Published as “Hitlerism and the Hindu World” in The National Socialist, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 18-20.
“Hitlerism and Hindudom” was Savitri’s original title.
The images and captions are from Irminsul’s Racial Nationalist Library

Edited by R.G. Fowler

Illustration: The Greek goddess Artemis as “Mistress of Beasts,” on a Boeotian vase, c. 700 BC.

Someone once asked Ramana Maharshi – one of the greatest spiritual personalities of modern India (he died only a few years ago¹) – what he thought of Adolf Hitler. The answer was short and simple: “He is a ‘gnani’,” i.e., a sage; one who “knows,” who is, through personal experience, fully conscious of the eternal truths that express the Essence of the Universe; conscious of the hierarchic character of its visible (and invisible) manifestations in time and outside time; conscious of the nature and place of gods, men and other creatures, animate and inanimate, in the light of the One inexpressible Reality behind, within and above them all: the Brahman-Atman of the Hindu scriptures, thousands of years old. This implies, of course, consciousness of the great Laws of manifestations that preside over the birth, life, death, rebirth and liberation from the wheel of birth and rebirth, of all creatures, and therefore of the fundamental inequality of creatures, including people – and races – the inequality of souls as well as of bodies, and – on the social plane – the strivings for an order that would be the exact reflection of this inequality within the universal, divine hierarchy – of this unity within hierarchical diversity. In the mind of such a perfect Brahmin (in the etymological sense of the word: a man who has realized Brahman-Atman within himself and, in consequence, “knows” the truth) the word “gnani” cannot mean anything less than that.

It is a far greater praise than any recognition of our Leader’s importance in mere history. It means that his unique place in history is the mere outcome of Something deeper and more difficult to sense (for the common mind): his place among those at the very top of the hierarchy of creatures. As I said before, Ramana Maharshi represents the double aristocracy of Hindudom: both by his caste (he was a Brahmin) and by the fact that he was one of the few who were strictly worthy of belonging to that exalted caste. His judgment is of more import than that of millions of average, albeit “intellectual” people.

I shall now relate an episode of my own life involving a youngster of a very low Hindu caste: the Maheshyas of West Bengal, a caste of tillers of the soil; one of the innumerable subdivisions of the Sudras.

The youngster, named Khudiram, after one of the fighters for Indian independence, was a typical specimen of the masses of Bengal: dark skinned, flat-faced – a blending of Dravidian (the race of most South Indians) and Mongoloid. He must have been about fifteen and was perfectly illiterate. He was my servant.

One day – in glorious 1940 – as he came back from the market where I had sent him to buy fish for the cats, he told me, beaming with joy: “Memsahib” (it is the way one addresses all European women, here in India) “I really wish your Leader will win the war! I want him to, and I pray to all the gods that he does!”

Pan-Hindu Flag

I was dumbfounded. I had never spoken about Adolf Hitler to Khudiram – a non-Aryan if any! I presumed the lad knew there was a war going on in faraway Europe – everybody knew it – and I was not over-astonished at his taking sides with us: all Indians in those days did the same, including the Communists (on account of the non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939). “The enemies of our enemies are our friends” – and Bengal was a bastion in the struggle against British rule. But I never expected such emphasis in the pro-German feelings of a Bengali village lad.

I asked him: “Why are you so strongly on the Leader’s side? Is it just because he is winning?” (The French campaign was then nearly over.)

Khudiram said: “No, I would be on his side even if he were defeated, but I pray all the gods he may win.”

“And why? What do you know about the war?”

And the illiterate lad replied, to my further surprise: “I may be an ignorant boy. But I met one in the market much older than I; he must be about twenty – a ‘learned’ boy, who can even speak a little English, and he told me that your Leader was fighting this war in Europe so that he might do away with the Bible and in its place set up, for all the West – the Bhagavad-Gita!”

I wondered what Adolf Hitler’s reaction would have been, had he known the interpretation given to his war aims in the Calcutta fish market. (I did not yet know of the high consideration he had for the most ancient Aryan philosophical poem. I was to hear of it in England, from a man who knew him well – after the war.) But I thought of a passage in the first chant of the Bhagavad-Gita, in its nineteenth century French translation by Eugene Burnouf: “Out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of castes (i.e., of races, for the castes originally corresponded to racial differences); out of the confusion of castes proceeds the loss of memory (i.e., one forgets who were one’s ancestors), out of the loss of memory proceeds the loss of understanding, and out of this all evil!”

I thought to myself in a flash: “True, this is the oldest known expression of the spirit of Mein Kampf.” And I told the boy: “Your elder friend is right. Our Leader is fighting for the Aryan West to go back to the eternal Aryan values that are exalted in the Bhagavad-Gita. Now I give you a day’s holiday, and a rupee to treat your friends. Go and tell them all – tell everyone you meet – what your market big boy said. He is right!”

Khudiram was delighted and joyously made for the door. But I stopped him for a while to put another question to him.

“You pray for our Leader’s victory – our victory,” said I. ‘Now, do you know that if we win the war and my Leader’s influence reaches the ends of the earth, you, within our New Order, shall remain forever what you are: a Maheshya – a Sudra. You are no Aryan. The New Order shall grant you no privileges: these will be, just as throughout the centuries, for the fair-complexioned Brahmans or Kshatriyas, who, in India, will remain at the top of Hindu society. Do you still love our Leader, knowing this?”

The lad of the tropics, the mouthpiece of the illiterate Hindu masses, exclaimed unhesitatingly: “Of course I do, and all the more, now I know it!” For this means that your Leader’s spirit is one with the Shatras [i.e., of the Hindu sacred writ] – that he knows the truth, and wants the world to abide in truth, as did the great ones who handed over the Shatras to their disciples. This is of no more importance whether I, a mere individual, get promotion or not in this world. The one and only thing that matters is the truth of the gods which is (now I know it!) your Leader’s truth also.

“If I was born a mere Maheshya, it is sure that I have sinned in many of my past lives. But this time I obey the Shatras – i.e., do not defile myself by eating forbidden things, do not mess about with girls of other castes, and so forth – then next time, when I am born again, I shall be born in a better family. And after several thousands of years – time does not count – who knows? I might be born as the son of a Brahmin, or perhaps in your Europe, as one of the young men who fight for your Leader’s ideals. Who knows?” [Image: Iron Age swastika (sun wheel) from Gotland, Sweden.]

Could one imagine, in Christian Europe, a lad of non-Aryan or doubtful descent saying: “This is my punishment for my past misdeeds, of before this present life. Now if I behave as I should, who knows? I might slowly, slowly, make my way upwards and after a thousand years or more be born a German.” No, one cannot, precisely because such thoughts are totally foreign to the Christian spirit and the belief that all souls are equally precious in the eyes of a personal man-loving god. This could have been possible if we had, in Europe, remained faithful to our old heathen values. And there old values are the very same “Hyperborean” ones as are to this day upheld in Hindu India, where the idea of segregated castes – the oldest form of “apartheid” on earth – and the belief that the Aryan is the one who should rule the world, are widespread and undiscussed ideas.

Well did Rudolf von Sebottendorf, founder of the famous Thule Gesellschaft that prepared the way for the triumph of National Socialism, well did he, I say, owe a lot to his visits to India, and his contacts with Hindus conscious of their Hyperborean traditions?

It is said in Hindu writ that “the year is the day of the gods.” The solar year, six months daylight and six months night, and the Arctic years, two or three full months light in the summer and two or three months night in the winter, are “days” of the Nordic ancestors of our fair-complexioned Indian Brahmins. The gods – the “shining ones” whose “days” were years of half sunshine and half darkness – were just perfect types of Aryan humanity: the hyperboreans of far-away Thule, the ones whom the twentieth century great Indian scholar, Tilak, mentions in his book The Arctic Home in the Vedas.

And it is noteworthy that tradition among Aryans other than those of India, places the seat of godhead in the same polar region: the Greek sun god Apollo is called “the Hyperborean.” Only the Hindus – including the non-Aryan masses of India insofar as they have not been corrupted by ideas drummed into their heads by degenerate Aryans (no longer Aryans of spirit) of today – have kept the traditions. Thanks to its forced Christianization from the fourth to the fifteenth century A.D., Europe has forgotten it. The glory of Adolf Hitler – and a few of his forerunners such as Friedrich Lange (founder of the Deutsches Bund, 1894) or Hans Krebs – is to have felt it intuitively, with the aid of the gods, and made it the philosophical basis of their social and political natures.

The holy Swastika that Adolf Hitler chose as the Symbol of his Movement is the visible link between him and orthodox Hinduism. One sees it everywhere in India: on temple gates, on pennants fluttering from the top of temples, on the walls in front of which marriage rites are celebrated (as all Hindu rites, before a burning fire), and on public signs and on ordinary advertisements, and on jewels, “for luck.”

There was a time when the Symbol was to be found everywhere also in Aryan countries – or countries under Aryan influence: on Greek pottery, and more so on Trojan pottery (nowhere are Swastikas more numerous than on the shards in the second layer of Troy, dating back to some 4,000 B.C.!) and in Mexico and Yucatan, civilized by a White and bearded god (according to tradition) – and a god from the East, apparently an Aryan.

Nowadays the holy sign is popular – widespread and revered – only among us National Socialists and among Hindus (the only two sects of people among which the superiority of the Aryan race is also recognized and accepted as a matter of course. As I said, in India, the non-Aryan orthodox Hindus also accept it, of whatever caste they may be).

May the official propaganda of Westernized Indians concerning democracy and equality not deceive us and prevent us from seeing how close to us is – and always was – real Hindu India!