Nuremberg, Forgotten

Excerpt from the book: Gold in the Furnace, by Savitri Devi

“Other political prisoners have been set free,
but, many of them, in such a state that it seems impossible for them ever to regain their former health and strength. I have met many such ones, day-to-day martyrs of the National Socialist faith for the rest of their lives. And I have had the honour of spending a few days in the company of one, amidst friends. His name is Herr H. I shall say something of the deep impression he left upon me, in one of the following chapters. Presently, I shall only repeat the tale of awe which I heard from his lips; the tale of the chambers of hell where he spent nearly three
years, a captive of those who hate us. What prompts me to speak of his experience rather than of similar ones of other faithful Germans is, first, that I know this man personally, and also that I look upon him as one of the finest National Socialists whom I have ever met— which is saying a lot.

Herr H had been Ortsgruppenleiter 2 in a town of the present-day French Zone, ever since 1932. He was arrested by the new masters of Germany— namely the Americans— at the end of May, 1945, for no other reason than that he was well-known as a genuine Nazi. He had never used his power to harm anyone, and there were no grievances against him.

He was first taken to Diez and there, locked up with thirty other people in a tiny room for two days and two nights, without food or drink or . . . any indispensable commodity; without sufficient space to sit down, let alone to lie down. The prisoners, tightly squeezed against one another all the time, were forced to sleep (if they could) and also to give way to the necessities of nature, in that standing position. And they did not know, of course, for how long they would be left to rot in that room.

After forty-eight hours, however, they were brought out, and taken, in cattle wagons, to Schwarzenborn near Treysa, in the Rothar Mountain Range. There had been gathered in a concentration camp, nine or ten thousand National Socialists prominent not only on account of their position in the Party organisation, but also by their status in life, their family, their intellectual or professional achievements. Prince August- Wilhelm of Prussia, and the Prince of Waldeck, and many other members of the old German aristocracy were there; and the rank and file prisoners were no common men. (Herr H himself is a very well-known architect.) About two hundred women were there also, some of them expecting children that were eventually born during their internment.

The men were lodged in what had once been the stables of the German cavalry. Three men were made to live, day and night, in the space originally destined to accommodate one horse. They lay upon straw, with no blankets; and they were given, for their daily ablutions, not separate jugs and washstands, not even a common tap of running water (which they could have used in turn), but a long and narrow common trough in which about a hundred of them were forced to wash themselves all together in the same water, like cattle. They were divided into sections of five hundred without any communication between one another. And for the ablutions of each section, the trough was refilled perhaps three or
four times.

They were put on a diet of systematic starvation; half a plate of thin, watery soup, and two or three hard biscuits about five inches long by two and a half inches wide per day; and then— after two or three months or so— one extra slice of bread which was given to them, not by the Americans (who ran the camp) but by the German population of the neighbourhood. Five per cent of the internees died of hunger during the first fortnight. And that proportion increased, as time went on. Herr H— a tall, strong man, with an immense store of vitality— lost forty-five pounds during the first month. However, the Americans decided to give the helpless prisoners a cup of coffee at midday, and an extra slice of bread.

Then came Christmas 1945, that most lamentable Christmas, perhaps, in the whole of German history. The Americans, and especially the Jews among them, knew what the immemorial Winter Solstice Festival, now disguised as the conventional birthday of Jesus Christ, has always meant and still means to the
Germans. It would have been a miracle if they had not thought of being cruel to the Nazi inmates of their concentration camps on that occasion. And they did think of it. The ration of the prisoners on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day consisted of half a plate of watery soup only— without even any dry biscuits or
bread at all, this time, let alone cakes or oranges or any niceties of the kind. Half a plate of thin, watery, tasteless soup, and nothing else— not a kind word from anybody; not a line from their families, for they were allowed neither to write nor to receive letters, and their families and friends did not even know where they were!

The Germans employed in the kitchen, however, managed to put aside six cakes for the internees, out of those they were allowed for themselves. And such was the fear the Americans inspired, that the servants hid those cakes … in the lavatory, in order not to be found out. By the end of December, Herr H, who had now lost sixty-five pounds, was no longer able to stand on his legs. He was sent to the hospital attached to the camp.
* * *
But one should not imagine that American brutality consisted merely in keeping the prisoners on a famine diet that was hardly believable, and under the hellish conditions I have just tried to describe from Herr H’s account. It extended to every dealing of the conquerors and “reformers” of Germany with the hated Nazis. It found expression in the collective punishments they imposed upon the latter, without any grounds, and in the impunity that the warders enjoyed, whatever they might choose to do.

Herr H told me, for instance, that the whole camp had once gone without any food or water at all for a whole day, just because a photo camera belonging to an American was missing. The object was found the next day in the pocket of another American, who had stolen it. Still, no extra food was given to the internees as compensation. Another time, an American guard, posted near the place where the prisoners used to go to have their meagre meals, fired for no reason whatsoever— just “for fun”— at one of the Germans quietly eating. The man was killed on the spot. He was an out-and-out good man, Herr H told me, and the father of six children. The guard was never even reprimanded, let alone punished. And these are the people who at Nuremberg assumed the role of judges; the people who, to this day, along with their allies, persecute National Socialism in the name of a so-called “more humane” outlook on life!— The vile hypocrites!

In February 1946, Herr H was sent to another concentration camp, in Darmstadt. Although he and several of the other internees sent with him were still ill, they were made to travel in cattle wagons without heating and without even straw to lie upon. And, on their arrival, the sick were not sent to hospital but straight to the cells, with the others.

The cells contained nothing but bed frames and had neither light nor heating. The mattresses that should have been on the bed frames had been thrown out of doors in the snow, and were covered with ice. They were brought in. The ice slowly melted. And it is on those wet, cold mattresses that the men— including the sick— were forced to lie. Twenty-five shared the same cell as Herr H.

Herr H was for two days and two nights shut in that cell, and then was again taken to hospital, where he remained three months. His body, once as strong as iron, had become so exhausted by hunger and hardships that his heart was hardly beating at all. To this day, he suffers from periodical fainting fits and his pulse, which I have myself felt, is slow beyond belief. And there is no hope for him ever to recover. His health is irretrievably lost.

One remembers, perhaps, how cold the winter of 1946-47 was all over Europe, and particularly in North and Middle Europe. In Darmstadt, where 40,000 political prisoners were interned, the temperature within the cells was 25 degrees centigrade below the freezing point. And the cells, I repeat, were not heated.

And Darmstadt, and Schwarzenborn, were by no means isolated instances of places deserving, in occupied Germany, the name of extermination camps. There were others— there are others, to this day— run with equally Democratic zeal. In such a camp, at Bad Herstfeld, political prisoners captured immediately after the capitulation were made to sleep upon the bare earth, without a roof over their heads whether in fine weather or in the rain, for weeks altogether, with hardly any food. They were forced to walk between double rows of soldiers, to be beaten by each one until they were unconscious— or dead. Camp 2288, run by the British, near Brussels, also in 1945, and containing 40,000 prisoners, was of the same description, from what a British officer, Mr. R, who was there, told me himself. 1 Dachau, once, under National Socialist rule, a camp for men mostly convicted for unnatural sexual offences, and world-famous on account of the repeated mendacious allusions to it in the anti-Nazi press and propaganda literature, was taken over by the Allies in 1945. They continued to use it as a concentration camp, with the difference that the internees were no longer sexual perverts, but just Nazis, and preferably men belonging to the Waffen SS. Many of these were afterwards sent to Darmstadt where Herr H met them. And he repeated to me something of the long tale of horror which he had heard from them, and which several of them, whom I had the honour of meeting myself, later on, confirmed.

Dachau, after the Allies had taken it over, became a place of torture— not merely of hunger, and cold, and hardships of all sorts, but of deliberate infliction of pain with all the repulsive apparatus attached to it; a chamber of Hell in the fullest sense of the word. And in that hell, the fiends were the Jews, mostly political culprits who had gotten into trouble for their shadowy activities under the National Socialist regime, and who were out for an easy and cowardly revenge.

All men to appear before Allied tribunals as “war criminals” were selected on the denunciation of Jews, and submitted to torture without any proof of the soundness of the charges brought against them. The tortures varied according to the amount and quality of imagination that the Jews possessed. Many of the victims were forced to lean in a row against a wall, with their feet a yard or so from it, and then struck on the legs with a rod, as hard as possible, so that they fell flat upon their faces, bleeding, and their teeth were knocked out. Others had their fingernails pulled out; or were hung up for any length of time or whirled around the room by a thin, strong rope, or a chain, fixed to their virile organs. The Allies themselves admit it. In his memorandum to the American War Minister Kenneth Royall, the American judge E. Lewy Van Roden states that the men who appeared before the American Military Tribunal at Dachau, charged with “war crimes,” were submitted to all sorts of tortures. “They were kicked, their teeth were knocked out, their jaws broken; they were put to solitary confinement, tortured with burning sticks of wood, starved, threatened with reprisals on their families, and given false hopes of release, in order to extract confessions from them.” 1

In Darmstadt and in Schwarzenborn, under the slightest pretexts, the internees were often condemned to remain stark naked in a freezing cold cell for a whole month, being allowed one blanket at night only.

Such is the treatment inflicted upon my comrades in the post-war anti-Nazi concentration camps under Allied management, by those darling Jews whom the whole world has been taught to look upon as the innocent and lovable victims of our “monstrous” regime, and to pity, and to champion, but, in reality, all the time— unknowingly— to obey implicitly as a slave.
* * *
Herr H, to whom I owe the above information and a great deal more, was at last released in December, 1947, after spending nearly three years in hell. It is difficult to say how many thousands of other National Socialists, once as healthy and able as he, have, like him, become physical wrecks in the same and in other extermination camps all over occupied Germany, and further east, in the unknown penal settlements of the Soviet Union, from which none have come back. It is difficult to say how many thousands have died. In particular, it is difficult to give a picture of that darkest and grimmest of all the varied aspects of the persecution of National Socialism: the martyrdom of the SS men. None is grim enough to be accurate. Whether in occupied Germany, in Russia, or in other countries, it is this splendid elite of the National Socialist forces that has decidedly suffered the most— as could be expected.

France is one of the countries where the young SS men, easy to recognise, were deliberately subjected to the greatest hardships: made to lie for weeks upon the cold, damp earth; starved; beaten; tortured. Many were sent to slave labour camps in the French (or Belgian) equatorial colonies, that they might die there of exhaustion coupled with malnutrition, ill-treatment, and tropical diseases. I met one— Herr W 1 — who, in 1945, after his capture by the French, was sent from Marseilles to Sidi-bel-Abbes with 18,000 others, and from there, through the Sahara Desert under the escort of half-wild Moroccan auxiliaries, to the Belgian Congo. These Africans, alone with the unarmed prisoners in the burning solitude, made it a pastime of firing at them under the slightest pretexts or even under no pretext at all. The French had perhaps taught them to look upon Nazis as the natural enemies of all dark-skinned people— as British propaganda has quite a number of silly Indians. And that, along with an inborn propensity to murder, possibly prompted them. Many of the prisoners who were not killed off in this fashion died nevertheless on the way of malignant fevers. They had no medicine, no opportunity for medical aid whatsoever; no care, save from their comrades.

In the Congo, they were parked in a camp, also entirely under the supervision of wild North African and Negro troops, and made to work like slaves in the lead mines twelve hours a day— from dawn to sunset— with water up to their waists and hardly anything to eat. They were not allowed to write or to receive any letters, not allowed to have any books that would have helped to make their lives less wearisome, less gloomy, less desperate, in that hell in which they remained three long years!

Of those 18,000 men who had sailed from Marseilles in 1945, only 4,800 lived to see the shores of Europe again in 1948; to see Germany in ruins, but also, perhaps— may all the Gods hear me!— to see their comrades and themselves avenged sooner than our enemies expect.
* * *
Yes, avenged, a hundredfold— not by the human agents, whoever these be who will, one day or the other, again plunge Europe and the whole world in streams of blood; but by the merciless unseen forces in whose play all human agents are but instruments; by the terror which our enemies have brought upon themselves every time they have hurt or insulted one of us. For there exists a Justice, immanent in the very nature of things; an unavoidable Law of action and reaction which measures the punishment to the enormity of the sin, and the enormity of the sin to the greatness of that against which and the value of those against whom it is committed.

I have seen the East and the West— visited fifteen countries; spent equally long years of my life in the Near East and in India. And, with the varied memories of those vast and varied lands forever vivid in my mind— the one advantage my strange destiny has given me over most other National Socialists— I say from the depth of my heart: I know nothing, in the modern world, as beautiful as the Nazi youth. Nothing. There are exceptional individuals everywhere among the Aryan and— in the Far East— among some of the non-Aryan races. There are still in India a few real Brahmins who would be fit to represent our mankind at its best before the inhabitants of another planet. But nowhere can one find a collectivity of human beings comparable with this physical and moral elite of Germany: tall, strong, handsome— looking, outwardly, like Baldur the Fair, the best of the Nordic Gods— truthful, reliable, self-confident, brave, and loving; kind to creatures; pious towards Nature; Heathen, in the highest sense of the word.

There is no forgiveness for people who have deliberately harmed such men as these; no forgiveness for people who have starved them, scourged them, disembowelled them, rejoicing in their groans of agony; who have thrown them alive into the chambers of hell. There is no forgiveness either for those who have treated likewise the elder National Socialists, the teachers, the inspirers, the creators of that godlike youth; the fathers and mothers of that unparalleled elite. With passionless exactitude, with smiling detachment, that impersonal, all-pervading Justice of which I spoke will grind them to death. And no amount of money or skill can save them.

And what if the irresistible wave of destruction overtakes us, also?

Were this just another struggle of material forces it probably would. But this is not. This is, as I have said already, the modern phase of the eternal struggle between the unseen Forces of Life and Light and the equally unseen Forces of death; between the world’s will to live, expressed in the will of its elite to thrive and rule, and the world’s age-old sickness— its tendency towards disintegration, expressed in the will of the parasites, of the weaklings, of the sub-men— of the multifarious scum— to destroy the natural elite and come to the top in its place. And in this, the all-important, the real struggle, we have already won the battle. However much we might appear, at present, powerless and hopeless, utterly crushed, we have already conquered on the invisible plane. We have kept our spirit. Kept it, not in victory— that is easy; that, any worthless fighters can do— but in the very abyss of disaster, humiliation, and agony; in the monotonous routine of prison life, day after day, month after month, for already four years, like Frau E and the other so-called “war criminals” who were not hanged; or like Herr H in the freezing cold cells of the anti-Nazi extermination camps (the proper ones to deserve that name) with nothing to eat; or in torture chambers; or, like Herr W and his comrades, under the Negro’s whip, in slave labour settlements in the burning heart of Africa; or, as thousands, to this day, in the midst of similar hardships in mines in the Ural Mountains, in Siberia, no one knows where.

After he had told me that he and the other SS men, prisoners in the same camp, were not allowed to have any books, Herr W added: “But I managed all the same to keep this.” And he produced from his pocket a tiny volume. I read upon the cover Selected Thoughts ofFriedrich Nietzsche. And Herr W said again: “A few golden words of the author of The Will to Power; that is what sustained me all through these hellish years.”

“Yes, words of pride and of power, not words of consolation,” thought I. And, recalling all that the young man had suffered, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of religious elation, as before the rising Sun— the daily victory of Light over darkness. I hailed in my heart that victory of the Nazi spirit, that triumph of everlasting youth— the assertion of that power of the world’s natural elite, that nothing and no one can ever break.

I notice the cop with his phone videotaping everyone and no name tag.. I wonder if some good citizen took pictures of the cop cars, cops and followed them back to their precincts/barracks. Maybe hang around, then follow them home when they leave work.. Just wondering.