Hinduism & National Socialism

I embraced Hinduism because it was the only religion in the world that is compatible with National Socialism. And the dream of my life is to integrate Hitlerism into the old Aryan tradition, to show that it is really a resurgence of the original tradition. It’s not Indian, not European, but Indo-European. It comes from back to those days when the Aryans were one people near the North Pole. The Hyperborean tradition.

Well, I’m not a full Hindu. I’m a National Socialist. To me it’s quite sufficient. I’m a European heathen. I’m one of those who would’ve fought Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. The great man I admired in my youth was Alexander the Great, my first love. My second love is Emperor Julian. Adolf Hitler is the third one. I put him above the others, but chronologically he’s the third. The first book I wrote in English in India is called A Warning to the Hindus.42 It was written in ’37. It was translated into six Indian languages. It’s not dedicated to an Indian. It’s dedicated to Divine Julian, Emperor of the Greeks and Romans, 360-363, the one who wanted to bring back the old Greek and Roman religion after Christianity had been ruling for— well, I don’t know—say fifty years. The Christian religion was instituted as the religion of the Roman Empire in 313. It was too late in 360. It was too late.

Now I must tell you something that I recently read this morning. I have a French friend. Well, she could be my daughter or, according to Indian standards, even my granddaughter. She’s much younger than I, thirty-eight. And she’s now in the South at her guru. She has a guru. Or rather the disciple of a dead guru. Her guru is dead. And she was visiting the ashram of the famous Ramana Maharshi.43 Ramana Maharshi is really the greatest, or perhaps one of the greatest, one of the first or second of the two or three greatest sages of modern India. An extraordinary man. He did not teach. He taught only through his radiations. He was perfectly silent. He was vowed to perfect silence. That’s a very queer thing to say, but he did teach like that. I know people who saw him and who said, “If silence can have meaning, that man shows it.”

Anyhow, he used to speak sometimes, of course. He was not silent completely. This woman asked his shishya, his disciple, “What did Ramana Maharshi say about Adolf Hitler? Did he ever mention him?” And the disciple answered, “Yes, he considered him as a jnani.”44 A jnani is something extremely high. A jnani and a rishi are the same thing, or practically the same thing. They’re Sanskrit words. Jnani has the same root as gnos, the Christian sect, the Gnostics, the people of knowledge. A jnani means a man who has complete knowledge, who knows everything, infused knowledge, intuitive knowledge, if you like. He is divine through his intuition. Like God, he knows everything through intuition. Well, I was extremely pleased to hear that said by a very great rishi, a very great Indian man, a sage, about our Führer.

It’s not what you have in Europe. Here in India, nobody says anything against him, except people who are brainwashed by European ladies. Apart from that, the masses of India don’t care. It’s something foreign. They have their own little, small, petty lives to think of, the poverty and the struggle from day to day. Some of the intellectual Indians like him very much. My landlord likes him very much. My landlord’s son likes him very much. Or else they have an idea like this. Satyananda Swami was the founder and head of the Hindu Mission, for which I worked for years, fighting Communism, fighting any religion of equality and especially Christian missionaries, in the name of Hindu tradition. Satyananda Swami used to say, “Adolf Hitler is the reincarnation of the god Vishnu.” Vishnu is the aspect of the Hindu trinity who goes to keep things from rushing to destruction. To keep them back, to go against time. Time is destruction. You have to destroy in order to create again, but there are forces that try to postpone destruction. And he said Hitler was the reincarnation of that force. And he was. He was. But it’s a nice thing to hear, a very refreshing thing to hear from a Hindu sage.

I told him, “I came here because I’m really a pagan, a worshipper of the sun, and I believe in the pagan reaction of Emperor Julian. And I came to India to get, if possible, a sort of tropical equivalent of what we had in Europe before Christianity. And I am not a disciple of any Indian, I’m a disciple of Adolf Hitler.” He said, “Good, good. Adolf Hitler, he’s as much a Hindu as any of our Hindus. He’s an incarnation of the god Vishnu.” There you are. It was extremely surprising and refreshing to hear that in 1936. And he said it during the war too. In Kubila he gave a speech in ’42. He openly said, “What we need here in India, as everywhere in the world, is National Socialism.” He openly said so. And I said to him, “Satyananda Swami, you’ll get into trouble with the British police.” He said, “I couldn’t care less if I did. I told them the truth.”


In fact, Hinduism is for the Aryans of India a means to be able to rule. According to tradition, the Aryans

should rule here. They don’t, because tradition has been abandoned for years and years and years. India is going away from tradition, like the whole world. We are in the Dark Age, and India is going to the dogs, and the whole world is going to the dogs. Except a minority who are fighting against time, against the current of time. And I hope that we’ll win. We will have to win. We can’t help winning. But I don’t know whether we’ll win just now and if the avenger Kalki, as the Hindus call him, is going to come very soon or whether he’s going to come in centuries. Because centuries are also very soon in the infinity of time. A century is nothing. And ten centuries are nothing. In fact I feel that myself. When I feel the struggle of Christianity to master Europe fifteen hundred years ago, I resent it as though it were now. I feel the struggle of Widukind as though it were now.

 41 Savitri accepted the theories of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas (Poona: Kesari, 1903). 42 Savitri Devi, A Warning to the Hindus (Calcutta: Hindu Mission, 1939). 43 Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950). His ashram is located in Tiruvannamali in Tamil Nadu, South India. For a vivid description of Ramana Maharshi as well as photographs, see Paul Brunton, A Search in Secret India (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1935), esp. 138- 142 and 280. 44 For more on the Ramana Maharshi’s opinion of Hitler, see Savitri Devi, “Hitlerism and the Hindu World,” The National Socialist, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 18-20.