Savitri Devi
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. This group emerged after the Second World War when a handful of former members of the British Union of Fascists took on the name. (The original BNP was absorbed quite quickly into the Union Movement - it is not connected with the present BNP.) She met with the British National Party president Andrew Fountaine. Beginning a correspondence with Colin Jordan, she became a 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 Luther 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, Savitri Devi 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 in India, she flew from Paris to Bombay on 23 June 1971. In August she moved to New Delhi, where she lived alone, with a number of cats and at least one cobra.
Savitri Devi continued correspondence with Nazi enthusiasts in Europe, the Americas and 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 Christian Bouchet.
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Death
She died in 1982 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 at the time. Her ashes were sent to the American Nazi Party shrine in Arlington where they were placed next to those of Lincoln Rockwell.
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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 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 Russell, 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 81-85002-40-1 | 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 | Promotes the idea that India must put aside social prejudice and communal hatred to create the political unity to achieve independence. | |
| 1946 | A Son of God: The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt | ISBN 0-912057-95-5 and ISBN 0-912057-17-3 | |
| 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 0-937944-14-9 | A work 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 0-939482-33-9 | 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 | 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) | A series of philosophical essays rather 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. |
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See also
- Nazi occultism
- Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy
- Hertha Ehlert
- Camillo Giuriati
- Externsteine
- Miguel Serrano
- Matt Koehl
- Franco Freda
- Claudio Mutti
- Kerry Bolton
- Subhas Chandra Bose
- Julius Evola
- Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
- Bal Gangadhar Tilak
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Notes
- ^ a b c Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2003). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (in English). New York University Press, pp. 88. ISBN 0814731554. OCLC 47665567.
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Bibliography
- Elst, Koenraad, The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of "Hindu Fascism", chapter V. "Savitri Devi and the "Hindu-Aryan Myth"" (New Delhi, India: Voice of India, 2001, 2 Vols., ISBN 81-85990-69-7).
- Gardell, Matthias, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, Duke University Press (2003, ISBN 0-8223-3071-7).
- Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York University Press, 1998, hardcover: ISBN 0-8147-3110-4, paperback: ISBN 0-8147-3111-2).
- Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, "Savitri Devi and the Hitler Avatar", chapter 5 (New York University Press, 2002, hardcover: ISBN 0-8147-3124-4; reissue edition, 2003, paperback: ISBN 0-8147-3155-4).
- Kaplan, Jeffrey (editor), Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right, Altamira Press (2000, ISBN 0-7425-0340-2).
- 100 Jahre Savitri Devi by D.A.R. Sokoll (ed.), issue #5 of the magazine Junges Forum. (Straelen, Germany: Regin-Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-937129-23-5). [In German.]
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External links
- The strange case of Savitri Devi and The eternal return of Nazi nonsense: Savitri Devi's last writings by Koenraad Elst
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