Savitri Devi

Savitri Devi Mukherji (born Maximiani Julia Portas, ; 30 September 1905 – 22 October 1982) was a French-born Greek fascist, Nazi sympathizer, and spy who served the Axis powers by committing acts of espionage against the Allied forces in India.

Born as Maximiani Julia Portas in 1905 in Lyon, Savitri Devi was the daughter of Maxim Portas, a French citizen of Greek descent and an English woman of Italian descent, Julia Portas (née Nash).

Maximine Portas was born two and a half months premature, weighing only 930 g, and was not at first expected to live.

She formed her political views early.

From childhood and throughout her life, she was a passionate advocate for animal rights.

Her earliest political affiliations were with Greek nationalism.

Portas studied philosophy and chemistry, earning two master's degrees and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Lyon.

She next traveled to Greece, and surveyed the legendary ruins.

Here, she became familiar with Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of swastikas in Anatolia.

Her conclusion was that the Ancient Greeks were Aryan in origin.

In early 1928, she renounced her French citizenship and acquired Greek nationality.

Joining a pilgrimage to Palestine during Lent in 1929, Portas decided that she was a Nazi.

During the 1930s, she distributed pro-Axis propaganda and engaged in intelligence gathering on the British in India.

She claimed that, during World War II, she enabled Subhas Chandra Bose (the leader of the Axis-affiliated Indian National Army) to contact representatives of the Empire of Japan.

During World War II, Devi's connection to the Axis powers led to a clash with her mother, who served with the French Resistance during the German occupation of France.

In 1932, she traveled to India in search of a living pagan Aryan culture, believing that the country represented "the best of racial segregation."

Formally adhering to Hinduism, she took the name Savitri Devi (Hindi: सावित्री देवी; which means "Sun-rays Goddess" in Sanskrit).

She volunteered to work at the Hindu Mission as an advocate against Judaism and Christianity, and wrote A Warning to the Hindus in order to offer her support for Hindu nationalism and independence, and rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and Islam in India.

Her first two books were her doctoral dissertations: Essai-critique sur Théophile Kaïris (Critical Essay on Theophilos Kairis) (Lyon: Maximine Portaz, 1935) and La simplicité mathématique (Mathematical Simplicity) (Lyon: Maximine Portaz, 1935).

In 1940, Devi married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Bengali Brahmin with Nazi views who edited the pro-German newspaper New Mercury.

During 1941, Devi chose to interpret Allied military support for Greece, against Italian and German forces, as an invasion of Greece.

Devi and Mukherji lived in Calcutta and continued to gather intelligence for the Axis cause.

This included entertaining Allied personnel, which gave Devi and Mukherji an opportunity to question them about military matters.

The information which they gathered was passed on to Japanese intelligence officials and the Japanese military found it useful when they launched attacks against Allied airbases and army units.

After World War II, she travelled to Europe in late 1945 under the name Savitri Devi Mukherji as the wife of a British subject from India, with a British Indian passport.

She briefly stopped in England, then she visited her mother in France, with whom she would quarrel over the latter's support for the French Resistance and then she traveled to Iceland, where she witnessed the eruption of Mount Hekla on 5–6 April 1947.

She briefly returned to England, then she traveled to Sweden, where she met Sven Hedin.

On 15 June 1948, she boarded the Nord-Express and traveled from Denmark to Germany, where she distributed thousands of copies of handwritten leaflets in which she encouraged the "Men and women of Germany" to "hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist!"

She recounted her experience in Gold in the Furnace (which was re-edited and released as Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of her birth).

Arrested for posting bills, she was tried in Düsseldorf on 5 April 1949 for the promotion of Nazi ideas on German territory as a subject of the Allied Control Council, and sentenced to two years imprisonment.

She was later a leading member of the Neo-Nazi underground during the 1960s.

Savitri was a proponent of a synthesis of Hinduism and Nazism, proclaiming Adolf Hitler to have been an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.

She depicted Hitler as a sacrifice for humanity that would lead to the end of the worst World Age, the Kali Yuga, which she believed was induced by the Jews, whom she saw as the powers of evil.

Her writings have influenced neo-Nazism and Nazi occultism.

Rejecting Judaism and Christianity, she believed in a form of pantheistic monism, a single cosmos of nature composed of divine energy-matter.

Within neo-Nazism, she promoted occultism, ecology, and the New Age movement, and more contemporaneously, she has influenced the alt-right.

She also influenced the Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano.

In 1982, Franco Freda published a German translation of her work Gold in the Furnace, and the fourth volume of his annual review, Risguardo (1980–), was devoted to Savitri Devi as the "missionary of Aryan Paganism".

Savitri was an associate in the post-war years of Françoise Dior, Otto Skorzeny, Johann von Leers, and Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

She was also one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists.