Introduction to Savitri Devi

Background: Anyone investigating or studying post-World War II National Socialism will eventually come across the name of Savitri Devi. She was an important theorist, author and publicist, and provided an important link between the original NS movement and its resurrected form from the late 1940s through 1982.

Early Life: Maximiani Julia Portas was born in Lyon, France, on Sept. 30, 1905. Her father was a French citizen of Greek and Italian descent, and her mother was an Englishwoman. She grew up in France and Greece. She studied philosophy and chemistry, and earned two master’s degrees in philosophy and science and a PhD chemistry from the University of Lyon based on her thesis La simplicité mathématique.

In 1932, her interest in Aryan pagan religions led her to immigrate to India, where she studied Hinduism. She adopted the name of the Hindu goddess Savitri as her own and used it as a pen name. She also became politically active and aware during this period, embracing Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism as her personal creed.

National Socialist Activism: During the War, she was part of an Axis espionage ring that funneled information on the British military in India to Japan and Germany. To avoid incarceration as an enemy alien, she married an upper-caste Indian in a political marriage of convenience. After the War, when she could travel freely again, she returned to Europe. In 1948, she journeyed to Occupied Germany to participate in the postwar National Socialist underground.

In 1949, she was arrested in Dusseldorf for distributing NS posters and flyers. Following a trial before a British military court in Cologne, she was sentenced to three years imprisonment. Initially, she was locked up with common criminals and lowlifes. However, after numerous protests to the prison’s warden, she was transferred to the section of the facility that held National Socialist political prisoners (so-called “war criminals”) She was released after serving only six months of her sentence, due to ill-health and a belief by the Occupation authorities that she was merely an eccentric foreign woman who posed no threat to the Occupation.

Following her release, she began to make contact with the surviving members of the Hitler government. She also wrote four books and numerous essays and articles on National Socialism. In 1962, she attended the founding congress of the World Union of National Socialists in England. She was a French signatory to the Cotswold Protocols, which formally established the World Union. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she conducted a lively correspondence with American National Socialist pioneer George Lincoln Rockwell and his successor, Matt Koehl. In 1982, Koehl reorganized Rockwell’s party, the National Socialist White People’s Party, as a religious formation called the NEW ORDER. Savitri was the first international associate to join.

Death: Savitri Devi died in England in 1982 of heart disease. She was 77.

Further information on her life, writings and beliefs can be found at the Savitri Devi Archive – https://savitridevi.org/

Essential Savitri Devi Reading List:

1. The Lightning and the Sun (1958): This book is considered by many to be her magnum opus. In it, she describes Adolf Hitler's role in history, which she sees as cyclical, rather than linear. (Available in print from NS Publications https://nspublications.com)

2. The Gold in the Furnace (1952): An extended meditation on National Socialism and National Socialist Germany. We think that this is her most profound work. (Available in print from NS Publications https://nspublications.com)

3. Defiance (1950): An account of her activities with the National Socialist underground in postwar Germany, which led to her imprisonment. (Available in print from NS Publications https://nspublications.com)

4. Pilgrimage (1958): Her description of life in postwar Germany under Allied occupation, centered around a narrative recounting her "pilgrimage" to National Socialist holy sites.

5. "Paul of Tarsus, or Christianity and Jewry" (1957): An essay investigating the Jewish origins of Christianity (Read at:

    https://nationalvanguard.org/2015/10/paul-of-tarsus- or-christianity-and-jewry/}

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