Savitri Devi Mukherji

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Savitri Devi Mukherji

Savitri Devi Mukherji (September 30, 1905 - October 22, 1982) was a woman of mixed French, English, and Greek ethnicity, who became enamored with Hinduism and National Socialism, trying to synthesize Hinduism with Nazi philosophy and Nordic racial ideology and proclaiming Adolf Hitler an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. Her writings exerted a decisive influence over post-war National Socialism and esoteric Hitlerism.

Contents

1 Biography

1.1 Early Impressions
1.2 Education and Activism
1.3 Pro-Axis Agitation
1.4 Arrest and Imprisonment
1.5 Pilgrimage
1.6 The Neo-Nazi underground
1.7 Death
1.8 Legacy

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] (http://library.flawlesslogic.com/gold.htm))

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 coloring 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. In early 1928, she renounced French citizenship and acquired Greek nationality. Joining a pilgrimage to Palestine during Lent in 1929, Portas realized she was, and had always been, a National Socialist. In 1932 she traveled to India in search of a living pagan culture. 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. Together they gathered information from British servicemen to pass on to the Japanese.

Arrest and Imprisonment

After the war she traveled to Europe in late 1945 (as the wife of an Indian she got a British passport). First to England, making contacts, she visited her mother in France, 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 Stockholm to Germany, where she distributed many thousands 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

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 Commission, 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 reentry of Germany, by obtaining a Greek passport in her maiden name). She flew from Athens to Rome then traveled by rail over the Brenner Pass into "Greater Germany", which she regarded as "[t]he spirtual home of all racially conscious modern Aryans".

She traveled to a number of sites significant in the life of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, as well as German nationalist and heathen monuments (recounted in Pilgrimage).

The Neo-Nazi underground

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.

Death

She died in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England at the house of her friend's Muriel Gantry, while en route to lecture in America. Her ashes were sent to the American Nazi Party shrine in Arlington.

Legacy

Savitri Devi has come to be seen as "the mother of 'Esoteric Hitlerism'", which was founded by the Chilean writer and diplomat Miguel Serrano ([2] (http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/devi.html)), and as pioneering its links to the occult, Green, and New Age movements.

Devi's works, in conjunction with those of Julius Evola have been major influences on the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party and activist Bill White.

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 mathematique		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)	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 %u201Cmost objectionable Nazi%u201D and . . . half-a-dozen cats		Her strangest book: a fictionalized autobiography 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.

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).

External links

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A collection of writings by and about Savitri Devi (http://library.flawlesslogic.com/1d.htm)
Priestess of Hitlerism: Savitri Devi (http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/devi.html) by Kerry Bolton
"And Time Rolls On . . ." (http://www.faem.com/devi/devipoem.htm) a poem by Savitri Devi
Gold in the Furnace (Excerpts from chapters 3-4) (http://www.faem.com/devi/goldfurn.htm) by Savitri Devi
The Cyclic View of History--article by Savitri Devi originally published in Volkfenew Dawn, 1948 (http://feastofhateandfear.com/archives/savitri_03.html)