worthier successor in Hitler's
view than anyone else in the party.[1] Rudel knew nothing of Hitler's
musings, but he did know that after the surrender of Germany, things could
never be the same again. He could not forget that it was the Third Reich and
Hitler's war that had made his reputation. A hostage to the aura of his own
heroism, the selfless patriot became a Nazi die-hard.
After the war Rudel had fled to Argentina, where he became a popular and
prominent member of the country's large Nazi community, which enjoyed the
protection of the Peron government. Rudel formed a close link with Juan Peron
(1895-1974), whose own successful political career owed much to his study of
Italian fascism. The wartime hero now turned his mind to devising plans for
assisting Nazi fugitives and war criminals to escape from Europe and became
the head of such a rescue organization called the Kameradenwerk. He also
founded the Rudel Klub as a mutual aid society in Argentina to help former
Nazis establish themselves with new livelihoods. Throughout his stay abroad
Rudel acted as a leading contact man between Nazis in exile and those still
in Germany. On his return to Germany in 1951, he became the patron of the
ultranationalistic Freikorps Deutschland, a right-wing extremist group
founded that year whose name and aims recalled the private armies and
revanchist squads set up by disgruntled soldiers after the First World War.
Newspaper reports in January 1952 fueled suspicion that Rudel and former SS
Colonels Otto Skorzeny and Eugen Dollmann were leading members of a
Madrid-based Nazi center that cultivated close links with another Nazi center
in Cairo directly involved in Nasser's anti-British plot that ended with the
ousting of King Farouk.[2]
As soon as he had returned to Germany, Rudel publicly declared his undying
admiration for Adolf Hitler and his vision of a resurrected, strong Germany.
This outspoken loyalty to the Third Reich backed by the wartime legend of his
Luftwaffe exploits firmly established him as the idol of the reviving
neo-Nazi movement. His nationalist views found a regular outlet in the
Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung (est. 1951), which was edited by former officials
of Goebbels's propaganda ministry and SS officers. Besides his support of the
Freikorps Deutschland, he became a committee member of the Deutsche
Reichspartei (DRP). When Savitri Devi first met Hans-Ulrich Rudel, he was
already perhaps the most popular and visible figure of the neo-Nazi scene in
the young German republic. His contacts among old Nazis in South America were
extensive and he was a key player in the Nazi clandestine groups in Spain and
Egypt. Although an activist by nature, Rudel could not help but be impressed
by Savitri Devi's praise of Nazism as an international racist movement, a
notion well suited to the clandestine and dispersed nature of postwar Nazi
conspiracy. She met him several times at Hanover, completing her manuscript
of The Lightning and the Sun on the occasion of a visit in March 1956.
Later that year Rudel returned to South America, living in Brazil and
Paraguay, where he befriended President Alfredo Stroessner (b. 1912), the
vintage dictator of German origin. By the early 1970s he had returned to
Europe and settled in the Austrian Tyrol, but he remained in close touch with
many wanted Nazis in South America, including Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief
of Lyons; Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor; and Walter Rauff, who had
planned the early extermination facilities for East European Jewry. All these
men, and hundreds of others, including Martin Bormann according to Rudel,
owed their new lives abroad to the postwar Nazi escape organizations in which
the Luftwaffe ace had earlier played a key role. He later befriended
President Augusto Pinochet (b. 1915) in Chile, where Rauff died at liberty in
1984. Hans-Ulrich Rudel's immense network of old Nazi survivors, South
American politicians, and businessmen was as great a legend as his Luftwaffe
record. Through her encounter with Rudel and his warm response to the
propagandist value of her proNazi books, Savitri Devi was properly launched
into the international network of escape organizations, mutual aid groups,
and new Nazi parties. Thanks to introductions provided by Rudel, she was
subsequently able to meet leading Nazi emigres in the Middle East and Spain.
The emergence of the Middle East as a haven for old Nazis during the 1950s
had its roots in the anti-British and pro-Axis attitudes of Vichy Syria,
Rashid Ali in Iraq, Mohammed Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
and even King Farouk of Egypt during the war. United by a common hatred of
Jewry, the Third Reich had taken the Palestinian mufti under its protection
following the Allied invasion of Iraq and he had lived throughout the war in
a luxurious suite at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. Hitler had enjoyed quite a
following among the nationalist youth of Egypt during the war, after Nassiri
Nasser, the later president's brother, had published an Arab edition of Mein
Kampf in 1939, describing its author as the "strongest man of Europe." Even
after the defeat of the Third Reich, Arab feelings remained very warm toward
the Germans, who were still regarded as potential allies against British
colonial power in the region.
Egypt became a favored destination for old Nazis in search of responsible
jobs and high office. King Farouk had been impressed by his palace garage
mechanics recruited from Afrika Korps POWs and wondered what he might achieve
with officers from the elite units of the Gestapo and SS who had fought so
hard against the hated British. A number of Nazi experts who had escaped the
Allied dragnet were hired by the king as military, financial, and technical
advisers. This Nazi influence in Egypt was to survive its royal patron, for
the young Egyptian officers who planned the military coup d'etat that ousted
King Farouk in January 1952 were themselves great admirers of the Germans and
availed themselves of further large-scale imports of ex-Nazi expertise. Thus
it came about that the former Gestapo chief of Dusseldorf, Joachim Daumling,
later actively engaged in SS operations in Croatia, was employed to set up
the Egyptian secret service along the lines of the SS
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Himmler's Reich Security Main Office), while the
former Gestapo chief of Warsaw organized the security police.[3]
Hans-Ulrich Rudel and his fellow conspirators Otto Skorzeny and Eugen
Dollmann played an important role in recruiting large numbers of former Nazi
fugitives from Argentina for key posts in the new republican regime. As early
as January 1952 they were in contact with influential Egyptian army officers
and the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had lived in Egypt since the
fall of the Third Reich. According to Israeli and French intelligence
reports, the Egyptian secret service and political police were staffed by
such men as SS General Oskar Dirlewanger, chief of the infamous SS penal
brigade; SS Major Eugen Eichberger, battalion-commander in the Dirlewanger
brigade; SS Colonel Leopold Gleim, chief of the Gestapo department for Jewish
affairs in Poland; SS Lieutenant Colonel Bernhard Bender, Gestapo official in
Poland and the Soviet Union whose knowledge of Yiddish enabled him to
penetrate Jewish underground organizations; SS General Heinrich Selimann,
chief of the Gestapo in Ulm; SS Major Schmalstich, Gestapo liaison officer to
French collaborationists and organizer of Jewish transports from Paris to
Auschwitz; SS Major Seipel, Gestapo official in Paris; and SS General Alois
Moser, a war criminal who was involved in the extermination of Ukrainian
Jewry.[4]
Wehrmacht General Wilhelm Fahrmbacher took over the central planning staff in
Cairo, while a number of former Nazi officials and sixty military experts,
mostly former Waffen-SS men, assisted in the organization and training of the
Egyptian army. Several of these were reported in 1958 as closely associated
with the then Algerian exile government. These included SS Colonel Baumann, a
participant officer in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto; Willi Berner, an
SS officer at Mauthausen concentration camp; and Erich Alter, implicated in
the murder of Professor Theodor Lessing at Marienbad and later commissioner
for Jewish affairs in Galicia. Economic and ideological advisers followed
fast on the heels of their military colleagues. Financial specialists from
Goering's Four Year Plan and the German Labor Front were soon employed in
Egyptian ministries.
President Gamal Abdel Nasser's anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist propaganda
apparatus discovered an ideological treasure trove among Nazi emigres.
Supervisory among these was Johannes von Leers, who had been responsible for
anti-Semitic campaigns at Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, together with Franz
Bunsch and Alois Brunner, who had held top jobs in Adolf Eichmann's "Jewish
department" of the SS Reich Security Main Office. The Egyptian propaganda
ministry also employed Walter Bollmann, Nazi espionage chief in Britain
before the war and later, as SS major, active in antiguerrilla and
anti-Jewish operations in the Ukraine; Louis Heiden, an SS official
transferred to the Egyptian press office during the war; Franz Bartel, an
"old fighter" of the early Nazi Party and Gestapo officer; Werner Birgel, an
SS officer from Leipzig; Erich Bunz, SA major and expert in the Jewish
question; Albert Thielemann, a regional SS chief in Bohemia; and SS Captain
Wilhelm Bockler, another participant in the liquidation of the Warsaw
ghetto.[5]
Nasser himself was well disposed toward the Germans, but all the more because
these asylum seekers wished to join him in the destruction of Israel. Around
1958 Egypt began to arm itself with new supersonic planes and rockets. At
least two hundred German and Austrian scientists and other personnel were
deployed in the new aircraft and missile center at Helwan, where rockets were
aimed at Israel. The two production units were under the supervision of
Austrian experts, Hans Schonbaumsfeld and Ferdinand Brandner. The latter, a
former SA colonel and notorious Nazi, appointed Dr. Harms Eisele, SS captain
and medical torturer in Buchenwald, as staff physician at Helwan. By October
1962 the presence of German scientists at Helwan had been exposed in the
world press. In April 1963 these matters precipitated a government crisis in
Israel (whose secret service had made attempts on the lives of several
Germans). There was also consternation in Bonn over this German contribution
to Egypt's military potential against Israel.[6]
Savitri Devi left Europe to return to India in the spring Of 1957. Under
cover of her maiden name she had illegally spent four years in West Germany,
completing her books Pilgrimage and The Lightning and the Sun while staying
with her friend Katja U. at Emsdetten and otherwise traveling around the
country to make contact with old Nazis. The supply of Indian gold and jewelry
that she had brought with her to cover her costs of subsistence was now all
but gone. She decided to return home by the overland route through the Middle
East. In May 1957 she sailed across the Mediterranean to Egypt with a warm
personal recommendation from Hans-Ulrich Rudel to leading Nazi personalities
in Egypt. Her first stop was in Cairo, where she made contact with Johannes
von Leers. He was a well-known senior Nazi placement in Nasser's new
administration, having arrived with his family from Argentina in 1954 through
Rudel and Skorzeny's recruitment consultancy. At the time of his meeting with
Savitri Devi, Leers was a specialist in Zionist affairs with top
responsibility for Cairo's anti-Israeli radio broadcasting.
Although the door of his ministry office bore an assumed Arab name, Professor
Dr. Omar Amin von Leers could only have been taken for a German. The
pink-cheeked, white-haired man with bright-blue marble-like eyes rose to
greet Savitri Devi with old courtly Prussian charm. Of course, he had heard
of her and her splendid books on behalf on the international Nazi cause.
Colonel Rudel had spoken warmly of her.
Would she accept his invitation to stay for a while and see what the Germans
were now doing in Egypt? He lived a short distance to the south of Cairo in
the town of Meadi (EI-Maadi) on the east bank of the River Nile. However, the
Leers house was full at present, and he would arrange for her accommodation
at the house of a neighbor, a Palestinian Arab called Mahmoud Sali with a
great admiration for the Fuhrer. This gentleman would be greatly honored if
Savitri Devi accepted his hospitality. She was delighted. Leers suggested
that she come and dine with them that evening.
Johannes von Leers (1902-1963) had very high qualifications for his Egyptian
assignment. A Nazi university professor and an SS officer, Leers had also
held a senior appointment in Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda, where he
specialized in vicious anti-Semitic campaigns targeted at both domestic and
overseas audiences. His long publication list of anti-Semitic diatribes
included 14 Jahre Judenrepublik (14 years Jewish republic) (1933), the
sinister photo album Juden sehen Dich an (Jews look at you) (1933), Blut und
Rasse in der Gesetzgebung (Blood and race in legislation) (1936), and
twenty-four other books. Leers's entire literary output revolved around the
concepts of race, blood, and soil. During the Third Reich his two titles
Geschichte auf rassischer Grundlage (History on a racial basis) (1934) and
Der Weg des deutschen Bauern (The way of the German peasant) had both been
published in large popular editions by Reclam. In the first work he described
Hitler as "absorbing the powerful forces of this Germanic granite landscape
into his blood through his father." From 1933 onward he and wife jointly
edited Nordische Welt, a monthly periodical published by Herman Wirth's
Gesellschaft fur germanische Ur- und Vorgeschichte (Society for Germanic
Prehistory), and after 1935 he wrote regular articles for the SS-Leithefte
published by the SS Race and Settlement Office under the auspices of Richard
Walther Darre. Leers's racial ideas were saturated with ideas of the Aryan
polar homeland, sun worship, and the power of the native soil. During his
Argentian exile Leers published a vicious attack on the anti-Nazi resistance
as Traitors of the Reich (parts 1 and 2).
Over the next few days Savitri Devi spent many hours in the company of
Johannes von Leers. The professor could trace his learned interests in
volkisch and racial anti-Semitism back to the late 1920s and recalled the
people he first met while living in Munich at that time. These included
Darre, the pioneer of Nazi "blood-and-soil" doctrine and, after 1933,
Reichsbauernfuhrer (national peasant leader) and minister of food and
agriculture in the Third Reich. Before her marriage, Gesine von Leers had
been the personal secretary of Herman Wirth, the renowned if controversial
Dutch-German scholar of Nordic traditions and ancient Germanic institutions.
She believed herself the reincarnation of a Bronze Age priestess and affected
barbarous gold jewelry. Another member of their Munich circle was Karl
Weisthor, an Austrian racial occultist who claimed ancestral-clairvoyant
memories of the distant Germanic past. Savitri Devi was thrilled to hear
Leers's account of the fashionable parties he and his wife had given for Nazi
top brass in Berlin in the early 1930s. Here he had introduced Herman Wirth
to Heinrich Himmler, who had henceforth become his patron and created the SS
Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Office) under Wirth's direction. The elderly
Weisthor also found favor with Himmler and became a valued member of his
personal staff, advising his chief on ancient Germanic religion, runes, and
the mysteries of race.[7]
Thrilled as Savitri Devi was at these reminiscences of the Third
Reich, she was even more excited by Leers's account of the new inter-national
Nazi mission against Jewry and communism. He told her of his successive
escapes from Soviet and Western detention camps in Germany; of how the secret
escape organizations had sent him and his family to safety in Argentina by
1946; and of the web of international Nazi conspiracy that in turn had
brought him and many other highly qualified Germans to Egypt to participate
in Nasser's new assertion of Arab power against Britain, France, and Israel,
culminating in the re-cent Suez crisis Of 1956. The Third Reich may have gone
down in flames in Berlin more than a decade ago, but here in the Middle East,
in Latin America, and Spain the old Nazis had new schemes for global
racketeering and political resurgence. He impressed upon her that Germany had
not lost its friends among those who resented the old colonial powers.
Germany was rearming itself economically at home, diplomatically and
ideologically abroad. In proof of his assertions, Leers offered her further
introductions to senior SS officers now ensconced in Damascus and Baghdad,
whom she might like to meet as she continued her journey to India.
She walked with Leers from his home in Meadi along the palm-tree-bordered
esplanade beside the wide stream of the Nile, across which stood the ancient
pyramids of Giza in the parched desert landscape. In Egypt she was daily
reminded of the immemorial sun cults and the young idealistic pharaoh
Akhnaton's ill-fated utopia so many centuries before, about which she had
written in Calcutta in the early 1940s. But meeting Johannes von Leers and
hearing about his numerous Nazi and SS comrades in Egypt also reminded her of
her own self-imposed exile from the Third Reich in India. She had always
regretted those years spent so far removed from her idol and the "great
events" in Europe. Here she found herself again in a foreign setting, outside
Europe, only this time she was accompanied by Nazi loyalists, who were
emerging across the world to prepare for Germany's resurrection. The din and
squalor of downtown Cairo recalled her memories of wartime Calcutta, and once
again she felt that her years of lonely witness, her passionate prophecies
of Aryan revival, and the end of the Kali Yuga had a uni-versal
significance. The Third Reich had passed, but the Fourth Reich was surely
coming. Now there were devotees of the Aryan faith throughout the world in
such places as this.
After visiting Tell-el-Amarna, the site of Akhnaton's solar city some 190
miles south of Cairo, she returned to Meadi to bid farewell to Leers and his
family and took a Greek ship from Alexandria to Beirut. She traveled on to
Damascus by car but found to her disappointment that her Nazi contacts there
had decamped for the hot summer months. She then continued her journey across
the desert by bus, first to Baghdad, and thence to Teheran, where she spent
three weeks. From the Iranian capital she traveled out to Pahlevi to see the
Caspian Sea and then continued by road from Teheran through Mashhad to
Zahedan on the Iranian-Pakistan frontier. Here she waited for a week at a
small Greek hotel that recalled the campaigns of Alexander the Great in this
ancient Persian border country until she could board the train that would
take her to Lahore. As the steam locomotive puffed across the burning desert
of Baluchistan-one of the hottest places on earth-she suddenly felt a great
sense of relief to be away from Europe and at long last back in Asia where
she could once again flaunt her Nazi convictions without fear of
incrimination or sanctions. She had left India at the end of that dark year
of defeat in -1945 and since that time she had spent long years in occupied
Germany as an undercover agent for Nazism, as an Allied prisoner, and again
as a Nazi propagandist and sympathizer in the German neo-Nazi underground.
But now India and Pakistan were independent, the British no longer ruled, and
she was free to sing the Horst Wessel Song at the top of her voice out of the
carriage window.
She arrived in Delhi on 30 July 1957 and within two days was back in Calcutta
with her husband at the old apartment in Wellesley Street. The postwar years
had not been easy for Asit Krishna Mukherji in view of his pro-German and
pro-Japanese wartime activities, and he had found it difficult to find other
sponsors for his editorial and journalistic work. However, during the 1950s
he had been making a living as a Hindu astrologer and had raised sufficient
money to pay for the printing of his wife's books and send her regular
financial support. Savitri Devi now wanted to fund the printing of her latest
books and for this she herself needed well-paid employment. In the late
summer she found a job as field interpreter for three East German engineers
who were building a funicular railway at the iron ore mines of
Jordania-Barajonda in the Orisa province. When this project was completed,
she returned to Calcutta to take up a post as a teacher at the French School
in September 1958. The proceeds of her interpreting job covered the
production costs of Pilgrimage and The Lightning and the Sun, which were both
published in 1958.
Although she was free to publish Nazi books in Calcutta, she suffered once
again from a sense of standing on the sidelines. Now independent, India was
eager to emphasize territorial nationality to avert racial strife, and with
the British gone, there was little interest in their former German enemy. By
1960 Europe beckoned to Savitri Devi once again as a more promising stage for
neo-Nazi activity. Her mother had died at Lyons in March 1960 and there were
affairs to be settled. In any case, she wanted to join forces again with her
German die-hard friends in preparing for a Nazi revival. For the second time
she bid farewell to her husband, in September 1960, and sailed via South
India and Ceylon to Marseilles. After docking at the great French port,
through which she had so often passed en route to Greece, India, and Egypt,
she traveled directly into Spain. Once again Hans-Ulrich Rudel had secured
her a top-level introduction into the neo-Nazi network by sending her books
Gold in the Furnace and The Lightning and the Sun to his colleague Otto
Skorzeny in Madrid.
SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (1908-1975) was another archconspirator in Nazi
escape organizations, and in political, and business intrigues, whose postwar
adventures are as astonishing as his daring wartime exploits. He had been one
of the first members of the Austrian Nazi Party in 1935 and had joined Das
Reich Division of the Waffen-SS at the outbreak of war. Thanks to his close
links with the Austrian SS police leader and later SS General Ernst
Kaltenbrunner, Skorzeny took command of a new SS commando unit in 1943.
Commando raids of breathtaking audacity and risk were the trademarks of
Skorzeny's warfare. On 12 September 1943 he entered the history books when
his special glider forces liberated the deposed Mussolini from a mountaintop
hotel in the Gran Sasso, where he was being held prisoner by the new Italian
government. In July 1944 he received a special secret authorization from
Hitler and was effective commander in chief of all German home forces in the
confusion following the bomb plot and played a crucial role in foiling its
success. In November 1944 he was appointed head of the sabotage section of
the SS Reich Security Main Office and led commando raids in U.S. uniform
(thereby contravening the Geneva Convention) in the Ardennes during the
Battle of the Bulge. Later he was involved in Operation Werewolf, a code name
for the resistance fighters, guerrillas, and foreign agents who were to
continue the war behind Allied lines.
At the end of the war Skorzeny was apparently charged with creating a special
corps to defend the Alpine Redoubt, supposed to provide a major bloc of
military resistance and a refuge for Hitler and the Nazi leadership in a
large mountainous area centered on the Austrian Tyrol, southern Bavaria, and
the Alto Aldige in northern Italy. From early 1945 Goebbels had mounted a
journalistic campaign to produce stories about impregnable positions,
underground supply dumps, elite troops, and mountainside factories. The
entire operation was a myth, intended to create confusion among the invading
Allies and distract them from the assault on Berlin. Skorzeny's actual task
was to coordinate the escape and evasion networks of leading Nazis. Skorzeny
is usually credited with the creation of the most famous network of all, the
ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehorigen) and its Bremen-Bari (B-B)
line, which provided a secure chain Of Some 250 friendly agents with safe
houses, money, and documents across Europe. The B-B line was the preferred
route for Nazi fugitives making their way southward through Germany, over the
Alps, and into Italy to reach Mediterranean ports, where they embarked for
Latin America. Thousands of war criminals had benefited from Skorzeny's
highly reliable escape line between 1949 and 1952.
But Otto Skorzeny's ambitions and love of adventure extended far beyond the
domestic operations of Nazi rescue organizations. He was an early recruit
into Reinhard Gehlen's new West German intelligence organization
(Bundesnachrichtendienst), itself a creation of the American CIA under Allen
Dulles with its overriding concern to use the indispensable knowledge of the
former German intelligence corps against the new Soviet enemy. Basing himself
in Madrid from 1950, Skorzeny built up an international
intelligence-gathering and mercenary-recruitment agency under cover of an
engineering and importexport business. He was appointed security adviser to
several right-wing dictatorships in Latin America and was a trusted
consultant to Spain's Ministry of the Interior. Skorzeny was further credited
with being the treasurer of enormous Nazi funds and gold reserves that had
been salted away on behalf of major German industrial concerns (the so-called
Circle of Friends) in neutral countries during the last year of the war. He
also dealt in arms and sold the supplies of weapons cached by the SS at the
end of the war in France, Austria, and Italy. Through his father-in-law,
Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's former finance minister, Skorzeny was invited by
Dulles in 1953 to help reorganize the security forces of the new Egyptian
Republic. In the course of his clandestine intelligence and commercial
dealings, Skorzeny regularly traveled from Madrid to Cairo, Tangier, Buenos
Aires, and Rome besides many towns in Germany and Austria.
Although principally a man of action and affairs, Skorzeny was well placed to
take an interest in the political and ideological side of international
neo-Nazism. Following the first postwar gathering of various neofascist and
neo-Nazi parties and movements in Rome in March 1950, about a hundred
delegates from these parties in Germany, Italy, Austria, France, Spain, and
Sweden assembled in May 1951 at Malmo in southern Sweden. Among these were
Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the prewar British Union of Fascists and the
Union Movement since 1948; Maurice Bardeche, brother-in-law of the French
fascist Robert Brasillach and representative of the Comite National Francais;
Fritz Rossler of the Sozialistische Reichspartei; and Karl-Heinz Priester, a
former leader of the Hitler Youth who had a dose connection with Skorzeny and
the SS international. The Malmo International was a milestone in the history
of postwar fascism, for it created the first confederation of parties in the
"European Social Movement," which advocated a third force in Europe against
the superpower blocs of the United States and the Soviet Union. Its right
wing subsequently founded the Nouvel Ordre Europeen (NOE), an extreme
anti-Semitic confederation, in Zurich in September 1951. These internationals
joined about fifty national movements and numbered perhaps several thousand
members worldwide. in his undercover operations Skorzeny was always able to
access these extensive Nazi networks.
Skorzeny regarded Savitri Devi as an exceptional ideologist on behalf of a
revived Nazi International and invited her to visit him in Madrid on her
return to Europe. They evidently found plenty to discuss for she remained his
guest for six weeks. Skorzeny was convinced that conditions were growing more
favorable for a fresh wave of neofascist sympathy in Europe. The loss of the
Congo had unleashed revanchist sentiments in Belgium, and now, in late 1960,
French extremists were seeking to delay any settlement of the conflict in
Algeria. There was a widespread hope among neofascists that the Algerian
issue would repeat the ideological conflict of the Spanish Civil War on a
European stage. The fascist organization Jeune Europe supported the
Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS) in Algeria and later found safe hideouts for
its leaders. The increased levels of colored immigration in Great Britain
were leading to a racial backlash and further support for far-right groups.
New German neo-Nazi groups and youth movements were being established,
including the Bund Vaterlandischer Jugend and the Notgerneinschaft
reichstreuer Verbande, sponsored by Skorzeny's friend Karl-Heinz Priester.
Skorzeny had read Savitri Devi's books and was impressed by their praise of
German virtues in the general context of a revival of the white Aryan world.
He felt she was someone to be encouraged, someone who should write more for
the Nazi International.
Here in Madrid Skorzeny could show her something of the prestige and
protection that notorious wanted Nazis enjoyed in their Spanish refuge. For
instance, there was Ante Pavelic (1899--1959), the leader of the Nazi puppet
state of Croatia between 1941 and 1944. Inspired by a tribal desire for an
independent Croat nation, Pavelic's fascist Ustase movement had waged a
savage war of vengeance, which claimed more than 800,000 victims among the
Serbs and Jews of Croatia. At the end of the war, the Croat dictator had been
sent along the ODESSA escape lines to Spain. From here he had gone to live in
Argentina, until he was shot by a Yugoslav enemy in Buenos Aires. He returned
to Madrid, dying there in 1959, a short while before Savitri Devi's visit to
Skorzeny. The list of foreign fascists in Spain also included Horia Sima
(1906-1993), commander of the Romanian Iron Guard, and senior Nazi officers
of the Condor Legion, who had earlier fought for Franco and destroyed
Guernica in the Civil War. Besides Skorzeny himself, the most notable Nazi
exile in Madrid at the time of her visit was Leon Degrelle (1906-1994), the
former Belgian Rexist leader and commander of the Wallonie Waffen-SS division
on the eastern front. During her stay Skorzeny introduced her to Degrelle,
who greatly impressed her with rousing stories of his anti-Bolshevik crusade
in Hitler's panEuropean army. She would later quote from his book Hitler fur
ein tausend Jahre with warm approval in her own memoirs.[9]
Degrelle had begun his political career in 1930 with the foundation of a
publishing house and an authoritarian Catholic and anticommunist political
movement called Christus Rex. After the Rexists had obtained 275,000 votes in
the 1936 general election, which gave them twentyseven seats in the lower
house and seven in the Senate, Degrelle became a force to be reckoned with in
Belgian politics but was interned by the government for his pro-German
position at the outbreak of the war. After the German occupation of the Low
Countries in 1940, Degrelle was freed and resumed his political activity.
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Degrelle volunteered to
form a Frenchspeaking Wallonian unit to fight alongside the Germans against
Bolshevism. Thousands of young Belgians flocked to join his new unit from
which the Wallonie and Langemarck Waffen-SS divisions were swiftly formed.
Degrelle was involved in seventy-five direct combat actions on the eastern
front and was wounded thirty-four times. By the end of the war he had risen
to the rank of SS-Standartenfuhrer as commander of the 28th SS Wallonie
division. Refusing the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allies,
Degrelle escaped from Oslo in Albert Speer's light plane, which crashed into
the sea off the Spanish coast near San Sebastian.
Franco was greatly impressed by Degrelle and his Catholic anticommunist
credentials. After the Belgian courts had sentenced Degrelle to death in
absentia as a traitor on two occasions, Franco refused all demands from
Belgium for his extradition from Spain. By way of further protection, the
Spanish authorities also provided him with an armed guard in case of a kidnap
attempt or assassination. Once he had recovered from his crash injuries,
Degrelle established himself as a businessman in Madrid. Rumor linked
Degrelle and his Falangist friends in Spain with the safehousing of Martin
Bormann in Madrid en route to Argentina during 1947. However, Degrelle's
chief contribution to the postwar Nazi cause was the ceaseless glorification
of the Third Reich and the encouragement of a younger neo-Nazi generation. He
published a dozen major books on Nazism, including Die verlorene Legion (The
lost legion), Hitler —geboren in Versailles (Hitler-born at Versailles), Denn
der Hass stirbt ... (Because hate dies ... ), and Hitler fur ein tausend
Jahre (Hitler for a thousand years), and regularly wrote for the far-right
European press. As a prewar Belgian fascist and a highly decorated Waffen-SS
commander, Degrelle was a powerful symbol of the self-styled pan-European,
anti-Bolshevik crusade of Nazi Germany. When the statute of limitations on
his Belgian convictions lapsed, Degrelle became a considerable public figure
in the neo-Nazi movement, receiving many visitors from abroad and addressing
large international right-wing youth rallies from the 1960s onward until he
was well into his eighties.[10]
In the course of her six weeks' stay with Otto Skorzeny, Savitri Devi was
able to gather a great deal about the work Of ODESSA and the other Nazi
escape organizations, which had brought so many wanted Nazis and SS to safety
abroad. She was excited to learn something of the farflung intelligence
networks that Skorzeny had expertly woven through the espionage and security
needs of Germany, Egypt, Spain, and Latin America, often with financial
support from the United States. She was greatly impressed by the clever
interplay of his financial, commercial, and political activities on behalf of
the "Circle of Friends" that had safeguarded German industrial and financial
interests through surrender and defeat. But Skorzeny was not just a man with
a Nazi past. His interests and influence reached far into the governments and
councils of contemporary states. He played the part of a Spanish grandee to
perfection, meeting his contacts at a restaurant where most of Franco's
cabinet took their lunch. He lectured in Spanish universities on new military
strategies and guerrilla warfare, and in 1960 he was a leading figure in the
West German government's negotiations for Bundeswehr bases in Spain. Savitri
Devi's admiration for Skorzeny was practically boundless; many years later in
Delhi she would recall him as "one of the finest people I have ever met."
The bravado and mystique of Otto Skorzeny were notorious. Time and time again
during the 1950s and 1960s his name was linked in the world's newspapers with
Nazi plots and foreign intelligence services, above all with the ODESSA and
its power to put former SS men in high places. So great was his aura of
competence and intrigue that he was even tenuously linked to the planning of
the Great Train Robbery in 1963. It seemed that Skorzeny's resources of
daring and imagination could never be underestimated in view of his successes
in the liberation of Mussolini, his bold guerrilla tactics, and the plans for
Operation Werewolf in an enemy-occupied, Germany.
And yet the myth always, perhaps necessarily, exceeded the man and his works.
The Skorzeny myth was in turn part of the wider myth of the Fourth Reich.
Adolf Hitler and the top Nazi leadership were long dead or imprisoned at
Spandau; the Third Reich, the Nazi Party, and the SS had vanished in the
inferno of a defeated nation; West Germany practiced parliamentary democracy
under the watchful eye and tutelage of its victors. And yet, on the fringes
of that safe, liberal Western world, in Spain, the Middle East, and Latin
America, such figures as Otto Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Leon Degrelle, and
their countless confederates were powerful symbols of Nazi survival. Through
her meetings with the men from ODESSA, Savitri Devi joined that world of
regenerate Nazism.
pp.169-186
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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