HITLER’S PRIESTESS NICHOLAS GOODRICK-CLARKE HITLER’S PRIESTESS Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK AND LONDON NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London Copyright ᭧ 1998 by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Hitler’s priestess : Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan myth, and neo- Nazism / Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8147-3110-4 (acid-free paper) 1. Neo-Nazism. 2. Savitri Devi. I. Title. JC481.G57 1998 320.53'3'092—dc21 97-45407 CIP New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America 10987654321 CONTENTS ALL ILLUSTRATIONS APPEAR AS AN INSERT FOLLOWING PAGE 80. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION: ‘‘Discovered Alive in India: Hitler’s Guru!’’ 1 1. Hellas and Judah 7 2. Aryavarta 26 3. Hindu Nationalism 43 4. The Nazi Brahmin 64 5. The Duce of Bengal 77 6. Akhnaton and Animal Rights 92 7. The Hitler Avatar 109 8. Defiance 126 9. Pilgrimage 147 10. The ODESSA Connection 169 11. Inside the Neo-Nazi International 187 12. Last Years and Legacy: Nazis, Greens, and the New Age 210 v vi CONTENTS NOTES AND REFERENCES 233 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 251 INDEX 255 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 269 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When writing the biography of an underground figure, one can only benefit from the help of persons in the milieu. Here I would like to thank Ernst Zu¨ ndel for initially drawing my attention to Savitri Devi in 1982 and sending me a copy of The Lightning and the Sun. I also wish to acknowledge Samisdat Publishers of Toronto for allowing me to quote at length from Savitri Devi’s books. Former comrades of Savitri Devi were generous with their memories, as well as with the loan of books and photographs. I am grateful to Beryl Cheetham, Lotte Asmus, Matt Koehl, and Colin Jordan. My re- searches were greatly aided by Muriel Gantry, at whose Essex cottage Savitri Devi died en route for America in 1982. A friend since 1946, her nonpartisan memoirs over several decades revealed much of Savitri Devi’s personality, as well as providing amusing anecdotes. I am much indebted to Miguel Serrano, who kindly sent me books and transla- tions, and his correspondence with Savitri Devi, and otherwise clarified the nature of his ‘‘Esoteric Hitlerism.’’ This study has also benefited from scholarly encouragement and de- bate. Warm thanks are due to my friends Professor Joscelyn Godwin and Dr. Hans Thomas Hakl for their generous help with sources and leads. An earlier review of Savitri Devi and her Hitler cult was the subject of my plenary lecture at the ninth international conference of CESNUR (Centre for Studies of New Religions, Turin) held at the University of Rome in May 1995. I owe thanks to the librarians and staffs of the British Library; the India Office Library and Records, London; the Bodleian Library, Ox- ford; the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford; and Indian Institute Li- brary, Oxford. vii INTRODUCTION ‘‘Discovered Alive in India: Hitler’s Guru!’’ The young German sat on the threadbare sofa listening to the words of the old woman before him. Through windows opening onto a bal- cony, shafts of dust-flecked sunlight shone into the darkened space of her humble, spartanly furnished room. Outside the strange, heady tu- mult of India resounded in the full glare of the midday heat. All around he could hear the street sounds and raucous, bustling squalor of this back alley in Delhi. Occasionally, her narrative was interrupted by the songs of the exotic birds she kept in her room and the young man was distracted by the sudden darting movement of the many cats, her in- separable companions, that lay at her feet or dozed out on the balcony in the warm air. His attention fixed on the worn and crinkled face of the old woman as she carefully chose her words to tell the story of her life. She was dressed in the fashion of Indian women, wearing a loose white sari and a thin cotton shift over her shoulders. Soft gray hair framed her high forehead and was gathered behind her ears. While her brow was barely lined, her cheeks, chin, and neck blurred in a mass of furrows and wrinkles. Her lips were thin, and her mouth looked twisted, pointing downward at the right side. But it was her eyes that held him. Her eyes burned with a strange luminous quality, the light of inner vision and missionary zeal. But he also noticed that the left eye stared with a pained expression, while the right appeared tired and liquid, and he remembered with a start that she was now almost blind with cataracts. The old woman’s name was Savitri Devi and the young man had traveled all the way from Frankfurt to find her in this small bare room in old India and to hear in her own words the story of her sacred 1 2 INTRODUCTION mission for Hitler and Nazism. This elderly and infirm prophetess of Aryan revival, a philosopher of Hitler’s cosmic purpose and Nazi pil- grim in the ruins of the German Reich at the end of the Second World War, had lived for years in poverty and obscurity in Calcutta and Delhi. Now in November 1978, at the end of a long life devoted to the Aryan cause, she had found a new publisher. In late 1982 Ernst Zu¨ ndel, the founder-proprietor of the neo-Nazi Samisdat Publishers in Toronto, publicized the availability of a set of five two-hour cassettes of live interviews with Savitri Devi and a brand- new edition of her out-of-print classic The Lightning and the Sun (1958). The notice was mailed worldwide on card flyers and it is worth quoting in its breathless entirety: THE HITLER CULT REVEALED. Discovered alive in India: Hitler’s guru! For serious students of the occult: You can now purchase the complete set of tape cassette recorded, live interviews with Hitler guru Savitri Devi at her home in India. Hear in her own words the narration of a prophetic pilgrimage along the edge of the cosmic abyss. Watch the clouds of evil scatter under the lightning of Cosmic Justice and the sun of Cosmic Truth. Read her shocking and most recently published manuscript, ‘‘The Lightning and the Sun,’’ which exposes the tangled roots of Nazism for all to see. Discover through her the secret Nazi pyramid connection with Pharaoh Akhnaton and the ancient cult of the sun. Learn the real signif- icance of Genghis Khan’s evil role in history, his incredible significance in the present. Discover the hidden springs of Hitler’s manic will to power, his mystical bond with the dark forces of time and destiny. Pursue the outlines of evil in its awesome cosmic context. Decipher now the encoded workings of the Nazi mind. Perceive how Hitler saw the workings of the universe through: Human sacrifice. Veg- etarianism. Aryanism. The cyclic view of history. The children of vio- lence. The will to survive and to conquer. The seat of truth. Gods on earth. Kalki, the avenger. Were ancient sanskrit laws of the universe compiled in the Bhagavad Gita the secret source of Nazi strength? The amazing answers to these riddles are now at hand. Read them in ‘‘The Lightning and the Sun,’’ Hitler guru Savitri Devi’s huge, illustrated 448 page illumination of occult Nazi wisdom and prophecy.1 The Samisdat publicity was a resounding finale to a long and eventful life, begun early in the century in the beautiful, old walled city of Lyons. INTRODUCTION 3 *** When I first read these lines on the card flyer, I knew very little of Savitri Devi. But Samisdat Publishers was known to me as a far-right press owned by Ernst Zu¨ ndel, notorious for the publication in 1974 of the first English-language translation of The Auschwitz Lie, a short book that denied the very fact of the Holocaust. However, the Samisdat catalogue mingled efforts to glorify the Third Reich, minimize war crimes, and deny the extermination of the Jews with odd books about UFOs, incredible German secret weapons, and postwar Nazi bases in Antarctica. Ernst Zu¨ ndel clearly offered these topics as a potent myth of apocalyptic Nazi revival backed by astonishing resources. This myth might appeal to an older generation of unrepentant Nazis seeking imag- inative relief from the division of Germany since 1945. At the same time it introduced a young generation of Germans to the idea of the Third Reich’s achievement and technological superiority against a back- drop of neo-Nazi science fiction. Samisdat’s presentation of Savitri Devi was evidently part of this strategy designed to entice new audiences with the neo-Nazi message. Ancient mythology and pyramid secrets, Eastern religion, vegetarian- ism, and Green ideas—the very currency of the burgeoning New Age with its interest in exotic religion, spiritual truths, and a worship of nature—could be exploited as bait for the young, unwary, or simply curious. By the late 1970s the historical experience of the Third Reich was quickly receding into the past. As popular literature and films ably demonstrated, Nazism was becoming something mythical, even fantas- tic and also plastic, that could be molded and combined with novel associations and thereby given new meanings.