Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism
Publisher: NYU Press | ISBN: 0814731112 | edition 2000 | PDF | 280 pages | 1 mb
The whole terrible Nazi experience had many oddities, and this relatively unknown woman is one of them. Born in France in 1905 as Maximiani Portas, she became a strong admirer of Hitler in the 1920s, moved to India in 1932 because of its caste system, and took a Hindu name. After the war she traveled through a devastated Europe and was a vocal apologist of the Nazis, their horrific atrocities notwithstanding. Her early writings were republished by far-right-wing publishers, and she gained new fans in the 1970s as neo-Nazism spread. Devi died in 1982, but the author writes that her combination of Hindu religion and Nordic racial ideology became "a bridge between neo-Nazism and the New Age" movements. (For more on this subject, see also Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology, New York Univ., 1992). This work will be useful for understanding the ideological background of the neo-Nazis. Suitable, but not essential, for all academic and large public libraries...