183 one, namely that of Christianity. Still more pernicious, I say, for in the new religion, the false doctrine of the equal possibilities of all men was not only broadened, but strengthened; sanctioned on the ground of alleged superhuman authority. It is no wonder that, when Europe ceased to be pious without ceasing to be foolish, she started seeking for the equivalent of that equalitarian inspiration which Christianity had so long given her, once more in decaying Hellenistic thought. America followed Europe, with a vengeance. Of all possible quotations from ancient Greek thinkers, the one that the super-Democrats of the New World found the most fit to figure above the pillars of the Library of the Archaeological School run by them in Athens, is precisely the one which I recalled at the beginning of this chapter. An anticipation, I suppose, in their minds; and an encouragement, also. From the depth of a past that is not very remote, but that looks so, in the eyes of a hotchpotch community hardly two hundred years old, the voice of the Greek-speaking internationalist (who might have been anything but a pure Greek himself, if he lived at the time I presume) tells them: “Yes, provided he has become familiar with the works of Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato, even a ‘Yank’ can become ‘a Hellene’—somewhat as a Pole, or an Armenian, even a Jew, settled in the USA, who speaks English, reads American papers and American novels, and enjoys American films, becomes ‘an American.’ Why not? It is culture that makes nationality. In other words, it is what one knows and what one is accustomed to think that makes what one is.” Christianity—as all other-worldly religions based upon revelation—had gone a step further. It had set up the idea that it is what one believes that determines, finally, what one is. And still today, strictly speaking, in the Christian conception, community of culture itself is overshadowed by the idea of common allegiance to moral and metaphysical dogmas. Any man, provided he believes in salvation through Jesus Christ with all its implications, is—in theory at least—according to it, to be treated as the equal of any other man who believes the same, to the extent that he can marry and give his children in marriage in that other man’s family, whatever be his race and the state of his health. Culture comes second. But I say: “In theory at least”; for, to most people, it is still a real or supposed “community of culture” that is the more important factor of Democratic equality. Community of religious beliefs comes in, with pious individuals, as a part of the cultural link. But, if Christianity never succeeded in uniting all men and mixing all races on the basis of common beliefs about the other world—if, for instance, to this day, it has not been able to break down the colour bar

184 in the countries where it exists—its slow and steady influence has succeeded in making many of those who believe in “equality through culture” extend to all mankind, even to obviously inferior races, the possibility of sharing with the Aryan, sooner or later, “a common culture.” This distorted attitude is at the back of the deplorable mania of “educating the natives,” of the most non-Aryan colonial countries, along European lines. And I repeat: no man of Aryan blood could probably ever have brought himself to believe—as our Democrats and Communists do—that any people (of whatever race) can, “through education,” imbibe the modern culture of Western Europe, if centuries of Christianity had not subconsciously prepared him to do so, by teaching his fathers that all souls are equal in the eyes of the Christian God, and that souls count, not bodies. The fact that, by civil as well as, in the case of coreligionists, by religious law, everywhere in the world save in caste-ridden India, in primitive societies admitting strict sexual “taboos,” and in countries in which an effective colour bar exists, anybody can marry anybody, only proves how powerfully the great international religions of equality—Christianity and Islam, both sprung from Judaism—have prepared the ground for the modern Democratic outlook, the logical outcome of which is, ultimately, Communism. The most democratic and cosmopolitan ancient Greek, for whom Hellenism meant just Hellenic culture, detached from Hellenic nationality and race, would never have gone to that length. He would never have admitted that a Chinese, for instance (highly civilised as he may be, in his own style) or an African, could “participate in Greek culture” however well he might be able to quote Homer by heart. And he would have been shocked at some of the marriages that take place in modern Europe. Humanity has greatly degenerated since the influence of Jewry—through Christianity, in the whole world, and through Islam, in the Near and Middle East and in Africa—has added itself, on an unprecedented scale, to the already existing forces of disintegration. But the root of the decay lies in the attitude expressed in the old sentence which I quoted above, i.e., in the attitude that consists of underestimating or altogether neglecting the basic physical factor in culture as well as in nationality. What one knows, and even what one seems generally to think and to do, does not determine in any way what one is. On the contrary, it is one’s physical background that determines one’s intellectual and moral tendencies and the real meaning of what one thinks and does and chooses to remember or forget. And more than one’s economical or geographical milieu, one’s physical background is one’s total ancestry—one’s race; one’s blood.

185 The Founder of National Socialism came, first and foremost, to remind the world of this forgotten, but all-important truth; to destroy the dangerous illusion that has misled Western consciousness ever since the decay of classical Heathendom; to denounce the foolishness of any attempt to “Germanise” even Aryans that are not of pure Germanic stock (let alone non-Aryans) and to proclaim, in defiance of twenty-four centuries of error, that “language and customs cannot replace blood.”1 * * * The foundation of new Germany as Adolf Hitler has laid it, can be admired in the concise wording of the fourth of the famous Twenty-Five Points that contain in a nutshell the whole programme of the National Socialist Party: “He alone can be a citizen of the State, who is one of the people. He alone can be one of the people, who is of German blood, whatever be his religion. No Jew, therefore, can be one of the people.”2 Even among the early National Socialists themselves, very few realised how enormous a revolution had just been started when, on the 24th of February 1920, in an impressive mass meeting at the Hofbräuhaus, in Munich, the Führer, for the first time, uttered these words in public. Four years later, he was to write in Mein Kampf that the mission of the National Socialist movement was “neither to found a monarchy nor to establish a republic, but to create a German State.”3 And indeed, not only was this the first time in the history of the German people that the conception of a real German State ever was put forward, but it was, as far as I know, the first time in the evolution of the world that the conception of a national State of any description was proclaimed, in full knowledge of its practical and philosophical implications and in full awareness of its importance. It was certainly the first time that the creation of such a State was willed for the welfare of a practically homogeneous Aryan population.4 The age-old Indian caste 1 Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 428 ff; cf. Mannheim, p. 389. 2 “Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 4). 3 “Ihre Mission liegt nicht in der Begründung einer Monarchie oder der Festigung einer Republik, sondern in der Schaffung eines germanischen Staates” (Mein Kampf, I, xii, p. 380; cf. Mannheim, p. 346). 4 Comprising, if not only people of unmixed Germanic or Nordic stock, at least Aryans only.

186 system, based upon the self-same racial principles as the new German régime, was devised for the harmonious development of many races living in one immense country under the intended political as well as spiritual domination of an exceedingly small Aryan minority. The only other modern civilised people, fairly homogeneous, whose native religion and tradition—combining ancestor worship, hero worship, and Sun worship—are conducive to the formation of a proper national State, the Japanese, are not Aryans at all. In Western Antiquity, the concept of race was stressed far more than it has been ever since; for the germs of decadence had not yet so firmly set in. Race consciousness, as distinct from culture consciousness, was something that really did exist. No man, for instance, could take part in the Olympic Games unless he could prove that he was of Hellenic blood. A mere cultural “Hellene” would not have been admitted—any more than, in India, to this day, a man of a low caste (or altogether outside the pale of the caste system) would be admitted into the innermost part of a Hindu temple or into a feasting hall “for Brahmins only,” whatever be his “culture.” Yet, not even then was the idea of racial integrity set up as the foundation of national life; as the dominant factor, both in culture and politics. In the far North, the Aryan in all his purity was practically alone; the possibility of intermixture was too remote, too unthinkable for him to feel the danger of it. In the Mediterranean regions, he was already, to a great extent, blended with the Minoan and Etruscan elements, the civilised pre-Hellenic and pre-Latin natives of Southern Europe. Pure blood meant no longer, objectively, what it still meant in the “Hyperborean” world, whence the Hellenes and their manly gods—Ares, the Warrior, and fair-haired Apollo, and other personifications of strength and beauty, life and light—had once come. In India, alone in the midst of numerous and prolific populations entirely different from himself both physically and culturally, the Aryan soon discovered that his only hope of survival lay in his systematic upholding of race consciousness and purity of blood as a principle and as a duty. He found that out, and acted accordingly only because he was “cornered”; because he felt that it was, for him, a matter of life or death. Generous and tolerant by nature, open-minded, sympathetic towards foreign things—anything but “arrogant,” in spite of what his enemies might say—the Aryan never seems to have fully awakened to racial consciousness unless he realised that he was “cornered.” For the first time in the West—for the first time in the world in a pre-eminently Aryan land—Adolf Hitler has roused in him that sense

187 of danger, and thereby brought him back to his forgotten healthy ancestral outlook on life; made him realise, in spite of twenty-four centuries of false teachings, that blood, and not artificially acquired “culture,” not artificially accepted morality, is the real link among men; nay, that any culture, any morality that is out of keeping with one’s racial genius, has no roots and no meaning; does not exist. Standing boldly alone against the downward rush of time—against that immemorial, slow process of decay inherent in human history; nay, defying it where it is the fiercest, i.e., near the end of a great historical Cycle—he re-installed the natural, the eternal order of values that had God alone knows how long been reversed in men’s minds and customs, and he proclaimed that the new German State was to be edified, not upon community of “culture,” or of religion, or of beliefs or of interests of any sort, irrespective of race, but, on the contrary, upon community of race irrespective of religion—irrespective of everything. That was indeed a revolution; the beginning of a truly New Order. Even more; that was, as I have said before,1 a call to resurrection; the only possible call to resurrection: “ Deutschland erwache!”—“Germany, awake! Freed at last from the grip of the death-forces that are planning your destruction (for they well know that, as long as you are alive, they cannot rule the world unthreatened) arise! Arise, and take the lead of the reborn Aryan race!” * * * And, to all those who understand its implications, it was a call to resurrection not addressed to Germany alone but to all pure-blooded Nordic people beyond the technical boundaries of the Reich; nay, it was a call to all people of Indo-European stock—Indo-Germanisch, as they say in German—to shake off the yoke of unhealthy philosophies imposed upon them through political, religious, or cultural channels, never mind how and never mind when, by the sly, subtle, patiently destructive, the jealous genius of Judaism. Our “Deutschand erwache!” meant also: “Arier, erwachet!” More still; it was, even beyond the pale of aristocratic Aryandom, a call to all those also lovable races that are worthy to live honourably under the Sun, and to those whom Nature has appointed to rule, in their own distant spheres; an appeal to all to give up the foolish teaching of equality through “common culture” with which the Jew has infected the West, and the West, in its turn, the 1 Page 14.

188 whole world; and to follow the new—and old; perennial—teaching of harmony in inequality and diversity; of purity of blood and originality of culture at every level of the natural hierarchy of races; of obedience to the will of the Sun that has “put every man in his place, and made people different in shape, in colour, and in speech”1 for the fulfilment of the particular task divinely appointed to each one. It was a call for the remoulding of every State into a national one, on a racial basis, according to the genius and requirements of the people whose welfare it is to be the custodian. As I said, few people were then—as few are now—aware of the universality and eternity of National Socialism. Some were, however. The Führer himself was, as go to prove several passages in Mein Kampf which allude to the laws of Nature as the ultimate foundation of our Weltanschauung.2 So were—and so are still—a few of his both German and foreign followers. So were, and so are, some of the most intelligent non-Aryans whom I have met. In 1941, a Japanese residing in Calcutta told me, “We look upon your National Socialism as . . . the Shintoism of the West.” Whoever has studied that immemorial religion of Japan, Shinto, or “the Way of the Gods,”3 especially in the new political form given to it in the eighteenth century by thinkers and patriots such as Motoori and Hirata, cannot help being impressed by the meaning of that apparently strange statement. What the man wished to say was that, for the first time to his knowledge, a great nation of the Christian West had shaken off the anti-national spirit of Christianity—nay, the anti-national spirit of all philosophy prevalent in Europe since the decadence of Pagan Antiquity, with the sole exception of that of Nietzsche—and boldly gone back, for its inspiration, to a doctrine of blood and soil much similar, in its essence, to that which the proud Land of the Rising Sun has never forsaken in spite of all internationalist influences. 1 King Akhnaton’s Longer Hymn to the Sun (circa 1400 BC). 2 “. . . die Menschen . . . ihr höheres Dasein nicht den Ideen einiger verrückter Ideologen, sondern der Erkenntnis und rücksichtslosen Anwendung eherner Naturgesetze verdanken”—“men . . . owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologues, but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature’s stern and rigid laws” (Mein Kampf, I, xi, p. 316; cf. Mannheim, p. 288), and “. . . unsere neue Auffassung, die ganz dem Ursinn der Dinge entspricht”—“. . . our new conception which corresponds wholly to the primal meaning of things” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 440; cf. Mannheim, 399) [Trans. by Ed.]. 3 An article of mine on Shintoism—unfortunately much abridged, and thereby robbed of a great part of its consistency by the editor—has appeared in the magazine New Asia in 1940.

189 Yes, our brave Allies of the Far East, would to God we had won this war together! You would have controlled the whole of the Mongolian world, you, the “Herrenvolk” of Asia, the nation of Tojo and Yamagata, and above all, of Toyama. In all the West including Russia—including the vanquished USA—the Führer’s word would have been the law and his spirit the source of inspiration. And some Brahmin, entirely devoted to our cause and supremely intelligent—uniting the suppleness and unscrupulousness of the East to his ancestral Aryan virtues—and in close touch both with Berlin and Tokyo, would have taken charge of India and South Asia.1 This was the world we wanted—the grand world of which we dreamed during this struggle. It meant, no doubt, the undisputed supremacy of Germany. And that is precisely why most non-German Aryans did not want it, although it meant, also, unlimited possibilities of free and healthy development for Aryan mankind wherever it is to be found at its best; nay, free and healthy development for all worthy races, each one in its place. It meant life and resurrection: the Führer’s gifts. And I say, repeating here one of my statements before my judges at Düsseldorf on April 5th, 1949—I, one of Hitler’s non-German followers—the Man and the Nation that brought the world such gifts had every right to rule. The Aryans who grudged them that right have betrayed the cause of their own race. * * * But nowhere, or nearly nowhere, is any noble race represented in its absolute purity by more than a small minority of individuals. Even in Sweden where the Germanic type—the tall, well-built, blond, blue-eyed or grey-eyed man—is by far the commonest, one cannot say that it is the only type to be found. There are Swedes in whose physical appearance one detects racial characteristics, Aryan, no doubt, but other than Germanic. And what is true of Sweden—racially one of the purest countries in the world—is still more so of the rest of Europe. “Unfortunately,” writes the Führer himself, “the kernel of our German nation is no longer racially homogeneous.”2 Anyone who has travelled at least in western and southern Germany is compelled to admit he is 1 This is not an allusion to Subhas Chandra Bose, who was not a Brahmin, but to Savitri’s husband A.K. Mukherji.—Ed. 2 “Unser deutsches Volkstum beruht leider nicht mehr auf einem einheitlichen rassischen Kern” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, pp. 436–437; cf. Mannheim, pp. 395–96).

190 right. And the more one goes southwards, the more that beautiful Nordic type—which is, uncontestedly, the Aryan type in its utmost purity—becomes rare. The truth is that, wherever the Aryans have settled in Europe (save in Germany and Scandinavia, that were covered with ice until very recently)1 they found previous inhabitants, sometimes primitive, as in England, sometimes highly civilised, as in Crete and the Aegean Isles, with whom they intermingled at a very early date. But the Celts, and later Saxons, interbred far less with the original non-Aryan population of Great Britain (which they pushed into the hilly parts of the country) than the Hellenes and Latins did, with the Minoans and Etruscans of South Europe. Whence the cleavage that one notices, to this day, between North and South Europe. As for Germany, its population has surely ceased to be as homogeneous as it was in the days when Hermann defeated Varus’ legions. Still, it comprises a fairly high proportion of pure Germanic types—many of exceeding beauty—and its elements that cannot be styled as strictly Germanic, or Nordic (mixed Celtic and Nordic, mostly) are anyhow Aryan. Intermixture with the old non-Aryan Mediterranean stock (pre-Hellenic and pre-Latin) has only occurred on a very restricted scale, and very late in history, through occasional marriages between Germans and southern Europeans. So has interbreeding with the Semitic race, fortunately. Even before the rise of National Socialism, there seem to have been fewer half-Jews and quarter-Jews in Germany than in the rest of Europe, with the exception of the Scandinavian countries, of Italy and, I must say, of Greece and the Balkan States (and Eastern Europe in general) where the Jew has always been looked upon as a foreigner—and an unpleasant one at that—tolerated, but never welcome. In spite of her lack of homogeneity, Germany was racially pure enough to appreciate the grandeur of Hitler’s message. And perhaps because of that lack of homogeneity—and certainly because of the presence of Jews in her midst, whose despicable rôle during and after the First World War was well-known—she was more ready to respond to it than any of those Nordic countries which had not had, for a very long time, the good fortune of feeling themselves in real danger. It was therefore natural that National Socialism should have originated in Germany, and found among Germans—save for a few brilliant 1 According to the Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924) the whole North of Germany was covered with ice up till about 15000 BC, South Scandinavia up till 10000 BC, and North Scandinavia up till 5000 BC.

191 exceptions1—its most devoted, most consistent, and most intelligent exponents. There was more to it. The only great European nation who, two thousand years ago, not only resisted the levelling influence of imperial Rome—the metropolis of a no longer Aryan world—but defeated her armies in open conflict; the one who resisted Christianity, surely the most stubbornly if not also the longest,2 was predestined to give birth to the greatest European of all ages and to be the first resurrected Aryan nation—the first to bear upon its flag the sacred Sign of the Sun, and in its heart, once more, the everlasting ideals of Nordic Heathendom. But that is not all. It was—and it is—the aim of National Socialism to regenerate the race by a systematic sex policy and a type of education that would make such a policy more and more easy to apply in practice. “The German Reich,” says Adolf Hitler, “must not only select out of the German nation only the very best of the original racial elements and preserve them, but it must slowly and surely raise them to a position of dominance.”3 This is possible in Germany because there is, there, a minority which represents the original Aryan in all his purity. It is possible in other lands also, to the extent that these retain racially pure elements, for “every crossing of races leads sooner or later to the decay of the hybrid product, so long as the higher portion of the cross survives, united in racial purity. It is only when the last vestige of the higher racial unit becomes bastardised that the hybrid product ceases to be in danger of extinction. But a foundation must be laid of a natural, if slow, process of regeneration, which shall gradually drive out the racial poison; that is, given that a foundation stock of racial purity still exists and the process of bastardisation is arrested.”4 If 1 Such men as Vidkun Quisling, Knut Hamsun, Sven Hedin, and a few others. 2 In the midst of the fourteenth century, Prussia was still to a very great extent Heathen. 3 “Das Deutsche Reich soll als Staat alle Deutschen umschließen mit der Aufgabe, aus diesen Volke die wertvollsten Bestände an rassischen Urelementen nicht nur zu sammeln und zu erhalten, sondern langsam und sicher zur beherrschenden Stellung emporzuführen” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 439; cf. Mannheim, p. 398). 4 “Jegliche Rassenkreuzung führt zwangsläufig früher oder später zum Untergang des Mischproduktes, solange der höherstehende Teil dieser Kreuzung selbst noch in einer reinen irgendwie rassenmäßigen Einheit vorhanden ist. Die Gefahr für das Mischprodukt ist erst beseitigt im Augenblick der Bastardierung des letzten höherstehenden Rassereinen. “Darin liegt ein, wenn auch langsamer natürlicher Regenerationsprozeß begründet, der rassische Vergiftungen allmählich wieder ausscheidet, solange noch ein Grundstock rassisch reiner Elemente vorhanden ist und eine weitere Bastardierung nicht mehr stattfindet” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 443; cf. Mannheim, p. 401).

192 the representatives of such a stock are, at first, alone encouraged, and then, alone allowed, to breed, while the others—the already bastardised—are more and more discouraged and finally forbidden to do so, a time is bound to come in which the Aryan, in all his original strength, intelligence, and beauty, far from having to struggle for his very survival in an increasingly degenerate world, will automatically take his place as the ruling element in a natural hierarchy of restored races. And that is the first and foremost aim of the National Socialist Movement: to reinstall the Aryan—the natural aristocrat from every point of view—to the position of power and honour which Nature, in her impersonal wisdom, has intended him to occupy, not merely in Europe but in the world at large. The Führer has expressed this in no uncertain terms: “This world is undoubtedly going through great changes. The only question is whether the outcome will be the good of Aryan humanity, or profits for the eternal Jews,”1 and: “For the world’s future, the important thing is . . . whether Aryan man holds his own or dies out.”2 But first, the Aryan must once more become worthy of his exalted rôle, both physically and from the point of view of character. To that end were conceived the selective sex policy of the Third Reich, and the National Socialist education. The erroneous belief that a link of common culture is sufficient to create nationality, goes hand in hand with all the fallacies concerning “individual freedom,” in particular with the idea that “one’s body is one’s own,” to be used as one pleases, for personal edification in asceticism or for personal lust. It is the glory of National Socialism to have exposed and fought this idea, along with the other; to have proclaimed that the individual belongs to his race, whatever “culture” he may choose to acquire, and that the individual’s body belongs to the race, at the expense of which no man or woman is free to sin.3 The negative side of our population policy—the sterilisation of the 1 “Sicher aber geht diese Welt einer großen Umwälzung entgegen. Und es kann nur die eine Frage sein, ob sie zum Heil der arischen Menschheit oder zum Nutzen des ewigen Juden ausschlägt” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 475; cf. Mannheim, p. 427). 2 “Für die Zukunft der Erde liegt aber die Bedeutung nicht darin, ob die Protestanten die Katholiken oder die Katholiken die Protestanten besiegen, sondern darin, ob der arische Mensch ihr erhalten bleibt oder ausstirbt” (Mein Kampf, II, x, p. 630; cf. Mannheim, p. 562). 3 “Es gibt keine Freiheit, auf Kosten der Nachwelt und damit der Rasse zu sündigen”—“There is no freedom to sin at the expense of future generations and thus of the race” (Mein Kampf, I, x, p. 278; cf. Mannheim, p. 254) [Trans. by Ed.].

193 unfit; the painless elimination of idiots, lunatics, incurables, and, in general, of all people whose life is a burden to themselves and to others—has raised enough indignation in this hypocritical world, which Christianity and like teachings have striven to make, for the last two thousand years, a safe place for the weaklings and the sick, and all manner of dregs of humanity. But our positive attitude to sex, and the subsequent constructive side of our population policy has met, perhaps, with more opposition still. Everywhere in the West, outside National Socialist circles (the East is accustomed to arranged marriages and does not feel half so shocked at our views) I have heard the same remark : “You cannot force a man and a woman to love each other just because it forwards your programme of racial regeneration, can you?” But there is no question of “forcing” them. The National Socialist régime never “forced” anybody in these matters. However, it is only natural that two young and healthy people of the same race should desire and love each other, provided they have the opportunity to meet. All that a wise national State can do, is to give such people ample opportunity of coming in touch with one another, while strongly forbidding all undesirable unions. And that is all that was done, in that beautiful new Germany which the advocates of “individual freedom” have reduced to ruins, and persecuted, and enslaved, to the extent they could. The Nazi policy of racial regeneration was buttressed, from the beginning, by a parallel system of education comprising “first, the cultivation of healthy bodies”1 and then the development of mental capability. At the same time as it pursues the policy of healthy birth which I have tried to describe, “the State must see to raising the standard of health of the nation by protecting mothers and infants, prohibiting child-labour, increasing bodily efficiency by compulsory gymnastics and sports, laid down by law, and by extensive support of clubs engaged in the bodily development of the young”2 says Point Twenty-One of the Party Programme. And anyone who ever was even slightly acquainted with National Socialist Germany knows how faithfully that ideal was put into practice, and with what splendid 1 “. . . so muß auch im einzelnen die Erziehung zuallererst die körperliche Gesundheit ins Auge fassen und fördern . . .” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, pp. 451; cf. Mannheim, p. 408). 2 “Der Staat hat für die Hebung der Volksgesundheit zu sorgen durch den Schutz der Mutter und des Kindes, durch Verbot der Jugendarbeit, durch Herbeiführung der körperlichen Ertüchtigung mittels gesetzlicher Festlegung einer Turn und Sportpflicht, durch größte Unterstützung aller sich mit körperlicher Jugend-Ausbildung beschäftigenden Vereine” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 21).

194 results. I have already spoken of the physical perfection of the German youth trained under the Third Reich. But that is not all. Next to the formation of strong and beautiful bodies comes the formation of character, the cultivation of the natural Aryan virtues: courage, self-reliance, will-power and determination, readiness to assume responsibility, readiness to self-sacrifice; fortitude, self-control, truthfulness; and absolute devotion to one’s ideals and to one’s leaders. Kindness, too, is to be encouraged; not weakness, not sentimentality, not that hypocritical squeamishness which disgusts us so much in our enemies the Democrats, but real kindness; the culmination of manly qualities, as Nietzsche himself says; the natural generosity of the strong. Even our opponents have to concede that this is true. Aldous Huxley, in his The Perennial Philosophy—that most disappointing book, of which many passages never would have been written, had the war taken a different turn—admits that the teaching of love and kindness towards living creatures was stressed in Nazi education. The love of woods, of flowers, of Nature in all her beauty—of the concrete body of the Fatherland—was also stressed; for our Weltanschauung is, as I have said before, the modern and Nordic form of the everlasting Religion of Life. Contrarily to the educational ideals prevailing to this day in the capitalistic world—and already in medieval Christian education—strictly intellectual training is to come, according to our programme, only after the formation of character and the cultivation of bodily perfection. It is to come in its proper place, in the natural order, for man is first an animal of a particular species and race; then, a man with the moral possibilities of his race, and then only, a “cultured” man, adding to his other sound qualities the final touch of acquired knowledge, not as an end in itself but as a help and a stimulus to creative thought. We are, here, brought back to this basic idea which I have tried to express previously and which is a part and parcel of our philosophy (as of every sane outlook on life): the important thing is not what one knows, or even does, but what one is. This is true from the national as well as from the individual standpoint. “The national State,” writes our Führer, “must act on the presumption that a man of moderate education, but sound in body, firm in character, and filled with joyous self-confidence and power of will, is of more value to the community than a highly educated weakling.”1 1 “Der völkische Staat muß dabei von der Voraussetzung ausgehen, daß ein zwar wissenschaftlich wenig gebildeter, aber körperlich gesunder Mensch mit gutem, festem Charakter, erfüllt von Entschlußfreudigkeit und Willenskraft, für die Volksgemeinschaft wertvoller ist als ein geistreicher Schwächling” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 452; cf. Mannheim, p. 408).

195 Another extremely important feature of our Nazi education (and of our whole system) is its absolute opposition to the pernicious “feminism” of our epoch—that product of decadence, of which the effect is nothing less than a still further lowering of the level of the race. We hate the very idea of “equality” of man and woman, forced upon the Western world more shamelessly than ever since the time of the First World War. For one, it is nonsense. No male and female of the same living species endowed by Nature with complementary abilities for the fulfilment of complementary destinies, can be “equal.” They are different, and cannot be anything else but different, however much one might try to give them the same training and make them do the same work. It is also a nefarious idea; for the only way one can, I do not say make man and woman “equal”—that is impossible—but force them, willy-nilly, into the same artificial mould; accustom them to the same type of life, is by robbing woman of her femininity and man of his virile qualities, i.e., by spoiling both, and spoiling the race.1 I do not deny that there are and always have been isolated instances of women more fitted for manly tasks than for motherhood, or equally capable of both. But such exceptions need no “feminism” in order to win for themselves the special place that Nature, in her love of diversity, has appointed to them. Around about 3200 before Christ, Azag-Bau, a wine merchant in her youth, managed to raise herself to such prominence as to become the founder of the Fourth Dynasty of Kish.2 In those days, women did not vote—nor did men, by the way—any more in Sumeria than elsewhere. Nor did they, in general, compete with men in all or nearly all walks of life, as in modern England and the USA. Curiously enough, the most fanatical female feminists are, as a rule, those in whom virile qualities are the most lacking. Masterful women, as Nietzsche remarks, are not feminists. Most remote Azag-Bau, or Queen Tiy of Egypt, or Agrippina, or, nearer our times, the little known but most fascinating virile feminine figure of Mongolian history, Ai Yuruk, who spent her life on the saddle and, along with her father Kaidu,3 “held the grazing lands of 1 In modern English literature, no author has exposed the feminist fallacy more brilliantly than D.H. Lawrence, in nearly all his works. 2 Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1. 3 Son of Kuyuk, son of Ogodai, son of Genghis Khan.

196 mid-Asia for nearly forty years,”1 all would have burst out laughing at the idea of “women’s emancipation” and all the twaddle that goes with it—in fact, at all the typically democratic institutions that our degenerate world so admires. But exceptions need no special education; or if they do, they educate themselves. Our National Socialist education for the present and future welfare of a healthy community, was—and will still be, when the time comes to enforce it once more—based upon the acceptance of the fact that men and women have entirely different parts to play in national life, and that they need, therefore, an entirely different training; that “the one aim of female education must be with a view to the future mother.”2 We did not “force” every woman to become a mother. But we gave every healthy woman of pure blood the necessary training and every opportunity to become a useful one, if she cared to. Girls were taught to consider motherhood as a national duty as well as an honour—not as a burden. They were trained to admire manly virtues in men, and to look upon the perfect warrior as the ideal mate, as is natural. Not every girl, also, could marry every man, even within the Party. The greater the man’s qualifications, the greater were the woman’s to be. For instance, a girl who wished to become the wife of an SS man—a great honour—had not only to prove that she was of unmixed Aryan descent (as every marriageable German was expected to) but also to produce a diploma attesting that she was well-versed in cooking, sewing, housekeeping, the science of child welfare, etc., in one word, that she had been tested and found fit to be an accomplished housewife. This does not mean that, in a National Socialist state, women are not to be taught anything else but domestic sciences and child welfare. In new Germany, they were given general knowledge also. And Point Twenty of the Party Programme, which stresses, among other things, that “the understanding of the spirit of the state (civic knowledge) must be aimed at, through school training, beginning with the first awakening of intelligence,”3 is to be taken into account in the 1 Harold Lamb, The March of the Barbarians (London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1941), p. 244. 2 “Das Ziel der weiblichen Erziehung hat unverrückbar die kommende Mutter zu sein” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 460; cf. Mannheim, p. 414). 3 The whole text of Point Twenty is as follows: “Um jedem fähigen und fleißigen Deutschen das Erreichen höherer Bildung und damit das Einrücken in führende Stellung zu ermöglichen, hat der Staat für einen gründlichen Ausbau unseres gesamten Volksbildungswesens Sorge zu tragen. Die Lehrpläne aller Bildungsanstalten sind den Erfordernissen des praktischen Lebens anzupassen. Das Erfassen des Staatsgedankens muß bereits mit dem Beginn des Verständnisses durch die Schule (Staatsbürgerkunde) erzielt werden. Wir fordern die Ausbildung besonders veranlagter Kinder armer Eltern ohne Rücksicht auf deren Stand oder Beruf auf Staatskosten”—“In order to make possible higher education and thus advancement to leadership positions for each capable and industrious German, the state must undertake a fundamental reconstruction of our entire system of public education. The curricula of all educational institutions must accord with the requirements of practical life. The understanding of the spirit of the state (civics) must be aimed at by the schools from the first awakening of intelligence. We demand the training at state expense of specially gifted children of poor parents regardless of their class or occupation” (Das Programm der NSDAP, p. 21) [Trans. by Ed.]

197 education of girls as well as of boys. Also, seldom was there, on the part of any State, a more sincere and serious attempt to provide every child with the maximum possibilities of development and advancement. “We demand the education of gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class and occupation, at the expense of the State,” said the Führer, again in the same Point of his programme. And he kept his word to the letter and gave the German people, in that line as in others, even more than he had promised, as his enemies themselves are forced to admit. * * * If one were to define its aim and its spirit, and its essential contribution to the regeneration of mankind, in one sentence, one should say that National Socialism has set up the conception of the natural and therefore eternal aristocracy of blood and of personal value, against that of the artificial aristocracy of class and capital; that it stands for the divinely decreed human hierarchy, against all the false barriers established by man. For that is the meaning of the doctrine of race and personality, those “two pillars supporting the whole edifice”1 of the National Socialist Weltanschauung. There is, properly speaking, no nationhood apart from racial homogeneity. A country of many races is not and can never be a nation in the sense we understand that word. To call it one might be expedient, if one wishes to give the whole population the temporary 1 “. . . die völkische Weltanschauung . . . nicht nur den Wert der Rasse, sondern damit auch die Bedeutung der Person erkennt und mithin zu den Grundpfeilern ihres ganzen Gebäudes bestimmt”—“The folkish worldview . . . not only recognises the value of race, but also the significance of personality, which it makes one of the pillars of its entire edifice” (Mein Kampf, II, iv, pp. 499–500; cf. Mannheim, p. 448) [Trans. by Ed.].

198 illusion of unity in view of some definite practical purpose1 (in view, for instance, of coalescing different races against forces which one has, one’s self, good reasons to fight). But that will not alter the fact that this feeling of unity will remain an illusion so long as the population consists of separate races. In a racially homogeneous nation—a real nation—any idea of class, whether based upon acquired nobility, or upon wealth, or learning, is artificial and anti-national. It only hinders the spontaneous feeling of racial solidarity, on which healthy nationhood rests, for “one can only be proud of one’s nation, if there is no class of which one must feel ashamed.”2 Hence National Socialism, the most aristocratic of all political philosophies, presents itself, in practice, in any homogeneously Aryan country at least, as the philosophy of a pre-eminently popular movement, standing for the rights of the workman and of the peasant as much, if not, in reality, much more, than Communism. It would indeed do good to most Communists of Aryan blood, before they foolishly insult him and fight us, to acquaint themselves with all that our Führer has done in Germany for the rehabilitation of manual work, and the welfare and happiness of the labourers. It would do them good to know that the German factory worker, miner, mechanic, engine-driver, was—in general—and is still a better National Socialist than the doctor, lawyer, or University professor. As a foreign working woman who had the good luck to live in Germany before the war once told me, it was the people—not the “bourgeois,” not the self-styled “intelligentsia”—“who lifted their right arms the most spontaneously, the most sincerely. As for the capitalists—they always looked upon Hitler with suspicion, if not with definite enmity.” The truth is that, in order to understand the depth and philosophical soundness of National Socialism, to appreciate its eternal value, one needs a broader and more living culture, as well as a more synthetic type of intelligence, and more sensitiveness to beauty than the average doctor, lawyer, or professor—let alone the average capitalist— 1 While, for example, a Hindu’s nationality is in reality his caste, I myself often spoke of “the Hindu nation” in propaganda pamphlets destined to unite all Hindus against the anti-racial, egalitarian—pre-eminently democratic—influence of Islam and Christianity (that has done a good deal in India, willingly or not, to prepare the way for Communism). It seemed to me, then, the only practical way to fight those forces. [See Savitri Devi, A Warning to the Hindus (Calcutta: Hindu Mission, 1939) and The Non-Hindu Indians and Indian Unity (Calcutta: Hindu Mission, 1940).—Ed.] 2 “Ein Grund zum Stolz auf sein Volk ist erst dann vorhanden, wenn man sich keines Standes mehr zu schämen braucht” (Mein Kampf, II, ii, p. 474; cf. Mannheim, p. 427).

199 generally possesses. While, on the other hand, one does not need to understand the depth of National Socialism in order to love Adolf Hitler. One needs only to feel the power of his love. And that is exactly what the humble folk of Germany did. To them he was—and is—their benefactor, their friend, their saviour; the one man, within centuries, who had really loved them more than himself, more than anybody or anything, and who had done for them what only love (when allied to genius) can do. Most “intellectuals” were not alive enough, not instinctively, spontaneously responsive to vital forces, human and superhuman, to a sufficient degree, to feel the same. (Those few who were, and are so, in spite of being “intellectuals,” are the Führer’s best followers.) As for the capitalists, they knew, with the sure instinct of worldly-wise, businesslike men, that the triumph of National Socialism meant the end of their power, of their class, of their world order, forever—far more certainly and more completely than even the triumph of Communism ever would. The strength of National Socialism lies in its appeal to the very best of Aryan men and women in and outside Germany, and in its hold on the German masses. It owes the former to Hitler’s personality and to its own objective value—both theoretical and practical—as a doctrine. It owes the latter to Hitler’s personality, and to the prosperity and happiness that the German people enjoyed under his régime, and that they have not forgotten; to the fact that, thanks to his unbending determination, the magnificent programme which he had set before the world on the 24th of February 1920, was carried out to the full—contrarily to those, far less radical and far less exalted, of so many politicians. * * * Apart from the policy of racial regeneration through marriage regulations, health regulations, and that new educational system of which I have spoken, what did the programme comprise? In one word, the liberation of the people from the thraldom of capitalism, through a series of laws concerning income, property, production. No régime—not even that of Soviet Russia—has done more than ours to exalt useful and honest work as the sacred duty of every man and woman. None has done more to make work an obligation for all. And, especially, none has done as much to render that obligation, at the same time, a pleasure. “It must be the first duty of every citizen of the State to work with his mind or with his body. The activity of the individual should not clash with the interest of the community, but must proceed within the

200 frame of the community and for the general good,”1 states Point Ten of the Party Programme. And Point Eleven is but the logical corollary of it: We therefore demand “the abolition of all incomes obtained without work and without toil.”2 Not just any work, but, as I have said before, useful, constructive work that has some value; that is neither a mere drudgery—reluctantly accepted because it is the only means to keep the individual’s body and soul together, while it is, every minute, resented as a loss of time and energy—nor some activity, however “interesting” it be, of which the only positive result is an increase of the individual’s bank balance; still less some form of exploitation of other people’s weaknesses or of other people’s vices, for the financial benefit of a few “clever” ones; but solid production of useful or beautiful material goods or of wholesome ideas, or some activity forwarding the necessary organisation of production, or that of national uplift or national defence; work of which the result is, ultimately, the nourishment and strengthening of men’s bodies, or the formation of men’s character, and of culture, such was “the first duty of every citizen of the State” in National Socialist Germany—and such will again be, I hope, the first duty of every man and woman in a future National Socialist Europe. Every law or regulation in connection with labour of any sort, was inspired by this idea. And every law was efficiently enforced. The abolition of the “slavery of interest”3 put forward as an article of the Party Programme, in Point Eleven and following; the “ruthless confiscation of war gains,” stressed in Point Twelve, on the ground that “personal enrichment during a war must be regarded as a crime against the nation”;4 the nationalisation of big business;5 the sharing out of the 1 “Erste Pflicht jedes Staatsbürgers muß sein, geistig oder körperlich zu schaffen. Die Tätigkeit des einzelnen darf nicht gegen die Interessen der Allgemeinheit verstoßen, sondern muß im Rahmen des Gesamten und zum Nutzen aller Erfolgen” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 10). 2 “Abschaffung des arbeits und mühelosen Einkommens” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 11). 3 “Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 11). 4 “Im Hinblick auf die ungeheuren Opfer an Gut und Blut, die jeder Krieg vom Volke fordert, muß die persönliche Bereicherung durch den Krieg als Verbrechen am Volke bezeichnet warden. Wir fordern daher restlose Einziehung aller Kriegsgewinne.”—“In view of the tremendous sacrifice of blood and treasure demanded of a nation by every war, personal enrichment through war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand, therefore, the total confiscation of all war profits” (Point 12) [Trans. by Ed.]. 5 “Wir fordern die Verstaatlichung aller (bisher) bereits vergesellschafteten (Trusts) Betriebe”—“We demand the nationalisation of all businesses that have (hitherto) been amalgamated (trusts)” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 13) [Trans. by Ed.].

201 profits of wholesale trade;1 the “extensive development of provision for old age”2 by the State, and the Land Reform, of which I shall say a few words, as well as the drastic prosecution and “punishment with death of usurers, profiteers, etc.,”3 were not merely desiderata, intended to impress the public in political meetings, during the struggle of National Socialism for power. They became realities, as soon as Hitler became the uncontested head of the Third Reich; with the immediate result that, in a cleansed atmosphere, a new life started for the German people. Not only were the six and a half million Germans, up till then unemployed, given a livelihood, but an immense—unprecedented—enthusiasm for public welfare, a spirit of healthy competition in disinterested service for the good of others, filled everyone’s heart and, in particular, the hearts of the young men and girls. And within an amazingly short time, the war-torn, downtrodden Germany of the 1920s was once more a leading power—nay the leading power in Europe. Work in the fields, in the mines, in the factories recently wrested from oppressive foreign control; work along those magnificent Autobahnen, the building of which will remain, forever, one of the grand material achievements of the Third Reich; work in the home, where the women felt themselves useful to the whole nation as they never had before; work in the schools, in which for the first time, a programme of education in the right national spirit was at last set forth; work in every useful line, was compulsory. Compulsory on paper, and in practice also. Anyone who just did not want to do his bit was forced to do it—and a little more, in addition—in a concentration camp—unless he chose to leave the country. But there was hardly anyone who did not want to do his bit; who did not joyfully come forward to do it. Never was “compulsory” work so little of a burden, so much of a pleasure. For now the Germans felt, as they never had before, that they—and not a gang of idle rich men; and especially not a parasitic gang of rich aliens (not even Aryans, let alone Germans)—were the 1 “Wir fordern Gewinnbeteilung an Großbetrieben”—“We demand profit sharing in all big businesses” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 14) [Trans. by Ed.]. 2 “Wir fordern einen großzügigen Ausbau der Alters-Versorgung” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 15). 3 “Wir fordern den rücksichtlosen Kampf gegen diejenigen, die durch ihre Tätigkeit das Gemeininteresse schädigen. Gemeine Volksverbrecher, Wucherer, Schieber u.s.w., sind mit dem Tode zu bestrafen, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf Konfession und Rasse”— “We demand ruthless war upon all those whose activities are contrary to the common interest. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished by death without regard to creed or race” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 18) [Trans. by Ed.].

202 lords of their own land and of their own destiny. Just as, in most countries, every male citizen has to spend a year or two (or more) in the army, so, in the Third Reich, every able-bodied young man or woman between sixteen and eighteen was expected to join some section of the “Arbeitsdienst” (labour service) for six months, and thereby to offer some positive contribution to the nation’s welfare, in addition to that which his or her usual activities might have constituted. Students, for instance, would go, under a leader, to work in the fields, along with the farm lads—to plant potatoes, to help bring in the harvest—or, in the case of girls, to help housewives with large families in their cooking, washing, and other domestic work. This was compulsory, no doubt. But it was anything but a drudgery—so much so that, apart from the general “Arbeitsdienst” that was for all young people, the students had a voluntary one of their own, whose members would, for a time, work as factory labourers, tramway drivers, etc., for the sheer sake of experience and service. I have spoken to many men and women who were enrolled in that regular army of peace. Not one of those I met has anything but pleasant memories of those months of non-professional service. And many have told me that they were “unforgettable months,” “the best time they ever had.” The work was done joyfully, nay, enthusiastically—as play would have been. Indeed, the general atmosphere of the country was one of joyous earnestness, of wholehearted, youthful activity. The self-confidence, the uncompromising spirit and the hopes of youth, had taken the place of the hesitations, the doubts, the pessimism and “defeatism” of bygone years. And work—no longer a curse even when compulsory—had become play; pleasure. * * * It would be superfluous to expatiate in detail upon the numerous laws promulgated under the Third Reich for the protection and welfare of the labourers and small traders. In a book like this, which is by no means a technical study but just a profession of faith, there is no point in doing so. Moreover, it would be impossible for me, here in jail—systematically deprived of books and kept out of contact with the other political prisoners—to obtain the precise references which I would need for such a task.1 1 For references, I have to rely upon my sole memory. It is good, no doubt, but has its limitations.

203 But the Land Reform is something too important not to be mentioned with some comments. And our Communist opponents have stressed too much in their propaganda, all that has been done in Russia and in Russian sponsored areas for “the welfare of the peasant,” for me not to say something of our efforts in the same line. Point Seventeen of the Party Programme had laid down, already as early as 1920, the spirit and the main features of the Land Reform: “We demand a Land Reform suited to our national requirements; the passing of a law for confiscation, without compensation, of land for communal purposes; abolition of interest on land loans, and prevention of all speculation on land,”1 an explanation of which was given by the Führer on the 13th of April 1928.2 A more detailed account of the policy of National Socialism as regards land and agriculture is to be found in the Party Manifesto of the 6th of March 1930, in which the reasons why farming “did not pay” in Germany before the creation of the Third Reich, are analysed, and the new land regulations set out. These regulations, like the rest of the laws that were promulgated by or under the inspiration of Adolf Hitler, were intended to free the people—here, the peasants—from the grip of the capitalist exploiter under any form, be it the selfish middleman between the farmer and the consumer—the middleman whose extravagant profits did not allow the peasant any decent living—or the moneylender, or the commercial concerns that sold to the peasant what he required in order to carry on his work efficiently, and that were, in Germany before 1933 as in many other countries, mostly owned by Jews. They gave every facility, every possible encouragement and help, every freedom to the peasant provided that he was a German and that he worked “in the national interest.” For the land being “a home, as well as a means of livelihood,” only members of the German nation, i.e., people of German blood, were allowed to possess land in Germany, which is only natural. “The National Socialist Party stands for private ownership,” the Führer has said on several occasions, in particular, in his declaration of the 13th of April 1928, explaining the attitude of the Party with regard to the agriculturists. And no Nazi has ever contested—as the Communists have—the right of the individual to possess property (land or anything else) and to transmit it to his children. But, “to the right to hold property, however, is attached the obligation to use it in the 1 Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 17. 2 Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 17, note.

204 national interest.”1 And, in the case of land, special courts were set up to enforce this obligation. And a farmer who, through bad farming, according to the judgement of those courts, was not acting “in the common interest,” could be expropriated with a suitable compensation. Land, under the Third Reich, could in no way become the object of speculation.2 The law concerning expropriation without compensation, “for communal purposes,” as stated in Point Seventeen of the Party Programme, was, in fact, directed, in the Führer’s own words, “against the Jewish companies given to speculation on land.3 Whoever owned land had to cultivate it himself, or to give it up (in exchange of a compensation, whenever the land was acquired legally) for the settlement of other farmers willing to cultivate it. The State had a right of pre-emption on every sale of land, in order to see to it that no land should thus become, for somebody, the source of an unearned income. It was also strictly forbidden to pledge land to private moneylenders.4 And necessary loans for cultivation were granted on easy terms by associations recognised by the State, or by the State itself. And the dues to the State were to be paid according to the extent and quality of the land. There were no hard and fast rules regarding the amount of cultivation expected from each farmer.5 It depended largely upon local factors concerning the land itself. Laws of inheritance prevented the subdivision of land, or the accumulation of debt upon it.6 Finally, the middleman’s business was transferred to agricultural associations,7 under State control. And everything was done to raise the farming class, not only economically but also educationally. These few details are enough to show that the National Socialist land policy was not only in no way less conducive to the peasants’ prosperity than that of the Communists (as our opponents of the Red Front like to pretend) but, indeed, far more so. It thoroughly protected the peasant’s interests without curtailing anything of his right to own private property and to inherit it, as well as to buy and sell. It left him an immense amount of initiative in the management of his own affairs, while safeguarding the interest of the community through strict State 1 Party Manifesto of 6 March 1930. 2 Point 17 of the Party Programme. Cf. Party Manifesto of 6 March 1930. 3 The Führer’s Declaration, Munich, 13 April 1928 (quoted in Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 17, note). 4 Party Manifesto of 6 March 1930. 5 Party Manifesto of 6 March 1930. 6 Party Manifesto of 6 March 1930. 7 Party Manifesto of 6 March 1930.

205 control wherever that was necessary. Nay, that very State control was, at the same time, the surest protection of the peasant against possible exploitation by clever money-makers. For what I said about the other laws and regulations foreseen in the Party Programme already before Hitler’s rise to power, is also true of those concerning land and agriculture: they were not just laws “on paper,” but were enforced. Indeed, no régime—not even the Communist—was as drastically opposed as ours to the grip of the money-makers on the land, and as ruthless in its endeavour to break it. Many of the “poor Jews” interned during the time it lasted, especially in Eastern Germany, were prosecuted not “just for being Jews,” as simple people are inclined to believe, but for dabbling in shadowy speculations on land, or lending money to farmers at exorbitant rates of interest, and so forth; for being, in one word, the exploiters of the people. Once freed from them and from their imitators, the German peasant no less than the labourer of the towns was able to work with the feeling that it was “worthwhile”; that he and his family, and the people at large, of whom he was a part, would draw the maximum benefit from his toiling year after year. Young people of all social conditions—sons and daughters of manual labourers, of professors, of generals, of humble shopkeepers, of men in high office—would come regularly and help him in the fields as members of the Arbeitsdienst, and make him realise more and more that he and they, he and the townsfolk, were one blood and one people—one nation. The joyful, hopeful, self-confident atmosphere of the towns spread to the countryside as well, in spite of the concealed, though thoroughly organised opposition that a great number of ecclesiastics set up, in many places, against National Socialism, taking advantage of the peasant’s ignorance or of his acquired prejudices.1 * * * Another most positive contribution of the National Socialist régime to the renaissance of Germany—and of Europe—lies in its effort to cleanse the press, as well as all forms of art and literature, and to build a new healthy and beautiful culture upon the ruins of the decadent, pseudo-culture of the capitalistic world; its effort to raise the moral as 1 I have heard, in villages of the Mosel region (around Treves) people criticising National Socialism as “anti-Catholic” and Alfred Rosenberg as “anti-Christ” under the influence of the clergy, as one can imagine.

206 well as intellectual and aesthetic standard of the adults, no less than of the young men and women. No aspect of National Socialist rule (save, perhaps, our struggle against Jewry) has been more bitterly and more foolishly criticised, not only by our deadly opponents but by “public opinion” in the world at large. And yet that stubborn fight for truth, and for the triumph of whatever is the healthiest and the best in the Aryan race, is something of which every Nazi can be proud—even if, for the time being, we failed. Without a thorough purging of the press, no renaissance would have been possible after 1933—no renaissance ever will be possible. For, so long as the journalist writes just to get paid—regardless by whom, and on behalf of whom, and for what ulterior purpose—and not because he feels the urge to enlighten or uplift his readers, then, I say, the “clever” ones, of whatever race or creed, who are in control of the money will remain, also, in control of people’s minds and, to the extent the “masses” have a say in national and international affairs, in control of the destiny of nations. For the reading masses are foolish—pre-eminently gullible—and the knowledge of the conventional symbolism of script has never made them less so. On the contrary, it has given them the dangerous illusion of free thought while enslaving them to the written word more than they ever had been to any tangible power. No one has pointed out more brilliantly—and sarcastically—than our Führer the evil influence of that self-styled “intellectual” or “enlightened” press, controlled by Jewish money. “The Frankfurter Zeitung,” states he (and this is only one instance among many), “always writes in favour of fighting with ‘intellectual’ weapons, and this appeals, curiously enough, to the least intellectual people.”1 “It is just for our semi-intellectual classes that the Jew writes in his so-called ‘intelligentsia’ press.”2 There were only two ways of dealing with the plague: either eliminate the press altogether, or else, use the incurable propensity of the newspaper readers to believe all that is printed for the triumph of the National Socialist Idea, by allowing the papers to print nothing but 1 “Für diese Leute war und ist freilich die ‘Frankfurter Zeitung’ der Inbegriff aller Anständigkeit. Verwendet sie doch niemals rohe Ausdrücke, lehnt jede körperliche Brutalität ab und appelliert immer an den Kampf mit den ‘geistigen’ Waffen, der eigentümlicherweise gerade den geistlosesten Menschen am meisten am Herzen liegt” (Mein Kampf, I, x, p. 267; cf. Mannheim, p. 244). 2 “Gerade für unsere geistige Halbwelt aber schreibt der Jude seine sogenannte Intelligenzpresse” (Mein Kampf, I, x, p. 267-68; cf. Mannheim, p. 245).

207 what was conducive to the strengthening of the new spirit, or at least, what was in no manner opposed to it. Of the two courses, the second was undoubtedly the easiest at the same time as the most profitable. One cannot teach people to think for themselves in a day. But if, while they are learning to do so, they must have something to believe, let that be the truth rather than lies. So the second course was taken. The press was not eliminated, but controlled, as foreseen by Point Twenty-Three of the Party Programme demanding, “legal warfare against conscious political lying and its dissemination in the press.”1 All editors of newspapers in German and their assistants had to be “members of the nation,” i.e., to be of German blood. Papers in other languages, or even foreign papers in German, could be published with the permission of the Government. But no non-German was allowed to influence the German press, either financially or otherwise, the penalty being (if any such transaction was found out) “the suppression of the newspaper and the immediate deportation of the non-German concerned with it.”2 It is easy to criticise such a policy, advocating the “right of the individual to express himself freely,” and what not. But one should first realise that, had a similar national press policy been applied in England (from the English point of view, that goes without saying) England never would have declared war on Germany in 1939; there would have been no bombardments, no ruins, no millions of dead—nothing of that immense misery that everyone deplores—but a happy Europe in which the two great Aryan nations, Germany and England, would have collaborated in a friendly spirit for the welfare of both of them and of the whole Aryan world. Such a result—at least I believe—would have been well worth obtaining at the cost of a little less liberty to lie. And then, also, I cannot help knowing that those Democrats who blame us for not having allowed the German papers to publish propaganda against our views, when we had power, are the self-same people who have been persecuting us for the last four years, on the sole ground that our outlook on life is diametrically opposed to theirs; the self-same people who sentenced me to three years’ imprisonment for writing and spreading “Nazi propaganda.” Their “liberty of 1 “Wir fordern den gesetzlichen Kampf gegen die bewußte politische Lüge und ihre Verbreitung durch die Presse” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 23). 2 “. . . jede finanzielle Beteiligung an deutschen Zeitungen oder deren Beeinflussung durch Nicht-Deutsche gesetzlich verboten wird und fordern als Strafe für Übertretungen die Schließung eines solchen Zeitungsbetriebes sowie sofortige Ausweisung der daran beteiligten Nicht-Deutschen aus dem Reich” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 23).

208 conscience” and their “right of the individual to express himself” are the most ludicrous humbug—so coarse and clumsy that anyone gifted with a shadow of common sense can see through it. The least said about those lies the better. * * * Along with the cleansing of the press took place the thorough purging of art and literature, in order to forward the growth of a healthy national culture, such as was really impossible in the enervating atmosphere that modern capitalism has created. This was also laid out, in principle, in Point Twenty-Three of the Party Programme: “We demand legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation, and the suppression of institutions which militate against the requirements above mentioned.”1 The world, accustomed by its whole education to call any cleverly written rubbish a manifestation of the “intellect”—encouraged to do so by the Jewish press, as one can well imagine—and trained to admire “intellect” above everything, burst out in loud indignation when, on the evening of the 10th of May 1933, in the presence of the Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels—one of the finest, sincerest, and most intelligent National Socialists who ever lived—the students of Berlin made a public bonfire of a lot of books, mostly but not all written by Jews, which came under the ban as decadent or pernicious literature. “What!” cried out the foreign press, “Going back to the intolerant fanaticism of the Middle Ages? Returning to barbarity! Burning books! How outrageous!” The newspaper-reading apes of the whole so-called civilised earth echoed the indignation. The more smeared they happened to be with cheap “learning” and the more puffed up with unjustified “intellectual” pretences, the more horrified they were at the news of the paper and printing ink holocaust, the more they ranted against Dr. Goebbels, against the Führer, against the German students and the Nazi Party, and (whenever they had the opportunity) against the isolated non-German Aryans, like myself, who understood the meaning of the holocaust and greeted it with cheers. 1 “Zeitungen, die gegen das Gemeinwohl verstoßen, sind zu verbieten. Wir fordern den gesetzlichen Kampf gegen eine Kunst- und Literatur-Richtung, die einen zersetzenden Einfluß auf unser Volksleben ausübt und die Schließung von Veranstaltungen, die gegen vorstehende Forderungen verstoßen” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 23).

209 The same frantic outcry was heard when the Third Reich banned as decadent, and dangerous to the moral health of the German nation, all the queer, sickly, distorted productions on canvas or out of stone which, before Hitler’s rise to power, used to pass as “art.” And still greater horror was expressed when doctors and professors of Jewish origin, and German “intellectuals” whose outlook was too obviously opposed to the National Socialist way of life, were dismissed from service. It reached its highest pitch, as one would expect, when a sufficient number of rich Jews, whom the Nazi Government had magnanimously allowed to leave Germany with all their money and valuables, settled in England, in America, in India, all over the world, and nourished the anti-Nazi propaganda more lavishly than ever. Yet, it was an artificial indignation—as artificial indeed as any parrot’s lesson. For half the people who took part in the world-wide chorus against the “Nazi persecution” of “art and culture” had not the faintest idea of the meaning of these two words. They just called “art” whatever was advertised to them as such in the Sunday editions of the daily papers dealing with Miss So-and-so’s latest “psychological” novel and Mr. So-and-so’s exhibition of oil paintings. The other half would simply have detested the sight—or the sound—of most of the stuff banned in Germany, had they seen it, or read it, and would have cried out wholeheartedly: “A jolly good thing it was banned!” had they been sure nobody would have overheard them. They joined in the parrots’ chorus only because they were afraid of being taken for “rustics”—“barbarians”—if they did not. The truth is that whatever was banned was really not worth keeping. The truth is also that, in the domain of art and culture as in all others, we National Socialists did not only ban, and forbid; and destroy. We also created. In fact, we only destroyed in order to be able to create, with the collaboration of a reborn people, untrammelled by unhealthy examples and depressing memories. And nothing would have served our propaganda so much, perhaps, as a series of double art exhibitions all over the world: in one hall, all the bizarre specimens of ultra-modern art which we banned—unnatural curves, contorted shapes, nightmarish expressions; queer human faces, supposed to be all the more rich in deep hidden “meaning” that they appear the more insane or idiotic to the unprejudiced eye—and in the other . . . the finest works of Arno Breker. And an explanatory notice addressed to the sincere observer: “We have come to destroy that, in order to create this.” That would have been Nazi propaganda indeed! And of the best kind. I wish such a double exhibition had been organised in every town of the

210 world where there was a German Consulate. What can be said, in this connection, of painting and sculpture, is no less true of music and literature. But many will say, “What about science? No civilised government can ban ‘scientific’ publications—and persecute a scientist like Sigmund Freud, on racial grounds. And banish Einstein, one of the greatest brains of all times.” Yes, I know; Freud and Einstein, the two instances that are automatically brought forth to damn us, every time the question of our attitude to “culture” arises. It is curious how few people are in a position to speak of these two scientists, even when they use their names as weapons against us. Millions have read some of the works of Freud (or some extracts from them) it is true, but only for the sake of vicarious sexual excitement—not out of thirst for scientific information; not as one should read them, if at all. As for Einstein, however fashionable it might have been to talk about his “theory of relativity” in the 1920s (when “simplified” explanations of it were to be found even in ladies’ magazines), nobody but a handful of highly specialised mathematicians and physicists can boast of understanding his scientific innovations. All that lay people know is that he is “a great brain”—which is undoubtedly true. And we are barbarians for not appreciating such greatness, when it happens to manifest itself in a Jew. There is a fundamental error, a thorough misconception, at the root of this attitude to us. It is not true that we do not recognise or appreciate such intellectual greatness as that of Einstein, in a Jew. We recognise it wherever it might be. But that is no reason why we should allow a Jew to hold a professorship in a German University—(or in a University in any Aryan National State, at that) any more than we would a Chinese or an Arab with similar qualifications. If nationality be, first and foremost, a matter of race (as it undoubtedly is) and if, as is natural, only nationals of a country, i.e., people of that country’s blood, should be allowed to occupy responsible posts there, then surely no Jew should be permitted to retain such a post, whether it be in the educational line or in the government, or elsewhere, in an Aryan country. The world should understand that there was, in our attitude, no personal hostility towards Einstein as a scientist. There was just the fact that we could not betray both the letter and the spirit of the Party Programme for the sake of anybody. And the “intellectuals” should blame us all the less as, science being above frontiers, it matters little, from their point of view, whether the “theory of relativity” be expounded from Berlin, New York, or Jerusalem.

211 The case of Sigmund Freud is a little different on account of the popularity of his works, and of the deplorable influence they have upon the lay people, especially the young. It is true that the lay people have no business reading them, and it is no fault of Freud’s if they do. Still, the fact remains that, unless strictly confined to the perusal of specialists, those works are dangerous—“likely to disintegrate” a nation’s life. They had—and have—not only in Germany but all over the world, wherever they are available in translations, a pernicious influence upon the young men and women who seek in them an opportunity of pondering over sex-pathology and of discovering, in their own lives, sex problems, real or imaginary, of which they would otherwise never have thought. The man, therefore, to the fact of being a Jew, added that of having—maybe unwillingly; but that makes no difference—a disintegrating influence. One really cannot blame the students of resurrected Germany for making a bonfire of his books along with many others, less technical in their suggestiveness. One cannot blame the Nazi government, either, for expelling Freud from Germany, a little roughly. The attitude of National Socialism to far-fetched monstrosities or pretentious platitudes in art; to far-fetched “problems,” analysed in loose and lazy style, to mysteries about nothing, bizarrerie, childish exhibitionism in literature; to artificial sex-quack1—“sex on the brain,” as Norman Douglas would have said—to the cheap eroticism of people who have nothing better to think of, is a joyous, boisterous, defiant “Goodbye to all that!” and a triumphant feeling of riddance. We Nazis have no interest in and no sympathy for the ugly, sickly, foul-smelling capitalistic world, which we are out to kill, and which will die anyhow, even if we have not the pleasure of striking the last blow at it. Facing the future—work and song; faith, struggle, and creation—we breathe in the beauty of our tangible ideals like a gush of fresh, invigorating air from the woods after some oppressive nightmare. Yes, goodbye to all that! Or rather, “Away with all that!” What have we in common with this world of parrots shrieking meaningless words at the top of their voices, and of monkeys scratching their genitals? The culture, of which we laid the foundations during the first brief years of our power, will be something entirely different from what the modern intellectuals call “culture.” 1 Savitri probably means “Quackelei,” i.e., silly talk, nonsense, prattle.—Ed.

212 * * * But an entirely new culture can hardly be conceived among people who retain the same religion as before. The Programme proclaimed at the Hofbräuhaus states, it is true, that “the Party as such stands for a positive Christianity.”1 But, as I have said before—and as all the most intelligent National Socialists I met have admitted to me—it was well-nigh impossible, in 1920, to say anything else, if one hoped at all to gather a following. And it also remains true that the very fact of replacing, as we did, the link of common faith by the link of common blood—the creedal conception of community by the racial one—is contrary to the spirit of Christianity, no less than to its practice, always and everywhere, up to this day. It remains true, in other words, that if whatever religion that is “a danger to the national State”2 is to be banned, then, Christianity must go—for nothing is more incompatible with the fundamental principles upon which rests the whole structure of any National State. However, apart from the fact that this could not be said in a political programme in 1920—or even in 1933—it could still less be done in a day. Christianity could not be too openly and too bitterly opposed, before the Nazi philosophy of life had become widely accepted as a matter of course; before it had firmly taken root in the subconscious reactions of the German people, if not also of many foreign Aryans, so as to buttress the growth of the new—or rather of the eternal—religious conception which naturally goes hand in hand with it. Until then, it would have been premature to suppress the Christian faith radically, however obsolete it might appear to many of us. “A politician,” our Führer has said, “must estimate the value of a religion not so much in connection with the faults inherent in it, as in relation to the advantages of a substitute which may be manifestly better. But until some such substitute appears, only fools and criminals will destroy what is there, on the spot.”3 1 “Die Partei als solche vertritt den Standpunkt eines positiven Christentums . . .” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 24). 2 “Wir fordern die Freiheit aller religiösen Bekenntnisse im Staat, soweit sie nicht dessen Bestand gefährden oder gegen das Sittlichkeits und Moralgefühl der germanischen Rasse verstoßen”—“We demand the freedom of all religious denominations in the state, so long as they do not endanger its existence or militate against the ethical and moral feelings of the Germanic race” (Das Programm der NSDAP, Point 24). 3 “Für den Politiker aber darf die Abschätzung des Wertes einer Religion weniger durch die ihr etwa anhaftenden Mängel bestimmt werden als vielmehr durch die Güte eines ersichtlich besseren Ersatzes. Solange aber ein solcher anscheinend fehlt, kann das Vorhandene nur von Narren oder Verbrechern demoliert werden” (Mein Kampf, I, x, pp. 293–94; cf. Mannheim, p. 267).

213 One had to prepare the ground slowly, by creating anew a thoroughly Aryan soul in the young people, through their whole education; and, at the same time—for the elder folk—by giving a precise meaning (as National Socialistic as possible) to the expression “positive Christianity.” That is what Alfred Rosenberg has endeavoured to do in his famous book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century.1 His “positive Christianity” is something indeed very different from the Christianity of any Church, nay, from the Christianity of the Bible, based as it is solely upon Rosenberg’s interpretation of what is obviously the least Jewish in the New Testament and upon Rosenberg’s own National Socialist philosophy. The Christians themselves soon discovered that it was no Christianity at all. And of all the prominent men of the Party, Alfred Rosenberg is surely the one whom they dislike the most to this day—although they are probably wrong in doing so, for there were and still are National Socialist thinkers far more radical than he. And he was, moreover, far too much a theoretician to be a real danger to the power of the Churches. But it is certain that, under all this talk about “positive Christianity,” there was, from the beginning, in every thoughtful National Socialist, the feeling that Germany in particular and the Aryan world at large need a new religious consciousness, entirely different from and, in many ways, in vigorous contrast to the Christian one; nay, that such a consciousness is already lurking in the general discontent, disquiet, and scepticism of the modern Aryan,2 and that the Nazi Movement must sooner or later help it to awake and to express itself. Although he too speaks of “positive Christianity” and insists on the fact that “nothing is further removed from the intentions of the NSDAP than to attack the Christian religion and its worthy servants”;3 and although he is very careful to separate the Movement from every endeavour to revive the old Germanic cult of Wotan,4 Gottfried Feder cannot help 1 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen, 1930). 2 This fact has been most forcefully pointed out by Gustav Frenssen in his magnificent book Der Glaube der Nordmark [The Faith of the Northland] (Stuttgart-Berlin: Georg Truckenmüller, 1930). 3 “Es kann nicht genug betont werden, dass der NSDAP nichts ferner liegt als die christliche Religion und ihre würdigen Diener anzugreifen” (Das Programm der NSDAP, p. 17). 4 “Die Partei als solche verbittet es sich jedenfalls, mit Wotanskultbestrebungen identifiziert zu werden . . . ”—“The party as such refuses to be identified in any way with the endeavours of the Wotan cult . . .” (Das Programm der NSDAP, p. 62) [Trans. by Ed.].

214 mentioning that slowly rising new consciousness, and “the questions, the hopes, and the wishes whether the German people will, one day, find a new form by which to express their knowledge of God and religious life,” if only to say that such questions, hopes, etc. are “far beyond the frame even of such a revolutionary programme as the one National Socialism proclaims.”1 And it is no less certain that, although no attempt was ever made officially to overthrow the power of the Churches and to forbid the teaching of the Christian doctrine, books inspired through and through, not by the desire to revive any particular Cult of old—that of Wotan or any other God—but by the love and spirit of eternal Nordic Heathendom, some of which are exceedingly beautiful, were published under the Third Reich, and read, and sympathetically commented upon in Nazi circles; and that this was the first time that the real Heathen soul of the North—the undying Aryan soul—fully realised, after nearly fifteen hundred years, that it is alive; more so, that it is immortal, invincible. I have already quoted Heinrich Himmler’s short but splendid book, The Voice of the Ancestors, that masterful condensation of our philosophy in thirty-seven pages, which only an out-and-out Pagan could write. It contains, among other things, a bitter criticism of the Christian attitude to life—meekness, self-abnegation, delectation in the feeling of guilt and misery; “aspiration towards the dust”—and, in opposition to it, a profession of faith of the proud and of the strong and free: “We do not exhibit our faults to anyone, we Heathens—least of all to God. We keep quiet about them; and try to make good for our mistakes.”2 Of the many other books of similar inspiration, I shall recall only 1 “Alle Fragen, Hoffnungen und Wünsche, ob das deutsche Volk dereinst einmal eine neue Form finden wird für seine Gotterkenntnis und sein Gotterleben gehören nicht hierher, das sind Dinge von säkularer Bedeutung, die auch über den Rahmen eines so grundstürzenden Programmes, wie es der Nationalsozialismus verkündet, weit hinausgehen”—“All questions, hopes, and desires as to whether the German people will find once again a new form for their knowledge and experience of God do not belong here, among things of secular meaning, and are far beyond the frame even of such a revolutionary programme as the one National Socialism proclaims” (Das Programm der NSDAP, p. 62) [Trans. by Ed.]. Savitri translates “Gotterleben” as “religious life” where “experience of God” would be more appropriate—Ed. 2 “Wir kommen nicht zu Gott, zu klagen, wir Heiden—weil wir unsere Fehler nicht den Leuten zeigen—am wenigsten aber Gott. Wir suchen unsere Fehler abzulegen und zu wachsen” (Die Stimme der Ahnen, p. 31 [cf. The Voice of the Ancestors, pp. 34–35—Ed.]).

215 two far less well-known than Alfred Rosenberg’s famous Mythus but, I must say, far more radical, and deserving undoubtedly more, both the pious hatred that so many Christians of all persuasions waste upon that work and the wholehearted admiration and gratitude of all real modern Heathens: one is Ernst Bergmann’s Twenty-Five Theses of the German Religion,1 and the other, Johann von Leers’ History on a Racial Basis.2 There, the incompatibility of the National Socialist view of life and the Christian is shown as clearly, once for all, as any uncompromising devotee of either of the two philosophies could desire: A people that has returned to its blood and soil, and that has realised the danger of international Jewry, can no longer tolerate a religion which makes the Scriptures of the Jews the basis of its Gospel. Germany cannot be rebuilt on this lie. We must base ourselves on the Holy Scriptures which are clearly written in German hearts. Our cry is: “Away with Rome and Jerusalem! Back to our native German faith in present-day form! What is sacred in our home, what is eternal in our people, what is divine, is what we want to build.”3 And Thesis Two of the Twenty-Five Theses—the number seems to have been chosen to match the Twenty-Five Points of the National Socialist Party Programme, so as to show that the “new” (or rather eternal) “German religion” is ultimately inseparable from the creation in Germany of a true National State—the second “thesis,” I say, states that the German religion is “the form of faith appropriate to our age which we Germans would have today, if it had been granted to us to have our native German faith developed, undisturbed, to the present time.”4 As for Christianity, it is frankly called “an unhealthy and unnatural religion, which arose two thousand years ago among sick, exhausted, and despairing men, who had lost their belief in life,”5 in a word, exactly the contrary of what the German people (or, by the way, any Aryan people) need today. I do not remember any writer having more strongly and decisively pointed out the contrast between the everlasting Aryan spirit and that 1 Ernst Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen der Deutschen Religion. Ein Katechismus (Breslau: Hirt, 1932). 2 Johann von Leers, Geschichte auf rassischer Grundlage (Leipzig: Reclam, 1934). 3 Die 25 Thesen der Deutschen Religion. 4 Die 25 Thesen der Deutschen Religion, p. 9. 5 Die 25 Thesen der Deutschen Religion, p. 9.

216 of Christianity and, especially, having more clearly stressed the nature of the Aryan religion of the future. There is no question of reviving the Wotan cult, or any other national form of worship from Antiquity, as it was then. The wheel of evolution never turns backwards. The religion of resurrected Germany can only be that which would have been flourishing today, as the natural product of evolution of the old Nordic worship, had not “that Frankish murderer Karl,” as Professor Bergmann calls Charlemagne, destroyed the free expression of German faith and forced Christianity upon the Germanic race by fire and sword, in the eighth and ninth centuries; or rather, had not Rome herself fallen prey to what her early emperors called “the new superstition,” introduced by the Jews. And what can be said of the new German religion is no less true of the desirable new religion of every regenerate Aryan people, organised under a real national State. The only international religion—if such a thing is to exist at all—should be the extremely broad and simple Religion of Life, which contains and dominates all national cults and clashes with none (provided they be true cults of the people, and not priestly distortions of such); the spontaneous worship of warmth and light—of the Life energy—which is not the natural religion of man alone, but that of all living creatures, to the extent of their consciousness. In fact, all the national religions should help to bring men to that supreme worship of the Godhead in Life; for nowhere can Divinity be collectively experienced better than in the consciousness of race and soil. And no religion definitely stamped with local characteristics, geographical or racial, should ever become international. When such a one does—as Christianity did; as Islam did—the result is the cultural enslavement of many races to the spirit of that one whence the religion sprang, or through which it first grew to prominence. An Indian Muslim, to the extent he is thoroughly Muslim, is outside the pale of Indian civilisation.1 And, to the extent he accepts Christianity, a European accepts the bondage of Jewish thought. And a Northern European, to the extent he accepts Christianity, and especially Catholicism, accepts, in addition to that, the bondage of Rome. Germany, the first Aryan 1 This is an idea which I have expressed many times, during my long struggle in India against those religions of equality that do not take racial factors into account. The immemorial non-Aryan cults and customs of India, however, were never put in any sort of bondage to the finer Aryan culture of the Sanskrit-speaking invaders, for the latter did admit the principle of the inequality of races and the importance of the racial factor in religion. The non-Aryan cults and customs were allowed to survive. They exist in India to this day.

217 nation that has rebelled on a grand scale against the Jewish yoke—cultural, no less than economical—is also the first Nordic nation to have shaken off, partly at least, in the sixteenth century, the less foreign (while Aryan1) but still foreign bondage of Rome. Nothing shows better the spirit of the religious revolution—of the religious liberation—slowly preparing itself under the influence of National Socialism, than the outcry of Ernst Bergmann which I have quoted above: “Away with Rome and Jerusalem! Back to our native German faith in its present-day form!” * * * The same inspiration—the same quest of the eternal Aryan faith under its present-day Germanic form—fills Johann von Leers’ History on a Racial Basis which I mentioned. There too one finds, applied to the domain of religion and culture, that passionate assertion of the rights of the Aryan North which constitutes, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of National Socialism on the political plane. For a political awakening of the type that Adolf Hitler provoked, stirring a whole nation to its depth, cannot go without a parallel awakening in all fields of life, especially in that of culture and religion—of thought, generally speaking. There too, one finds—based this time upon the extensive researches of Herman Wirth in ancient lore—a protest against the idea, current in all the Judeo-Christian world, that the old Aryan North was something “primitive” and “barbarous”; and a vision of the future in which Germany in particular and the Aryan race at large will rise again to unprecedented greatness, having rediscovered their glorious, eternal collective Self. The passage of Johann von Leers’ book which comes a few pages after his tribute to Hitler as “the greatest regenerator of the people for thousands of years”2 is worth quoting in extenso: After a period of decadence and race-obliteration we are now coming to a period of purification and development which will decide a new epoch in the history of the world. If we look back on the thousands of years behind us, we find that we have arrived again 1 To the extent the metropolis of the Roman Empire, with the multifarious race-mixtures that took place there and the resulting conflicting influences, can still be termed “Aryan.” 2 Geschichte auf rassischer Grundlage, p. 67.

218 near the great and eternal order experienced by our forefathers. World history does not go forward in a straight line, but moves in curves. From the summit of the original Nordic culture in the Stone Age, we have passed through the deep valleys of centuries of decadence, only to rise once more to a new height. This height will not be lesser than the one once abandoned, but greater, and that, not only in the external goods of life. . . . We did not pass through the great spiritual death of the capitalistic period in order to be extinguished. We suffered it in order to rise again under the Sign that never yet failed us, the Cross of the great Stone Age, the ancient and most sacred Swastika.1 The form and particulars of a modern Aryan religion destined to rule consciences in the place of obsolete Christianity are not yet laid out—and how could they be? But the necessity of such a religion could not be more strongly felt and expressed; and its spirit and main features are already defined. It is the healthy religion of joy and power—and beauty—which I have tried to suggest in the beginning of this book. In other words, it is the eternal aspect of National Socialism itself or (which means the same) National Socialism extended to the highest sphere of life. I have previously recalled the Führer’s words of wisdom concerning the growth of a new religion, better adapted than Christianity to the requirements of the people, namely, that “until such a new faith does appear, only fools and criminals will hurry to destroy what is there, on the spot.”2 In 1924—when he wrote Mein Kampf—he obviously felt that the time was not yet ripe for such a revolution. From what one reads in the famous Goebbels Diaries, published by our enemies in 1948 (and therefore, no one knows to what extent genuine) he would appear to have been in perfect agreement with the Reich Propaganda Minister’s radical opposition to the Churches at the same time as with his cautious handling of the religious question during the war. As long as the war was on, it was, no doubt, not the time to promote such changes as would, perhaps, make many people realise too abruptly that they were fighting for the establishment of something which, maybe, they did not want. But, when victory would be won, then, many things that looked impossible would be made 1 Geschichte auf rassischer Grundlage, pp. 76–77. 2 Mein Kampf, I, x, pp. 293–94; cf. Mannheim, p. 267.

219 possible. According to the Diaries, the Führer was even planning, “after the war,” to encourage his people, gradually, to alter their diet, with a view to doing away with the standing horror of the slaughter-houses1—one of the most laudable projects ever seriously considered in the history of the West,2 which, if realised, would have at once put Germany far ahead of all other nations, raising her conception of morality much above the standard reached by Christian civilisation. He was certainly also planning the gradual formation of a religious outlook worthy of the New Order that he was bringing into being. Already, the most devotedly radical among the active Party members, the corps d’élite; the SS men—were expected to find in the National Socialist Weltanschauung alone all the elements of their inner life, without having anything to do with the Christian Churches and their philosophy. And if one recalls, not the Führer’s public statements, but some of the most striking private statements attributed to him, one feels convinced that he was aware of the inadequacy of Christianity as the religion of a healthy, self-confident, proud, and masterful people no less than any of the boldest of the National Socialist thinkers, nay, no less than Heinrich Himmler himself and those whom he had in mind when he repeatedly wrote, in his brilliant booklet, “ Wir Heiden”—“We Heathens.” I know that the sayings attributed to a man, either by an admiring devotee in a spirit of praise or by an enemy, in a spirit of hatred, are, more often than not, of doubtful authenticity. Yet, when, while quoted in order to praise the one alleged to have uttered them, they in reality condemn him, or when, while quoted as “awful” utterances, with the intention of harming him, they in reality constitute praise; and when, moreover, they happen to be too beautiful, or too true, or too intelligent for the reporter to have invented them wholesale, then one can, I believe, accept them as authentic or most probably so. Of the many books written purposely to throw discredit upon our Führer, I have only read one through and through; but that one—the work of the traitor Rauschning, translated into English under the title 1 “An extended chapter of our talk is devoted by the Führer to the vegetarian question. He believes more than ever that meat eating is wrong. Of course he knows that during the war, we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also” (The Goebbels Diaries, 26 April 1942). [Cf. The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–1943, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 188.—Ed.] 2 Only once was the slaughter of animals forbidden on a wide scale, by order of the Indian Emperor Ashoka (3rd century BC).

220 Hitler Speaks—I read not merely with interest, but with elation, for it is (much against the intention of its author) one of the finest tributes paid to the Saviour of the Aryan race. Had I come from some out-of-the-way jungle and had I never even heard of the Führer before, that book alone would have made me his follower—his disciple—without the slightest reservation. Should I characterise the author of such excellent propaganda as a scoundrel? Or is he not just a perfect fool: a fellow who joined the National Socialist Movement when he had no business to do so, and who recoiled in fright as soon as he began to realise how fundamentally opposed his aspirations were to ours? His aspirations were, apparently, those of a mediocre “bourgeois.” After he turned against us, he did not actually lie; he did not need to. He picked out, in the Führer’s statements, those that shocked him the most—and that were likely to shock also people who resemble him. And he wrote Hitler Speaks, for the consumption of all the mediocre “bourgeois” of the world. As there are millions of them, and as the world they represent was soon to wage war on the Führer, the book was a commercial success at the same time as an “ideological” one1—the sort of success the author had wanted: it stirred the indignation of all manner of “decent” Untermenschen against National Socialism. But one day (if it survives) a regenerate Aryandom will look upon it as the unwilling tribute of an enemy to the greatest European of all ages. And Hitler’s words about Christianity, reported by Rauschning in the fourth chapter of his book, would be admired—not criticised—in an Aryan world endowed with a consistently National Socialist consciousness, for they are in keeping with our spirit—and ring too true not to be authentic. “Leave the hair-splitting to others,” said the Führer to Hermann Rauschning before the latter turned renegade: Whether it is the Old Testament or the New, or simply the sayings of Jesus according to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, it is all the same Jewish swindle. It will not make us free. A German Church, a German Christianity, is a distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both. You can throw the epileptic Paul out of Christianity—others have done so before us. You can make Christ into a noble human being, and deny his divinity and his rôle as a saviour. People have been doing it for centuries. I believe there are such Christians today in England and America—Unitarians, they 1 There were five printings of the book in English up till 1940. And probably others after that date.

221 call themselves, or something like that. It is no use. You cannot get rid of the mentality behind it. We do not want people to keep one eye on life in the hereafter. We need free men, who feel and know that God is in themselves.1 Indeed, however clever he might have been, Rauschning was not the man to concoct this discourse out of pure imagination. As many other statements attributed to the Führer in his book, this one bears too strongly the stamp of sincerity, of faith—of truth—to be just an invention. Moreover, it fits in perfectly with many of the Führer’s known utterances, with his writings, with the spirit of his whole doctrine which is, as I said before, far more than a mere socio-political ideology. For, whatever might be said, or written, for the sake of temporary expediency, the truth remains that National Socialism and Christianity, if both carried to their logical conclusions—that is to say, experienced in full earnest; lived—cannot possibly go together. The Führer certainly thought it premature to take up, publicly, towards the Christian doctrine as well as the Churches, the attitude that the natural intolerance of our Weltanschauung would have demanded; but he knew that we can only win, in the long run, if, wherever essentials are concerned, we maintain that intolerance of any movement sincerely “convinced that it alone is right.”2 And he knew that, sooner or later, our conflict with the existing order is bound to break out on the religious and philosophical plane as well as on the others. This is unavoidable. And it has only been postponed by the material defeat of Germany—perhaps (who knows?) in accordance with the mysterious will of the Gods, so as to enable the time to ripen and the Aryan people at large, and especially the Germans, to realise, at last, how little Christianity can fulfil their deeper aspirations, and how foolish they would be to allow it to stand between them and the undying Aryan faith implied in National Socialism. That Aryan faith—that worship of health, of strength, of sunshine, and of manly virtues; that cult of race and soil—is the Nordic 1 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p. 57. 2 “Die Zukunft einer Bewegung wird bedingt durch den Fanatismus, ja die Unduldsamkeit, mit der ihre Anhänger sie als die allein richtige vertreten und anderen Gebilden ähnlicher Art gegenüber durchsetzen”—“The future of a movement depends upon the fanaticism, indeed the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as alone correct and forward it past other similar formations” (Mein Kampf, I, xii, p. 384; cf. Mannheim, pp. 349–50) [Trans. by Ed.].

222 expression of the universal Religion of Life. It is—I hope—the future religion of Europe and of a part at least of Asia (and, naturally, of all other lands where the Aryan dominates). One day, those millions will remember the Man who, first—in the 1920s—gave Germany the divine impetus destined to bring about that unparalleled resurrection; the Man whom now the ungrateful world hates and slanders: our Hitler. Imprisoned here for the love of him, my greatest joy lies in the glorious hope that those reborn Aryans—those perfect men and women of the future Golden Age—will, one day, render him divine honours.