577 minority of Nazis, in contrast to an immense majority of monkeys.” Yes thought I, now, the monkeys are at the top. When they have misruled long enough, we will once more come to power and keep them down — forever.” And I imagined myself on my return, warmly greeted by tall, handsome men in uniform, whom I in my turn would salute, openly, triumphantly, with the mystical words that I had so many times and with such fervour uttered in a low voice, among my friends, in the present days of trial: “Heil Hitler!” With those two words, I would cross the frontier, next time . . . The train increased its speed. The border station was no longer visible. “Good bye Germany, where I was so happy; where I was not alone. One day, I shall come back, and see thee free!” I remembered my manuscript now safe in my attaché-case — as miraculously saved as though it had been thrown into the fire and brought out intact. And a sentence from it — a sentence that I had actually uttered many times, for it expressed and justified my whole attitude towards my Führer’s people, — came to my memory: “Adolf Hitler has made Germany sacred to every worthy Aryan of the world.” And the words in which I had, in the introduction of my book, characterised that vanguard of the racial élite of mankind that the persecuted élite of Germany represents in my eyes, also came back to me “Those men of gold and steel, whom defeat could not dishearten, whom terror and torture could not subdue, whom money could not buy . . . my comrades, my superiors . . . the only ones among my contemporaries for whom I would gladly die.” “I should have come long ago, I know,” thought I. “But I have not entirely wasted my time during those

578 fruitless years. I have gathered experience of distant climes, and knowledge of the past, and echoes of eternal wisdom from the four corners of the earth, to put it all to the service of my Führer and of his beloved people. When you are powerful, publish my profession of faith in you, my German brothers; those words from the depth of my heart which I wrote in cafés, in waiting rooms, in friends’ houses — and in prison — amidst the ruins of present-day Germany, stick them upon the walls, one day, when you rule this continent! Put them before the eyes of the young men and women of the great victorious new Reich, and tell them: ‘An Aryan woman who was not a German wrote this about us, when we lay in the dust, under the heels of our inferiors’. Tell their children, when I am dead.” The train rolled on. I was now in Luxemburg. I would soon be in France. But what were manmade frontiers? The only frontier in which I had ever believed was the natural, God-ordained barrier of blood. Even the sea could not separate people of the same pure stock. The train carried me further and further away front the conventional border of Germany. But the Greater Reich of my dreams had no border. Wherever there were people conscious of their pure Aryan blood, and intelligent enough to understand and to accept Hitler’s eternal Idea, and Germany’s divinely appointed mission, there was the living Greater Reich. No frontier — and no order of expulsion from Germany, given in the name of Germany’s present-day persecutors — could keep me from remaining a member of that one true Aryan brotherhood. “One day, I shall come back,” I kept thinking, as I rolled further and further away. “One day, my love and admiration will contribute to exalt the German racial

579 pride and will to power — the Aryan consciousness of the best Aryans, If that be, I shall not have come in vain; nor lived in vain.” And opening once more my attaché case — that same brown attaché-case which I had in hand on the night of my arrest — I saw there the priceless copy of Mein Kampf handed over to me in the name of all my comrades, in the name of all Germany, by one of the finest National Socialists I knew — a martyr of our cause; and, under it, the two thick exercise books that contained the original handwritten copy of my Gold in the Furnace, my loving gift to Germany, that I would now start typing in peace, and in safety. What mattered the life of utter loneliness that I was now to resume? What mattered the grinding poverty that awaited me, and the day-to-day provoking hostility of the charlatans and imbeciles in the midst of whom I would now be forced to live, if I could do that — and write the beautiful story of my days in Werl — in waiting for our Day? Once more, thanking the Lord of the unseen Forces, Who governs all that is visible and tangible with mathematical equity. I repeated within my heart the words of Leonardo da Vinci: “O mirabile Giustizzia di Te, Primo Motore! . . .”