Part One: Savitri Devi: The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion

my heart. Thank you. Yeah, there we go, Here we go. Jamie, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. I uh, I think that that's true. I'm good. I have to add I have to add it probably good. I have to add a bag to my Spirit Airlines flight. But that's about as as challenging as it's getting to day. Speaking of monsters, that is the greatest monster of all online interface. You had to like swipe your credit card

if you sneeze on a Spirit our Lines. I have this friend, his name is Lenny, and he listens to the podcast so he may hear this. And Lenny is uh one of the one of the most experienced travelers I know, and at one point I was taking a flight with him in Eastern Europe to Ukraine through whizz Air, which is one of the worst airlines I've heard. Yeah,

they're terrible. Never had the pleasure. There was a moment where they started hassling us about our bags, and it became clear that we weren't going to be able to like fit everything like that, we were going to have to take stuff out. And the line from him that I'll never forget was I guess, well, I guess I'm wearing all my pants today. I've heard multiple pairs of fans on how if you're not going on to a Spirit Airlines flight wearing five jackets? Like, what are you

even you yourself? I've been on a Spirit Airlines right eye next to like an actively drunk person multiple times. That's just normal, I know. But yeah, you're right, you haven't wept. If you haven't wept and thrown things away, well waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines, have you even have flown? We've gotten off topic, Um, very off topic, Jamie. Yes, have you ever heard of Savitri Devi? Oh good, oh boy, Jamie, you are in for a

motherfucking treat. I love when you don't tell me in advance. Okay, Okay, Yeah, this is one I'm going to guess almost nobody listening

to has heard of. But she's one of the most important people for understanding where we are right now in the year um like the most the most recent headline that ties directly to is you remember when the FBI arrested all those members of the base, that that neo Nazi group that's plenty to start a second Civil War by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia that was full of armed people, that whole, that whole hullabaloo. Yeah, well she's kind of behind all that, although she died

decades before it happened. So that's today's story. Let's do it. So now, Jamie, we're gonna start like we start every good day by talking about our old buddy. Shouldn't call him a buddy, Adolf Hitler. It's weird because I can call Stalin a buddy, but I feel like calling Hitler a buddies a bridge too far. I don't know. On this show. I feel like they are just rules that are different. Yeah, they're they're old friends. At this point,

so Hitler was he was a secular ruler, Jamie. Um, he was not a not a not a not a like I think, I think there's a lot of misconceptions about kind of the nature of his power and like his regime because of all of these like History Channel documentary is in this industry of books on Nazi occult history and like Nazi magic and the hell Boy movies. But like to hear it, yeah yeah, I mean they're

great movies, at least one of them is. But um, like this idea that like, you know, the Nazis were like full full of magic, right, and that Hitler like believed all sorts of like weird cookie occult stuff about like raising the dead and aliens and ship and it's just not true. Um, there were some funky occult ties to national socialism, but they were phrase oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, cult ties, yeah baby yeah, But they weren't to Hitler. They were too like kind of like side figures.

Like the B List of the Nazis. A lot of those guys were kind of into the occult. But like your A listers, really we're we're pretty secular. Guy Beyonce is the Nazi. Beyonce is I'm trying to think of like like the Nazi Jeremy Renners, the halls. Oh, how dare you speak is name in this forum? I thought we was. We made a pact to never speak of him again. We we never signed that contract. We never did. It was under negotiation for a long time. Yeah, it

is still in arbitration now. The Tulist Society UH spelled Thule Society like the top racks on people's jeeps? Was it? Well, subers people suberus um. The Tolist Society was a German occult group in the early twentieth century UH in Germany UM, and it provided some of the early funding and leadership for the Nazi Party. Heinrich Hitler held bizarre quasi magical beliefs for his whole time in power, and he was kind of into some weird He thought he was like

a reincarnated prince and some ship. But Hitler himself was not at all into a cult stuff um. And the only guy really close to him who was was Rudolf Hess, who was his deputy and for a long time his best friend. This is the guy he like co wrote mind comp with like Hess and Hitler like fucking type before Hitler ghost his his like his ghostwriter, yeah, kind of like more like his his muse. Yeah. And also

the guy who was a competent typist both. I mean, you got you gotta if your muse is also a competent typist who says the perfect person doesn't exist, Yeah, Rudolf hess That's what people say about Rudolph Hess is he was the perfect person. So he was also the deputy fearer for a while. Oh six six six six six. Yeah, he was a cool dude, um, but he wasn't really in the picture for very long. He got increasingly marginalized

after Hitler came to power in thirty three. Um, and in nineteen forty one he kind of went bug fuck uh and got on a plane and flew to Great Britain while the two countries were at war. Sorry, how would you define bug fuck? I would have defined bug fuck is like independently hopping in your private plane and fing to a country that your country is actively bombing to try to parachute down and negotiate for peace between your two nations without anyone asking. I would describe that

as pretty bug fuck. Yeah, that's that's not This is like a new term for me, and now this is the only like reference point I have for it, So I'm not going to know how to how to define bug funk moving forward. Okay, So bug funk is when like the world is falling apart and you're like fuck it and you and you go the funk off and then you is that it kind of yeah, like it was a kind of thing where like there was no

chance of it ever working. He did not have the authority to to to sign a peace treaty for Germany, uh and Britain did not have any interest in talking with him or making peace with Germany at this point. Um. So he basically just flew and crash landed in England and got arrested and spent the rest of his life

in prison. And it was he huge embarrassment for Hitler because this this is like his right hand man who in the middle of the war like flies to his enemies country to like try to negotiate without Hitler's approval. It was it was very weird. Um And because hess was like this occult dude into astrology and all this ship and like this weird he was actually kind of like a Buddhist, Like he's a weird dude. Um, but because he held all these weird beliefs and he piste

off Hitler so badly. Hitler bands like all of this weird occult ship that had cropped up around the Nazi Party in ninety one. So yeah, so after forty one, like really most of that stuff is illegal, Heinrich Hitler gets up to a little bit of it with the s S because he's got a castle and he he's just a weird dude. We'll get into some of that in a later episode. The important thing to understand is that, like, yeah, Hitler was like a distinctly not wooy guy, Like he's

not a new age sort of dude. He's like if you mentioned You're like if he's like the guys on Reddit, who like if you mentioned you so much as nine your zodiac sign, They're like, she's not credible, she's fun, she's a she's lost. Yes, I love that type of person, and I I feel confident saying that. A hundred percent of Hitler's biographers agree he would have been extremely on Reddit. I owe more on Reddit than anyone has ever been on Red. Sure. Yeah, no, he would be the most

reddity guy of of all of them. And we have to admit that that is very what's his signs? That's very his sign of him. Wouldn't you say, I don't know, he's such a Taurus, he's s Taurus. Sure, okay, continue, that's I assume you're referring to the maker of really shoddy handguns, which is I think they're Brazilian terrible guns. Okay. No, I'm just trying to the behind the bastard's board. Not either way of advocating the Taurust sign or the Taurist firearms brand is not going to go well for you.

Um um. Yeah. So now Hitler, so he's not into the occult at all. He's not a big fan of Christianity either. Um. He felt it was fundamentally Jewish because Jesus was Jewish, which is, you know, not an irrational point of view within the logic of being a Nazi. Uh. And he worried a weakened the German people. But he also respected Christianity for its ability to inculcate good values in the German people. Uh. And the primary good value it inculcated was making lots of babies because most Germans

were Catholic, and Catholics aren't big fans of condoms. I'm not not sure if you're aware of that. Um No, I know I wouldn't have aunts if it weren't for this attitude, none of us would. Now. Hitler himself was a baptized Roman Catholic all his life, he probably didn't really believe much of anything other than that that Hitler was a cool dude. Um, but he felt it was

important to maintain this image. Um. Now. There were some among his followers that it was Nazism's destiny to become the new Great German religion, but Hitler himself pushed back against this, insisting in mind comp that national socialism quote is not a religious reform, but a political reorganization of the German people. He believed, quote, it is criminal to try to destroy the accepted faith of the people as

long as there is nothing to replace it. And it is possible that given enough time, Hitler would have tried to replace Christianity with something else, but he never attempted to do so. And as far as we know, the supernatural as it's generally known, played very little role in the Nazi regime. But and here's where the real episode starts.

In the decades since Hitler shot himself in that bunker in ve Nazism has changed quite a lot the actual political and historic beliefs of the original Nazis, and if Hitler himself have been twisted and shifted into something even weirder.

It would be too much to say that this new form of Nazism is more dangerous than the original, given the tens of millions of people who died from the original Nazism, But it's probably accurate to say that the fact that Nazism has mutated into what we call esoteric hitlersm um has made it better able to survive in

the era of the Internet. Now. Esoteric hitler Ism is a term used to refer to a number of different strains of postwar Nazi thought that put a bizarre religious and occult spin on Nazi racial theories and on Hitler himself, often seeing the man as essentially the avatar of a god. Uh four Chan and eight Chan are in the modern age, two of the most prolific vectors for this the spread of this brand of nonsense. There are strains of it

in Brenton Terrence Manifesto and Honor's Brevick's Manifesto. And today we're talking about the woman who invented all of this, the single person who became the living link between the Nazism that tried and failed to conquer Europe and the modern Nazi movement that spawns mass shootings and attempted mass shootings on a monthly basis today. Her name was Savitri Devi and she was a huge piece of ship. This is someone's feminism somewhere. This is some piece of ships feminism.

She is a feminist icon. Feminism is the law. Now. This is a woman who spent her whole life living alone with a pile of cats and changing Nazism forever. Okay, well what if she just did the first half? You know, that was not she was not willing to do just the first She's like, okay, so I'm in a pile of cats, that's great, what else could I do? And that was her second idea. That's embarrassed, that was her second idea. It does she does start first focused on

the cats and then moved straight to Nazism though. It's remarkable. Yeah. So she was born Maximiani Portas on September nine five in Lyon, France. Her mother, Julia, came from Cornwall, the town with the thirty six dumbest name in all of England. Her father's ancestry was a milange of various Mediterranean peoples without access to birth control. He was mostly at Allian

in Greek. Although young Maximiani was born a French citizen, she latched onto her father's Greek ancestry from the very beginning. Some of this had to do with the fact that Leon had a large and active Greek expat community, and her dad was a prominent member of it. She also nursed an early fascination with Roman history. Her name Maximiani was actually just the female form of Maximian, the proper first name of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. So she's up.

She's a big old nerd. I really have to emphasize what a nerd she is. I feel like I've met versions of this girl in like sophomore English classes and they're like, actually something something, and you're like stop at stop that, please, just like finish reading. Their eyes were watching God, let's move on. I was the male version of this for a while. I mean I took three years of Latin because I was such a Roman history nerd. Okay, Robert. Some of us took five years of Latin, and do

we remember a fucking thing? Of course? Not? No, no, I not not a goddamn word. I like when I was in high school, in junior high, in high school, if you were like in the quote unquote advanced classes, they would be like, let's teach them a language that they can't use. Goddamn totally useless term. Did you have to me? That's one of those. But did you have to use that textbook that was about the Romani family? Did you do a Romanti? Oh no, no man. I

was like fucking Killius and Quintus. I remember those names. They were like the fucking It was like a bunch of Pompeii people who all died at the end of the book. Are everyone died at the end of our textbook? Wait? Was it like we had? We had the Cornelia family. It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus, and then they had a friend named Sextus who they sound like

fucking losers. They weren't. It was there. Your your family sounds way better because our family There was like three books in total, and the whole second book, So like all of eighth and ninth grade they're just stuck in a ditch. They're like in a it. Their carriage isn't a ditch. They can't get out. They're staying at an inn. The innkeepers yelling at them. They're stuck in a ditch. They're stuck in a did for a whole month. And then they go to Rome and and everything is fine.

It sounds like a nightmare. Second, well, yeah, nightmare, so horrible. Maximiani would have gotten a lot. Well, no, she wouldn't have. She would have been the most annoying person in our Latin class. Yeah. I don't like when people are in the Latin class and they're also like into it, and I'm like, m, we should be learning. We didn't have to learn to pronounce anything right. You never had to

speak because there was a crassical reason to speak it. Well, no one knows either, like you've got ecclesiastical Latin, but there's no way to know if it was exactly the same as with the Roman spoke. So we just didn't give a ship. It was great. Yeah, my teacher Ms. Cook would come and she would what was the thing? She would say. She was like, um, okay, discipuli at this descipula like She's like, hello, students, let's learn Julie is Caesar, and then we would just talk about how

the family was stuck in the ditch all day. Well, Maximiani spent her young life stuck in that ditch, and that ditch was called being a huge nerd for Mediterranean classical civilizations. She was a strong willed child, which here is a synonym for unspeakably arrogant and a giant pain in the ass. She felt strongly about just about everything. Everything. Yeah, strong willed. She was known to be utterly immovable once

she latched onto an idea. One strong opinion she developed early was that British people were terrible, which is not inaccurate. She hated her mother's English friends and the way they prattled on about illnesses and their dying families. Harsh. That's so harsh, Like I wish my family wasn't. She's like, shut Jesus Christ, Yeah, we get it. She didn't like French people very much much either, and the particular cause for her hatred of the French was the French Revolution.

She read about it as a little girl in school and was instantly furious. The Republican ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity disgusted her. She was punished at school for making an obscene gesture at a plaque of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And again, how she's like eight or nine. Yeah, she's like a fucking little kid

at this point. Yeah. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, which small child Savitri Devi flipped off, includes such controversial takes as people are innocent until proven guilty, people have the right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, and people should be able to speak and write with freedom. Some real hot She's okay, So she was like born to be harmful, she was born to be a fascist. Like she as a small child, She's like, people aren't equal?

What is this bullshit? That's so the little flipping off to human rights? You do you do feel like we should have known? We should have known. I mean, I love flipping off old documents too, But to me, it's the magna carta, and the magna carta knows why. The magna carta knows what she did. Oh yeah, the Manacarta shakes in her boots whenever you come walk. The Magna Carta is a messy bitch, and I have no time for it. Okay, Robert, g I can't believe you just

called a female document of bitch a messy. You're setting a bad example, Robert. Feminism is document misogyny. She's she's literally shaking right now. She's here. You didn't tell me the magna carta was in the room to She's literally she drove me here. Horrible. She's, well, I don't have driver's license. I don't know what you want. I don't know how much further to take this bit. So I'm just kinda Later in life, in nineteen Savitri Devi told an interviewer a beautiful girl is not equal to an

ugly girl. So she remained pretty consistent about her belief in the fundamental inequality of human beings, like her whole life. And she's getting really granular about it too. Yeah, she's granular about sucking everything now. Chief motivating factor in her childhood, I have to say, was completely understandable. She felt a deep, powerful sense of rage at the abuse of animals by

human beings, starting at age five. Yeah, starting at age five, she began expressing to her parents concern at the abuse of animals she witnessed in a daily basis. She was horrified by circuses, the fur trade, and the eating of meat. While still in elementary school, she became a committed vegetarian and eventually a vegan. Maximiani Portas was particularly disgusted by the abuse of cats by peasants on the French countryside. Her only real biographer, Nicolas Goodrick Clark, claims this quote

disgusted her and turned her against manned kind. And since most people listening probably don't know anything about the history of cat torture in Europe, I didn't know anything about the history of cat torture in Europe. I'm gonna have to talk about that now for a little while. Like specific to this region, cat torture all of Europe, really, but like, yeah, specifically to France. Like the French hate cats, Okay, listen,

they are assholes about cats. Yeah. Uh. Today we rightly revere cats as our moral and intellectual superiors, and we have organized or society around pleasing them. This is right and good. But cats have not always been beloved in the West. While they are considered basically wholly in Islam, they're like ritually clean, like you can have them in in mosques and stuff all over the place. You have to wash your hands after touching them if you're gonna

go pray. There's a long Christian tradition of seeing cats as demonic entities. Uh. And to be fair, Islam is kind of shitty on the subject of dogs. So I guess whatever of the big religions you pick, you're gonna be terrible to one of the good animals. I don't

know why. Yeah, it's weird. Now. In the fifteenth century, Edward, Duke of York, announced that if the devil inhabited any living animal, it was the cat, and for centuries all around Europe, good Christians tortured and murdered cats for almost no reason. In Belgium, they held an event called caton Stote, the Festival of Cats, which sounds awesome but actually just involved drunken townsfolk throwing cats from the top of the church onto hard cobble stones and then lighting them on fire. Yeah,

I hey, okay. It's always really frustrating when you hear a story about the underclass and it's like you're playing to stereotypes about the underclass. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm gonna be honest. I bet the rich people got to go up first and throw the nicest cats just to set. Yeah, and then and then they would privately be throwing cats at hard marble floors as well. My god, it's horrible.

And Catton Stot still still takes place in Epra every May, but they use stuffed animals now, which just stop, just just stop. It's not a good tradition. It would be so easy to not do it. It would be so easy they do. Do they eat the cat? Like? Do they or is it just we're just killing the cats? Not that that makes no, they're just murdering cats for no good reason. Okay, it's fun, that is, and people are horrible, But Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly torture

cats in Belgium? Your sponsors? That is exactly right. Sophie vets every sponsor to make sure they do not torture cats in Belgium. Yes, is that that's true? That's a lie, Robert, Okay, okay, it is a small country, so the vetting is pretty easy. Like you'll notice I did not say, for example, Canada. No, you certainly just got canceled before our very eyes products. We're back. Yeah, those were good ads, Jamie, good products,

after all those good ads. Are you ready to hear more about the systematic torture of cats by generations of Europeans. I just got a cat, Robert, this is not fair. I love cats. Shoutout, Flee. Shout out to flee my cat. He's got a big Neck's got a big neck. Shout out to Roach, one of the side characters in the first version of the movie with Keanu Reeves, where some of the people are bank robbers but they also surfers. Oh oh, oh, you're talking about the Kiana Reeves surfing

movie with um we've covered on. Yes, Roach. Roach is the one who bleeds out in a plane point break. He's a good character. We're talking about We're talking about point Break, Yes, point Break, that's the movie classic. Yes. Now, in France, there was a centuries old tradition of burning hundreds of cats to death and gigantic bonfires. Louis sixteenth even famously lit Paris's cat fire in Brutes such a cat fire. Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie, who else?

This is just all news to me, Just just okay. I'm I'm glad that this wasn't like common knowledge. I would be horrified if I just didn't, you know, even burning cats Okay, Like it doesn't surprise obviously, like you have to assume earlier times people are more callous to cats and dogs because them being like what they are now is kind of a more recent development because we have all these extra resources. But I didn't realize it was this like cruel, This is a lot is in

the cat fire. That's like bad writing. M m yeah, so the king would would. Yeah, so brule lichettes, which I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that because it's a horrible thing. And fuck funk. France, as it was called um varied in a number of different ways. Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were tied uh together in like huge pires. Sometimes living cats were tied above small fires on like a spit and then roasted to death. Sometimes cats were set in wooden

cages and burnt to death. Uh. In some towns, people known as Coramant's cat chasers would soak cats and fuel light them on fire and chase them through town to the amusement of citizens. People are so upset all the time. I know, right, they're an oppressed species. Yes they are. Yeah, I would be piste. We you should be. I'm pissed. The charred remains of these tortured cats were taken home

as good luck charms by people. In seventeen thirty, as revolutionary sentiments simmered and bubbled throughout French society, to Parisian apprentice printers got fed up with their masters and abducted their cats. They staged a massive public trial, the Great Cat Massacre, as it's become known to history. Now, this was tied more towards issues of class hatred than hatred of cats. Um. But the cats wound up actually like, but they end up being the escaped cats for the

whole situation exactly. And that's also the worst way to die as as a symbol for something that has nothing to do with you. Yeah, those cats have no understanding of class theory. It's like if someone like murder me and then they're like, well, this has something to do with Like my opinion on the new Taylor Swift record has nothing to do with Jamie, but I killed her

as to send a message. It would be like if one group of aliens came to Earth and murdered you for something they knew human beings were going to do a hundred years in the future. Something you're completely incapable of understanding or knowing about, Like just yeah, this like it's just wild. But these apprentices felt their masters treated the family cats better than their workers. Um. And because

they couldn't quite you know, murder their bosses. Uh, they got a crowd together and they captured a bunch of rich people's cats, and then they put them on trial and sentenced them to be hung until dead. And they hung just a funkload of cats to death. They made like the owners of the cats watch. It was super

fucked up. I don't know what to do right now. Well, what you can do right now is you can get a little bit into the head of a sensitive young soul like Maximiani Portas, because a lot of this stuff was still going on in France. It wasn't at its worse, but like cat torture and burning was still happening in

the countryside. And she sees this as a little girl and is like, this is part of why she hates those like you know, French revolutionary all use of freedom and equality is She's like, well, clearly this is all bullshit. Look at what they're doing to these animals, Like where's their you know, equality and freedom and like like like she that's kind of like where she comes at this from, right. Um. Yeah, so she's deeply sympathetic to animals and particularly cats, and

basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings. Um and yeah, so an interesting story. I'm going to be interested in how she galaxy brains being sympathetic towards the plight of of of brutally murdered cats to becoming a fascist. But you know, I fascism common thing for fascists, to be honest, it's to fascism, well, you know, not committing cat murders, but like hating people because of how garbage they are and thinking fascism is the only way to fix something

because people just can't be allowed to live on their own. Okay, I knew that. I think I thought you were saying cats specific reasons. I'm like, well, this is a true education. Yeah. Now, Maximiani was very good in school. She was a bright student. She read and wrote constantly, and her very favorite writer

was a nineteenth century French poet, Charles Leconte Delisle. Uh. And here's how Savitri's biographer describes Leconte Delisle's work in the book Hitler's Priestess, which is really the only decent biography of Savitri Devi quote Leconte Delisle's own tragic view of the universe. His romantic colors were always tinged with

somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiani. He regarded all religious symbols as fragments of a divine truth, but the profusion of faiths over time convinced him of the relative value and ultimate vanity of every doctrine. Beset by a sense of cosmic futility, Leconte Delisle rejected Christianity and evoked the stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic people's and his famous

poem Psycho Poems Barbara's. He was also powerfully attracted to Hinduism following the translation of its sacred texts in the eighteen forties. Maximiani felt a profound sympathy with Le Conte Delisle's view of life's fragility, the vanity of existence, and

the illusion of the world. His romantic poems about the ancient Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Celts and Hindus their proud paganism and heroic action, yet final resignation in the face of death and oblivion confirmed her own of version to

Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview. So goths didn't exist in the early twentieth century, but Maximi is clearly that she is a proto goth It's again, it's just like, if there had been a hot topic for her to uh, you know, be, a lot could have been avoided. Imagine how many hot topic employees were saved by that business, Yeah, a lot of them. Imagine how many fascists we avoided by, for example, the existence of Kylo Wrin fan fiction. Honestly, honestly, it's wow. That

actually hit for me. Wow, that hit that people. People need an outlet, you know, and if you don't, this is what happens. Right, You're just like, if you can make it horny and palatable, you're going to prevent something bad. This was a a young girl who desperately needed to be distracted, and nothing distracted her, and that it's a problem had blaze at a pretty clear track for you to really, I mean, I just yeah, send me back in time with a Jack Skellington hoodie for this woman.

Oh my god, that would have solved so many problems, created some others. I mean, she still would have been a deeply annoying person, but like I had a Jack Skellington hoodie. But also I had never seen the movie. I was a total poser. Oh boy, that's going to get you canceled harder than anything else today. And then I saw the movie and guess what, I didn't like it very much. I watched it. It's fine, it's fine. Well, actually I don't. I think it's maybe not so good.

Beautiful animation though, anyways, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get a judge it for its time, ah do I? Anyways, it was no For example, the Little Toaster, I don't know, yeah, no, no, it didn't kids up. I loved the Little Toaster. Damaged me forever, really, that's why. But he was brave robber. That's why you throw bagels, right, Robert, I don't know. It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators. You've got to do some exposure therapy for you. With brave old toaster.

That's why he doesn't toast his bagels. He only. I mean, that's like the thing tragic. M's tragic. Imagine the path we could have avoided. I know Maximiani Portis was very political as a young girl. Um when World War One started in nineteen fourteen, she at nine years old, knew very clearly that she did not trust the entent powers

UM so like England, France, you know, Russia. Some of this likely came from the fact that Greece's King Constantine was very pro German and refused to get into the war on the side of either the entent or the central Powers UM. But the King of Greece's prime minister, a guy named Venizelos UM which I'm probably mispronouncing, uh, disagreed with the king. He was very pro British and

supported Greece getting into the war. The two fought over this for years until in nineteen sixteen a group of pro Venizelos army officers staged a coup against the king. There were rumors that the untuanted back this, and those rumors seemed credible in light of the fact that French and British troops landed in Salonika and Athens in nineteen fifteen and sixteen to force Greek compliance in their demands from military access to the Macedonian Front so they could

better fight Austria Hungary. Um, that's a lot a history there, but basically she's very pro Greece and wants Greased to stay out of the war because she also likes Germany, hates the English, hates the French, and she's piste off because England and France back this prime minister who wants Greased to get into the war and they also funk with Greek sovereignty and stuff. She gets really angry overall. And and how old is she at this point? Like

where where are we? Nine? Ten eleven years old? When I imagine, did you know what was going on in the world when you were nine or ten years old? Like? How where were you? I was pretty I mean not nine and eleven. Happened when I was like twelve, And that was definitely like the start of me getting political. I guess, yeah, I was. I was in World War One. Yeah, you know. World War One's that level of thing, right where like even a little kid is gonna like, you're

gonna pay attention to that ship. It's kind of a big deal. You won't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll you'll know what's going on. You'll know what's going I guess I'm just like, it would be so bizarre to me if someone was like Jamie's beliefs at eight years old, was nine eleven? Was school got out early

that day? And and this is where I should note that this is going to be an imperfect episode in terms of that sort of thing, because our main source on this is Hitler's Priestess, which is a biography that's fairly decent but also flawed because it's mainly based on Savitri Devi's own biographical writings of her recollections of her own life. Like, there's just not a lot of information.

There's not a lot of weren't a lot of people to go back to and like talk to about her and as a child and stuff who were still alive when she became relevant. I think it was written if I could write about like what I thought I thought at eight years old, I'd be like, Jamie was a brilliant genius who had start opinions on foreign policy. Okay,

got it well. But that said, given the I don't think we shouldn't discard all of this because if you look at the thrust of her life, she does live the life of someone who's always been very political I mean yeah exactly so, um yeah. Venizelos and his men took over part of Greece with the backing of Britain and France UH, and those two countries were happy to recognize his government while they carried out a brutal ten month blockade of the Greek provinces that stayed loyal to

the king. And young Maximiani watched all this as she grew into an adolescent girl. Some of her earliest memories were news reports of protests from Athens of royalist crowds railing against the entent and Maximiani sided with them and consider of the Antons treatment of Greece to be basically criminal.

Her disgust was reinforced after the war. In the wake of the Central powers defeat, the Ottoman Empire was broken up and Greece was given control in the Versailles Treaty of A city called Smyrna now Smyrna is a city on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey. It was the center of a nearly three thousand year old Greek community that lived on the coast of Anatolia.

Greece with some justification thought that a lot of Anatolia ought to be part of Greece because it was culturally and historically Greece, and the newly created nation of Turkey did not agree. So, with the backing of the Versailles Treaty, Greece invaded Smyrna in nineteen nineteen to make good on the promises that you know, had been made to them by the entant, and the fighting was a disaster from

the beginning. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated in the war technically, but on the ground and actual battles their soldiers had performed pretty well. They'd fought off a big invasion at Gallipoli. The birth of the Turkish nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire was met with a swelling of nationalist fervor in Anatolia, and this helped to spawn a powerful insurgent Turkish movement dedicated to defeating the

Greek invasion m hm. SO. A truce was reached in nineteen twenty, but like many recent truces in Turkish military history, it was not a real truce, and around the same time King Constantine was restored to the Greek throne. This turn, the remaining Great powers of Europe against Greece, and even though they promised Greece Smyrna and the Versailles Treaty in nineteen twenty one, they basically like like, funk that ship and hold all of their support. Do we know where

the where the Greeks at this time stood on cats? Uh? You know, they're closer to the Middle East. So I'm gonna guess more pro cat, more pro cat. Okay, Okay, yeah, I think yeah. The further in that direction you get more pro cat, less pro dog. You know, I think that's generally fair Western They've got a lot of dogs. Yeah, yeah, dog. Maybe they just lit cats and dogs on fire. I don't know. I did not do that research. Okay, these are the questions I have Robert take of relieve them.

So the French and Italian governments like betray Greece first, and they signed agreements with the Turkish leader Mustapha Kamal and to ignore the promises they had made in the Verse I Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the longest, but when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia in March of nine, all of the allies suddenly adopted a policy of neutrality. Britain banned for their arms sales to Grease Well, France was happy to allow its weapons makers to sell

straight to Turkey. The whole effort to incorporate the Greek regions of Anatolia into the Greek nation ended in disaster and military defeat. In nineteen twenty two, Greek forces fled Asia Minor, and the Turkish army conducted a campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing on their agan coast. They massacred some thirty thousand Christians, a mix of Greeks, Armenians and Frank's, in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would ever

crop up on their coast again. This Mrner debacle. This, this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatoly anymore, not like there was for three thousand years prior. This

is like what she wipes out that community. Uh So, you can see why a Greek nationalist like Maximiani Portas, who is like fifteen sixteen years old then and like really actually starting to like understand the world, is furious about all this, and it it breeds in her a powerful hatred of the entent powers, particularly of France and

of of England. Um. And she basically felt that like all these fancy words they had about liberty and democracy were bullshit when they couldn't even hold the basic promises and protect the lives of tens of thousands of innocent

Greek civilians, which is very valid. Yes, yeah, yeah, Now I'm not trying to like ignore the Turkish point of view in this too, like Greece is not in the right here as a country either, Like everybody's in the wrong, although Turkey massacrest people, so I'm gonna say, maybe they're more in the wrong. But this is complicated. But this is sort of how Maximiani is very much on the

side of Greece is fucked over. And this is an entirely like a crime committed by the Entente powers against against Greece, and it sets up the rest of her life in a lot of ways. Um. So other influences on her developing mind, where the sight of French crowds and leon cheering uproariously at the brutal terms of the Treaty of Versailles when they were announced. She was horrified when the French government stationed black Synegalese troops to occupy

the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland. Now, this is one of those moves by France that engendered a whole shit litter racism in Central Europe. It was a big influence on a lot of early Nazi thinkers too. And obviously black soldiers aren't he worse than white ones, but as civilians living under military occupation, you're going to hate whatever foreign soldiers occupy your country. And if those soldiers are the only black people who've ever met, it wasn't a great

move on France's behalf Jesus Christ. Yeah, so I'm trying to set up all of like this is like the ship that is forming. She's twelve, fifteen, sixteen is all this is going on like formative fucking years. Yea. Yeah. So she hates France, she hates England, she hates black people, she hates Turkish people, She's she loves a lot more hate. She loves cats. This is the consistent one. Yeah. Yeah. Uh. In nineteen twenty three, a fresherly graduated Maximiani Portis left

France to attend college in Greece. She was just on the edge of eighteen and furious with the status quo in Europe. Without any real clear idea of how she thought things ought to be. Instead, she did, however, know that she was obsessed with Hellenism, which is like ancient Greek culture. She's a she's dork. Yeah, she's a big fucking joy. She's like Troy, Oh my god. She would not shut up about the Elliot. She was a fucking you. I find multiple translations and you're like, can you not?

She has wrong and profoundly thirsty opinions on Achilles. She's like ranked gods and goddesses hot. If she'd seen the actual movie Troy that came out like a decade ago, she would have been furious, because there's no way Brad

Pitt was as hot as the Achilles in her mind. Beautiful. Yeah, she believed the old Greeks had been quote a civilization of iron, rooted in truth, a civilization with all the virtues of the ancient world, none of its weaknesses, and all the technical achievements of the modern age, without modern hypocrisy, pettiness and moral squalor. Now this is of course wildly inaccurate. Uh.

The ancient Greeks were like unbelievably fucked up. They also did a lot of cool shit obviously, like every other ancient that's all ancient people do, a lot of cool shit. All Aztecs amazing shit, horribly fucked up, ancient Romans, amazing ship, Han Chinese ancient amazing ship. Horribly for everybody. Yeah. In the Greek specific case, uh, they fucked a bunch of little kids. They repeatedly put narcissistic idiots in charge of their city states. They made numerous blunders that ensured their

period of military and economic might was short lived. And they also created some of the most influential philosophy and fiction and art that has ever been made in the history of the human race. Complicated people, Um, Maximiani does not get a complex picture of ancient Greece. It's just the good ship. Yeah. Yeah, Um, you might say, like, I don't know, like I want to say, her understanding of Greek history was not deep. It was certainly incomplete.

Um that said pretty much only like, the only thing Europeans would write about the ancient Greeks in that period was wildly positive. You weren't going to get like critical like commentary on, for example, pederasty in ancient Greece in fucking nineteen twenty like it's you're just not going to

read that. Um. Yeah. So her love of Greece was mostly focused on obsessing over their incredible art and fantasizing about the idealized culture that she to existed there, right, I mean this, I mean we as children all read revisionist history about horrifying cultures. I was obsessed with ancient Rome a lot of the same reasons, of course, because you're just like, oh, it seems like the only dio

dope stuff and more cool outfits. Well, I will say I was kind of a fucked up kid, so when I learned about like all of the fucking crucifixions and ship I was kind of like, hell yeah, but you're so metal. I mean, it is pretty fucking metal metal. We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus and his friends one of these days, but it's fucking one of like the biggest mic drop moments in the history of torturing people to death with wood. Um. I think that's

fair to say. Thrilled to have such a hyper specific um. So she moves to Greece. She's super happy for a while. Obviously, best place in the world for this girl is fucking Grace. At this point in time Um and the time she spent discovering the wonders of Athens rules Um coincided with some very important goings on in Germany. I'm gonna quote

again from the book Hitler's Priestess. Years later, she would recall that she spent such a sunlit afternoon upon the Acropolis on ninth October ninety three, the fateful day of Hitler's push, when he and his followers had attempted a coup against the Varian government and staged a march to the felde Heron Hall in the center of Munich. The police successfully broke up the march, and sixteen martyrs of the early Nazi movement fell beneath the hail of bullets.

When details of the incident were published in the world press the following day, there was some discussion over lunch at the International Home Hostel, which is where she was crashing at the time. Maximiani admits that she did not yet connect Hitler with her own dream of a new

racial order based on her view of classical Greek antiquity. However, she strongly sympathized with him as an enemy of the Allies on account of his contempt for the Versailles Treaty and saw a parallel between his nationalist idea of one state for all Germans and the Magali idea among the Greeks, which is the idea that like Greece should recoup its ancient like power and like Taco for the places that had controlled back in the day. She's a little ideal argument. Yeah.

She engaged in a heated argument in defensive Hitler with the French managerist of the hostel. So so we've lost arguing about Hitler's with the hostel. No, we lost her when she's been gone for a while. Yeah, but you know who won't argue in support of Hitler with a French hostel owner in Athens. Robert the products and services support this podcast would never ever heard us or do something wrong. I've been saying it for years. I have all agreed for years. Fingers crossed for a dig pill

ad right after this. But a great transition, both of you. Just wonderful work. We're back. So it was during this first visit to Greece that Maximiani Portis would have seen the symbol for the first time that would come to define her life and legacy. I am talking, of course,

about the swastika. Odds are good she would have encountered it for the first time in the National Museum of Athens, which hosted a huge amount of what were believed to be Trojan artifacts, which had been uncovered by the pioneering and controversial archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Now Schleiman was not a professional archaeologist, which is not weird for the time. Most of like the archaeologies of this period, or like gentlemen

adventurers who I mean get our nerds. Basically the people in the people in like the Mummy movies, who are just wearing people in Tarzan. That was the most accurate thing about the Mummy movie, other than the way mummies react to shotguns. They're all they're all named Clayton. Yeah yeah,

so Schlimann uh yeah. Throughout the mid eighteen hundreds had been a very successful German arms merchant, trading raw materials for the ingredients to make ammunition um and he had nursed a deep obsession with the Iliot his entire life. In his late middle age, he decided to take his fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover the true loka of the ancient city of Troy. Unlike pretty much any like traditional archaeologists, Schlimann used the Iliad as a guide.

He thought this book was like basically essentially accurate um and he followed the poem as if it had been a work of serious historical scholarship, and shockingly enough, this kind of worked. In eighteen seventy one, after three years of searching, Schleiman found what was very likely to have been the site of ancient Troy. His methods of digging

it up were brutal. He used crowbars and battering rams and destroyed countless thousands of artifacts, including ironically, what a lot of archaeologists now believe was the actual physical evidence of Troy. He dug too far down basically because he was. He fucked up and probably destroyed what actual Trojan relics there were. But he doesn't find what a lot of people think was the site of Troy. It's just other ship was built there and he dug up the wrong

ship anyway. It's fucked up, Yes, yes, So his research or his digging, despite all the ship destroyed, produced hundreds upon hundreds upon hundred of artifacts which people at the time believed to be Trojan and many of those artifacts, more than eighteen hundred of them were in blasmed with various types of swastika. And I'm gonna quote next from Scientific American. He would go on to see the swastika everywhere from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa.

And as Schliemann's exploits grew more famous and archaeological discoveries became a way of creating a narrative of national identity, the swastika grew more prominent. It exploded in popularity as a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca Cola products, boy Scouts and girls club materials, and even American military uniforms. The Antiquities on Earth by Dr Schlieman at Troy acquire for us a double interest, wrote British linguist Archibald says

in eighteen ninety six. They carry us back to the later stone ages of the Aryan race. Oh dear on Coca Cola products. Probably if that was just a product or service advertised, But it wasn't a nutz. It's like I spent some time living in in and it's the swasticas all over the dam and it is weird. It takes. You never really get used to it because of like

what it means to the West. It's always like there's so many swast because around here, that is I mean, and that is fascinating to like track the history of a symbol and like how it affects different areas of

the world differently. That sounds extremely darring. I actually I have some like tapestries that I picked up in India that have little swastikas on them in parts, and it's one of those things where it's like every now and then, like they're not the same as the Nazi swasticas, but they're close enough that people will be like, what, No, I need to leave your home right now? Yeah, I mean yeah, Like most people are pretty small, so most

people aren't getting na Nazi swastie. If I was over your house and you said that, I would be like, I actually, my uber is here, you know, like if you're like, they're not nasty swas Nazi swasticas, so calm down. Yeah, it's like that. And they offered me a Miller Lite. They're not not would you like a Miller Light? No? Exactly. My standard greeting people, Yeah, that's how you greet all your guests. That's specifically how I say to hello to

the officers who pulled me over for speeding. No, I would be and he said that, I I know, I've gone down that Wikipedia hole at one point of just like tracking the symbology the symbology of the There's criticism of Schleiman honestly for his methods, but he's not in any way a Nazi, Like he's just a guy who finds a bunch of swastika is buried underground, and he's just an unqualified archaeologist using his money in a weird way.

He's he's very controversial. Still, there are aspects of what he did that a lot of people praise because he got a lot of ship right, but he also destroyed a huge amount of cultural antiquities. He's an interesting person. You should read about Schleiman if you're stidn archaeology. Yeah, yeah, I mean it seems like a lot of those gentlemen explorers really delighted and you know, like destroying and selling off pieces of ancient history that had nothing to do

with them. All of them are problematic. Yeah, I will say Schliemann is one who comes from like a pure place of just being really into this history. Um, but yeah, you know they're all problematic, so hashtag yeah. Now the Swasti, because he found increasingly all over the world, played directly into a shared delusion that was spreading like a disease among many of the era's white people, the myth of

the ancient arian. Now in actual historical terms, arian is a term used to refer to the Indo Aryan language group. It was never a racial classification. The terms started being used because early linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu, Urdu in Sanskrit. Well, the term Arian was initially applied to speakers of various Indo Iranian languages. The understanding of

the word became corrupted in the late eighteen hundreds. This occurred along the same time that colonialism started to reach its absolute zenith, and there were a lot of white folks looking for reasons to justify the fact that they were basically plundering and enslaving the entire world. There were also a lot of white folks looking at their increasingly multiracial societies, which at that point, like ment Italians and Slavs, breed with Germans and British people. And we're getting concerned

about this fact. Uh. And I'm gonna refer back to Smithsonian Magazine again quote. The rising interest in eugenics and rachel hygiene, however, led to some to corrupt Aryan into a descriptor for an ancient master racial identity with a

clear through line to contemporary Germany. As The Washington Post reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several years before the start of World War Two, Arianism was an intellectual dispute between bewhiskered scholars as to the existence of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at once stage

of Earth's history. In the nineteenth century, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobnel and others made the connection between the mythical Arians and the Germans, who are the superior descendants of the early people, now destined to lead the world to greater advancement by conquering their neighbors. The findings of Schlieman's digg in Turkey then suddenly had a deeper ideological meaning for the nationalists. The purely Arian symbol Schliemann uncovered was

no longer an archaeological mystery. It was a stand in for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the reich Schamerbund, a nineteen twelve anti Semitic group and the Bavarian Frey Corp paramilitary. Basically, the proud boys of the era UM used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity as the master race. Now, the reality is that swastikas appeared damn near everywhere in human history. It's a common design and a striking one, and a bunch of different groups

of people have independently figured it out over time. And people should stop talking to you about your blanket and actually just relaxed. They're pretty small. If you're nowadays, the swastika is the swastika, like it's the Nazi thing unless you're in India. Um, because the world's big. Um. But back in these days, like if you're looking at like ancient history, it's best to kind of look at the swastica like humor that weird s doodle we all put

on our trapper keepers back in the nineties. Like no one invented that. It just showed up everywhere. That's the fucking swastika in prehistory. Um, It's just all over the damn place. But of course, yeah, oh I have that blanket. Yeah.

It was not seen as this though, um by a lot of people, and anthropologist Gwendoline Lake notes quote when Heinrich Schleeman discovered swastica like decorations on pottery, flagments and all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of the site had been Arian all along. The link between the swastika and Indo European origin, once forged, was impossible

to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto a universal symbol, which hints served as a distinguishing boundary mark up between non Arian, or rather non German and German identity. That's fascinating that, I mean, because you can understand the logic, but it also is kind of absurd to assume that like, oh, this symbol is always surely must mean the exact same thing thousands of

years ago as it does to me today. Now. The people then were as dumb as the people who planted the Iowa Caucuses. Wow, that's why all this happened. Robert, my my dog worked on the shadow app so really watch your mouth. That is son he invested in the shadow app I have to say it this all up? Yeah, I mean, of course he kept he was talking about shadow app for and I'm like, that can't be real. And then I thought it was the Dog from what was that movie with the dogs and cats that talk

and they find their family terrible. I don't know a good movie Homeward Bound Homeward. Oh, I haven't seen Homeward it found. Sonny definitely just wanted to harm people, and he wanted to harm the discourse, and that's why he invested in Shadow Up. That's fair. That's fair. You could call him the Hitler of the Iowa CAUCUSUS, which many has,

but it makes me uncomfortable. Sitting in Athens, reading the news of Hitler's movement in Germany and staring at ancient swastika's on beloved Greek artifacts, things started to come together in Maximiani Portis's mind. She moved to Greece permanently in ninety after finishing college and renouncing her French citizenship. The very next year, nine she went with her mother and aunt on a trip to the Holy Land that wound up having just as deep an impact on her developing

mind as the swastika. Now, Maximiani had never been very religious. Her mother and aunt were, though, and while they failed to inculcate a love of Christ in Maximiani, they did succeed in making her hate Jewish people, which is not the part of Christianity to transfer. If you're gonna pick one of all, well, I mean there's so many different horrible things to take away from Christianity, and that is, um, that is the worst of all. She got none of

the good stuff, just the anti Semitism. Uh yeah, she um, yeah, it's not great. It's not great. I'm starting to think this lady maybe not so nice, not heading in a

great direction. Yeah. Now, a lot of this was tied to the fact that Maximiani was so in love with Greek culture, and she was really piste off because she was like particularly love with like ancient Greek pagan culture, like the old Greek gods and their myths and stuff, and none of that stuff was very relevant other than it's like an academic thing by this point in history, and Christianity and Judaism were obviously hugely relevant in Europe, and she hated this, and she blamed the Jews for

the fact that nobody other people weren't as into Greek history as she was, Like, this is like the core of it. For it was like she's in love with like Zeus and ship and she's like, why don't people like this as much as I do? If the Jews, she's become a chaos nerd. No, it's great, It's not great. Yeah, that's really bad. So her trip to the Holy Land with her mom and aunt was a bit of a

weird one, Okay, I mean, I'm yeah. She was revolted by the obeisance they played to Judeo Christian holy sites, and as she touristed her way through old Jerusalem, she felt, in her biographer's words, overwhelmed and repelled by the exotic nature of the Jews. They're attired their customs, observances and festivals, the strange dark men and broad brimmed hats and long

black coats hastening to prayers at the Wailing Wall. Okay, it's interesting that Goodwin Clark portuss biographer mentions this specifically, seeing these Jewish people and being like horrified by the way they look in their coats and hairlocks and long

black coats. It's possible that precise moment never happened, but it's worth noting that this moment bears a striking resemblance to a tale Adolf Hitler told regularly about the supposed moment that he specifically gained his hatred of Jewish people. And here's how he wrote about that moment in mind comp this takes place in Lynz, no, sorry, in Austria Vienna. Once, since I was strolling through the inner city I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hairlocks.

Is this a jew? Was my first thought, for to be sure, they had not looked like that in Lenz, where he grew up. I observed the man furtively and cautiously. But the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form. Is this a German? This is like a huge moment in like Hitler lore. It's possible that the reason that that portis writes her own think like her own story this way is that she's hearkening to mind Camp,

because again, she writes about this later. It's also possible they just were similar people and had a similar moment. If she's the primary resource for herself, she seems to have like a fair grasp on storytelling. It makes sense that she would pull it doesn't make sense. She's like, oh, this is the end of Act one, where's my insighting? She needs she wrote her own insighting incident. If it didn't, yeah,

I'll take a leaf out of you know. It's like, uh, you know, George Lucas uh stole from from Great Japanese Cinema to make Star Wars, and in a very similar fashion, Savitri Devi stole from Adolf Hitler, the of notchrue artists, Steele Rombert. It's what they it's what they been saying for generations. Yeah, that is funny. I mean I feel like that same logic of like you have to have

a story to go with your hatred. They have that same logic on like Iron Chef, you know, like you have they have like there has to be a story that goes with this dish, and sometimes you're like, sometimes it just is she just cooks some fucking food, asshole. Sometimes you just make some food and it's bad and

it's terrible. Yeah, so, uh, Maximiani would go on to claim that after this visit to the Holy Land, she decided that Hitler's campaign of hate against Jewish people was not just a matter of German concern, it was an international crusade. She came to believe that all of the formerly pagan nations of Europe had to throw off their Judeo Christian heritage and like reconnect with their pagan roots.

Um And this is the first time she realizes that sees a national socialist, and she the way she described it, she realizes she's always been a national socialist, and so she falls fully in love with Hitler at this point, um And she's not a German Nazi though, And initially the way she decides to like act on this newfound Nazism is to basically try to revive Greek nationalism and pagan beliefs, kind of with the structure of national socialism

over them. And so she returns to Athens and she sets to work trying to cobble together her own Greek version of not Seism, but focused around a religious component that involved return to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon. I mean always this woman. Yeah. Uh. Now, by this point, the ancient Greeks had become sort of the Uberman in her own mind, and this conception was nursed by the bits of hitler speeches that made their way over into

the press and her part of the world. By nineteen thirty she finally read Mind Camp for the very first time, which introduced Maximiani to Hitler's theories about the Aryan race. His ideas about the superior race consistently undermined by the evil Jews, jailed remarkably well with Maximiani's own beliefs about

the ancient Greeks and the Jews. She became increasingly obsessed with the Arians and in part the idea of seeking out the remaining evidence of their existence, and at the time it was generally understood that India had been conquered and ruled by the Arians. Many among the weirder Nazi sets saw Hinduism as an example of a pure Aryan

pagan tradition uncorrupted by Judaism. They found the Hindu cast system deeply intriguing as well for reasons that should be obvious, and enshrined a small number of superior beings and power over a vast number of less valuable individuals. In nineteen thirty two, Maximiani's father died and she decided to take this as an opportunity to travel to India to seek out the truth of the ancient Arians. It's like a Nazi version of Eat, Pray Love. Yeah, this is in

another world. This is a very cute movie, and she just took every rod the same from it. It's you remember that horrible Cameron Crow movie Elizabethtown or Orlando Blue drive the Country with his dad's ashes and it's like, I'm glad we had this talk. And You're like, what the funk are you? That sounds like forty different movies, Jamie, It's no, it's the same. It's the same. All my elizabeth Town heads will know it's the same. Paula Dean's in that movie. Oh God, speaking of Nazis now. Um

So Savitri decide she's gonna go to fucking India. And she's not the only person with this idea of going to India to seek out the Arians. In fact, the nineteen thirty five Heinrich Hemmler's s S founded the on a Nerby, a scientific think tank dedicated to finding evidence of the ancient Arians, and they actually sent multiple expeditions

into India and Tibet. Maximiani went to India to find evidence of the Arians too, but she also went there to see firsthand evidence of a civilization founded upon what she believed was a natural racial hierarchy. She felt that Indian society looked how the world would appear in the year eight thousand, after six thousand years of Nazi rule, very specific women eight thousand. The Jonas Brothers didn't even think that far. You know that they're huge, the Naziment

that I do not get that joke. The Jonas brothers first single in two thousand six or maybe seven was a song called year three thousand. They said, not much has changed, but we live underwater. That's all they knew about. That's a lot that age. Jamie. Well, they say that not much has Jade noted the underwater. It's a weird it makes no sense. Okay, saw Robert continue your podcast. But she's thinking to a year eight thousand, eight thousand, Kevin Jennis already has You have to give her credit.

She is eight times as ambitious as Hitler. God. Yeah, So upon her arrival in the country, her beliefs were seemingly confirmed when she watched a parade celebrating Rama, a deified Aryan hero. The parade featured huge numbers of dark skinned Indians bowing and worshiping a lighter skinned statue of Rama. And Rama is most assuredly not white, although he is

often depicted as lighter skinned, but he is. He's definitely Indian. Um. But it was not uncommon Europeans who were attracted to India in this period to decide that a number of ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white. Um. This was like a common thing. And in fact, Maximiani's favorite poet who we talked about earlier, Laconte de Lisle, had actually written a poem about Rama that referred to him as Thou whose blood is pure, Thou whose body

is white, and a subduer of all the profane races. So, yeah, everyone's a little bit of a Nazi in colonialism. That's kind of the deal. That's kind of their thing. It's kind of I mean that, yeah, not shocking. And if you're if you're interested in the story of Rama, one thing I would recommend it super accessible. There's a movie online by Nina Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's amazing, called Sita sings the blues. If you just google that, it's the whole movie is free. It's one of those

beautiful pieces of animation. It's why I went to Indian in the first places. Incredible movie. Um. And one of the things that does really well is it has all these scenes where like individual like myths from like Hindu mythology are explained by like groups of people arguing about them, which, if you actually go to India, is how you learn

about myths. Like if you talk about the myth of Sita and Rama to like a family, everyone in the family, you know, like like multiple different versions of the story, and people will argue with each other. Like it's not like Christian orthodoxy or whatever. Like it's very very complicated stuff,

but fascinating. Um. So yeah. Maximiani is convinced that this guy's white though, um and she falls in love with India um and eventually finds her way to an ashram in Bengal, where she's able to live cheap and learn Hindi and study Hindu religious traditions. She gets a job outside of Delhi teaching English and Indian history, and she grew more and more taken with Hinduism, until in nineteen thirty six she adopted a Hindu name, Savitri Devi, taken

from a Hindu solar goddess. This woman is obsessed with gods and goddess, loves gods and goddess is so much. She's such a dork. Yeah, it's specifically sun gods and goddesses. She's fucking obsessed with akat in two. It's weird. There was a girl in my middle school who was like, call me Artemis, and we were like, no, okay, no, we did, we did and are and and if I was also a dork, but not that kind of dork god. No,

I was just a normal, bright eyes loving dork. I'm a big believer in calling people by whatever name they prefer to be referred to, unless it's the name of a god or goddess. Then I just start, I just get furious. Yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna push that behavior. Well, she was. She was Artemis for all of eighth grade, and then she went back to uh, just just Alex for the rest of that. As far as I know her life, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, any

other name really now. Early on in her time in India, Savitri had hiked to the top of a hill and seeing a beautiful Indian fortress, one of many such colossal ancient relics that dot the country. She was taken by its beauty and equally horrified a more modern Jesuit hospital that had been constructed nearby. This was powerfully symbolic to her, and she claimed that it cemented in her a deep need to protect Hindu India from being infected by Judaeo

Christian taint. Starting in nineteen thirty seven, she began working as an anti Christian preacher for Swami Satyananda's Hindu mission in Calcutta. For two years, she criss crossed the country, meeting with various tribal elders and arranging public debates with Christian missionaries. And I'd like to quote now from an article by konrad Elst, an indiologist who's analyzed this history. Quote.

Thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of her adversary, she could destroy the credit of the imported religion in the minds of the villagers and prevent or undo many conversions. There was a sharp contradiction between her own racist and anti egalitarian convictions and the reformist and egalitarian program of the Hindu mission. To the Hindu mission, Hinduism was a value to in itself. To Savitri Devi, it was but

an instrument of her imagined Aryan race. In her years as a preacher, she kept her non Hindu preoccupations to herself, but in her memoirs uh she declared that she conceived of her reconversion mission as an exercise and deception. From the racist arian viewpoint, it was necessary to give the most backward and degenerate Aborigines a false Hindu consciousness. She wrote. This is one of the major areas where you'll run

into disputes about Savitri Devi. The common view on her legacy is spoiler that she proposed a synthesis between Hinduism and Nazism, and aspects of this are true, But it would be more accurate to say that she found Hinduism a useful tool for advancing Nazism. Um and I'm gonna quote again from else essay. In contrast with the Hindu nationalists, but in tune with Indian Marxists and Castists, she believed that the concept nation and a program of nationalism could

not apply to India. In nineteen thirty eight, she used the slogan make every Hindu and Indian nationalist, and every Indian nationalist to Hindu. Now, this seems to be something not legitimately yeah, and she didn't really believe it. In her autobiography years later, she expressed the belief that nationalism could only exist within members of the same race, and she thought that all the different casts in India were different races. And we're getting into the weeds here too much.

But it's important to understand for what comes next that Sabitri Devi advocated for Hindu nationalism, but not because she believed strongly in it, because she saw it as a useful tool for harming the British Empire in advancing Nazism main goal. So she's merely co opting it for her own sinister purposes. It's a little more complicated than that, because she also loves it, like she's She's takes on a lot of Hindu beliefs. It's this is a weird story and there's no like, super simple answer to it.

But it's not as simple as she just becomes Hindu and also Nazi. Like it's weirder than that too. No one edited this out I need people to know what what I've been forced to endure. You just like literally did that into the microphone. Literally it was hard. I had to. I'm sorry. I can see Robert right now. And he wiped his nose on the mic and he was lit it and then licked it. You licked it.

All of this gets edited out now. Many Hindu nationalists were very bullish about the Nazis because Great Britain owned India and ruled it as a brutal colonial oppressor, and they figured, you know, the enemy of my enemy, right. Uh. Not all of them felt this way. There were a lot of Hindu nationalists who were against the Nazis because they were like, well, but their Nazis, um, so again

paying everybody with the same brush. Yeah, But Savitri got along very well with the set of Hindu nationalists who are like, yeah, the Nazi seemed good, um. And she's particularly taken with Dr Asit Krishna Mukherji, when, of India's few actual committed Nazis in nineteen thirty seven and thirty eight, Mukerji started to publish a bi monthly pro Nazi magazine, The New Mercury. Savitri met him in early nineteen thirty eight. And they didn't instantly fall in love, um, but she

fell in love with like his mind. She was probably bisexual, um, but certainly wasn't interested in Mukerji in any way. But she falls in love with like this guy's Nazism. Basically they're that kind of so they're in God, that's so, I mean, it's not gad, that's bleak because it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're going to marry a Nazi and they're you're not even attracted to them, no excuse, no excuse you, but you know what I mean. She has a little bit of an excuse, but we're getting to it.

So you are cutting love lady, all kinds of slack, Robert. I'm just explaining her. Do you have a crop? Now? She so, she she doesn't. They don't get together right away. She loves his understanding of Nazi ideology, and particularly his emphasis on the mythst of the Old arians U and Mukerji was like obsessed with the Thule Society of the tool of society, and it acquired a lot of their

occult writing. So he's like that kind of nerd, and Mukerji seems to like genuinely appreciate Savitri's ideas and the fact that she was just as much of a nerd for Nazism as he was, but he was baffled by her insistence on staying in India while Nazi Germany like rose to the heights of its power in early nineteen thirty nine, He asked her, what have you been doing in India all these years, with your ideas and your potentialities, wasting your time and energy. Go back to Europe, where

duty calls you. Go and help the rebirth of Aryan Heathendom, where there are still Arians strong and wide awake. Go to him who was truly life and resurrection, the leader of the Third Reich. Go at once. Next year will be too late. And he was kind of right about that, but he was convinced that she could do Yeah, yeah, I'm like, well historically okay, yeah. Savitri, though, was convinced that she could do more for the cause of Nazism

in India than in Germany. She'd become close with members of the rush Tria Swam Savik Song or RSS, an India Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar to the Nazis. The founder or One of the founders, be Hedgwar, formed the group to defend Hindu society from daily onslaughts by outsiders, and he included Muslim Indians as members of that group. Like all fascist organizations, the RSS had a uniform khaki shorts,

a white shirt and a black cap. RSS members met daily to train with bamboo beatsticks called lathis and to learn about Hindutva Hindu nationalism. In nineteen thirty nine, Savitri

wrote a warning to the Hindus. The books Forward was written by G. D. Savarkar brothers to one of the co founders of the r s S and, according to an article by South Asian affairs analyst Peter Friedrick, quote DEVII advanced VD Savarkar's thesis of Hindutva that India is a Hindu nation of Hindu people and only for Hindu people. She claimed that Hindu society is India itself, called Hinduism the national religion of India and suggested that Hindu should

tell non Hindus, we represent India, not you. Therefore India is ours, not yours. She urged Hindus to recover, along with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old to rebecome a military race. The method, she said, should be the organization of the young men and pledge bound military like batches with Hindu nationalism as their only ideal. And here's where I pause to note that the current Prime Minister of India, Narindra Modi, is a member of the RSS.

A warning to Hindus is still considered to be a deeply influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement and the RSS. Moody probably read it as a child and a list of his crimes. And the thousands of murders and mosque bombings and beatings carried out by Hindu nationalists against Indian Muslims would go beyond the scope of this episode, but it is worth noting that the current authoritarian lurched by India, the world's largest democracy, owes at least a decent amount

to the work of Savitri Devi. So that's cool. You're in love with her? Are? Oh my god? I mean it is a sign of where this is going that I kind of glossed over the fact that she played a role in the establishment of what's starting to become a fascist dictatorship in India. We just have so much the ground to cover. We have so much to cover. We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today. We have some time, but yeah, okay, okay, well we'll make time.

We'll make time for the fashion. In nineteen forty Britain and Germany went to war. Savitri's extremist beliefs were well known at this point, and she was forced to marry Mukerjee in order to stay in the country. So that's why they get married. It's a it's basically a green

card thing. Yeah, got it. She described it as a sexless marriage, primarily to allow her to stay in the country, and she did what she could for Nazism while in India, spying on British military positions for the access and facilitating communication between sub hos Chandra Bose, leader of the National Indian Army of pro Axis Group, and the Japanese government.

In a different world, these contributions might have played a role in a Japanese invasion of India, but World War Two went the way it did, and Hitler eventually shot himself at a bunker to avoid capture. Familiar Vitree learned of his death through an overheard conversation from two Muslim men on the Marabar Coast. She was inconsolable for days over the death of her hero and the end of the belief system she had dedicated her life to championing,

but mcare she told her not to worry. This was merely part of the cycle of ages, and the dark age brought on by Hitler's defeat would someday end, And likewise, Jamie, one of this episode must now end, but this dark age will continue on Thursday with part two of the story of Savitri Devon. No, okay, how you doing, Jamie. I'm look, I'm just unclenching. That's important for the next two minutes, and then we can talk about it again. Always be clenching. Yeah, go plug your plug doubles. First,

Oh right, uh leave that in. I want people to know that I had And also leave in Robert blowing his nose on the mic. Then Chris, leave that in. You can edit out. It's going to be horrible, Chris. You can edit out the part where Robert is like young Delicious after licking his own not off the mic, but everything else should probably stay in. I feel like this is legally abuse. You could probably report me to h R. Could be fun. Could be fine. My Twitter

is Jamie Loft. This help on my Instagram is at Jamie christ Superstar and I'm touring for the better part of February. You can go to my website Jamie lofts is Innocent dot com to find out where yeah yeah, and you can find Sophie on Twitter finding her at Why Underscore Sophie Underscore Why, And that's it. That's all you can find of us online, which you're on Behind the Bastards dot com, including the full free text of Hitler's Priestess if you want to read this book. Um,

the episodes over go stop the French from murdering cats? Yes, great,