Beyond Man

Chapter Sixteen: The Lord of the Nations

It is well-known that the Nazi party proved itself to be anti-intellectual in a blunt and even boisterous manner, that it burned books and classified the theoretical physicists among its ‘Judeo-Marxist’ enemies. It is less well-known in favour of which explanations of the world it rejected the official Western sciences. And still less is known about the concept of man on which Nazism was based, at least in the minds of some of its leaders. When knowing this, it is easier to situate the last World War within the framework of the great spiritual conflicts; history regains the breath of the Legend of the Ages.¹

— Louis Pauwels

The Medium Adolf Hitler⁹¹

‘Hitler is a choice instrument of the hostile forces,’ the Mother wrote in a letter to her son André. Many would have agreed with her if they had read that letter. Dusty Sklar, for instance, writes in her book The Nazis and the Occult: ‘Hitler was abandoning himself to forces which were carrying him away — forces of dark and destructive violence. He imagined that he still had freedom of choice, but he had long been in bondage to a magic which might well have been described, not only in metaphor but in literal fact, as that of evil spirits.’² And Denis de Rougemont said of Hitler: ‘Some people think, because of what they have experienced in his presence … that he is possessed by a Dominion, a Throne or a Power, as Saint Paul typifies the spirits of the second order, who can take possession of any human body whatsoever and occupy it like a garrison. I have heard him deliver one of his great speeches. From where does he get that superhuman power he then emanates? One feels very well that an energy of this nature does not come from the person in question and that it could even manifest without that person being of any importance, for he is only the instrument of a power outside our psychological understanding. What I say here would be romanticism of the worst kind were it not that the work done by this man — and I do mean by that power through him — is a reality which stupefies the century.’³

The best known eye-witness account in this connection is that of Hermann Rauschning, former head of the Nazi-government of Danzig: ‘A member of his entourage has told me that Hitler wakes up in the night shouting impulsively. He calls for help, sitting on the edge of his bed, he is paralyzed as it were. He is in the grip of a panic which makes him tremble so violently that the bed shakes. He utters confused and incomprehensible vociferations. He gasps for breath as if he were going to choke. The same person has narrated to me one of those crises with details which I would refuse to believe, were it not that my source is absolutely trustworthy. Hitler was standing in his room, swaying, looking around him in bewilderment. “There he is! There he is! He has come here!” he groaned. His lips were pale. Sweat ran down in big drops. Suddenly he started pronouncing numbers without any meaning, then words, snippets of sentences. It was terrible. He used terms put together in bizarre ways, completely out of the ordinary. Then he became silent again but was still moving his lips. He was then given a massage and something to drink. But again, all at once, he screamed: “There! There! In the corner! He is there!” He stamped on the parquet floor and shouted …’⁴ ‘When we say that Hitler is possessed by a Vital Power, it is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment,’⁵ said Sri Aurobindo in January 1939.

Who was the ‘spirit’ or ‘power’ by whom Hitler was possessed? He is already known to us as the Lord of Falsehood, one of the four great Asuras from the drama at the beginning of the manifestation. ‘He calls himself the Lord of the Nations. It is he who initiates all wars … We talk to each other. Over and above all that we are in contact with each other … After all, I am his mother!’ the Mother told smilingly. ‘He once told me: “I know that you will destroy me, but before being destroyed I will cause as much damage as possible, be sure of that.”’⁶

Being one of the first four great emanated Beings by the Creating Mother, he was and is her son. At one time he was the Incarnation of Truth, but after the fall he became the Lord of Falsehood who, with his three brothers, has held this world in his grip up to now. As one of the original Asuras, he was fully aware of the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the Earth, and of their effort to change Falsehood into Truth, Darkness into Light, Suffering into shadowless Bliss and Death into Immortality. In other words, this meant that it was their aim to put an end to the sovereignty over this creation of the Negative Forces, to whom was left the choice either to convert and become once again the brilliant great Beings they had been at the beginning, or to be dissolved into their Origin and thus annihilated as individual forms of existence.

As the Mother once told, the Asura of Darkness, who was the original incarnation of Light, Lucifer, has been converted. In the years of her intense occult activity in the beginning of the century, he agreed that she would give him a vital body, and since then he has been cooperating for the general Transformation. The Asura of Suffering, on the contrary, has been dissolved into his Origin. (But one should not forget that the four Asuras have emanated ‘cascades’ of secondary beings, who remain active independently and who may go on existing for a long time to come.) Max Théon, the teacher of Mirra Alfassa, was a humanly incarnated emanation of the Asura of Death and Paul Richard of the Asura of Falsehood. As Sri Aurobindo himself remarked, Paul Richard has even written an unpublished book entitled Le Seigneur des Nations (The Lord of the Nations), in which he accurately expounded the aim and methods of that Being. The Mother did everything possible to convert Richard; this was the reason why she had married him and the cause of the hell their relation had been for her all along, also in Japan and during their last months together in Pondicherry. Richard knew very well who Mirra essentially was, and despite his appreciation of Sri Aurobindo, he himself wanted to be recognized by her as the Avatar! All this makes us understand better his depressions and suicidal thoughts which he confided in 1928 during a nocturnal conversation to Dilip Kumar Roy in Nice.

However, an emanation is not the being itself in its fullness, and the Asuras of Death and Falsehood watchfully refrain from incarnating themselves in their essence, for by so doing they would be subjected to the laws of the evolution. Even the Asura who possessed Hitler was not the essential Lord of the Nations. It was ‘not the Lord of the Nations in his origin but an emanation of him, a very powerful one.’⁷

‘Hitler was a medium, a first rate medium.⁹² He has become possessed during spiritistic seances. It is then that he became seized by crises which were thought to be epileptic. Actually they were not, they were crises of possession,’ told the Mother to the youth of the Ashram in one of the conversations afterwards published as the Entretiens. ‘It was therefore that he had that kind of power, which in fact was not very great. But when he wanted to know something from that Power, he went to his castle⁹³ to “meditate”, and there he addressed a very intense appeal to what he called his “god”, his supreme god, who was the Lord of the Nations … This was a being … he was small, and he appeared to him in a silver armour, with a silver helmet and a golden aigrette. He looked magnificent. And he appeared in such a blinding light that the eyes hardly could look at him and bear the brilliance. He did not appear physically, of course: Hitler was a medium, he “saw”. He had a certain clairvoyance. And it was in those cases [when meeting the Lord of the Nations] that he suffered his crises: he rolled about on the floor, he slavered, he bit in the carpets — it was a terrible state he was in. The people around him knew that.’⁸ This is a confirmation of Rauschning’s testimony from a very different corner. It is worth mentioning that a poster on the street walls of Munich, at the time Hitler became politically active there, showed him in silver armour.

How had the Lord of the Nations been able to take hold of Hitler, to possess him? August Kubizek, Hitler’s friend and confidant during the latter’s years in Vienna, remembered after the war a strange experience he had had with him in 1906 after an evening at the Opera. The two inseparable friends were regular visitors of the famous Opera House. (Years later Hitler was still able to whistle faultlessly all of the Meistersinger, and at one time he even had started writing an opera himself.) It was after a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi that something happened which Kubizek never forgot: ‘I was struck by something strange, which I had never noticed before, even when he had talked to me in moments of the greatest excitement. It was as if another being spoke out of his body and moved him as much as it did me … I rather felt as though he himself listened with astonishment and emotion to what burst forth from him with elementary force. I will not attempt to interpret this phenomenon, but it was a state of complete ecstasy and rapture, in which he transferred the character of Rienzi … with visionary power to the plane of his own ambitions.’ Hitler evoked in grandiose, inspired images his own future and that of his people. ‘Hitherto I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or perhaps an architect. Now this was no longer the case. Now he aspired to something higher, which I could not yet fully grasp.’⁹ As this was a one-time experience, it cannot be termed possession, but the fact that another being seemed to speak through Hitler was typical of the medium he was. Some doors in him stood clearly ajar. At that time he was seventeen.

On the subject of possession of a person by an invisible being, the Mother said: ‘There are cases in which people become very ill and come out of the illness totally different from what they were before.’¹⁰ These words immediately call to mind an event in Hitler’s life mentioned by all his biographers. After having been blinded in the First World War, during a gas attack near the Belgian town of Wervik, he was transported by train to a military hospital at Pasewalk, in Pomerania. It was there that he heard the news of the collapse of Germany and its unconditional surrender. He became a prey to unfathomable despair. In Mein Kampf he wrote about this crisis: ‘I went back to the dormitory where I threw myself on my bed and buried my burning head under the bedcover and the cushion … Terrible days and still more terrible nights followed … In those sleepless nights, I felt growing in me the hatred against those guilty of this catastrophe. It was then that I became conscious of my life’s true destiny … As to me, I took the decision to become a politician.’

It is astonishing how much the (courageous) corporal-courier Adolf Hitler was protected throughout that war. Time after time he felt as if driven by an inner impulse to leave a certain place which promptly afterwards was hit by a shell. The historian John Toland calls it ‘a series of narrow escapes verging on the miraculous.’ Hitler himself told the British correspondent Ward Price how one day he was eating his dinner in a trench with several comrades. ‘Suddenly a voice seemed to be saying to me, “Get up and go over there.” It was so clear and insistent that I obeyed mechanically, as if it had been a military order. I rose at once to my feet and walked twenty yards along the trench, carrying my dinner in its tin-can with me. Then I sat down to go on eating, my mind being once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and deafening report came from the part of the trench I had just left. A stray shell had burst over the group in which I had been sitting, and every member of it was killed.’¹¹ This protection would never leave him till the day of his death.

The Mother has said that the possession took hold of him ‘during spiritistic seances’. One does not have to search long to find out where and when this may have happened. During the years of Hitler’s political schooling and rise in Munich, he was strongly influenced by two persons, both of whom had ties with Eastern occultism. The first was Dietrich Eckart, called by André Brissaud ‘the great initiator’ of Hitler. ‘Until his death [in 1923] Dietrich Eckart will be the great mentor of Adolf Hitler. The future Fiihrer of the Third Reich will owe him much, to begin with his “initiation” in the legend of Thule and the development of his mediumistic faculties. Eckart will contribute considerably to the development in Hitler of an unshakable self-confidence, founded on the certitude of being in possession of the most important secrets to dominate the world.’¹² These words certainly leave sufficient space for secret seances. Besides, shortly before his death Eckart will say to Karl Haushofer and Alfred Rosenberg: ‘Follow Hitler. He will dance, but I am the one who has composed the tune. We have given him the means to communicate with Them … Do not mourn for me: I will have influenced history more than any other German.’¹³

André Brissaud writes about the secret Thule society: ‘It will be the life-source of National Socialism which was, we repeat, not only a movement aiming at success, supremacy and the exertion of political power, but also, and mainly, an instrument to develop a Weltanschauung [worldview] in its human totality; the political will-to-power went hand in hand with the firm determination to promote an ideology capable of assuring a decisive human transmutation, a metamorphosis integrally racist, biological, moral, social, economical, political, religious and philosophical. Those who discard this truth will never understand a thing about the Nazi phenomenon.’¹⁴ The other person who left his mark on Hitler was the ‘geopolitician’ Karl Haushofer, a general in the First World War (Rudolf Hess was his adjutant) and a specialist in Eastern religions and mysticism. F. Sondern wrote in 1941: ‘Dr. Haushofer and his men dominate Hitler’s thinking … It was Haushofer who taught the hysterical, planless agitator in a Munich jail to think in terms of continents and empires. Haushofer virtually dictated the famous Chapter XVI of Mein Kampf which outlined the foreign policy Hitler has since followed to the letter.’¹⁵ He thought up Hitler’s Lebensraum [living-space] theory. He also had a fundamental plan which we shall discuss shortly.

Haushofer’s nefarious influence on Adolf Hitler has been dramatically confirmed by his son, Albrecht Haushofer. The latter was involved in the Stauffenberg plot leading to the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. Albrecht was imprisoned in Moabit jail, in Berlin. He wrote a cycle of sonnets before his execution — that is to say in circumstances which usually warrant sincerity. One of those sonnets is entitled ‘The Father’ and in it he wrote: ‘Once it was in the power of his will / To push the demon back into his cell. / My father held the seal and broke it. / He did not sense the breath of evil / And out into the world he let the devil.’¹⁶

Everything Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, with their extensive occult knowledge, have said about Hitler being possessed by the Demon could be confirmed by many more historical facts. But the so-called ‘objective’ historians do not have the necessary norms, knowledge or insight to appraise this sort of data. Therefore ‘objective history’ always produces a drab picture of what really happened and is not much more than documented highbrow journalism. And therefore ‘objective’ historians sometimes write such ‘reasonable’ but inane psychological dissections of personalities like Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and of ancient cultures — in brief, of everything that really mattered on the wearisome and tortuous road of the human pilgrimage. The norms of rationalistic historical writing are always too superficial to explain the forces behind the past event. The monstrosities committed by the Nazis could be inspired by nothing but a monstrous Power to which (or rather to whom) humans are dwarf-like, ant-like beings, though sometimes instruments temporarily inflated by the invisible powers they open themselves to in their ignorance — but afterwards Adolf Eichman again, functionary and civilian, in the dock of history.

The Hitlerian Man-god

Indeed, as Brissaud wrote: ‘Those who discard this truth will never understand a thing about the Nazi phenomenon.’ Neither will those who remain ignorant of the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The Asura, Lord of Falsehood, has definitively refused to be converted and sworn that he, before his own destruction of the Earth, would inflict the greatest possible damage. The Mother once said that all the wars of the twentieth century are actually episodes of one single war and that all have been his doing. The whole was one single war of the dark forces dominating the Earth against the White Force of the evolutionary yoga of the double Avatar. The aim of this war, as far as the dark forces are concerned, has always been the annihilation of civilization, of any progress gained by humanity, to plunge it again into the night of barbarism as illustrated by the Nazi regime in Germany and Stalinist communism in Russia.

The result the action of the Asura aimed at this time was ultimately the retardation and if possible the obstruction of the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. We have seen how in his anger and frustration he turned directly against Sri Aurobindo, in November 1938, when Sri Aurobindo was on the verge of effecting the manifestation of the Supermind on Earth, to this end putting off the beginning of the imminent war. We have also heard the Mother say that their work was completely interrupted by the war, which demanded their full attention and occult intervention to avoid the clock of history once again, like so often in the past, being put back.

All these assertions become much more acceptable if one realizes that Hitler’s design was, as it were, the shadow of the aim of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. That ‘infrarational mystic’, as Sri Aurobindo called him, was driven by his vision of the Übermensch, a superman superior to the kind Friedrich Nietzsche had envisaged, a vision which could have been inspired into him only by the Asura (very probably via Eckart and Haushofer). In the words of Achilles Delmas: ‘Hitler’s aim is not the establishment of the master race, nor world conquest either; these are only the means of the great work dreamed of by him. His true objective is to perform a work of creation, a divine work, the aim of biological mutation. It will result in an ascension of humanity without equal up to now, in “the apparition of a humanity of heroes, of half-gods, of men-gods.”’¹⁷

Hermann Rauschning quotes Hitler’s own words: ‘When Hitler turned to me, he tried to formulate his vocation as the harbinger of a new humanity in rational and concrete terms. He said: “Creation is not finished. It is clear that man has reached a phase of metamorphosis. The old human species has already entered a stage of perishment and survival. Humanity takes a step upwards every seven hundred years, and the stake of the struggle on a still longer term is the coming of the Sons of God. All creative force will be concentrated in a new species. The two varieties will evolve quickly while separating from each other. The one will disappear and the other will develop. It will surpass present man infinitely … Do you now understand the profound meaning of our National Socialist movement? He who understands National Socialism as nothing but a political movement does not know much about it.”’¹⁸

To the same Rauschning, Hitler cried out triumphantly: ‘The new man lives among us! He is here! Is this enough for you? I shall tell you a secret: I have seen the new man. He is intrepid and cruel. I have been afraid in his presence.’ ‘When he spoke these words,’ Rauschning adds, ‘Hitler trembled with ecstatic fervour.’¹⁹ Rauschning also reports a conversation Hitler had with Bernhard Forster, Nietzsche’s brother-in-law: ‘[Hitler said he] would not reveal his unique mission until later. He permitted glimpses of it only to a few. When the time came, however, Hitler would bring the world a new religion … The blessed consciousness of eternal life in union with the great universal life, and in membership of an immortal people — that was the message he would impart to the world when the time came. Hitler would be the first to achieve what Christianity was meant to have been, a joyous message that liberated men from the things that burdened their life. We should no longer have any fear of death and should lose the fear of a so-called bad conscience. Hitler would restore men to the self-confident divinity with which nature had endowed them. They would be able to trust their instincts, would no longer be citizens of two worlds, but would be rooted in the single, eternal life of this world.’²⁰ A vision of this kind Rauschning would not have been able to invent all by himself — and Hitler neither.

Hitler considered himself more and more as the prototype of his own idea of the man-god. This is clear from a paragraph in Toland’s biography, in which one hears echoes of the last quotation from Rauschning: ‘He had also come to regard himself as a man of destiny, superior to any other human being, whose genius and will power would conquer any enemy. Mesmerized by his political and military victories, he explained to one Nazi commander that he was the first and only mortal who had emerged into a “superhuman state.” His nature was “more godlike than human,” and therefore as the first of the new race of supermen he was “bound by none of the conventions of human morality” and stood “above the law.”’²¹ And after a law had been voted which gave Hitler full plenipotentiary powers, Toland writes: ‘He was now officially above the law with the power of life and death. He had, in essence, appointed himself God’s deputy and could do the Lord’s work: wipe out the vermin and create a race of supermen.’²² In the Third Reich not a single important decision was taken without the knowledge and the permission of the Führer, ‘a man who had cruelty in his blood’ according to the phrase from January 1939 of Sri Aurobindo, who did not have to wait till the discovery of the extermination camps to see through Hitler.

From the beginning Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew exactly the kind of adversary they were dealing with and the human instruments he had sought out. When Sri Aurobindo saw a newspaper photo of Chamberlain and Hitler in Munich, he compared them respectively to a fly and a spider watching the fly from its web. He said that Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, as well as Hitler, were possessed by ‘forces from the vital world’. Gregor Strasser, a true idealist and one of Hitler’s companions of the first hour, who would soon disagree with him and pay for his idealism and disagreement with his life, warned a friend of his: ‘I am a man marked by death … Whatever happens, mark what I say: From now on Germany is in the hands of an Austrian, who is a congenital liar, a former officer [Goering], who is a pervert, and a clubfoot [Goebbels]. And I tell you the last is the worst of them all. This is Satan in human form.’²³

It is worth noticing that almost all the main actors in the great Nazi drama came together in the right place, Munich, at the right time: Dietrich Eckart, Anton Drexler, founder of the DAP, Ernst Roehm, organizer of the SA, Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, and others. One who has heard the Mother on the instinctive reunification of souls with specific tasks in the evolutionary occurrence cannot but conclude that there are also soul-families of the negative forces. One who would join the group several years later was Heinrich Heydrich; of him his closest collaborator, SS General Walter Schellenberg, would later personally tell André Brissaud: ‘Heydrich was a cold-blooded animal. He had the look of a reptile. He made me freeze. His venom was mortal. I have never met a similar being. His power of fascination — in a completely different domain from that of Hitler — was demoniacal.’²⁴

Nowadays it is too often forgotten that at a certain moment in the twentieth century human beings possessed by devils and incarnated devils had, according to Sri Aurobindo’s estimation, a fifty per cent chance of success in their designs. Moreover, it is convenient to forget how much Hitler and his consorts were initially lauded, by what masses of thousands of ordinary, ‘decent’ citizens they were enthusiastically cheered, how many literally took Hitler for a new Saviour, for the Christ of modern times. If history can teach one lesson — except the lesson that nobody learns anything from history, ever — it is perhaps the fact that human beings are not only petty and malicious, but also blind and ignorant, now as well as then. ‘Nazism was one of those rare moments in the history of our civilization that a door opened on something other, in a clamorous and visible way. It is truly remarkable that the people behave as if they have seen or heard nothing, except the spectacle and the ordinary noises of the disorder of war and politics.’²⁵

In part 21 of the deeply moving BBC serial about the Second World War, The World at War, Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge is interviewed about the last days in the bunker in Berlin. He tells how the Führer, before committing suicide together with his wife of one day Eva Braun, said good-bye to all those present. They had lined up for a last salute or handshake and Linge stood at the end of the line. After Hitler had told him that the last units of the German Army should break through the Russian lines in groups to try and reach the Western Allies, and that the personnel in the bunker should join one of such groups, Linge asked him, ‘Mein Führer, for whom then shall we fight henceforward?’ Hitler’s answer (and these were his very last words in public), ‘Für den kommenden Mann’, for the coming man. These words are only understandable in the light of the view explained in this chapter.

The Springing Tigers

Alas, discernment was lacking among the Ashramites too — not in all, but in many. As we know, a number of Sri Aurobindo’s disciples had been ready to sacrifice their life for the liberation of India. These had remained very anti-British, and reasoning that the enemies of their enemies were their friends, they were pro-Hitler and sympathetic to everybody on his side. This was dangerous, for these ‘misguided patriots’ formed unwittingly a channel by which the Asura could directly hit out at the heart of his true target. ‘If this Asuric influence acting through Hitler is being cast on the Ashram too, it is dangerous,’²⁶ Sri Aurobindo cautioned. ‘The Asura is more concerned with us than with anything else. He is inventing new situations so that we may fall into difficulty.’²⁷

Another, younger sort of pro-Hitlerian Ashramites were the supporters of Subhash Chandra Bose, the Indian ‘Führer’ — which is the literal meaning of ‘Netaji’ as he was and is still called in India.

Subhash Chandra Bose, though born in the old Oriya town of Cuttack, was a Bengali. He also, like Sri Aurobindo some thirty years earlier, had studied at Cambridge University for the Indian Civil Service, but he had submitted his resignation before being enlisted. His mentor was Chittaranjan Das, the barrister who had defended Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Bomb Affair. By now C.R. Das himself had become a nationalistic politician of prominence. He was called ‘Deshbandhu’, Friend of the Nation, and had become, at the time Bose put himself under his aegis, the vice-chancellor of the National College in Calcutta which had opened its doors under the rectorate of Sri Aurobindo.

Against this background, somewhat familiar to us, the gifted and ambitious Bose quickly rose to the top. He became mayor of Calcutta, and in 1927 general secretary of the Congress jointly with Jawaharlal Nehru. He was more than once put behind bars because of anti-British agitation. All the same, he obtained in 1937 from the British authorities permission to travel to Europe for medical treatment. There he became fascinated by the fascist dictators, whom he met personally. (It was he, very probably, who gave books by Sri Aurobindo to Mussolini to read.) The aspiration of becoming a dictator himself grew in him. In 1938 he was elected national president of the Congress. His opinions, however, did no longer concur with the ‘ahimsa’ of that other authoritarian man, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Bose founded, within the Congress, his Forward Block.

In 1941 he escaped the watchful eye of the British. He reached Germany after an adventurous journey via Peshawar, Kabul, Bokhara and Moscow. In Germany he founded the Indian Legion, mainly with Indian prisoners of war who had fought in the British ranks. He chose as their flag the Indian tricolour — horizontal orange-white-green — with a springing tiger in the middle. This is how they became known as ‘the Springing Tigers.’ But Germany was very, very far from India and Hitler did not show any intention of marching towards it in order to satisfy Netaji’s desires or demands.

However, marching on India were Hitler’s allies, the Japanese. Bose therefore decided to try from the East what was denied him in the West. A German U-boat took him from Kiel to the south of Madagascar, where he transshipped at sea to a Japanese submarine. He reached Tokyo after a journey of eighteen weeks. The Japanese considered him potentially useful and gave him some of the assistance he asked for. He founded the Indian National Army, this time not only with Indian prisoners of war but also with Indian expatriates living in South-Asia. He also formed a Provisional Government of Free India with himself as head of state, prime minister and minister of war and foreign affairs. One of his biographers, Hugh Toye, writes: ‘Everywhere Bose met adulation, near adoration, devotion which moved him so that sometimes, simply in answer to the popular mood, he would make claims and promises which his most sanguine admirers deplored. But his audience cheered the more. He toured the prisoner-of-war camps and won two thousand volunteers, he spoke to Indian meetings everywhere, he conferred constantly with the Japanese. In August he was at the Burmese Independence celebrations in Rangoon. There followed visits to Bangkok and Saigon. There were more speeches, interviews without number and long meetings with Japanese commanders and government officials.’²⁸

On 19 March 1944 a Japanese army of 230,000 men crossed the border into India. It was the beginning of the campaign spearheaded at Imphal, a small town in North-East India. Three thousand soldiers of Bose’s Indian Army took part in it. That Imphal would fall, in spite of the dogged resistance by the British and the Indian troops loyal to the British Crown, was a foregone conclusion. But the monsoon rains came suddenly, totally unexpected because more than a month early, and ‘the Japanese chances of success were washed away.’ It became, writes Hugh Toye, ‘a military catastrophe of the first magnitude.’²⁹

The Japanese, no more than the Germans, had never intended relinquishing any power over India to somebody else — supposing the country did fall into their hands — not even to the naive Netaji. They had nothing but contempt for the Indian troops, who in their eyes were deserters and betrayers of their motherland. S.C. Bose died on 18 March 1944 on the island of Formosa (the present Taiwan) where, en route to Tokyo, he had been mortally wounded and burned in an airplane crash. In India, which shortly afterwards became independent without him, rumours kept circulating for a long time afterwards that he was wandering through the country as an anonymous monk. He is revered as a national hero, and in documentary films one still can see him smile, basking in the company of Hitler, von Ribbentrop or Tojo Hideki, without any of the viewers present taking umbrage.

Hugh Toye says that Subhash Chandra Bose had only three friends in his life: his brother Sarat in the early years; Emilie Schenkl, a German girl who at first was his secretary, whom he later married, and who was left behind with their baby daughter in Vienna; and Dilip Kumar Roy, known to us and who brings us back again on the path of our story.

In 1933, Bose ‘begged his friend Dilip Kumar Roy to leave his yogic cell because he needed someone he could trust’ to present India to the world. That ‘yogic cell’ should be taken with a substantial grain of salt, for the Mother had put a full floor in a former colonial house at Roy’s disposition and he lived there like a prince, in the midst of a circle of friends and admirers, with daily visits at tea-time and musical evenings starring himself and others. Roy, from his end, sometimes tried to convert Bose to Sri Aurobindo’s yoga — something for which Sri Aurobindo showed little enthusiasm, as we read repeatedly in his correspondence with Roy and with Nirodbaran. As a rule, ‘great’ men and women are but seldom detached, supple and receptive characters, and however great they may seem to the eye of the outside world, they might be the last to take up a life of yogic surrender and self-abnegation.

The Ashram in Difficulty

Everything we have seen corroborates the supposition that in the Ashram not only a pro-Hitler group of idealistic freedom fighters but also a pro-Hitler group of Bose-sympathizers must have been present — although D.K. Roy himself, enlightened by Sri Aurobindo, seems to have sided with the Allies. The former freedom fighters and the Bose-sympathizers together formed a considerable part of the Ashram population and the situation became very tense, more particularly after the shooting war started and Germany invaded the Low Countries. In Talks with Sri Aurobindo Nirodbaran says on 11 May 1940: ‘In the Ashram the feelings are divided. Some are for the British and some for Hitler.’ Sri Aurobindo asks: ‘For Hitler?’ Satyendra answers: ‘Not exactly, but they are anti-British.’ Sri Aurobindo’s reply: ‘Not a rational feeling. How can India, who wants freedom, take sides with somebody who takes away freedom from other nations?’

On 17 May Sri Aurobindo himself starts the conversation: ‘It seems it is not five or six of our people but more than half who are in sympathy with Hitler and want him to win.’ Purani (laughing): ‘Half?’ Sri Aurobindo: ‘No, it is not a matter to laugh at. It is a very serious matter. The [French] Government can dissolve the Ashram at any moment. In Indo-China all religious bodies have been dissolved. And here the whole of Pondicherry is against us. Only because Governor Bonvin is friendly towards us can’t they do anything. But even he — if he hears that the people in the Ashram are pro-Hitler — will be compelled to take steps and at least expel those who are so. If these people want that the Ashram should be dissolved, they can come and tell me and I will dissolve it instead of the police doing it. They have no idea about the world and talk like little children. Hitler is the greatest menace the world has ever met. If Hitler wins, do they think that India has any chance of being free? It is a well-known fact that Hitler has an eye on India. He is openly talking of world-empire. He will turn towards the Balkans, crushing Italy on the way, which would be a matter of weeks, then Turkey and then Asia Minor. Asia Minor means ultimately India. If there he meets Stalin, then it is a question as to who wins and comes to India.’

Nirodbaran mentions in a note that in the morning of that same day, the Mother had said to Nolini: ‘It is treachery against Sri Aurobindo to wish for Hitler’s victory. Sri Aurobindo’s cause is closely connected with that of the Allies and he is working night and day for it. It is because my nationality is French that the Ashram is allowed to exist. Otherwise it would have been dissolved long ago.’³⁰ On 23 May Sri Aurobindo said to Purani: ‘The Ashram has been declared a nest of pro-Nazis and pro-Communists by your friend the Consul. He says he can even produce documents … The movement against the Ashram is growing … The danger is not only to the Allies but to us also.’³¹

On 19 September 1940 Sri Aurobindo and the Mother made a public stand in favour of the Allies by contributing, via the British Governor of Madras, one thousand rupees to the war fund of the Viceroy. In the accompanying letter Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘We feel that not only is this a battle waged in just self-defence and in defence of the Nations threatened with the world-domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity.’³²

Even in 1942 it was still necessary for Sri Aurobindo to explicitly formulate his standpoint in a letter to a disciple: ‘You have said that you have begun to doubt whether it was the Mother’s war and ask me to make you feel again that it is. I affirm again most strongly that this is the Mother’s war. You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance … It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet realise. If the other side that has declared itself for the free future of humanity triumphs, this terrible danger will have been averted and conditions will have been created in which there will be a chance for the Ideal to grow, for the Divine Work to be done, for the spiritual Truth for which we stand to establish itself on the earth. Those who fight for this cause are fighting for the Divine and against the threatened reign of the Asura.’³³

Many have felt all this throughout the war, especially those whose lives were at stake, but few have understood or been able to formulate it intellectually, and almost all have forgotten about it by now. However, this was what the Second World War was all about and this is the cause of the hypnotic power it still exerts, even though for most people it is the hypnotic power of Evil.

Target India

The aim of the Asura consisted in counteracting the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; such was his nature and he fought for his survival. All the same, did Hitler (and Stalin) really intend to push through towards India, or was this a patriotic exaggeration of Sri Aurobindo’s?

This ultimate target of the Lord of the Nations must surely have been present in the vision of his main human instruments. John Toland writes: ‘On February 17 [^1941] Hitler ordered the preparation of a drive to the heart of Britain’s empire, India. This would be accompanied,’ just as foretold by Sri Aurobindo, ‘by seizure of the Near East in a pincer movement: on the left from Russia across Iran and on the right from North Africa toward the Suez Canal. While these grandiose plans were primarily designed to force Britain onto the side of Germany, they indicated the extent of Hitler’s vaulting aspirations.’³⁴ The same author tells also how von Ribbentrop persistently tried to talk the Japanese into a massive attack on India. ‘The Wehrmacht [the German armies],’ he said, ‘was about to invade the Caucasus and once that oil region was seized the road to Persia would be open. Then the Germans and Japanese could catch all the British Far East forces [including those in India] in a giant pincer movement.’³⁵ More and more people who knew Hitler from close by became convinced that the man had become insane; Toland quotes among others the opinion of Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, who ‘told friends that during a recent visit to the Führer [in the last phase of the war] he had heard an old and broken Hitler muttering such disjointed phrases as, “I must go to India.”’³⁶ An obsession, yes — but disjointed?

A newspaper report from Moscow under the headline ‘Hitler planned conquest of India, documents reveal’ and dated 21 June 1986, was published the next day in the Indian Express. According to the documents on which this report is based, Germany, Italy and Japan had signed an agreement, in January 1942, on the division of the spheres. Hitler counted on a quick defeat of Russia to invade, in the spring of the same year, West Asia, which would then serve as a springboard for reaching India. But he had had to postpone his plans because of his defeat before Moscow and the unexpectedly strong resistance of the Russians. Nonetheless, he never left India definitively to the Japanese.

Another report from the Press Trust of India in the same newspaper and dated 22 April 1989 has the headline: ‘Hitler had plans to invade India’. It reads as follows: ‘Hitler saw India as part of his huge Nazi empire, to be formed after Germany attained world domination, states a monograph by Soviet professor Carlo Tskitishvrili.

Called the “Rout of the Brown Monster”, the monograph reveals some startling facts about the German command’s plans to conquer West Asia and India, reports the Soviet news agency APN. Hitler signed Directive No. 41 which named a “breakthrough to the Caucasus” as one of the principal tasks in the war on April 5, 1942. The Hitlerite general staff saw the Caucasus and Transcaucasia as a support base for a subsequent invasion of West Asia and India, the monograph stated … On April 7, 1941, a draft plan was drawn up by the German command for raising a 43-division group of land forces to operate in the tropics including India.’

All data point in the same direction and at the same target. Already in May 1940 Sri Aurobindo had said: ‘It is a very simple thing to see that Hitler wants world domination and his next move will be towards India.’³⁷ He forewarned: ‘Hitler doesn’t bluff. He has done everything he has said, but at the time it suited him.’³⁸ When comparing the data concerning this subject, one finds that Sri Aurobindo’s foresight about Hitler’s ultimate intentions dated from a year before the historically documented facts.

A Suitable Person

In the prologue to this book, we have narrated Hitler’s inexplicable and fatal hesitation at the time his tank divisions, in the very beginning of the war, had been able to take prisoners or destroy the whole British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. We remember that Sri Aurobindo wrote of himself in the third person: ‘Inwardly, he put his spiritual force behind the Allies from the moment of Dunkirk when everybody was expecting the immediate fall of England and the definite triumph of Hitler, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the rush of German victory almost immediately arrested and the tide of war begin to turn in the opposite direction.’

But the danger was far from averted. If Hitler had gone on with the invasion of Great Britain immediately after the surrender of France, nothing could have thwarted him anymore, according to Sri Aurobindo. ‘Hitler had his chance after the fall of France. If he had at once attacked then, it would have been difficult for England to resist. Hitler really missed the bus.’ ‘[The British] were saved by Divine Intervention during this War. They would have been smashed if Hitler had invaded England at the right time, after the fall of France.’³⁹ All the same, in October 1940 Sri Aurobindo still gave Hitler a fifty per cent chance of success. ‘It is only the British Navy that stands against Hitler’s world domination … He is practically master of Europe.’⁴⁰ ‘Now only Hitler’s death can save the situation … I want him to be eliminated … I don’t care about the date. If he dies it is enough.’⁴¹

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother followed the war very closely, not only in the newspapers but also on the radio. At first, Pavitra and Pavita (the former secretary of the writer Paul Brunton) went every evening to the house of Udar Pinto who had a radio. Pavita noted down the news bulletin in shorthand, wrote it out in longhand at home and sent it to Sri Aurobindo’s apartment. When this was no longer possible because Udar had to be absent for some time, the radio was installed in Pavitra’s room and later on connected with a loudspeaker in Sri Aurobindo’s apartment, allowing the latter to hear the news directly for himself.

The White Force, just like the Black Force, needs its human instruments to intervene actively in the affairs of the world. The Asura had his; Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were searching for theirs. Strong personalities were hardly available among the leaders of the Allies, as appears from their hesitant diplomatic manoeuvering before the outbreak of the hostilities. Politicians of the kind of Daladier and Chamberlain were no match for Hitler and Stalin. Their gullible, spineless and watered-down democratic idealism time and again lost out against the inspired, unscrupulous and daring cunning of their opponents. Sri Aurobindo at first thought he had found ‘the man of destiny’ in Hore-Belisha, the British Secretary of War from 1937 to 1940 who, in the spring of 1939, had introduced general conscription in Great Britain. But then Winston Churchill rose to his true stature.

There is evidence that Winston Churchill was directly inspired by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. When A.B. Purani spoke with praise about Churchill’s famous speech in which he had nothing to offer the British people but ‘blood, hard work, tears and sweat,’ Sri Aurobindo answered laconically: ‘Yes, he was inspired,’ surely not meaning some vague poetical inspiration. Maggi Lidchi-Grassi, who had free access to the Mother, writes in The Light that Shone in the Deep Abyss: ‘The Mother told the author how Sri Aurobindo used to tell her of the words that he would put into the mouth of Churchill before the famous broadcasts, and certain passages were spoken by Churchill word for word⁹⁴ … His secretary Nirodbaran had heard of this, and Dyumanbhai, at present managing trustee of the Ashram [i.e. in 1992], has confirmed it. He told me that certain passages in Churchill’s speeches often were repetitions of words already spoken in Pondicherry. Anuben Purani tells me that her father A.B. Purani, one of the few people who saw Sri Aurobindo every day, told her the same thing.’⁴²

Churchill himself declared openly in the British Lower House on 13 October 1942: ‘I sometimes have a feeling — in fact I feel it very strongly — a feeling of interference. I want to stress that I have a feeling sometimes that some guiding hand has interfered. I have the feeling that we have a guardian because we serve a great cause, and that we shall have that guardian so long as we serve that cause faithfully.’⁴³ In January 1941 he had already pronounced: ‘I have absolutely no doubt that we shall win a complete and decisive victory over the forces of evil, and that victory itself will be only a stimulus to further efforts to conquer ourselves.’⁴⁴ Unusual words from a politician, but he could not have put it better.

There is no doubt that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have constantly intervened in the war events with their spiritual force. We already know about the ‘miraculous’ escape of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. Hitler had promised that a couple of months later, more exactly on 15 August 1940, he would address the world from Buckingham Palace. August 15 is the anniversary of Sri Aurobindo and Hitler’s choice was probably not coincidental. (‘I have not seen any other person who has followed, with such extraordinary fidelity, the Asura,’⁴⁵ said Sri Aurobindo.) But in the Battle of Britain on that day forty-four Germans airplanes were shot down, the highest number in one day so far.

A particularly interesting example of the intervention of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the war is Operation Barbarossa — the codename of Hitler’s campaign against the USSR. Ideologically Hitler could not but turn against communist Russia if he did not want to go against the grain of everything he had written and proclaimed very loudly. The Slavs to him were an inferior race, not much better than animals, and only fit to be led by the superior master race; they were governed by a scandalous Jewish regime; and the land inhabited by that race of Untermenschen (underlings) was needed by the German Herrenvolk for its Lebensraum. The Non-aggression Pact of 1939, cynically calculated, was signed by both parties for no other reason than to gain as much time as possible and meanwhile improve their respective positions.

In fact, Stalin was even more evil than Hitler. Hitler was human after all, and he therefore had a soul, albeit one possessed by an Asura; Stalin was a direct incarnation of a malevolent vital force — literally a titanic, power-hungry being without conscience or soul, whose deeds of monumental cruelty are written in history with letters of blood. ‘There are some rare individuals who are born without a psychic being and who are exceptionally villainous,’ said the Mother. And K.D. Sethna writes: ‘In Stalin Sri Aurobindo and the Mother discerned a phenomenon not merely of possession but of incarnation, a vital being born in a human form and not just employing that form as its medium.’⁴⁶ Sri Aurobindo saw Stalin as a greater danger than Hitler.

‘On the face of it, Stalin and Hitler were most unlikely allies. What could they possibly have in common?’ asks John Toland. He gives the answer himself: in fact, there were a number of similarities. One admired Peter the Great while the other saw himself as the heir of Frederick the Great. Both were advocates of ruthless force and operated under ideologies that were not essentially different. Communists and Nazis alike were self-righteous and dogmatic; both were totalitarian and both believed that the end justified the means, sanctifying injustice, as it were, in the name of state and progress.’⁴⁷

Sri Aurobindo declared already in March 1940: ‘There is no chance for the world unless something happens in Germany or else Hitler and Stalin quarrel.’ But the asuric protection of Hitler was so strong that it prevented or foiled all attempts on Hitler’s life. (There have been more attempts than is usually remembered nowadays.) Then the Mother intervened personally.

She has narrated that intervention several times. The following is the version of 5 November 1961 from the Agenda: ‘It was the Lord of the Nations, the being that appeared to Hitler … And I knew when they were going to have their next meeting (for, after all, he is my son, that’s what was so comical!). So, for once I took his place and became Hitler’s god, and I advised him to attack Russia. Two days afterwards he attacked Russia. But on leaving the meeting I met the other one [the Asura] who came to his appointment! He was rather furious. He asked me why I had done such a thing. I answered: “That is none of your business — because it had to be done.” Then he replied: “Wait and see. I know — I know! — that you will destroy me, but before being destroyed I will cause as much damage as possible, you may be sure of it.” Then I came back from my nocturnal outings and told everything to Sri Aurobindo. That kind of life! … People do not know what is going on. They know nothing. Nothing.’⁴⁸ Hitler had told field marshal von Brauchitsch as early as July 1940 that they ‘should start thinking of the Russians’. It was in that summer that Hitler decided ‘that the time had come for Lebensraum and the destruction of Bolshevism. He instructed the army to make preparations in this direction … A surprise attack was to be launched on the Soviet Union as soon as possible — May 1941.’⁴⁹ The staff officers whom General Jodl informed of Hitler’s decision could not believe their ears. Germany was still fully involved in the war against England and … this would be the two-front war which had defeated Germany in the First World War! ‘Jodl cut short the debate with the words: “Gentlemen, it is not a question for discussion but a decision of the Führer.”’⁵⁰

The initial resistance of those experienced officers against Hitler’s senseless decision must have been spontaneous and forceful. Nevertheless, this was not the moment the Mother took the place of the Lord of the Nations, for in an earlier version of her intervention she says that Hitler attacked Russia ‘two days later,’⁵¹ and in another version: ‘Two days later we got the news of the attack.’⁵² Her ‘divine’ intervention, most probably on 20 June 1941, must have tipped the scales for Hitler to issue the irrevocable order to launch Operation Barbarossa against all reasonable arguments and the advice of his planning staff. We find an argument in favour of this supposition in Hitler’s Tischgespräche (table talk), secretly noted down by Heinrich Heim and Werner Köppen. In these talks ‘Hitler expounded on the spirit of decision, which consisted, he said, “in not hesitating when an inner conviction commands you.”’ And he gave an example: ‘The tremendous military operation now in progress [the invasion of Russia], he said, had been widely criticized as impracticable. “I had to throw all my authority into the scales to force it through. I note in passing that a great part of our successes has originated in ‘mistakes’ we’ve had the audacity to commit.”’⁵³ This time, however, the inspiration of the audacious ‘mistake’ came from another source than the usual. The German troops saw Moscow only from afar; Stalingrad became a German mass grave (Stalingrad Massengrab); against ‘General Winter’ no senseless audacity would do; and the two-front war caused once more the defeat of Germany.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother must have intervened in countless big and small events during the war, some known but most of them unknown. It was, for instance, not the courageously fighting but vanquished British-Indian Army which inflicted on the Japanese their first ‘military catastrophe of the first magnitude’ in North-East India, but the completely unexpected, very premature and extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains, as we have seen in the life sketch of S.C. Bose — just like the British Expeditionary Force was saved from Goering’s bombers by meteorologically unexplainable fog. Another instance: the only parts of Stalingrad still in Russian hands were three tiny enclaves on the bank of the Volga, but twenty-four German generals could not take them …

In 1914, the Mother had prevented the occupation of Paris, the metropolis said by Sri Aurobindo to be the symbol of Western civilization — representing everything this civilization had gained since the Renaissance in individual freedom and possibilities of progress for mankind, thereby opening the gates of the future. When in 1940 the Germans entered the city, Sri Aurobindo feared for a while that they, under the inspiration of the Asura, would level it to the ground. ‘Paris has been the centre of human civilisation for three centuries. Now he [i.e. Hitler] will destroy it. That is the sign of the Asura … Destruction of Paris means the destruction of modern European civilisation.’⁵⁴ How many know that, at that moment, Paris was saved for the second time by the Mother and protected by her throughout the war? ‘From time to time there were people who were a little conscious, like when I spent all my nights of the last war over Paris so that nothing should happen — not integrally, but a part of me. I floated in the air … Later on, it has become known that some people had seen something: there had been a great white Force, as it were, indeterminate as to its form, hovering over Paris to prevent the city from being destroyed.’⁵⁵

Even that did not dispel the threat by the Asura. For it is especially in defeat that he gives free rein to his nature of unconditional egoism, raging fury and the orgiastic pleasure of destruction. The order of the OKW, the German headquarters, is printed with all references in the best-seller by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre Is Paris Burning? ‘Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does he must find there nothing but a field of ruins.’ And the authors write that the nght of the liberation of the city ’every Parisian looking out of his window could gaze at one of the wonders of the war: Paris was unharmed. The Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Louvre, the Sacré-Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, all those peerless monuments which had made the city into a beacon of civilized man, had up to that day stood undamaged through five years of the most destructive war in history.’

On 15 August 1945 the Japanese emperor Hirohito, for the first time in history addressing the nation directly, broadcast a message declaring the unconditional capitulation of his country, thus bringing the Second World War to an end. The reader will remember that 15 August is the birthday of Sri Aurobindo — the day on which in 1940 Hitler intended to speak to the world from Buckingham Palace and on which India will become independent in 1947.

In his high villa on the fatal hill
Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,
Dictator of his action’s sudden choice. (Collected Poems, p. 111)

John Toland too calls the Berghof ‘Hitler’s place of inspiration’, where he went into retirement before his important and always unexpected decisions.

‘For without victory there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.’