Savitri Devi Mukherji
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Image:Mukherji.jpg Savitri Devi Mukherji (September 30, 1905 - October 22, 1982) was a French woman, of mixed English, Italian and Greek ethnicity, who became enamoured with Hinduism and National Socialism, trying to synthesise Hinduism with Nazi philosophy and racial ideology and proclaiming Adolf Hitler an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.
Her writings have exerted a decisive influence over post-war National Socialism and esoteric Hitlerism.
Although mystical in her conception of National Socialism, Savitri Devi saw it as a practical faith without the requirement of metaphysics.
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Biography
Born Maximiani Portas in Lyon, France, daughter of a Greek/Lombard Italian father and an English mother. At one time, her self-described nationality was Indo-European. ([1])
Early impressions
Portas formed her political sympathies and antipathies early on. From childhood throughout her life she was a passionate advocate for animal rights, thus colouring her impression of the practitioners of Kosher slaughter. Her earliest political affiliations were for Greek nationalism. Thus, during the First World War, she was outraged by the Entente's invasion of neutral Greece, especially after the Allied outrage over the German invasion of neutral Belgium.
Education and activism
She studied philosophy and logic earning degrees in chemistry and philosophy and wrote her doctoral thesis on the philosophy of science. In early 1928, she renounced French citizenship and acquired Greek nationality.
Joining a pilgrimage to Palestine during Lent in 1929, Portas realised she was, and had always been, a National Socialist. In 1932 she travelled to India in search of a living pagan culture. Formally converting to Hinduism, she took the name Savitri Devi ("Sun-rays Goddess" in Sanskrit). She volunteered at the Hindu Mission and wrote A Warning to the Hindus to offer support for Hindu nationalism and independence, and rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and especially Islam in India.
Pro-Axis agitation
In 1940 she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Bengali Brahmin with National Socialist convictions who edited the pro-German newspaper New Mercury. This marriage was purely a way for her to avoid deportation and was never consummated. Together they gathered information from British servicemen and American soldiers to pass on to the Japanese.
Arrest and imprisonment
After the war she travelled to Europe in late 1945 (as the wife of an Indian - she was Savitri Devi Mukherji now - she got a British passport). First to England, making contacts, she visited her mother in France, travelled on to Iceland where she witnessed the eruption of Mount Hekla, back to England, then to Sweden where she met with Sven Hedin.
On June 15, 1948, she took the Nord-Expreß from Denmark to Germany, where she distributed many thousands of handwritten leaflets encouraging the “Men and women of Germany” to “hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist!” She penned her experience in Gold in the Furnace (which has been reedited in honour of her 100th birthday under the title Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany).
Arrested for posting bills, she was tried (in Düsseldorf on April 5, 1949), for the promotion of Nationial Socialist ideas on German territory subject to the Allied Control Council, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. She served eight months in Werl prison, where she befriended her fellow Nazi and SS prisoners, (recounted in Defiance) before being released and expelled from Germany. She went to stay in Lyons, France.
Pilgrimage
In April of 1953 she began a pilgrimage, as she called it, of National Socialist holy sites (bypassing the blacklist, on her re-entry of Germany, by obtaining a Greek passport in her maiden name). She flew from Athens to Rome then travelled by rail over the Brenner Pass into "Greater Germany", which she regarded as "[t]he spiritual home of all racially conscious modern Aryans".
She travelled to a number of sites significant in the life of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP (German Nazi Party), as well as German nationalist and heathen monuments (recounted in her 1958 book Pilgrimage).
The Neo-Nazi International
Savitri Devi became friends with Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and completed her manuscript of The Lightning and the Sun at his home in March of 1956. Through his introductions she was able to meet a number of Nazi émigrés in Spain and the Middle East. In 1957 she stayed with Johannes von Leers in Egypt. In 1961 she stayed with Otto Skorzeny in Madrid.
Savitri Devi took employment teaching in France during the 1960s, spending her summer holidays with friends at Berchtesgaden. In the spring of 1961, while on her Easter holiday in London she learned of the British National Party(The original BNP emerged after the Second World War when a handful of former members of the British Union of Fascists took on the name. This party was absorbed quite quickly into the Union Movement - it is not connected with the present BNP)and met its president Andrew Fountaine. Beginning a correspondence with Colin Jordan, she became an devoted supporter of the National Socialist Movement. In August 1962, Savitri Devi attended the international Nazi conference in Gloucestershire and was a founder-signatory of the Cotswold Agreement that established the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS). At this conference she met, and was greatly impressed with George Lincoln Rockwell. When Rockwell became leader of WUNS, he appointed William L. Pierce editor of its new magazine: National Socialist World (1966-68). Along with articles by Jordan and Rockwell, Pierce devoted nearly eighty pages of the first issue to a condensed edition of The Lightning and the Sun. Because of the enthusiastic response, Pierce included chapters from Gold in the Furnace and Defiance in subsequent issues.
After retiring from teaching in 1970, she spent nine months at the Normandy home of close friend Françoise Dior while working on her memoirs. Concluding that her pension would go much further back in India, she flew from Paris to Bombay on 23 June 1971. In August she joined her husband in New Delhi.
Savitri Devi continued correspondence with Nazi enthusiasts in Europe and the Americas including Jordan, John Tyndall, Matt Koehl, Miguel Serrano, and Ernst Zündel. She was the first to claim to Zündel that the Nazi genocide of the Jews was untrue; he proposed a series of taped interviews (conducted in November of 1978) and published a new illustrated edition of The Lightning and the Sun in 1979. A number of neo-Nazi pilgrims traveled to meet her, among them was Christian Bouchet.
NOTE: The claim that Savitri Devi influenced Ernst Zündel's views on the Holicaust is false. According to Zündel himself, the reverse is the case. He claims that Savitri Devi believed all the major tenets of the Holocaust story, including the use of homicidal gas chambers. She was extremely skeptical of Zündel's attempts to dispute elements of the Holocaust story. Zündel even suspected that she WANTED to believe in the extermination of six million Jews. At the very least, she did not care. In her 1978 interviews she said that her standard answer to the accusation of the six million was: "Pity it was not sixteen million, then the Jewish problem would have been solved." In the same interviews, Savitri also claimed that she believed in the standard Holocaust story until 1977, when she read Arthur Butz's THE HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
Death
She died in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England at her friend Muriel Gantry's house; the cause of death was recorded as myocardial infarction and coronary thrombosis. She was en route to lecture in America at the invitation of Matt Koehl. Her ashes were sent to the American Nazi Party shrine in Arlington where they were placed next to those of Lincoln Rockwell.
Legacy
Savitri Devi has come to be seen as "the fore-mother of 'Esoteric Hitlerism'", which was founded by the Chilean writer and diplomat Miguel Serrano [2], and as pioneering its links to the occult, Green, Deep Ecology, and New Age movements.
Francisco Freda published a German translation of Gold in the Furnace in 1982; the fourth volume of his annual review, Risguardo (1980-), was devoted to Savitri Devi as the "missionary of Aryan Paganism". Far-rightist Italian, and self-described "Nazi Maoist", Claudio Mutti was influenced by reading Pilgrimage as an idealistic teenager. As a young bodyguard for Colin Jordan, David Myatt enthusiastically embraced the values expressed in The Lightning and the Sun. In the U.S., James Mason (whose Universal Order bares strong resemblance to the sentiments of Savitri Devi) paid tribute to Savitri Devi in Siege, and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme has recommended The Lightning and the Sun. Revilo P. Oliver has seen the potentiality of a future religion venerating Adolf Hitler "in the works of a highly intelligent and learned lady of Greek ancestry, Dr. Savitri Devi."
Her works, in conjunction with those of Julius Evola have been major influences on the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party and activist Bill White. Moreover, they have influenced Traditionalist thought (philosophia perennis); Savitri Devi herself was influenced by writers and thinkers like René Guénon, Julius Evola, and Oswald Spengler.
Works
| Year | Title | ISBN | Summary |
| 1935 | Essai critique sur Theophile Kaïris | First doctoral thesis, on the life and thought of the Greek educator and philosopher Theophile Kaïris. | |
| 1935 | La simplicité mathématique | 500-page main thesis on the nature of simplicity in mathematics. It included a discussion of Léon Brunschvicq, and drew upon the work of George Boole, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russel, Henri Poincaré, and Alfred North Whitehead. | |
| 1940 (written 1935-6) | L'Etang aux lotus (The Lotus Pond) | Impressions of India. A combination of travelog and philosophical, cultural, and political reflections. | |
| 1936 | A Warning to the Hindus | ISBN 8185002401 | Written to rally support for Hindu nationalism and independence, and rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and Islam. |
| 1940 | The Non-Hindu Indians and Indian Unity | India must forget social prejudice and communal hatred to create the political unity to achieve independence. | |
| 1946 | Son of the Sun: The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt | ISBN 0912057955 and ISBN 0912057173 | |
| 1951 | Defiance | Autobiographical account of her propaganda mission, arrest, trial, and imprisonment in occupied Germany in 1949. | |
| 1952 (written 1948-9), reedited 2005 | Gold in the Furnace | Conditions in postwar Germany. | |
| 1958 (written 1953-4) | Pilgrimage | Account of her pilgrimage to various National Socialist holy sites. | |
| 1958 (written 1948-56) | The Lightning and the Sun | ISBN 0937944149 | Her Magnum Opus synthesizing the Hindu philosophy of cyclical history with National Socialism. Contains biographies of Genghis Khan, Akhnaton, and Adolf Hitler. Famous for the claim that Hitler was an avatar of the God Vishnu. |
| 1959 (written in 1945) | Impeachment of Man | ISBN 0939482339 | Animal rights and ecology. |
| 1965 (written 1957-60) | Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or The True Story of a "Most Objectionable Nazi" and . . . half-a-dozen Cats | Her strangest book: a fictionalized autobiography (referring to what the commandant of the Werl Prison in Germany had called her) and memoir of her favorite cats. | |
| 1976 (written 1968-71) | Souvenirs et reflexions d’une aryenne (Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman) | More a series of philosophical essays than a memoir, this is the most comprehensive statement of her philosophy. | |
| 2005 | And Time Rolls on: The Savitri Devi Interviews | 1978 autobiographical interviews originally recorded in Calcutta. | |
References
- Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (New York University Press, 1998, hardcover: ISBN 0814731104, paperback: ISBN 0814731112).
- "Savitri Devi and the Hitler Avatar", chapter 5 of Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (New York University Press, 2002, hardcover: ISBN 0814731244; reissue edition, 2003, paperback: ISBN 0814731554).
- The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of "Hindu Fascism" by Koenraad Elst, chapter V. "Savitri Devi and the "Hindu-Aryan Myth"" (New Delhi, India: Voice of India, 2001, 2 Vols., ISBN 8185990697).
- 100 Jahre Savitri Devi by D.A.R. Sokoll (ed.), issue #5 of the magazine Junges Forum. (Straelen, Germany: Regin-Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3937129235). [Scholarly research in the German language, several texts by and about Savitri Devi.]
External links
- The Savitri Devi Archive
- A collection of writings by and about Savitri Devi
- Priestess of Hitlerism: Savitri Devi by Kerry Bolton
- "And Time Rolls On . . ." a poem by Savitri Devi
- Gold in the Furnace (Excerpts from chapters 3-4) by Savitri Devi
- The Cyclic View of History--article by Savitri Devi originally published in Volkfenew Dawn, 1948
- Woman Against Time: Remembering Savitri Devi's 100th Birthday by R.G. Fowler on the National Vanguard site.