SAVITRI DEVI Archive

Chapter 9 of Souveniers et réflexions d'une Aryenne
(Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman)

“Awake, stir your fettered strength,
Make the sap run in our dried up furrows;
Make flash, under the flowered myrtles,
An unexpected blade, as in the Panatheneae.”

The increase in population is, as I tried to show above, at the same time the consequence and the cause of ever-renewed technological development—the consequence of the conservation, thanks to improvements in medicine and surgery, of a more and more considerable number of people who, normally, should not live; the cause of efforts by creative minds to create means to satisfy the needs, real or imagined, of a population that multiplies, often despite the absence of protective hygiene, and even more so if such hygiene is available. It is a vicious circle, and all the more tragic that it can probably be broken only on a worldwide scale. It would be criminal, indeed, to encourage the most noble and gifted people to lower their birthrate, which would expose them, given equal armaments—or simply in the fatal peace of a “consumer society” infinitely extended through gradual technological progress—to being erased by human types that are qualitatively inferior to them but dangerously prolific and whose demographics escapes any control.

Nobody was more conscious than Adolf Hitler of this fact, which he accords, in his policies, a place that it had never had under any régime, however racist, of the past. And it is perhaps in this more than in anything else that the obvious opposition of Third German Reich to the main tendencies of the modern world appears.

These tendencies are expressed in a precept harped on a hundred thousand times: “Live and let live”—applied (and this is to be emphasized) to men of all races and all degrees of health or physical or mental illness, but only to man. It is the opposite precept that our protectors of the sacrosanct mammal with two legs apply to the quadrupeds, whales, reptiles, etc., as well as the birds and the forests. There, it is a question of “letting live” at most what does not obstruct the indefinite expansion of all kinds of men and even, in extreme cases, only what supports this expansion, as it is apparently the case in communist China, where only the “useful,” i.e., exploitable animals have the “right to live.”

The eternal glory of Adolf Hitler—and, perhaps, the most brilliant sign that he was, par excellence, the man “against Time”; the man of the last chance for not partial but total rectification—is, precisely, to have overthrown this order of things. It is his glory for all times to have—and that even in a country in the midst of war, where so many urgent problems imposed their priority—“let live” Nature: protected (as far as possible) the forests and their inhabitants; took a clear position against vivisection; refused for himself all meat and dreamed of gradually suppressing the slaughterhouses, “after the victory” (when he would have had a free hand).¹ It is his glory, even more, to have mocked the misplaced zeal of lovers of “purebred” dogs, cats, or horses who were indifferent to the purity of their own progeny, and applied this time to man, in the name of the human élite, the very principle that had for millennia regulated the behavior of man with respect to animals and trees: “let live” only what does not obstruct the flowering of this élite; in the extreme case, only what favors it—or at least did all that was materially possible in this direction, in a world where, in spite of his power, he still had to take into account constant opposition.

I pointed out above the encouragement the Führer gave to the German birthrate.² The German people, at the same time the most gifted of the West, the most disciplined, and the most hardened by war, was to be the principal source of the future European aristocracy. (Hadn’t they already been that of the old aristocracy of the continent? The people from whom came, with the Franks, all the lords of Europe in the Middle Ages?).³ It was necessary that this source remain inexhaustible. However, “the most exceptional member of a family is often the fifth, the seventh, the tenth, or the twelfth child”⁴ and birth control brings about, in the more or less long term, the fall of stronger peoples—as it had, noted the Führer, brought about the end of the ancient world by numerically weakening its patrician houses in favor of the plebs who multiplied unceasingly and provided more and more of the adherents of leveling Christianity.⁵ It was thus necessary to honor mothers of large families.

But it does not follow that, according to the example our friends of man, Adolf Hitler contemplated with satisfaction the idea of an Earth infinitely exploited by an infinitely increasing population. Far from it! Even in Germany, the systematic encouragement of the birthrate as well as the protection of healthy children of good race were coupled with a severe policy of selection that, before the seizure of power, the diffusion of Mein Kampf had revealed to the public.⁶ In expression of this same policy, the law of Third Reich envisaged the sterilization of incurable patients, the damaged, the defective, thus of the more or less mixed Germans of non-Aryan blood—Jewish or otherwise—who were likely to transmit their physical and mental infirmities or their racial inferiority to their descendants. It also prohibited formally—under penalty of forced labor—any marriage and all extramarital sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans or people “of related blood”⁷ (artverwandt), i.e., Aryan, and more specifically Germanic.

Strict as it obviously was for the whole of the people, it was even more so for the members of the élite corps—the true Nordic aristocracy from any point of view—that the SS represented. They were directed to marry. It was, for them, a duty to the race—and also a command of the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler.⁸ And they were asked to have as many children as possible. But they could choose their wives only with the authorization of the “SS Race Office” (SS Rassenamt) that examined with ultimate rigor the family tree of the girl, as well as her state of health and that of her ancestors.

And, if they were to create life profusely, they were also to be prodigious with their own blood, on all the fields of battle. It was to them that were entrusted the missions that required the most sustained courage, the most superhuman endurance, the most complete contempt of suffering and death. It is enough to compare the losses borne by these men on all fronts, but especially on the eastern front, with those of the other German military units and the best foreign armies, to feel just how little the life an individual of the élite, and a fortiori that of any lesser individual, counted in National Socialist Germany, when it came to the service of Reich. Admittedly, the birthrate was encouraged there, and the more so as the quality—physical and psychic—of the parents was more perfect. Admittedly, no German and no German of pure blood were to try to cheat nature by using contraceptives, and thus to risk depriving the race of an exceptional specimen.⁹ But, in addition, war—which the Führer envisaged, even “after victory,” as being quasi-permanent on the edge of the conquered territories, like the moving borders of the old Roman Empire; war, the “natural state of man”¹⁰ as he himself said—limited and would continue to limit the number of adults, so much so that an SS family could not foresee the probability of survival . . . unless it counted at least “four children.”¹¹

In other words, to the dream of perpetual peace in a stunted world, where man would have made Nature the maidservant of his petty pleasures and his petty health, Adolf Hitler opposed the dream of permanent battle—of “perpetual revolution”—at once the joy and the duty of the Strong, standing alone in the midst of universal disgrace. To the comfortable law of least resistance, he opposed the old Law of the Jungle: the ideal of life as at the same time exuberant and precarious, the dangerous life. To the slogan that slovenly, vacant, pretentious, and wretched youths were to diffuse soon in the nightmare world of that followed the collapse of the Reich: “Make love, not war!” he opposed beforehand the law of the English aristocracy of old: “To breed, to bleed, to lead.”

But that is not all. One of the most depressing traits of the Dark Age as it draws to its end is, certainly, the disordered proliferation of mankind. Malthus had, more than a hundred and fifty years before, already announced the dangers, but only from the economic point of view. Our optimists of today try to respond to him by suggesting new possibilities for exploiting the earth, and even the sea, which would allow us, according to them, to view without concern the quintupling, even the tenfold multiplication, of the human population of the planet. But the dangers remain and become greater and greater, because the global increase in the number of men happens today not in an “arithmetic” but in a geometric progression. And it seems indeed that currently—more than a quarter century after the defeat of National Socialist Germany—the point has been attained beyond which nothing, except a gigantic external intervention, human or . . . divine, could arrest it—all the more reason to decrease the population of the world to the level where it would cease to imperil the natural balance.

However, more than any other, the Führer was conscious of the catastrophe already represented (and more and more represented) by the overpopulation of certain areas of the earth—and not only because of the inevitable pressure, of more or less brief duration, of the “hungry” against the “affluent.” What he feared above all was the gradual disappearance of the natural élites, of the racial élites, under the rising tide of biologically inferior multitudes even if, here and there, some barrier could be set up in order to protect them. Because it should be noted that, at least in our time, it is, in general, the least beautiful and the least gifted races and, within the same people, the least pure elements, that are the most prolific.

What the Defender of the Aryan élite also feared was the lowering of the physical, intellectual, and moral level—the loss of quality—of generations to come. It is, indeed, a result, statistically inevitable, of the unlimited increase in the number of humans, even “of good race,” as soon as natural selection is beaten and breached by the generalized application of medicine, surgery, and especially preventive hygiene, factors of reverse selection. Also, his program of purifying the German people (and, if he had won the war, the people of Europe) entailed, parallel to the sterilization of the incurable, who were able, despite everything, to justify their own existence by some useful work, the pure and simple physical suppression (without suffering, self-evidently) of beings human in form only—but only just—such as monstrosities, idiots, the mentally retarded, the insane, etc. It was conceived as a definitive return to healthy Nature, which drives the mother bird to throw the deformed chick out of the nest; also, in the spirit of the stockbreeder who, from the litters of his bitches or his mares, culls without hesitation the deformed specimens or those too weak to survive without constant care. It was conceived in the spirit of the divine Lycurgus, legislator of Sparta. And it is known that the laws of Lycurgus had been dictated to him by Apollo of Delphi—“the Hyperborean.”

Unfortunately, this program knew only the beginning of application. The savage opposition of the Christian Churches, Catholic as well as Protestant, resulted in “putting off until later” the drastic measures it comprised. Adolf Hitler was too realistic to fly in the face, in the midst of war, of prejudices that eleven hundred years of Christian anthropocentrism had anchored in the psychology of his people—and to face the indignant sermons of some bishops, such von Galen of Münster. It would have been difficult to put these prelates (and this one in particular) under arrest, without risking in their flocks a disaffection that could not have been more inopportune for the régime. Thus (inter alia) some ten thousand mental patients survived the fall of the Third Reich in the asylum of Bethel, close to Bielefeld—unfortunately, I repeat.

It remains true that the physical elimination of human rejects was, with the sterilization of patients who were incurable but still “usable” as “economic factors,” was an essential aspect of Adolf Hitler’s fight against decadence. The pure and simple suppression of medicine and preventive hygiene was, logically, to be another aspect of it. And it would, no doubt, have been another aspect, in a victorious Germany that would have dominated Europe and would not have had anything more to fear from the menace of the prolific multitudes, massed in the East under the command of leaders who had identified the old cause of Pan-Slavism with that of Marxism-Leninism. Indeed, in view of the tragic reality of this menace—and what it represented, in the longer run, and for quite different reasons, namely, the overpopulation of the entire Earth—it was with this foreign proliferation that a brake had to be applied first.

In a discussion on 15 January 1942, the Führer refers to the “alarming” increase in the population of India, an increase of fifty-five million in ten years¹²—much more alarming, one should say, that, in this distant and last bastion of a properly Aryan religious and metaphysical tradition, it is the low castes, the aboriginals and Eurasians—the non-Aryans and the racially-mixed—that multiply at an almost insane rate, while the few million Aryans who succeeded for sixty centuries to survive more or less pure, in a vast multiracial environment, represent an increasingly restricted minority and enjoy (and enjoyed already in 1942, thanks to the parliamentarism introduced by the British), less and less political influence. But this tragedy did not concern Germany in war. The Führer continues: “We notice the same phenomenon in Russia; the women there have a child every year. The principal reason for this increase is the reduction in mortality due to progress in hygiene. What are our doctors thinking?”¹³ There, it concerns the direct threat of indefinitely increased masses, which are likely to submerge and dissolve in their midst the future German colonists of the steppes of the East and, at the same time, to soften the combatants of the German army the least detached from the human-too-human; Aryan masses, undoubtedly, but non-Germanic, and that the fate of history has opposed to Germans in the Middle Ages, and, later, sometimes mixed with Mongolian blood. It concerns a danger for the German people and the balance of the new world that the Führer dreamed of founding: a Pan-European Empire, if not Pan-Aryan, dominated by Germany.

Adolf Hitler wanted to counter this danger, and he surmised well that the prohibition of preventive hygiene measures would not be enough. Also, if one believes the report of Rauschning, he had considered more radical measures—always in the spirit of the immemorial Law of the Jungle; of the “struggle for life,” that the superior man has to apply against every other man of lower quality than himself since they are his true rivals on earth: they, and not the noble beasts, aristocrats of the forest, savannah, or desert, his “equivalents” in the world deprived of the Word; they, and not the trees, ornaments of the soil. “Nature is cruel,” declared the Fighter “against Time”; “We thus have the right to be as well. At the moment when I will launch into the storm of iron and fire the flower of Germanism, without a pang of regret for the precious blood that will gush in floods, who could dispute the right to destroy millions of men of lower races, who multiply like insects, and whom I will not, moreover, exterminate, but merely systematically prevent from reproducing?—for example, by separating the men from the women for some years”¹⁴ . . . And more: “Since so much has been said for centuries about the protection of the poor and the miserable, the moment perhaps has come to preserve the strong, who are threatened by their inferiors.”¹⁵

Lastly, it is of little use to recall that this “directed economy of demographic movements,”¹⁶ by means of which he hoped to be able, beyond the Germanic world, to stop this tendency to overpopulation characteristic of the Dark Age, represented only one aspect of his activity against the current of the tendencies of this Age. A parallel action, more visible and more brutal—like that so much decried and so misunderstood, of the Einsatzgruppen—would have completed it later. While all the wisdom of the Führer must be presented as a return to eternal Principles, his methods do not fail to recall those of Antiquity in their total absence of “individual conscience” and, therefore, remorse, as much with him, who was the person in charge, as with the men who applied them. The culling of human rejects even in the midst of his own people makes one think of the summary treatment reserved in Sparta for malformed newborns that the Ephors judged unworthy of being raised. And the action of his Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia—among the many populations controlled and always ready to revolt—singularly recalls the pitiless Spartan kryptei among the Helots. The one as well as the other, above all, are acts of preventative defense against being swarmed by the vanquished, whose mere awareness of their number encourages them to raise their heads, and that the least thing could cause them to rise up in force against their conquerors.

An enthusiastic declaration of the Führer shows, moreover, better than long commentaries, his eminently revolutionary attitude and his contempt for the modern world that he knew, in any case, was doomed and that he dreamed of destroying: “Well, yes, we are Barbarians, and we want to be Barbarians. It is a title of honor. We are those who will renew the world. The current world is close to its end. Our only task is to ransack it.”¹⁷

To ransack it in order to build on its ruins a world in agreement with the eternal values; with “the original meaning of things.”¹⁸

One can reconcile the actions undertaken, in Germany and in the countries occupied by the armies of the Third Reich against the Jews with those of the Einsatzgruppen in the Eastern territories. In both cases they acted, according to instructions transmitted by Reinhardt Heydrich in May 1941 to the heads of the latter, “to destroy without mercy any opposition past, present, and future to National Socialism,”¹⁹ i.e., to eliminate as much as possible the current or potential enemies of the new faith and the new Germanic Empire. In the second case, the action reveals a scale of values in perfect opposition to all anthropocentrism—or furthermore, a scale of values completely stripped of hypocrisy. For war is in itself the negation of any anthropocentric faith or philosophy—above all war between men of different races and civilizations, in which the one considers the habitat of the other as necessary, or favorable, for their own development. Himmler pointed out that the Anglo-Saxon pioneers in North America “had exterminated the Indians who only asked to live on their native ground”²⁰ And the most savage anti-Hitlerians are indeed forced to admit that he spoke the truth and that there is not any “respect for human dignity” in the attitude of the founders of the USA with respect to the true Americans. It is too easy, after the fact, when they installed their democracy across a whole continent practically empty of its inhabitants, a race destroyed in the most cowardly manner—by alcohol—it is easy then, I say, to proclaim that the era of violence is over; to prohibit others from carving out a “living space” as one carved one out for oneself, and, if their efforts fail, to make them appear before a parody of an “international Tribunal” as “criminals against humanity.” It is easy. But it shows dishonesty, bad faith. It also shows secret and sordid envy—of the dwarf against the giant—of the plutocrat in search of new markets against the warrior capable of honest and detached violence; also, of all the proud citizens of trembling colonial powers against the triumphant Third Reich at the peak of its glory.

In these two actions—those of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia, and that against the Jew everywhere—those responsible for the Third Reich treated, or allowed to be treated, the men of conquered countries as the founders of the USA had treated the Redskins, but with less hypocrisy. They openly admitted that “the greatest tragedy is to create a new life by treading upon corpses”²¹—the number of corpses does not matter if the “new life” is closer to its divine prototype, if it is more faithful to the supreme values, than the life that disappears. And they sincerely believed that it was it, or it would be. (And it would, indeed, have been, if Germany had won the war.)

To the American prosecutor Walton, who questioned him during his trial, after the disaster, Gruppenführer SS Otto Ohlendorf, commander in chief of Einsatzgruppe D, declared that a man “who showed pleasure in these executions, was sent home”²²—which is to say that these executions were considered in high places, as in the ranks of the SS, as an unpleasant necessity, as a task to be accomplished without hesitation, certainly, but without joy or distaste, with a serene indifference, in the interest of the German, soon to be pan-Aryan, Reich, which was also “the interest of the Universe.”²³ Indeed, in the spirit of the supreme Leader, Adolf Hitler, the expansion and the transformation of the Reich were to start a world “rectification,” in the traditional sense of the word.

But if, in practice, a “People’s Commissar,” a Slavic Communist,²⁴ were killed as an “enemy of the Reich,” as well as a Jew, it remains true that there is a nuance—a difference of significance—between these two actions. The Slavic Communist was—just as any Communist, just as a good number of non-Communists, such as the nationalists of the Polish intelligentsia, who were also shot by the commandos of Einsatzgruppen—considered as personally dangerous. In killing him, one eliminated an enemy, real or supposed. (There was not time to examine each particular case and to see whether, perhaps, some individuals of value could not have been, with time, brought to accept a new Europe dominated by Germany.)

The Jew—more for the danger that he could represent, and often represented personally—was himself held to be dangerous by his very essence: by belonging to the people whose historical role was to spread counter-truths and counter-values, the source of subversion, the source of “Anti-nature”; the “chosen” people of the Powers of Decline (the exact antithesis of the Aryan and especially of the German), without whom neither Marxism, nor Jacobinism, nor Christianity—this “Bolshevism of the ancient world,” as the Führer put it so well—nor any of the forms of the superstition of “man” and his “happiness” at all costs would ever have seen the light of day. He symbolizes the victory of the Dark Age that the initiates know to be inevitable, but that they endeavor, despite it all, to push back as long as possible, if they have a heart that loves combat. His elimination was, even more than that of people of all races who believed his lies, a challenge thrown to the Forces of disintegration. Because he was the “impure” element, Himmler had, in more than one speech, compared him to the parasitic insects whose presence degrades the most beautiful hair, the most robust body. And he saw in its suppression “not a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness.”²⁵

And yet . . . If there was an order to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen to eliminate without mercy “the enemies of National Socialism” (and that means the Jews as well) there does not exist any German document proving that the “final solution of the Jewish problem” meant the “total physical liquidation of the Jews.” In the famous Protocol of the Wannsee Conference of 18 January 1942, the authenticity of which is questioned as well by an author as impartial as André Brissaud,²⁶ one finds, during the show trials after the war, with the well-known bad faith that regarding the SS, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), Gestapo, etc., the sentence that actually means “expulsion of the Jews from German living space”—Zurückdrängung der Juden aus dem Lebensraum of the deutschen Volkes—translated as “extermination of the Jews in German living space.”²⁶ And indeed, it seems that, initially, it is only “expulsion” and not indiscriminate extermination that was carried out, and that, in spite of the aggressiveness of the Jews of the whole world, in spite of the resounding “declaration of war against the German Reich” issued in New York at the beginning of August 1933, by Samuel Untermayer, President of the “International Jewish Economic Federation to combat the Hitlerite oppression of Jews” . . . while there still had been in Germany neither “oppression” nor persecution; in spite of the call of Wladimic Jabotinski—future head of the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun Zwi Leumi—in the Jewish review Masha Rietsch in January 1934, for “the extermination of all Germans.”

That seems all the more true as before the war, the Sub-Group IV 134 of Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) itself was occupied, in close cooperation with Haganah, the clandestine Zionist organization, with sending the Jews of Reich to Palestine, then under British mandate, and that in spite of the opposition of the government in London. Thus, in 1938 and the first months of 1939, nearly four hundred thousand Jews left the German territory, in full agreement with the National Socialist authorities.²⁸ Not to mention those who left it without being forced, from 1933 to 1938, or before 1933.

Moreover, the famous “Nuremberg Laws” of September 1935, which could not better reflect the spirit of the Hitlerian revolution and the purest Aryan racism, while denying in Jews (as well as all non-Aryans) the possibility of acquiring German nationality and prohibiting them “to raise the German colors or to hoist the national flag of Reich,” gave them the right “to hoist the Jewish colors.” The exercise of this right, it was specified, “was placed under protection, of the State,”²⁹ which proves quite well that, at that time, Israelites were still—in spite of their historical role as “ferments of decomposition”—considered in National Socialist Germany, certainly as foreigners, of which it was advisable to be wary and who should be held at a distance, but not as “vermin” to destroy.

Things would change in 1941 and above all in 1942, and more and more as the Second World War became more relentless, more “total,” and that, thanks above all to those “million non-Jewish friends of the Jews,” with whom Samuel Untermayer had envisaged, almost ten years before, favorable collaboration with his brothers in race in their fight to the death against the Third Reich.

For as of May 1940, the massive attack of the English air force, deliberately directed against the German civilian population, commenced. The English General Spaight boasts enough of it in his book Bombing Vindicted. And the flood of phosphorus and fire did nothing but intensify after the entrance of the USA into the war, until, night after night, whole German cities were transformed into blazing infernos. It is estimated that approximately five million German civilians, women, old men, children, died during these ferocious bombardments: crushed under the smoking debris or burned alive in their shelters by burning liquid asphalt that flowed through the melted streets.

The Führer did not, from 1933 until shortly after the “declaration of war” of several Jews in the name of them all, have all the Jews of Germany interned, as he could have then.³⁰ He felt strong enough to be generous, and besides, there was a luminous side to his personality along with the implacable. He had allowed to leave all who wished it—to leave with their money, which they immediately used to stir up world opinion against him and his country. He had done everything, tried everything, to peacefully uproot them from German living space; but no government had agreed to accommodate them en masse on its territory or in its colonies. Now, it was war. And it was a Jewish war, as they themselves proclaimed to anyone who wished to hear them; a war waged by Aryans whose self-interest (badly understood), narrow and jealous nationalism, and especially the superstition of “man” inherited from both Christianity and Descartes had, for years, been exploited by Jewish propaganda; a war made against the Germans as “enemies of humanity” and against the National Socialist Weltanschauung as “a negation of man.” It was hell unleashed against Germany by the Jews, in the name of “man.”

Nobody, certainly, if he is not one of those who “live in the eternal,” can boast of knowing the deep thoughts of Adolf Hitler. However, it is logical to suppose that, at the origin of the hardening in his attitude towards the Jews that appeared after 1941, but especially later, there was, in him, a violent reaction against this superstition of “man” and all the morals that result from it, in view of the daily horror and relentless increase of “phosphorus cleansings,” as their authors, the Anglo-American bombers, called them.³¹ If this was the application of the morality of “man,” relentlessly crushing National Socialism by burning alive, women and children included, the people who had acclaimed it and carried it to power, then why still hesitate to oppose them, until the final consequences, with the immemorial morality of the Jungle: the fight to the death between incompatible species?

Perhaps the Führer did not order the massive suppressions of Jews, without distinction of sex or age, more in conquered spaces of the East (where besides they very often mingled with the most dangerous snipers and saboteurs), than in the concentration camps. But he allowed his collaborators to act, and most carried out radical measures—like Goebbels, whom Hitler, however, had severely reprimanded shortly after the well-known popular “pogrom” the night of 9-10 November 1938, called Kristallnacht.³² Heinrich Himmler and Reinhardt Heyrich did nothing but carry out suggested measures, for which the Führer accepted full responsibility.

But it is above all the properly constructive aspect of Hitlerism that makes of it the philosophy of the combat of the élite against leveling—against “massification” (Vermassung)—and the instrument of rectification in extremis of Aryan humanity and, through it, of all earthly life, against the current of Time.

I have said and repeated throughout these discussions: the “New Order” of the Führer—which he wanted and which, unfortunately, the pressure of the dark Forces of the whole world was to crush before its installation—was nothing “new.” It was the oldest Order that can be: the “original” Order of things, firmly based on the eternal truths that dominate and condition this particular manifestation of the Being that is life.

But its resurgence in our advanced stage of the Age of untruths par excellence (and a fortiori, later still) could not and will not be able to never take place except by grace of combat. Because of that, the idea of combat without relent—of “perpetual revolution”³³—is inseparable from Hitlerism. It sustained as well its most positive creations, in all domains, by the most implacable defensive measures against the corruption of the race or the saboteurs of the régime. Hitlerian intolerance is, in its very aggressiveness, only a defensive intolerance: a reaction, as I tried to show, against the millennial intolerance of Judaism and its “jealous God,” and against those no less “jealous” entities (“universal conscience,” “democracy,” etc.) in which a more and more Judaized world believes. Hitlerism itself is, in its very conquering spirit, only a movement of defense, protection, resurrection of the fundamental values of Life, denied in the West for centuries. It is the defense of the ideal Order, more or less apparent in the most venerable ancient societies, against all interbreeding, all leveling, all choices against the grain, all perversions of nature; against the disintegrating pressure of what it is conventionally called “progress” and which is only, at bottom, the ever more emphatic affirmation of anthropocentrism. It is, I repeat it again, unthinkable apart from the Dark Age.

When I speak about this “constructive aspect,” I do not particularly have in mind the spectacular achievements, material, social, and even cultural, of the Third German Reich: not the revival of the national economy, almost the next day; not various initiatives or institutions that one could call “philanthropic,” if leaders of the régime themselves had simply held them to be only marks of social justice: assistance to mothers with children; distributions of coal to old men during the winter; cruises to the Balearic or Canary Islands organized for factory workers on paid leave—not the royal Autobahnen with four lanes as far as the eye can see amidst the splendor of the restored forests. All these were only the obvious signs of the victorious revolution—nothing but a start. The other signs, less obvious, more subtle than the former, had already made their appearance in all domains of life. The newborns received, more and more often, beautiful German names, evocative of a legendary past. Furniture—at least in certain privileged homes, such as those of members of the SS—was decorated with symbolic motifs, whose occult influences were felt even by those to whom they were never explained. But, whatever their importance may have been, they were still only signs. They were not the revolution.

The true, positive, creative revolution—unique among the political upheavals of every century, since Antiquity—was the return to the sources, under the command of a qualified Leader and Master: at the same time initiate and strategist, and supreme holder of political authority; prophet of the “new” (or rather eternal) Doctrines and founder of the corresponding visible order; invested, as I mentioned above, with the “power of the Two Keys”—elected by these Forces of Life that militate with more and more impersonal fury against the current of the fatal tendencies of the Cycle close to its end. The true revolution was the effort of restoration of a traditional society, hierarchized according to the intangible values of time immemorial; resting firmly on the ground while it would carry its élite of race, character, and knowledge beyond the human, as the plant with the long serpentine stems maintains on the surface of the pond, far above the nourishing mud, its mystical lotuses, blooming in the light.

The European, if not pan-Aryan, society that the Führer wanted, was not to be anything else than that. Centered politically around the “Greater Reich”—i.e., Germany, supplemented by spaces conquered in the west and especially in the east, it would have been dominated by the Germanic élite of the S.S. into which one would have incorporated more and more Aryans of non-German origin, judged worthy to form, with their brothers of blood, the warrior aristocracy of the new world. And a part at least of this young aristocracy would have been—already was, in fact—a spiritual élite: an initiatory group, attached, via a very old tradition, of Germanic expression, with the primordial Tradition.

Controlled since 1933 by the very Incarnation of the divine Liberator who returns unceasingly and, in subsequent years, by those of his paladins he himself would have chosen, the Reich was to become again what it had been, centuries before Christianity and Rome: the soil of the old German tribes; a “Holy Land” in the esoteric sense of the word; the cradle of a civilization nourished by energies streaming out from a powerful center of initiatory realization. And it is notorious that this new Aryan civilization, with its Germanic élite, had been this time inspired by exactly the same principles as the old society of Vedic and post-Vedic India, in times when the caste system, based here too on “race and personality,” still corresponded effectively with the natural hierarchy of men. There is, in both cases, at the root of the whole social structure—and, with exceptions, at the base of the relationship between conquerors and conquered—the same concept of irreducible congenital inequality between the human races, and even between the more or less clear subdivisions of the same fundamental race—inequality that no religious or philosophical anthropocentrism can attenuate, and that it is up to the wise legislator to reinforce—if that is possible—never to fight. The abyss that, in the spirit of Führer, separates the Aryans worthy of this name from the “sub-humans,” recalls in more ways than one, that which, in the Sanskrit Scriptures, separates and opposes the “twice born” Arya from the Dasyu. The Führer, according to Rauschning, goes so far as to speak about a “new variety of man,” the result of a true “mutation” in the “scientific and natural sense of the word,”³⁴ who “would exceed today’s man by far” and would move away more and more from “the man of the herd” who has already entered, according to him, “the stage of deterioration and obsolescence.”³⁵

It seems that he considered this “mutation”—which, like the initiation of the “twice-born” of ancient India, or that of the free men of pagan Greece into the “mysteries,” concerned only the race of the Masters—as the result of a severe series of tests. He judged that it was too late to impose such asceticism on the already mature generation. It was the youth, the “splendid youth” that Adolf Hitler loved so much—whose destinies he was to still trying to guide “in centuries to come,” by writing his Political Testament under the thunder of the Russian guns—that was to undergo it, and to emerge transformed, hardened, improved, raised to a higher level of being; a level that an élite within the élite was still to exceed.

It is in the “fortresses” (Burgs) of the simultaneously warlike and mystical Order of the SS—these veritable seedbeds of Kshatriyas of the West—that masters of arms and spiritual masters of the new aristocracy were to carry out the education of the young candidates for super-humanity. “My pedagogy is hard,” declared the inspired Legislator of the new Aryan world. “I work with the hammer and break off all that is weak or worm-eaten. In my Burgs, of the Order, we will raise a youth before which the world will tremble; a violent, imperious, intrepid youth” . . . a youth that “will be able to bear pain. I do not want in it anything weak or tender. I want it to have the force and the beauty of young lions . . . the innocence and the nobility of Nature.”³⁶ And further on, in the same conversation with Rauschning: “The only science that I will require of these young people is the control of themselves. They will learn how to overcome fear. Here is the first degree of my Order: the degree of heroic youth. It is from there that the second degree will depart: that of ‘the free man,’ the man ‘at the center of the world,’ ‘the God-man.’”³⁷

Who was it, this “God-man,” this “man in the center of the world,” whose nature seems to have completely escaped in Rauschning, as no doubt it did a number of other interlocutors of the Führer? Who was it—who could it be—if not he whom the sages, in the traditional sense of the word, call “the primordial man” or “the paradisiacal man”: he who has succeeded, thanks precisely to his “self-control,” in identifying himself with the center his being (which is, like that of any being, human or not, the very center of the manifested world) and who, thereby recovered the original innocence, since “while acting, he does not act”?³⁸

But there was a “future stage of virile maturity,” other degrees of initiation, more elevated, of which, according to Adolf Hitler, one was “not allowed to speak.” There were revelations that were to come “later”—“a long time, perhaps, after his death.” He knew that his death—like, at least apparently, that of the whole universe of truth which he was striving to recreate by iron and fire—would be indispensable to the ultimate achievement of his mission. He had had, at sixteen years of age, an extraordinary intuition of it, I should say: a vision.

He had, it seems, never expressed to anyone the depths of his thought, nor the extent (and horror) of what, from the angle of the “eternal Present,” his interior eye could discover about the immediate future of Germany and the world; nor the profound reasons—more than human—that made his combat necessary in spite of the old certainty and the more and more obvious prospects of inevitable collapse. He never said anything, because metaphysical knowledge, which alone justified all he could have said, is, like any knowledge of this order, incommunicable. Among his most devoted collaborators, the only ones who could follow him without an act of faith, were those—like Rudolf Hess—who, without being like him aspects of He-Who-Returns-Age-After-Age—were nevertheless initiates. These did not need any transmission, verbal or written, to grasp all that, in the secret thought of Führer, although impenetrable to the discursive intelligence, did not exceed their level.

The absolute rejection of an education that is “free and obligatory,” and the same for all,is still one of the great features that brings the society that Adolf Hitler dreamed of founding—and already that of the Third Reich itself—closer to traditional societies of the past. Already in Mein Kampf, the idea of an identical education for young boys and girls is rejected with utmost rigor.³⁹ One cannot give the same instruction to adolescents whom Nature destines for different and complementary functions. Likewise, one cannot teach the same things, and in the same spirit, to young people of the same sex who will, later on, have to devote themselves to unrelated activities. It would be to fill their memories with an accumulation of information for which the majority have no use, while depriving them, undoubtedly, of invaluable knowledge and neglecting the formation of their characters.⁴⁰ That is true, certainly, when they are sons of the same people. It is more so when they are not. To realize this, one need only think of the incongruities resulting from the mania for the general diffusion of a uniform instruction in a country of multiple races and cultures, such as, for example, India; or those caused by offering a baccalaureate program in French literature to twentieth-century Khmers, ignorant, for the most part, of their own culture.

Adolf Hitler saw, in this calamitous stupidity, one of the most alarming symptoms of the universal gangrene of the anti-Tradition. He wanted people to be taught only what it is good and desirable for them to know to take their place in the human hierarchy, the place they are destined to occupy by their total heredity: their race and their innate personal capacities. Few thinkers have attacked with his vehemence the “civilizing” mission of the Christian missionaries in Black Africa and elsewhere, their obstinate imposition on people of other climates ridiculous clothing⁴¹ and values that serve only to derange them and make some of them revolt. Few were as categorical as him in condemning a uniform general education, distributed without discrimination in the primary schools, to the children of the masses, even European—even German. He judged particularly useless, for the great majority of sons (and more so for the daughters) of the people, the superficial study of foreign languages, as well as science. One had, according to him, to be content to teach just enough of these matters “to give a good start”⁴² to those pupils who would take a true interest in them and would continue their schooling.

In a European society dominated by its Germanic élite, such as the Führer would have reconstructed it, if he had been able, education and culture, and a fortiori the practical probability of a advanced spiritual development, were to recover the secret character—strictly initiatory—that they had had in most remote antiquity, among the Aryan peoples and the others: among the Germans of the Bronze Age as in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, and in India. They were to be reserved for the privileged.

Emerging “in the beginning,” i.e., in the heroic age of National Socialism, from the decisive test of combat, these privileged ones came necessarily from all the classes of the “pre-Hitlerian” society. It could not be otherwise in a time when “class,” not corresponding to the purity of blood and its inherent qualities, no longer has any justification. But these soldiers of the first hour would, little by little—along with the youths rigorously selected and hardened, in the “Burgs” of the Order of the SS, in the asceticism of the body, the will, and knowledge—form an aristocracy, hereditary from hence forth, strongly rooted—owners of vast family domains in conquered spaces—and itself hierarchized. They would, these members of the élite corps par excellence, among whom stood side by side the most handsome, the most valorous sons of the peasantry, the most brilliant academics of good race, and many youths representing the ancient and enduring German nobility, gradually meld themselves into a true caste, an inexhaustible reservoir of candidates for super-humanity.

And, I repeat, this new nobility of the Western world, which he was creating, would also admit Aryans of “other nationalities” who had “shown sympathy” with the combat that Führer carried out,⁴³ admittedly “for the great Reich,” but also for the return of the entire Earth to a life based on the traditional truth; “for the great Reich” because to him it alone could be instrument of this rectification in extremis, if any somewhat durable rectification were not already impossible. Already the Waffen SS, which, were it not for the destiny proper to our end of the cycle, could have been the barrier against the immense enterprise of subversion that Marxism represents, included contingents from about thirty countries, including an Indian Legion and a “Britische Freiwilligen Korps” (British Volunteer Corps) or “English Legion of Saint George”—for it is true that “great empires are, of course, born on a national base but very quickly leave it behind them.”⁴⁴ And what is true of an “empire,” is all the more true of a civilization.

“Total freedom of instruction” was thus to be the privilege of the élite of blood and character—of the natural élite—and of “those whom it would admit to its midst.”⁴⁵ (And it was going to admit fewer and fewer to the extent that, thanks to the rigorous racial selection to which it would be subjected, it would rise more and more above the less pure, less perfect masses.) If necessary, completely released “of all humanitarian and scientific prejudices,” and returning to those of the first ages of the world, the future Hitlerian civilization would impart “to the great mass of the lower class” and, a fortiori, to the lower races conquered abroad, whom the Führer designated in advance with the name of “modern slaves,” the “benefit of illiteracy.”⁴⁶ And wherever, for the maintenance of harmony between the community, the visible hierarchy, and the real hierarchy of the world of Essences, a certain knowledge and a certain quality of existence would be considered necessary or advantageous, it would impart different degrees of knowledge and asceticism, or encourage their acquisition—“a level of education for each class, and, within each class, for each level.”⁴⁷ And that even among the élite, which, I repeat, would comprise “levels” corresponding to innate capacities of development and action.

In several discussions, the Führer admitted great debts to his adversaries, in particular the Catholic Church, of which he admired its solid structure and duration, and, within the Church, the Order of the Jesuits, with its spiritual exercises and iron discipline. He admitted having borrowed from Freemasonry the practice of secrecy—the very thing that made them strong, and made them dangerous in his eyes. He wanted, he said, to beat the Jews “with their own weapons,” and declared—with justice—that “he who learns nothing from his enemies is stupid.”⁴⁸ But these contributions, as important as they may be, would never have been enough to give to true Hitlerism the traditional character that I tried, throughout these pages, to highlight. They would not have been enough, because the Church and the Freemasons were, as a whole (as spiritual groups), cut off, already for centuries, from the primordial Tradition, and because the Jews, the agents of deliberate organized leveling of all non-Jewish humanity, could not, for this reason (i.e., apart from isolated apolitical individuals, thirsting for pure spirituality, who perhaps exist among them) do anything else but represent the anti-Tradition: the inspiring and directing brain of social subversion, itself the tangible expression of subversion in the esoteric sense of the word. Another thing was needed: no more borrowing from the deformed, if not reversed, image of the Tradition, such as it appears in the organizations and in the pseudo-religious, pseudo-racial community that National Socialist Germany had to fight, but a powerful, effective, true bond with the Tradition, a bond assured and maintained by the only means by which it ever was restored and consolidated: initiation.

If one thinks of this total rejection of modern prejudices, by which Hitlerism is opposed to all the political doctrines of our time, as of the centuries that immediately preceded it; if one remembers this dream of universal hierarchy, based above all on blood, that was and remains his own; and, especially, perhaps, if one considers this resounding negation of the great Jacobin idea of the “right of all men” to at least primary instruction, one cannot help but relate the spirit of the Führer to that the ancient legislators, spokesmen of the Gods. I have, in connection with the liquidation of idiots, mental retardates, and other human rejects that Adolf Hitler wanted, and the whole biological effort of selection practiced under his orders, especially within the SS élite, evoked the laws the Delphian Apollo once dictated to Lycurgus. (And the physical perfection that was required of the volunteers of the Black Order, bring immediately to mind that which this same God, Aryan par excellence, demanded of his priests: that anyone with weak eyesight or even one tooth in need of care, be barred from the possibility of the noviciate.)

The secret character of all science—even secular—in the future Hitlerian civilization, and the efforts already made under Third Reich to limit, as much as possible, the ills of general education—the “most corrosive poison” of liberalism—evoke the curse that, thousands of years ago, and in all the traditional societies, was visited on all those who would have divulged willy-nilly—and especially to people whose blood is held to be impure—knowledge that priests (and those whom they considered worthy) had exclusively. They recall the very ancient Laws of Manu and the strict prohibition therein on teaching Sudras (and, with better reason, Chandalas, Poukhasas, and other people of mixed blood) the science of the sacred Scriptures and magical incantations.⁴⁹ The most severe penalties applied, in ancient India, to the Aryan who allowed himself to state a secret text in the presence of a man of the servile castes, and to the Sudra, or the mongrel, who may have heard, even without having listened. Similar laws existed among all peoples still attached, each via its élite of blood and science, to the original Tradition, all science then still “sacred” and secret.

In his book, brimming with gall but also abounding with involuntary homages to the Führer—the most malevolent criticisms that, in fact, are compliments, of which he is unaware—Hermann Rauschning describes Hitlerism as “the irruption of the primitive world into the West.”⁵⁰ In reality, it is not the “primitive world” that is operative here—not, at least, the “primitive world” in the sense that Rauschning intends—but the primordial world; the world before any rupture with the Tradition of more than human origin. The “savages” to whom the Christian alludes, furious to be mislead, are by no means “primitives,” but degenerates: precisely what the West is approaching, having just rejected the latest of its Saviors to date. The civilization that the latter had founded, if, by its refusal, Europe had not shown that it was already “too late,” had all the characteristics of the mighty “rectifications” that occur throughout the cycle, each time more briefly, but always inspired by the same nostalgia for the more and more inconceivable Golden Age, the Age of Truth.

Granted, irresistible forces, essentially telluric, had, at the call of Adolf Hitler, enthralled the crowd. And from the imposing night processions, in the light of torches, to the sound of battle songs, the drums and the brass bands, a true collective enchantment was unleashed. Why not? That also belonged to the art of awakening immemorial instincts; of the “return to Nature,” in its depth and its richness—and its innocence—after centuries of lies and emasculation. In spite of that, it was not “the tom-tom of savage tribes” that, as Rauschning writes, dominated the moving structure of the Third Reich, and above all, the thought and the aspirations of the Führer and the grand masters, known or hidden, of the SS—élite within the élite. It was, inaudible to carnal ears, but everywhere present, subtle, indestructible, calm even above Germany in flames, even above Europe degraded after the disaster of 1945, the eternal “music of the spheres” about which Plato spoke.

And those who were (and are) likely to seize its rhythm, to hear it, would continue to hear it even after the defeat: before the dwarves, disguised as “judges,” of the carnivalesque post-war tribunals; at the foot of the gallows and in the concentration camps of the victors; in the spinelessness of the “consumer society” imposed on the dismembered Reich and on Europe, the colony of the USA—the society with empty arsenals and brimming larders, as required by the Jews, who had forgotten nothing, and, alas, learned much since the time of the Weimar Republic.

For what is eternal cannot be destroyed. And the initiate is he who lives in the eternal and acts in the name of the very principles that govern the Universe. A Hindu of those who, at the beginning of the Second World War and even before, had greeted in the person of Adolf Hitler an “avatar of Vishnu” and the “leader of all Aryans,” told me that he recognized him as such because he wanted “to return the caste system to its original meaning, then, to extend it to the whole world.”⁵¹ In him, he specified, had reappeared That which, a few thousand years ago, had declared to the hero Arjuna: “From Me emanate the four castes, created by the different distribution of qualities.”⁵²

That concurs with and confirms all that I have just said—the initiate being consciously identical to the Principle of all being or non-being (having “realized” the identity of its essence with Him).

In spite of the polemics that the name of the Führer always unleashes, more than a quarter century after the disappearance of his person, his initiation into a powerful esoteric group, in direct connection with the primordial Tradition, is today no longer in doubt.

Granted, his detractors—and they are numerous!—tried to present him as a man carried away in all excesses, after being driven by his “hubris,” his lack of measure, to betray the spirit of his spiritual Masters. Or, they saw in him a Master of error, a disciple of “black magicians,” himself the soul and instrument of subversion (in the metaphysical sense, which is the most tragic). But their perspicacity is suspect for the sole reason that they view everything from the “moral” point of view—and a false morality, since it is supposedly “the same for all men.”

What, indeed, rebuffs them, and prevents them a priori from recognizing the truth of Hitlerism, is its total absence of anthropocentrism and the magnitude of the “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” on which it is historically dependant. In other words, they reproach Hitlerism for being in dissension with “the universal conscience.” But the too famous “universal conscience” does not exist; it never existed. It is, at most, only the sum of the prejudices common to people of the same civilization, insofar as they neither feel nor think for themselves—i.e., it is in no way “universal.”

And, moreover, spiritual development is not a business of morals but of knowledge, of direct vision of the eternal Laws of being and non-being. It is written in those ancient Laws of Manu, whose spirit is so close to that of the most enlightened devotees of the Führer, that “a Brahmin possessing the entire Rig-Veda”—which does not mean knowing by heart the 1009 anthems that make up the oldest of all Scriptures of Aryan language and inspiration, but having supreme knowledge—initiation—which would imply the perfect comprehension of the symbols that hide there under the words and the images that they evoke—it is written, I say, that this Brahmin “would be sullied by no crime, even if he killed all the inhabitants of the three worlds, and accepted food from the vilest man.”⁵³ Granted, such a man, having transcended any individuality, could act only without passion and, like the sage about whom Bhagavad-Gita speaks, “in the interest of the Universe.” But by no means does it follow that his action would correspond to a morality centered on “man.” There is even cause to think him capable, if need be, of going far beyond such a morality. Because nothing proves that “the interest of the Universe”—the agreement of an action with the deep exigencies of a moment of history, that the initiate himself grasps from the angle of the “eternal Present”—does not require, sometimes, the sacrifice of millions of men, even the best.

Much is made of the membership of Adolf Hitler (as well as several very influential personalities of the Third Reich, inter alia, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Dietrich Eckart), in the mysterious society, founded in 1912 by Rudolf von Sebottendorf.⁵⁴ Just as much is said about the determining influence there would have been on him of writings of a very particular esoteric and messianic character, inter alia, the writings of the former Cistercian monk Adolf Josef Lanz, called Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, founder⁵⁴ and Grand Master of the “Order of the New Templars” and his review Ostara.⁵⁶ One cannot fail to point out his slim connection with the geopolitician Karl Haushofer, member of the “Society of Vril,” versed in the knowledge of secret doctrines that would have been revealed to him in India, Tibet, and Japan, and very conscious of the immense “magic power” of the Swastika.⁵⁷ Finally, one must stress the particular role of initiator, which, of those near him, at least Dietrich Eckart would have played—if not Dietrich Eckart and Rudolf Hess, although both one and the other always posed in public life as his faithful disciples and collaborators. Dietrich Eckart would have, in December 1923, on his deathbed, declared before some of his brothers of the Thule Society, that the Masters of the aforesaid Society, including himself—he would have said “us” while speaking about them—would have given Adolf Hitler “the means of communicating with Them,” i.e., with the “Unknown superiors” or “Intelligences above humanity,” and that he would have, in particular, “influenced history more than any other German.”

It is advisable, however, not to forget that, whatever may be the initiatory training he followed later, it seems certain that the future Führer already was, “between twelve and fourteen years of age,”⁵⁸ and perhaps even earlier still, in possession of the fundamental directives of his historical “self”; they had already appeared in his love of art in general, and especially architecture and music; his interest in German history (and in history in general); his ardent patriotism; his hostility to the Jews (whom he already felt to be the absolute antithesis of the Germans); and finally, his admiration without bounds for all the works of Richard Wagner. It seems certain, if one refers to the account that his friend of adolescence, August Kubizek, left us of his life until the age of nineteen, that his great, his true “initiator”—the one who really awakened in him a more-than-human vision of things prior to any affiliation with a group with an esoteric teaching whatever it be—was Wagner, and Wagner only. Adolf Hitler retained all his life the enthusiastic veneration he devoted, almost since childhood, to the Master of Bayreuth. Nobody ever understood, felt, like him, the cosmic significance of the Wagnerian themes—nobody; not even Nietzsche, who nevertheless had undoubtedly traversed a certain way towards knowledge of the first Principles. The creation of Parsifal remained an enigma for the philosopher of the “superman,” who grasped only its Christian trappings. The Führer could rise beyond the apparent opposition of contraries—including the apparent one between “The Good Friday Spell” and the “Ride of the Valkyries.” He saw further. He hailed, behind “the poetic decoration of Wagnerian drama” . . . “the practical teaching of the stubborn fight for selection and renewal,”⁵⁹ and in the Grail, Source of eternal life, the very symbol of “pure blood.” And it was the glory of the Master to have known how to give his prophetic message the form of Parsifal as well as that of the completely pagan “Tetralogy.” It is that the music of Wagner had the gift to evoke to him not only the vision of “former worlds” but also scenes of history “in potential,” in other words, to open the doors of “the eternal Present”—and that, apparently, in adolescence, if one believes the admirable scene that August Kubizek reports having taken place following a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi at the Linz Opera, when the future Führer was sixteen years old. The scene is too beautiful not to quote it in extenso.

While leaving the theater of Linz where they had just attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, the two young people—Adolf Hitler and August Kubizek—instead of returning home, took, although it was already past midnight, “the way that led to the top of the Freienberg.” They liked this deserted place for passing, alone in the middle of nature, beautiful Sunday afternoons. Now, it was Adolf Hitler, visibly upset after leaving the spectacle, who had insisted that they go back there, in spite of the late hour—perhaps because of it. “He” (i.e. Adolf Hitler) “went,” wrote Kubizek, “without saying a word, without taking account of my presence. I had never seen him so strange, so pale. The higher we climbed, and the more the fog dissipated.” . . . “I wanted to ask my friend where he wanted to go thus, but the fierce and forbidding expression on his face prevented me from asking him the question.” . . . “Arriving at the top, the fog”—in which the city was still plunged—“had disappeared.”

Above our heads the stars shone all their fires in a perfectly clear sky. Adolf then turned to me and seized my two hands, which he tightened fast between his. It was a gesture that I had never seen him make before. I felt the extent to which he was moved. His eyes shone with excitement. The words did not leave his mouth easily, as usual, but hoarsely. His voice was raucous, and betrayed his distress.

Little by little, he started speaking more freely. The words came from his mouth in a flood. Never before had I heard him, and never again I was to hear him speak as then, when alone, standing under the stars, we had the impression of being the only creatures on earth.

It is impossible for me to relate in detail the words that my friend uttered before me in this hour.

Something completely remarkable, which I had never before noticed when he spoke to me with excitement, struck me then: it was as if another “I” spoke through him—an Other, whose presence upset him as much as it did me. One could in no way believe that it was a matter of an orator carried away by his own words. Quite the contrary! I rather had the impression that he himself was astonished, I would even say bewildered, by what spouted out of him with the elementary violence of a force of Nature. I dare not venture any opinion on this observation. But he was in a state of rapture, in which he transposed in an imposing vision, to another plane of his own—without directly alluding to this example and model, and not merely as a simple repetition of this experience—what he had just lived in connection with Rienzi. The impression the opera made on him, rather, had been the external impulse that had constrained him to speak. Like a mass of water flooding forth irresistibly from a broken dam, a torrent of eloquence flowed from him. In sublime images, with an invincible power of suggestion, he unfurled before me his own future and that of the German people . . . Then, there was silence. We went back down towards the city. The clocks of the bell-towers struck three in the morning. We parted before the house of my parents. Adolf shook my hand. Amazed, I saw that he did not return home, but started again toward the hill. “Where are you going now?” I asked him, intrigued. He answered laconically: “I want to be alone.” My eyes followed him a long time, while wrapped in his dark coat, he went up the empty street, in the night.”⁶⁰

“And,” Kubizek adds, “many years would pass before I understood what this hour under the stars, during which he had been lifted above all terrestrial things, had meant for my friend.”⁶¹ And a little later her reports the very words Adolf Hitler pronounced, much later, after having told Frau Wagner⁶² the scene I have just related—unforgettable words: “At this point in time everything began.” Then, i.e., when the future Master of Germany was, I repeat, sixteen years old.

It is, at the very least, curious, that this extraordinary episode—which, in addition to its clear “ring” of truth, has as a guarantee the very ignorance Kubizek seems to have had of the supra-human domain—has not been, to my knowledge, commented on by any of those who tried to attach National Socialism to “occult” sources. Even the authors who wished—quite mistakenly!—to ascribe to the Führer the nature of a “medium,” did not, as far as I know, try to make use of it. Instead of that, they emphasized the immense power of suggestion that he exerted not only on crowds (and women), but on all those who came, be it only occasionally, in contact with him, on men as coldly detached as Himmler; on soldiers as realistic as an Otto Skorzeny, a Hans-Ulrich Rudel, or a Degrelle.

However, to regard as a “medium” one who enjoys such a power is to ignore the basic principles of the science of parapsychological phenomena. A medium—or “subject”—is one who receives, who undergoes the suggestion, not one who is able to subject others to it, and especially so many others. This power is the privilege of the hypnotist or “magnetizer,” and, in fact, of a hypnotist of a superhuman calibre; of a magnetizer able to compel, to his advantage—or rather to that of the idea he wants to promote—those who are the strongest, the most composed, the most refractory to any influence, to play the role of “mediums.” One is not at the same time magnetizer and medium. One is one or the other, if not neither one nor the other. And if one wants to assign the “parapsychological” a part in the history of the political career of Adolf Hitler—as I believe one has the right—then the magnetizer is him, whose power of exaltation and transformation of human beings, by the word alone, was comparable to the power said to have been exercised once by Orpheus, with the enchantment of his lyre, on people and wild animals. The “medium” is the German people, as a whole, or almost—and some non-Germans throughout the world, to whom the radio transmitted the spellbinding Voice.

The episode referred to above—I translated Kubizek’s account of it⁶³—could very well be used as an argument in favor of the presence of “mediumic gifts” in the young Adolf Hitler if these so-called gifts were not contradicted in a resounding way, precisely by confusing the power of suggestion that he did not cease exerting, throughout his career, on the multitudes and practically all individuals. Kubizek tells us, indeed, that he had the very clear impression that an “other ‘I’” had then spoken through his friend; that the prophetic flood of eloquence appeared to spring forth as from a foreign force within him. However, if the adolescent orator had nothing of the “medium”; if he in no way was possessed by “an other”—God or the Devil, it does not matter; in any case not himself—then what was this “other ‘I’” who seemed to replace him, during this unforgettable hour at the top of the Freienberg, under the stars? And to replace him so completely that his friend would have been pained to recognize him, if he had not continued to see him?

It is understood that Kubizek “did not dare pass judgment” on the above. He speaks, however, about the “ecstatic state” of “complete rapture” (völlige Entrückung) and of transposition to an experience lived by the visionary on “another plane, in accordance with him” (auf eine andere, ihm gemässe Ebene). What is more, this vivid and recent experience—the impression produced on him by the story of the Roman tribune of the fourteenth century, translated and interpreted by the music of Wagner—had been, the witness tells us, only “the external impulse” that had led him to a vision of the future, personal as well as national; in other words, that had served as the occasion for the access of the young man to a new consciousness: a consciousness in which space and time, and the individual state that is related to these limitations, are transcended. The “another plane, in accordance with him” of the young Adolf Hitler means nothing less than the “eternal present,” and far from being “possessed” by some foreign entity, the future Master of the multitudes had become master of the Center of his own being; he had, under the mysterious influence of his Initiator—Wagner—taken the great decisive step on the way of esoteric knowledge, undergone the first irreversible change—the opening of the “Third Eye”—that had made him an “Edenic man.” He had just acquired the degree of being corresponding to what is called, in initiatory language, the Lesser Mysteries. And the “other ‘I’” that had spoken with his mouth about things of which his conscious everyday self was still unaware, or perhaps only half-perceived, “as through a veil,” a few hours before, was his true “I,” and that of all living things: Being, with which he had just realized his own identification.

It may seem strange to the immense majority of my readers—including those who, still today, venerate in him “our Führer for always”—that he could, being so astonishingly young, show such an awakening to supersensible realities. Among the men who aspire with all their ardor to essential knowledge, how many are there, indeed, who grow old in pious meditation and exercises without ever reaching this stage? But if there is a domain where the most fundamental inequality and the most flagrant appearance of the “arbitrary” reigns, it is surely this one.

It is not impossible for an exceptional youth of sixteen to cross the barrier that opens up the spirit in search of the principal truth, the initiation in the Lesser Mysteries. According to what is still told in India of his life, the great Sankaracharya would have been one. And twenty-two centuries earlier, Akhnaton, king of Egypt, was also sixteen years old when he started to preach the worship of Aton, Essence of the Sun, whose “Disc” is only the visible symbol. And there is every indication that there were others, less and less rare as one goes backwards along the course of the cycle of which we live in the last centuries.

If, in addition, one sees Adolf Hitler as one of the figures—and undoubtedly the penultimate one—of He-who-returns when all seems lost; the most recent of the many Precursors of the supreme divine Incarnation or the last messenger of the Eternal (the “Mahdi” of the Muslims; the Christ returned in glory of the Christians; Maitreya of the Buddhists; Saoshyant of the Mazdeans; Kalki of the Hindus, or whatever name one prefers to call He who must put an end to this cycle and open the Golden age of the next one), then all is clear. For then it is natural that he was an exceptional adolescent and already before that an exceptional child; a child for whom a sign, a word, or nothing (or what could appear to be “nothing,” to the eyes of everyone else) was enough to awaken intellectual intuition.

Then, one can even think that during the school years 1896-97, 1897-98 (and part of 1898-99) that he spent as pupil at the college of the Benedictine abbey of Lambach-an-Traun, in Upper Austria, the magic of holy Swastika—powerful cosmic symbol, immemorial evoker of the most fundamental Truth—seized, penetrated, dominated him; that he would be, beyond the exciting solemnity of the Catholic worship, identified with it forever.

For the reverend Father Theodorich Hagen, abbot of Lambach, thirty years before, had this sacred sign engraved on the walls, on the woodwork, in all the corners of the monastery, however paradoxical that such an action, “without precedent” in a Christian convent,⁶⁵ might appear. And while he sang in the choir, the young Adolf Hitler, nine years old in the year 1898, ten in 1899, had “just opposite him” on “the high back of the abbatial armchair,” in the very center of the heraldic shield of Father Hagen, the ancient Symbol from now on destined to remain forever attached to his own name.

Thus it is natural that he had very early, parallel to his opening to the world of the Essences, the consciousness of what must be done in this visible and tangible world to bring to it, in the eleventh hour, a “rectification”; or even merely to suggest one—for sounding the last, the supreme warning of the Gods, if the universal decline were (as it seems, indeed, to be) irremediable. And, according to what Kubizek reports, everything indicates that this was so, since, at the moment of his extraordinary awakening, the future Führer spoke about the “mission” (Auftrag) that he would one day receive to guide the people “from servitude to the pinnacle of freedom.”⁶⁶

If, now, one wonders which influence, besides that of the music of Wagner and that, less immediate, perhaps, but always vivid, of the Swastika, could help the young Adolf Hitler acquire so early the power to transcend space and time, one immediately thinks of the sole love of his youth: the beautiful Stefanie with the heavy blonde braids rolled up around her head like a flexible and brilliant crown⁶⁷; Stefanie, to whom he never dared address a word, because she “had not been introduced to him,⁶⁸ but who had become in his eyes “the feminine counterpart of his own person.”⁶⁹ Kubizek insists on the exclusiveness of this very particular love, and on “the ideal” plane on which it always remained. He tells us that the young Adolf Hitler, who identified Stefanie with Elsa of Lohengrin and “other figures of heroines in the Wagnerian repertory,”⁷⁰ did not feel the least need to speak to or hear her, so certain he was that, “intuition sufficed for the mutual comprehension of extraordinary people.” He was satisfied to see her passing in the distance; to love her from afar like a vision of another world.

Once however, on a beautiful Sunday in June, something unforgettable happened. He saw “her”—as always, at the side of her mother—in a procession of carriages decked with flowers. She held a bouquet of poppies, cornflowers, and daisies: the same flowers that swamped her carriage. She approached. Never had he seen her so close—and never had she seemed more beautiful to him. He was, said Kubizek, “walking on air.”⁷¹ Then, the luminous eyes of the girl lighted upon him for a moment. She smiled to him, in a carefree manner, in the festive atmosphere of this sun-drenched Sunday, took a flower from her bouquet, and threw it to him.⁷² And the witness of this scene adds that “never again”—apparently, not even when he saw him again in 1940, shortly after the campaign in France, at the pinnacle of glory—did he see Adolf Hitler “more happy.”

But even then, the future Führer did nothing to approach Stefanie. In his idyll he remained, “for weeks, for months, for years.”⁷³ Not only did he no longer wait for the girl after the just-mentioned gesture, but “any initiative that he could have taken beyond the rigid framework of conventions would have destroyed the image he fashioned of her in his heart.”

When one remembers the role played, in the life and spiritual evolution of the knight of the Middle Ages, of the “Lady of his thoughts”—who as well could be (although it was not necessarily) a figure whom he had merely glimpsed, and even some remote princess, whom the devoted knight knew only by her reputation for beauty and virtue—and when it is known, moreover, what deep connections existed between the Orders of Chivalry and the hermetic, i.e., initiatory, teaching, one cannot help making the connection.

Kubizek ensures us that, at least during the years that he lived in Vienna in his company, the future Führer did not answer even once the solicitations of women—did not await any of them, did not approach any of them, although he was “physically and sexually completely normal.”⁷⁴ And he tells us that the adored image of she who, in his eyes, “incarnated the ideal German woman” would have sustained him in this deliberate refusal of any carnal adventure.

It is instructive to note the reason for this refusal that Kubizek relates in all simplicity, not understanding the implications of the words of his friend of youth. Adolf Hitler wanted, he tells us, to safeguard in himself, “pure and undiminished,”⁷⁵ what he called “the flame of Life,” in other words, the vital force. “Only one moment of carelessness, and this sacred flame is extinct forever”—at least for a long time—he wrote, showing us thereby the value the future Führer attached to it. He tries, without success, to elucidate what it is about. He sees in it only the symbol of the “holy love” that awakens between people who keep pure of body and of spirit and who “are worthy of a union intended to give the people a healthy posterity”?⁷⁶ The safeguarding of this “flame” was to be, he continues, “the most important task”⁷⁷ of the “ideal State” that the future founder of the Third German Reich thought about during his solitary hours. That is true, undoubtedly. But there is more to it.

There wass, it seems, on the part of the young Adolf Hitler a voluntary refusal of sexual life, not, certainly, with the aim of the vain “mortification of the flesh,” but for the use of the “sacred flame of life” for the conquest of the higher states of his being and, finally, for the conquest of the realization, of the experience of the Unthinkable beyond Being and Non-Being: the “supreme Heaven” of Dante; the One of Plotinus; the Brahman of the Sanskrit Scriptures. The revolution that he already contemplated could only come from “on High,” for it is a true, the sole true revolution: the overthrow of anthropocentric values that are nothing but the product of the laughable vanity of fallen man. He knew it. And thus, no doubt, more than one knight aspiring to “God,” that is to say, to knowledge of the supreme Principle, resisted more easily temptations of the senses by evoking the idealized image of his “Lady”; thus Dante saw himself accompanied through two levels of his ascent through successive paradises by the radiant Beatrice whom he had, on the material plane, seen two times, but who never spoke to him—thus also Adolf Hitler ascended, we think, accompanied inside by the blonde Stefanie, to the first levels of spiritual development beyond the stage where he had been able to arrive without her. He saw in her some of the great female figures of Wagnerian drama. He saw in her “the German woman par excellence”; living Germany. It was natural that she concretized for him in human form the power of suggestion—the symbolic eloquence—of the music of the Master of Bayreuth and the immemorial Swastika.

For the initiation of the future Führer to the most universal truths was to be done under the Germanic sign, in the particular tradition with which he was going to be attached, to be identified, more and more; for he was at the same time the sleeping Emperor, surging suddenly forth from his cave to the call of his people’s despair, and Siegfried, the Warrior “freer than the Gods,” creator of a world of supermen: the Germanic form of He-who-comes-back age after age.

It is remarkable that, “in full possession of himself,”⁷⁸ he had, already at the time in question here, the position that he was to take later in Mein Kampf against all the social problems raised by sex: that he felt the same revulsion for venal love (even legalized) as for any manner of unhealthy eroticism; the same respect for the “sacred Flame of life”—the divine force, source of racial immortality, that it is not advisable to divert from its goal for the mere pleasure of the individual, but to put at the service of the race. It is remarkable that, for everything related to the sexual field in general (as with other fields), he already considered them, for others, from the point of view of a legislator, while for himself the only things that counted were knowledge and the power linked to it, and the path that leads to it: the preparation for the extraordinary role he was to play in history. In the midst of the great corrupt city, he was surrounded, Kubizek tells us, “by a screen of unshakeable principles that enabled him to build his life”—I myself would say his “being”—“in complete internal freedom, independent of a threatening environment.”⁷⁹ One thinks, reading these words, of the “magic circle” that surrounds and protects a man who reaches a certain stage of initiatory realization and helps him to continue his development in a true, albeit invisible, isolation.

For Adolf Hitler, how long did this isolation and this “severe monastic asceticism,”⁸⁰ about which Kubizek speaks, endure? Probably until he reached the supreme degree of knowledge, in other words the state where he was finally fully aware, not only of being (like the tribune Rienzi) “charged with a mission” for the people, but of having chosen this task for himself and of having decided “to take human form” in the visible world in order to achieve it, and to do this even if it were to be a total failure, for in spite of everything, this was written in the eternal order of things. This stage, the final transformation—irreversible; that which corresponds to initiation in the “Great Mysteries”—having been accomplished, all asceticism became superfluous—like the vessel, once exiled but finally returned to port, that need no longer go forth.

It is known that at an appointed time “Beatrice is supplanted by Saint Bernard to guide Dante in the ultimate stages of his ascent to the summit of the successive paradises.”⁸¹ One can wonder who, after Stephanie, helped Adolf Hitler to climb to the highest levels of secret knowledge, and when he climbed to them: when he still lived in Vienna? Or in Munich? Or shortly after his decision, upon the announcement of the capitulation of Germany in 1918, “to become a politician”? That is to say, as it had been the case of at least one other initiate who changed the face of the world, namely Christ himself, around thirty years of age? Or earlier? Or later? It is nearly impossible to answer this question with certainty.

Two things, however, are beyond doubt. First is that, all his life, the Führer continued still to bathe in the spiritual atmosphere of Wagner—even more than that of Nietzsche—and to draw his inspiration from it. “I know thoroughly all the thoughts of Wagner. At the various stages of my life, I always return to him,” he supposedly said one day to Hermann Rauschning⁸² while he found that, with Nietzsche—and although this thinker “already foresaw the superman as a new biological type,” . . . “all is still floating.”⁸³ I repeat: Wagner, himself initiated to the highest degree—his work being the proof—was, through his work, the true spiritual master of Adolf Hitler.

The second unquestionable thing is that, either directly through the Thulegesellschaft, or, before his first contacts with it, through other contacts—perhaps already in Vienna—with people having the same preoccupations, the same dreams, and above all the knowledge of the same Order as its members, Adolf Hitler knew the old hyperborean Tradition, according to Guénon the Source of all the others, within which he received his supreme initiation. Because, for him, the fact that he was one of the earthly incarnations (in Sanskrit: avatara) of He-Who-Returns in each epoch of tragic decadence, to fight against the current of Time and to attempt a “rectification,” did not exempt him from the secret teaching of the Masters of a particular form of the eternal Tradition. These Masters, from whose tutelage he could very well have escaped, and, what is more, with whom—as André Brissaud suggests⁸⁴—he could have clashed in the future, had, in spite of it all, their role to play in his awakening to Himself. Other very great figures of the past, who left their imprint on history—among others, the Buddha himself, considered in Hinduism as a “Incarnation of Vishnu”—have had Masters, even if they were quickly to exceed them.

One would have to have been a member of the Thulegesellschaft to say with exactitude what distinguished its teaching from that of other real or pretended initiatory organizations, or those claiming to be such. But that is not so important if, as A. Brissaud seems to think, Adolf Hitler very quickly released himself from the influence of the Masters he could have had (besides, of course, that of Wagner, whose music, at once epic and initiatory, underlay his whole life and even accompanied him beyond death).⁸⁵ What is important to realize is that he had—one could not with certainty say precisely when, but surely before the seizure of power—actually received the supreme initiation that put him above the contingencies of this world and beyond good and evil; in other words, that he “awakened” completely and definitively so that he was of all eternity and remains so absolutely.

As I pointed out above, the particular restrictions that he formerly needed to impose on himself, in a spirit of asceticism, became useless. And if he continued to observe some of them, if he, inter alia, stubbornly abstained from alcoholic beverages and tobacco, it was by natural disposition rather than from concern with discipline. And if he also refused to eat all animal flesh, it is that there was, deep inside him—the artist and friend of animals—an increasingly profound dislike of the ugliness and horror represented by the slaughterhouse and butcher’s shop. That said, he lived consequently as a harmoniously balanced man, mixing, without embarrassment and astonishment, in the most refined society if he considered it necessary for his work, or if, after hours of contact with his rough S.A. and the people, he found relaxation there. He appreciated the company of women and—like Siegfried, like the Prophet Mohammed, like Krishna, the incarnate God, and other famous Combatants “against Time”—he knew love, sporadically at least, so it seems; when he had the leisure! He lived, above all, to the limit of all the satisfactions possible. He procured art of all forms; art that he prized so highly that he did not allow even one man who was insensible to it ever to lead the National Socialist State. People who, like the French writer Malraux—whom one certainly cannot suspect of partiality in his connection!—met him in society gatherings, at the dinners of ambassadors, admitted that he had “spirit,” and even “humor”; that he “could dance,” in the sense in which Nietzsche understood this expression.

But, parallel to that, he remained always and above all the man of his combat. And he seems to have been increasingly conscious of the necessity, for those who directed this combat under him and in collaboration with him, to have, themselves, a share of secret knowledge of superhuman origin. Hence his dream of a German Empire arranged hierarchically—and, beyond that, of a world arranged hierarchically—according to the spirit of the Tradition; of a “system of castes on a planetary scale,” to use again the expression of an intelligent Hindu admirer of the Third Germanic Reich. Hence, also, his efforts toward the creation of the Order—“a veritable lay priesthood,” as Rauschning writes—which was to be the guardian of the Tradition at the summit of the social pyramid of the Great Reich and, after the inevitable collapse, at the summit of that of the faithful survivors. This Order, as I have said, was that of the Schuzstaffel or “Protection Echelons,” commonly indicated by its initials—SS—the Order that the Führer wanted at the same time to be “militant” and “triumphant,” in the sense in which these describe the Church in Catholic theology; i.e., warlike, concerned above all with the defense and the expansion of the Strong of the Aryan élite in this world, and having reached, at least to a certain degree, being, separate from the remainder of men, as the “elect” are separated from the “world”—the initiates from the uninitiated persons—in all traditional societies.

Without the existence of such an Order, the overthrow of false values on all planes (including the material plane) was inconceivable.

¹Declaration of Adolf Hitler to Joseph Goebbels, 26 April 1942. Goebbels Diaries.

³ Except those of Scandinavian origin, and even they too are Germanic.

⁹ “Does one know what one loses because of birth control? The man killed before his birth is an enigma.”—Adolf Hitler, 19-20 August 1941 (Free Remarks, 29).

¹³ Free Remarks, 203.

¹⁴ Rauschning, 159-60.

¹⁵ Rauschning, 160.

¹⁶ Rauschning, 160.

¹⁷ Rauschning, 160.

¹⁸ Mein Kampf, 440.

¹⁹ Andre Brissaud, Hitler and the Black Order, edition 1969, page 319.

²⁰ Confidences with Kersten (see the book of Kersten: Les mains du miracle [The Hands that Made the Miracle], p. 319).

²¹ Brissaud, 309.

²² Brissaud, 324.

²³ Bhagavad-Gita, III, Verse 25.

²⁴ Many Commisars of the People in Soviet Russia were then Jews, but not all of them, far from it.

²⁵ Citation needed.

²⁶ Brissaud, 309.

²⁷ Quoted in extenso in Grimm, 187.

²⁸ Brissaud, 307.

²⁹ Article 4 of the Third Nuremberg Law.

³⁰ If, through the voice of its responsible representatives, a nation, whatever it is, declared war on France, would not all citizens of this nation living in France be immediately interned?

³¹ Sauvageon, an author of the post-war period, has given this cynical title to the one of his novels.

³² Grimm, 84.

³³ Rauschning, 59.

³⁴ Rauschning, 272.

³⁵ Rauschning, 272-73.

³⁶ Rauschning, 278.

³⁷ Rauschning, 279.

³⁸ Bhagavad-Gita, IV, verse 20.

³⁹ Mein Kampf, pp. 459-60.

⁴⁰ Free Remarks, 309 and 344.

⁴¹ Free Remarks, 309.

⁴² Free Remarks, 344.

⁴³ Rauschning, 62.

⁴⁴ Rauschning, 62.

⁴⁵ Rauschning, 62.

⁴⁶ Rauschning, 62.

⁴⁷ Rauschning, 62.

⁴⁸ Laws of Manu, Book IV, 80-81.

⁴⁹ Rauschning, 287.

⁵⁰ Rauschning, 287.

⁵¹ Probably a reference to Swami Satyananda of the Hindu Mission.—Ed.

⁵² Bhagavad-Gita, IV, verse 13.

⁵³ Laws of Manu, Book II, 261.

⁵⁴ The Thule Society—Ed.

⁵⁵ In 1900.

⁵⁶ Founded in 1905.

⁵⁷ Brissaud, 53.

⁵⁸ Brissaud, 39.

⁵⁹ Rauschning, 257.

⁶⁰ Kubizek, 139-41.

⁶¹ Kubizek, 141.

⁶² Kubizek, 141-42.

⁶³ There is a French edition of Kubizek’s Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, published by Gallimard. But the original text was unfortunately abridged there. The most interesting passages of this account do not appear in the translation.

⁶⁴ Leconte de Lisle, in the poem entitled “Hiéronymus,” of the Tragic Poems.

⁶⁵ Brissaud, 23.

⁶⁶ Kubizek, 140.

⁶⁷ The name Stephanie evokes the idea of the crown (“Stephanos” in Greek).

⁶⁸ Kubizek, 88.

⁶⁹ Kubizek, 88, “die weibliche Entsprechung der eigenen Person.”

⁷⁰ Kubizek, 78.

⁷¹ Kubizek, 78.

⁷² Kubizek, 84.

⁷³ Kubizek, 87.

⁷⁴ Kubizek, 276.

⁷⁵ Kubizek, 280.

⁷⁶ Kubizek, 280.

⁷⁷ Kubizek, 280.

⁷⁸ Kubizek, 276.

⁷⁹ Kubizek, 286.

⁸⁰ Kubizek, 286.

⁸¹ René Guénon, L’ésotèrisme de Dante.

⁸² Rauschning, 257.

⁸³ Rauschning, 273.

⁸⁴ Brissaud, 109.

⁸⁵ After the announcement of the tragic death of the Führer in 1945, a German radio announcer played the last part of the opera of Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, the celebrated “Twilight of the Gods.”