Savitri Devi


Savitri was born Maximiani Portas, of English and Greek parents in Lyons in 1905. Educated in France and in Greece, she earned masters level degrees in philosophy and science in France in the 1920s, and received a Ph.D. in chemistry on the basis of her dissertation, La Simplicit Mathmatique in 1931.


She became a Greek national in 1928 as she took to Hellenism, disillusioned with Christianity. It was the swastika signs on the palace of Athens that stirred Savitris first feelings for the Aryan race. Even as a young girl, she was much attracted to Germany and to the German philosophical and intellectual traditions. Appalled by the betrayal of Germany at Versailles following the First World War, as well of the treatment of Greek refugees in the same period, she determined to learn more of what she instinctively felt were the deeper realities which determined the seemingly chaotic course of world events. It was during this youthful quest for hidden and suppressed knowledge that she acquired her life-long aversion to Judaism. Savitris anti-Semitism was fed by several currents. First, there was the Bible, and in particular, the Old Testament which she felt was rife with examples of Jewish perfidy. This feeling would be considerably reinforced by reports of Zionist actions in Palestine in the 1920s.


Savitri was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, and considered him as an incarnation of God Vishnu. She left for India in 1932 to search for the roots of the Aryan civilization. She undertook what would prove to be a lifelong study of the classic Indian texts the Vedas1 and the Upanishads. From these sources, and from their contemporary manifestations in the caste system, Savitri felt that she had found the true sources of the once and future greatness of the Aryan race. She regarded Hinduism as the only living Aryan heritage in the modern world and was convinced that only Hinduism could take on and oppose the Judeo-Christian heritage. India fascinated her, in her opinion India was the only country that honoured Aryan Gods and could stop the influence of the Jews. She had great admiration for the Brahmins 2, who she saw as a pure race. Her championing of Aryan-Nazi causes and Hinduism led to her entering the political scenario in India in between the wars. By the late 1930s, she was involved with Hindu nationalist movements like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.


In 1939, she published A Warning to Hindus under the auspices of the Hindu Mission. In the book, she scorned the Congress for its secular policies and said there was no India but a Hindu one and warned the Hindus not to let the Muslims overwhelm them.


In 1939 Savitri met a Bengali Brahmin, Asit Krishna Mukherjee, a publisher with pro-German sympathies, who made a strong impression on her. He edited The New Mercury, a Nazi mouthpiece funded by the German consulate in Calcutta. In 1940 she married Mukherjee in a Hindu ceremony in Calcutta. The marriage gave her a British passport and the possibility of deepening her work for the Third Reich. Both worked clandestinely for the Axis powers in Calcutta and though Mukherjee's publication was banned during the war, he started publishing another magazine called The Eastern Economist with Japanese help.


The defeat of Germany in the Second World War came as a shattering blow to Savitri who vowed to travel to Europe again and do what she could to uphold the NS morale. In November 1945 she left India to begin her career as a die-hard neo-Nazi. She settled in England where her book on the religious heritage of Ancient Egypt, A Son of God, was published and well received in British intellectual and occult circles.


It was the work that followed however, the Impeachment of Man, which was finished in London and published in 1946 that stands as a classic in the current world of National Socialism. Opening with epigraphs from Alfred Rosenberg (Thou shalt love God in all things, animals and plants), it argues passionately for a society that transcends the human-centered to recognize the value of all living things. Vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist3, and opposed to Jewish ritual slaughter, the Impeachment of Man infuriates, inspires, and informs across the ideological spectrum. (Definitely makes a great gift for the young person who thinks that concern for animal rights is "left-wing" and began with PETA J.)


Savitri did not believe in the Holocaust and felt it was all Allied propaganda. Concentration camps, she said, were meant for the detention of enemies of Nazism. She was an early convert to the field of holocaust denial, and it was under her influence that such well-known holocaust revisionists of the present day as Ernst Zundel were introduced to the field. Savitri traveled to occupied Germany where she was arrested in 1949 for distributing propaganda leaflets. She had only admiration for the National Socialists she met in prison, saying they were just doing their chosen job. She wrote 'Heil Hitler' on the prison walls as an act of defiance. She is even supposed to have enjoyed her term in the women's prison in Westphalia where she was staying with other comrades. While in jail, she expanded one of her leaflets into the book which she considered her magnum opus, Gold in the Furnace. In it, she states explicitly that which until 1948 she had never dared to publicly utter: I love this land, Germany, as the hallowed cradle of National Socialism; the country that staked its all so that the whole of the Aryan race might stand together in its regained ancestral pride; Hitlers country. Because for the last twenty years I have loved and admired Hitler and the German people I was happy, oh so happy! thus to express my faith in the superman whom the world has misunderstood and hated and rejected. I was not sorry to lose my freedom for the pleasure of bearing witness to his glory, now, in 1948.


She was released from prison after six months and she settled to France. Savitri, who mastered 7 languages, traveled extensively, making contacts everywhere. She became active among neo-Nazis, meeting Oswald Mosley and other European fascists and joining forces with the British fascist party and later World Union of National Socialists. This was also her most productive literary period, and she began to write theories denying the Holocaust. The autobiographical Defiance appeared in 1950. Savitris example served as an inspiration to a new generation of National Socialists when a portion of the book was published in the Winter 1968 edition of the National Socialist World. Gold in the Furnace came out in 1952, followed by another memoir, Pilgrimage in 1958.


In 1958, Savitri also published her most important work, The Lightening and the Sun. A condensed version was published in the premier edition (Spring 1966) of William Pierces American Nazi Party intellectual journal National Socialist World. The Lightening and the Sun is a remarkable exposition on occult National Socialism which explicitly deifies Hitler as the savior of the Aryan people and suggests a religious and political history in which the Third Reich is the apex and the natural culmination of Aryan development. Kalki will lead them through the flames of the great end, and into the sunshine of the new Golden Age.We like to hope that the memory of the one-before-the-last and most heroic of all our men against time Adolf Hitler will survive at least in songs and symbols. We like to hope that the lords of the age, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honors, through rites full of meaning and full of potency, in the cool shade of the endless regrown forests, on the beaches, or upon inviolate mountain peaks, facing the rising sun.


George Lincoln Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959, began to correspond with Savitri in 1960. It was Savitri who introduced Rockwell to the man who would quietly become something of a mentor, the unreconstructed German National Socialist Bruno Ludke. Together with Britains Colin Jordan, the three became the core of the World Union of National Socialists.


In 1971, Savitri returned to India where she completed her autobiography which has her final statement on Aryan racialist religion. In 1977, after her husband's death, she continued to correspond with neo-Nazis in Europe and America. In 1982, at the age of 77, she died in London, during a brief stopover before going on a lecture tour to some seven or eight cities in the USA.


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