Behind the Bastards - Part One: Savitri Devi: The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion

Episode Date: February 11, 2020

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Hitler's Priestess, Savitri Devi.FOOTNOTES: Hitler's Priestess Twitter Photo Savitri Devi: The strange story of how a Hindu Hitler worshipper became an alt-right icon Why white supremacists and Hindu nationalists are so alike The Man Who Brought the Swastika to Germany, and How the Nazis Stole It Ritualistic Cat Torture Was Once a Form of Town Fun The Great Cat Massacre: French History Revealed by the Americans Savitri Devi: The mystical fascist being resurrected by the alt-right Hitler is Homeless in Vienna THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CULT EXPERIENCE  HINDUISM AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM Priestess of Hitlerism: Savitri Devi The Death of Adolf Hitler Savitri Devi Wiki Savitri Devi From Christchurch to India: How India’s RSS Inspires White Nationalist Violence Feuerkrieg Division (FKD) Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's esoteric? My Hitlerism shit. That is two Hitler starts in a row.

Jesus Robert. Well, it fits with this episode. This is Behind the Bastards podcast about the worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans. I'm the host. And my guest today is Jamie. Hi. I just go by one name now. I'm the Beyonce of, no, Billy Wayne's the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards. Yeah. You are the podcaster formerly known as the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards. They're the Beyonce of my heart. Thank you. Yeah, there we go. Here we go.

Jamie, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. I think that that's true. I'm good. I have to add a bag to my Spirit Airlines flight, but that's about as challenging as it's getting today. Speaking of monsters, that is the greatest monster of all. Pay to breathe. You have to swipe your credit card if you sneeze on a Spirit Airlines flight. I have this friend. His name is Lenny, and he listens to the podcast, so he may hear this. And Lenny is 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 Whiz Air, which is one of the worst airlines on the planet. Oh, I've heard of Whiz Air. 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 worn multiple pairs of pants on. How, if you're not going on to a Spirit Airlines flight wearing five jackets, like, what are you even, you're, you're robbing yourself. You're, I've been on a Spirit Airlines right eye next to like an actively drunk person multiple times. Well, no, that's just normal. I know, but it's like, yeah, you're right. If you haven't wept, if you haven't wept and thrown things away while waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines,

have you even flown? We've gotten off topic. Very off topic. Jamie. Yes. Have you ever heard of Savitri Devi? No. Oh, good.

Oh, boy, Jamie, you are in for a motherfucking treat. Oh, 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 2020. Okay. Like the most, the most recent headline that ties directly to her is,

you remember when the FBI arrested all those members of the base that, that neo-Nazi group, there's plenty to start a second civil war by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia that was full of armed people. Yes. That whole, that whole hullabaloo. Yes. Yeah. Well, she's kind of behind all that, although she died decades before it happened. So that's today's story.

Nice. Let's do it. So now Jamie, we're going to start, like we start every good day by talking about our little buddy, shouldn't call him a buddy, Adolf Hitler. Okay. It's weird because I can call Stalin a buddy, but I feel like calling Hitler a buddy is a bridge too far. I don't know. In this show, I feel like there are just rules that are different.

Yeah. They're old friends at this point. So Hitler was at his core. Who was he? He was a secular ruler, Jamie. 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, of his power and like his regime because of all of these like history channel documentaries and this industry of books on Nazi occult history and like Nazi magic and the Hellboy movies. Oh, I'd love to hear it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're great movies, at least one of them is, but like this idea that like the Nazis were like full of, full of magic, right? And that Hitler like believed all sorts of like weird, kooky occult stuff about like raising the dead and, and, and aliens and shit. And it's just not true. There were some funky occult ties to national socialism. Love that phrase. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Oh yeah. That ties. Yeah, baby. Yeah, but they weren't to Hitler. They were to 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 were, were, were pretty secular guys. The Beyonce's, the Nazi Beyonce's.

Yeah. As opposed to, I'm trying to think of like, like the whole. The Nazi Jeremy Renner's. Oh, how dare you speak his name in this forum? I thought we, we made a pact to never speak of him again. We never signed that contract. We never did. It was under negotiation for a long time. Yeah.

Yeah. It is still in arbitration. Now, the Tula society, spelled thul society, like the top racks on people's jeeps. Was it, well, Subaru's, people's Subaru's. The, the Tula society was a German occult group in the early 20th century in Germany. And it provided some of the early funding and leadership for the Nazi party. Heinrich Himmler 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 shit, but Hitler himself was not at all into occult stuff.

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 Mein Kampf with, like Hess and Hitler are like fucking tight before Hitler comes to power. His ghost, his, his, like his ghost writer. Yeah. Kind of like more like his, um, his muse. Yeah. And also the guy who was a competent typist, both of those things. I mean, you gotta, you gotta, if, 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 Rudolf Hess is he was the perfect person. So he was also the deputy furor 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 33.

Um, and in 1941, 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, sorry, sorry. Uh, how would you define bug fuck? I would define bug fuck as like independently hopping in your private plane and flying 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 you to. That's how you would define bug fuck? 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 fuck moving forward. Okay. So bug fuck is when like the world is pop falling apart and you're like fuck it and you, and you go the fuck off. And then you, is that it? Kind of. Yeah. Like it was the 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. And Britain did not have any interest in talking with him or making peace with Germany at this point. So he basically just flew and crash landed in England and got arrested and spent the rest of his life in prison. Very bug fuck. And it was a 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. Yes. His hess was like this occult dude into astrology and all this shit.

And like this weird, he was actually kind of like a Buddhist. Like he's a weird dude. Sick. But because he held all these weird beliefs and he pissed off Hitler so badly, Hitler bans like all of this weird occult shit that had cropped up around the Nazi party in 1941. Okay. So, yeah. So after 41, like really most of that stuff is illegal. Heinrich Himmler gets up to a little bit of it with the SS because he's got a castle and he, he's just a weird dude.

We'll get into some of that in the later episode. The important thing to understand is that like, yeah, Hitler was like a distinctly not wooey guy. Like he's not a new age sort of dude. He's like a guy, if you mentioned your, like if I, he's like the guys on Reddit who like, if you mentioned you so much as mention your zodiac sign, they're like, she's not credible. She's fun. She's a, she's lost it. Yes. Yes.

I love that type of person. And I feel confident saying that a hundred percent of Hitler's biographers agree he would have been extremely on Reddit. More on Reddit than anyone has ever been on Reddit. Sure. Yeah. No, he would be the most reddity guy of all of them. And we have to admit that that is very, what's his sign? That's very his sign of him, wouldn't you say?

I don't know. He's such a Taurus. He's such a 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. Taurus? Oh, okay.

No, I'm just trying to get canceled on the behind the bastards board. Never. No, either way, advocating the Taurus sign or the Taurus firearms brand is not going to go well for you. Okay, fair. Yeah, so now Hitler, so he's not into the occult at all. He's not a big fan of Christianity either. 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. And he worried we can the German people, but he also respected Christianity for its ability to inculcate good values in the German people.

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. 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. But he felt it was important to maintain this image.

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 1945, Nazism has changed quite a lot. The actual political and historic beliefs of the original Nazis and of 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 Hitlerism has made it better able to survive in the era of the Internet. Now, esoteric Hitlerism is a term used to refer to a number of different strains of post-war 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. 4chan and 8chan are, in the modern age, two of the most prolific vectors for the spread of this brand of nonsense. There are strains of it in Brinton Terence Manifesto and in Anders Breviks 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 spawned mass shootings and attempted mass shootings on a monthly basis today.

Her name was Savitri Devi, and she was a huge piece of shit. This is someone's feminism somewhere. This is some piece of shit's feminism. She is a feminist icon. She's 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?

She was not willing to do just the first half. She was 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 embarrassing. That was her second idea. She does start first focused on the cats and then move straight to Nazism, though. It's remarkable. So she was born Maximiani Portas on September 30th, 1905, in Lyon, France. Her mother, Julia, came from Cornwall, the town with the 36th dumbest name in all of England.

Her father's ancestry was a melange of various Mediterranean peoples without access to birth control. He was mostly Italian and Greek, although young Maximiani was born a French citizen, she latched on to her father's Greek ancestry from the very beginning. Some of this had to do with the fact that Lyon 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 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 it, stop it. Please just like finish reading their eyes. We're 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, no. Of course not. Not a goddamn word. Like when I was in high school, like in junior high and high school, if you were like in the quote, quote, advanced classes, they would be like, let's teach them a language they can't use. I'm so stupid. Yeah.

God damn it. Totally useless term. Did you have to use that? I mean, it's one of those. Did you have to use that textbook that was about the Romani family? Did you do Eche Romani? Oh, no, no, man. I was like fucking Kaikilius 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. Our system. Everyone died at the end of our textbook. Wait, was it like the... We had the Cornelia family. It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus.

And then they had a friend named Sextus. They sound like fucking losers. They weren't. It was fucking Kaikilius for me. 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 ditch. Their character's in a ditch. They can't get out. They're staying at an inn. The inn keepers yelling at them. They're stuck in a ditch. They're stuck in a ditch for a whole month. And then they go to Rome and everything is fine.

That sounds like a nightmare. Well, yeah. Nightmare. It was 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. I'm like, hmm, we should be learning a real language. I looked at her. You didn't have to learn to pronounce anything. All right. You never had to speak it because there was no practical 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 what the Romans spoke, so we just didn't give a shit. It was great. Yeah. My teacher, Miss Cook, would come and she would, what was the thing she would say?

She was like, okay, discipuli et discipuli. Like she'd be like, hello, students, let's learn Julius Caesar. And then we would just talk about how the family was stuck in the ditch all day. All day. Horrible.

Yeah. Well, Maximiani spent her young life stuck in that ditch, and that ditch was called being a huge nerd for Mediterranean classical civilizations. Got it. She was a strong-willed child, which here is a synonym for unspeakably arrogant and a giant pain in the ass.

Sure. She felt strongly about just about everything. That is how they describe annoying children. And she developed opinions on everything. Yeah. Strong-willed. Yeah. She was known to be utterly immovable

once she'd latched onto an idea. One strong opinion she developed early when 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.

My God. That's so harsh. She's like, I wish my family wasn't dying. She's like, shut up. Jesus Christ. Yeah. We get it. She didn't like French people very much either.

Okay. 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, she's like eight or nine. Yeah. She's like a fucking little kid at this point. That is so funny. 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. Wow. Some real hot takes being thrown out there.

Yeah. Jeez. Okay. So she was like born to be harmful. She was born to be a fascist. She was... 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 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 Magna Carta shakes in her boots whenever you come walking by. The Magna Carta is a messy bitch, and I have no time for it. Okay, Robert. Gee, I can't believe you just called a female document a bitch.

A messy. You're setting a bad example. Robert, feminism is the law now. Document misogyny. She's literally shaking right now. She's here. Oh, no. She's in the room with me.

You didn't tell me the Magna Carta was in the room today, Sophie. She's literally... She drove me here. Horrible. Well, I don't have a driver's license. I don't know what you want. I don't know how much further to take this bitch.

I'm just gonna... Later in life, in 1978, 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. She's granular about fucking everything.

Now, the 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. Okay. Starting at age... 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, Nicholas Goodrick-Clark,

claims this quote disgusted her and turned her against mankind. 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 going to have to talk about that now for a little while. Oh, no. It's like a thing, Jamie. Okay, so like specific to this region cat torture?

All of Europe, really. But like, yeah, specifically to France. Like the French fucking hate cats, historic. Okay. All right, I'm listening. They are assholes about cats. Okay. Yeah.

Today, we rightly revere cats as our moral and intellectual superiors, and we have organized our society around pleasing them. This is right and good, but cats have not always been beloved in the West. While they are considered basically holy in Islam, they're like ritually clean. Like you can have them in mosques and stuff all over the place. You don't have to wash your hands after touching them

if you're going to go pray. There's a long Christian tradition of seeing cats as demonic entities. 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 going to be terrible to one of the good animals. Okay. I don't know why. Yeah, it's weird.

Now, in the 15th 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 Ypres, Belgium, they held an event called Catastote, the Festival of Cats, which sounds awesome, but actually just involved drunken townsfolk

throwing cats from the top of the church onto hard cobblestones and then lighting them on fire. No. Catastote. Yeah. Yep. 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. Don't throw cats on the pavement. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to be honest, I bet the rich people got to go up first and throw the nicest cats. Just to set a good example.

Yeah. They would privately be throwing cats at hard marble floors as well. Yeah. My God. It's horrible. And Catastote still takes place in Ypres every May, but they use stuffed animals now, which just stop. Just stop.

It's not a good tradition. It would be so easy to not do it. It would be so easy. Do they eat the cat? Or is it just we're just killing the cats? Not that that makes it better. No, they're just murdering cats for no good reason. Because it's fun.

That is worse. And people are horrible. But Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly torture cats in Belgium? Your sponsors? You don't know that. That is exactly right. No, we do. You don't know that.

Sophie vets every sponsor to make sure they do not torture cats in Belgium. Yes. Is that, that's true? That's true. Robert doesn't lie. Robert, I, okay. Okay. It is a small country, so the vetting's pretty easy.

Like you'll notice I did not say, for example, Canada. No, you certainly didn't. True bastard. No, I did not. Canada. Wow. Canada. Just got canceled before our very eyes.

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We're back. Jamie. Yep. Those were good ads. 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. Oh my God. Shout out Flea. Shout out to Flea, my cat. He's got a big neck.

Want to say about my cat? He'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're also surfers. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you're talking about the Keanu Reeves surfing movie with, with what's his name? We've covered it on the Vectelcast. What is it called?

Yes. Roach is the one who bleeds out in a plane. Point break? He's a good character. We're talking about point break? Yes, point break. That's the movie. A classic.

Yes. Now, in France, there was a centuries old tradition of burning hundreds of cats to death in gigantic bonfires. Louis XVI even famously lit Paris' cat fire in 1648. Brule les chats. The king set the cat fire? Yeah, of course. Who else?

Jamie, who else? This is just all news to me. Yes, it was news to me too. Okay. I'm glad that this wasn't common knowledge. I would be horrified if I just didn't know we've been burning cats. Okay. Obviously, you have to assume earlier times people are more callous to cats and dogs because

them being what they are now is a more recent development because we have all these extra resources, but I didn't realize it was this cruel. This is a lot. The king is setting the cat fire. That's bad writing. Yeah, so Brule les chats, which I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that because it's a horrible thing in fuck France as it was called, varied in a number of different ways.

Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were tied together in huge pyres. Sometimes living cats were tied above small fires on a spit and then roasted to death. Sometimes cats were set in wooden cages and burnt to death. In some towns, people known as court amounts, cat chasers would soak cats in fuel, light them on fire and chase them through town to the amusement of citizens. People wonder why cats are so upset all the time. I know, right? They're an oppressed species.

Yes, they are. Yeah, I would be pissed. We should be. I'm pissed. I am. The charred remains of these tortured cats were taken home as good luck charms by people. In 1730, as revolutionary sentiments simmered and bubbled throughout French society, two 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. This was tied more towards issues of class hatred than hatred of cats, but the cats wound up actually taking the brunt of the damage. But they end up being the scape cats for the whole situation. Exactly. And that's also the worst way to die 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 murdered me and then they're like, well, this has something to do with my opinion on the New Taylor Swift record, it has nothing to do with Jamie, but I killed her 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 100 years in the future. Something you're completely incapable of understanding or knowing about. Like it's just wild. But these apprentices felt their masters treated the family cats better than their workers.

And because they couldn't quite murder their bosses, 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 fuckload 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, I think 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 worst, 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 French revolutionary values of freedom and equality is she's like, well, clearly this is all bullshit. Look at what they're doing to these animals. Where's their equality and freedom? That's kind of where she comes at this from, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So she's deeply sympathetic to animals and particularly cats and basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings. And yeah, it's an interesting story. I'm going to be interested in how she galaxy brains being sympathetic towards the plight of brutally murdered cats to becoming a fascist, but fascism finds a way. I think it's a pretty common thing for fascists, to be honest.

It's common for all of us. Cat murders to fascism? Well, not committing cat murders, but like hating people because of how garbage they are and thinking fascism is the only way to fix things because people just can't be allowed to live on their own. Okay. I knew that. I thought you were saying cat specific reasons and like, well, this is a true education.

Yeah. Now, Maximilani was very good in school. She was a bright student. She read and wrote constantly and her very favorite writer was a 19th century French poet named Charles Laconte Delisle. And here's how Savitri's biographer describes Laconte Delisle's work in the book Hitler's Priestess, which is really the only decent biography of Savitri Devi. Interesting.

Laconte Delisle's own tragic view of the universe. His romantic colors were always tinged with somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximilani. 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, Laconte Delisle rejected Christianity and evoked the stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic peoples in his famous poem, Cycle Poems Barberes. He was also powerfully attracted to Hinduism. Following the translation of its sacred texts in the 1840s, Maximilani felt a profound sympathy

with Laconte 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 aversion to Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview. So Goths didn't exist in the early 20th century, but Maximilani's clearly that. She is a proto-goth. It's again, it's just like if there had been a hot topic for her to, you know, be an assistant

manager at, a lot could have been avoided. Imagine how many hot topic employees were saved by that business. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine how many fascists we avoided by, for example, the existence of Kylo Ren fanfiction. Honestly, honestly, it's, wow, that actually hit for me. Wow. That hit that.

People need an outlet, you know? My blood pressure just changed. 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 from happening. Like a young girl who desperately needed to be distracted and nothing distracted her, and that is a problem.

Right. And that lays out 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. I wanted it. 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. It's fine. I watched it. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah.

Well, actually, I don't, I think it's maybe not so good. Beautiful animation though. Anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You got to judge it for its time. Do I? Anyways. There was no, for example, the little toaster. I don't know. I do prefer to check. Brave little toaster. Yeah.

Yeah. Brave little toaster have come out. It didn't fuck kids up. Yeah. No, it didn't fuck kids up. I loved the brave little toaster. Yeah. Brave little toaster damaged me forever.

Really? That's why he throws bagels. Oh my God. But he was so brave, Robert. He was so brave. That movie fucked me up. That's why you throw bagels, right, Robert? I don't know.

It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators. We've got to do some exposure therapy for you with the brave little toaster. That's why he doesn't toast his bagels. He only throws them. That's like the thing. Tragic. It's tragic. Imagine the path we could have avoided.

I know. Maximilani Portas was very political as a young girl. When World War I started in 1914, she, at nine years old, knew very clearly that she did not trust the Entente powers, so like England, France, 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 Entente or the central powers. But the king of Greece's prime minister, a guy named Venizelos, which I'm probably mispronouncing, 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 1916, a group of pro-Venezelos army officers staged a coup against the king. There were rumors that the Entente had backed this, and those rumors seemed credible in light of the fact that French and British troops landed in Salonica and Athens in 1915 and 16 to force Greek compliance in their demands for military access to the Macedonian front so they could better fight Austria-Hungary. That's a lot of history there, but basically she's very pro-Greece and wants Greece to

stay out of the war because she also likes Germany, hates the English, hates the French, and she's pissed off because England and France back this prime minister who wants Greece to get into the war, and they also fuck with Greek sovereignty and stuff, so she gets really angry over all this. And how old is she at this point? Like where are we? 9, 10, 11 years old by 1916 when the day happens. Did you know what was going on in the world when you were 9 or 10 years old?

Like how old were you? I was pretty old, I mean 9, 11 happened when I was like 12, and that was definitely like the start of me getting political. I guess, yeah, I was 8 so that makes sense. 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 shit, it's kind of a big deal. You won't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll know what's going on. You'll know what's going on.

I guess I'm just like, it would be so bizarre to me if someone was like, Jamie's beliefs at 8 years old was 9, 11 was school got out early that day. 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 are still alive when

she became relevant. Oh, if I could write. The book was written in 98. Yeah. If I could write about like what I thought, I thought at 8 years old, I'd be like, Jamie was a brilliant genius who had strong 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, she's tuned in to Latin New Class. Sure. Yeah, exactly. That's a vibe. So, yeah, Vinizelos and his men took over part of Greece with the backing of Britain and France and those two countries were happy to recognize his government while they carried

out a brutal 10 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 whalist crowds railing against the Entente and Maximiani sided with them and considered the Entente's 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 3000 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 1919 to make good on the promises that had been made to them by the Entente and the fighting was a disaster

from the beginning. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated in the war technically, but on the ground in 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.

So a truce was reached in 1920, 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 turned the remaining great powers of Europe against Greece and even though they'd promised Greece Smyrna and the Versailles treaty in 1921, they basically like, we're like, fuck that shit and pulled all of their support. Do we know where the Greeks at this time stood on cats? You know, they're closer to the Middle East, so I'm going to guess more pro cat.

More pro cat. Okay. Okay. Okay. That tracks. Yeah. I think that tracks. Yeah.

The further in that direction you get more pro cat, less pro dog. You know, I think that's generally fair. So just these Western, they got a lot of dogs. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone should be pro cat and dog. Maybe they just lit cats and dogs on fire. I don't know.

I did not do that research. Yeah. Okay. These are the questions I have, Robert. Take them or leave them. So the French and Italian governments like Betray, Greece first, and they sign agreements with the Turkish leader, Mustafa Kamal, and to ignore the promises they'd made in the Versailles treaty to Greece.

Britain held out the longest, but when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia in March of 1921, all of the allies suddenly adopted a policy of neutrality. Britain banned further arms sales to Greece while 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 1922. Greek forces fled Asia Minor and the Turkish army conducted a campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing on their Aegean coast.

They massacred some 30,000 Christians, a mix of Greeks, Armenians, and Franks in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would ever crop up on their coast again. Awesome. The Smyrna debacle, yeah, this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatolia anymore. Not like there was for 3,000 years prior. This is like what wipes out that community. Okay. Yeah.

So you can see why a Greek nationalist like Maximiani Portas, who is like 15, 16 years old then and like really actually starting to like understand the world, is furious about all this. And it breeds in her a powerful hatred of the Entente powers, particularly of France and of England. And she basically felt that like all these fancy words they had about liberty and democracy were bullshit when they couldn't even hold to basic promises and protect the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Greek civilians.

Of course. That's a fair point. Very valid. Yes. Yeah. I tend 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 massacres 30,000 people.

So I'm going to 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 Greece. It sets up the rest of her life in a lot of ways. So other influences on her developing mind were the site of French crowds in Lyon cheering uproariously at the brutal terms of the Treaty of Versailles when they were announced. She was horrified when the French government stationed black Senegalese 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 any 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 you 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 shit that like is forming. She's 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 is all this is going on like formative fucking years. Yeah. Yeah. So she hates France. She hates England. She hates black people.

She hates Turkish people. She's... She loves cats. A lot more hate. She loves cats. This is the consistent one. Yeah. Yeah.

Jesus Christ. In 1923, a freshly graduated Maximiani Portis left France to attend college in Greece. She was just on the edge of 18 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. Well, of course. Yeah.

She's a dork. Yeah. She's a big fucking dork. She's a dork. She's like, wait. Hellen of Troy? Absolutely, yes. Oh my God.

She would not shut up about the Iliad. She was a fucking... You know that. She's like, I've read multiple translations and you're like, can you not? Okay. She has strong and profoundly thirsty opinions on Achilles. She's like ranked gods and goddesses hot to nut. 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.

The ancient Greeks were unbelievably fucked up. They also did a lot of cool shit, obviously, like every other ancient people. That's pretty common knowledge, yeah. That's all ancient people do a lot of cool shit, all Aztecs, amazing shit, horribly fucked up. Ancient Romans, amazing shit, Han Chinese, amazing shit, horribly for everybody, yeah. In the Greek specific case, 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 in fiction and art that has ever been made in the history of the human race. Complicated people. Maximiani does not get a complex picture of ancient Greece. It's just the good shit, yeah. Good lord. You might say, I don't know, I want to say your understanding of Greek history was not

deep. It was certainly incomplete. That said, the only thing Europeans would write about the ancient Greeks in that period was wildly positive. You weren't going to get critical commentary on, for example, pedorasty in ancient Greece in fucking 1920. You're just not going to read that. Her love of Greece was mostly focused on obsessing over their incredible art and fantasizing

about the idealized culture that she believed had existed there. I mean, we as children all read revisionist history about horrifying cultures. I was obsessed with ancient Rome as a kid for a lot of the same reasons. Of course. Because you were just like, oh, it seems like they only did dope stuff and wore cool outfits. Well, I will say I was kind of a fucked up kid, so when I learned about all of the fucking crucifixions and shit, I was kind of like, hell yeah.

Wow Robert, you're so metal. I mean, it is pretty fucking metal. You're so fucking metal. We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus and his friends one of these days, but it's fucking one of the biggest mic drop moments in the history of torturing people to death with wood. I think that's fair to say. Thrilled to have such a hyper specific.

So she moves to Greece. She's super happy for a while, obviously. Best place in the world for this girl is fucking Greece at this point in time. And the time she spent discovering the wonders of Athens, which rules, coincided with some very important goings on in Germany. I'm going to quote again from the book, Hitler's Priestess quote, years later, she would recall that she spent such a sunlit afternoon upon the Acropolis on 9th October, 1923, the fateful day of Hitler's Putsch when he and his followers had attempted to coup against the Bavarian

government and staged a march to the Feldherne Hall in the center of Munich. The police successfully broke up the march and 16 martyrs of the early Nazi movement fell beneath a hail of bullets. When the tales 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 Greece should recoup its ancient power and take over the places it had controlled back in the day. Seems a little idealistic. She engaged in a heated argument in defense of Hitler with the French manageress of the hostel.

Oh, God. So we've lost her. Arguing about Hitler with the hostel. No, we lost her with the cat, I think. I mean, she's been gone for a while. Good Lord. You know who won't argue in support of Hitler with the French hostel owner in Athens? Who, Robert?

The products and services support this podcast. Products and services would never, ever, ever hurt us or do something wrong. I've been saying it for years. I have. I'll agreed for years. Let fingers crossed for a dick pill ad right after this. Yeah. What a great transition, both of you.

Just wonderful work. Thank you. So talented. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. In the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. In Alphabet Boys, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Welcome to CSI on Trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, it was during this first visit to Greece that Maximiani Portas 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 Schleiman. Now, Schleiman was not a professional archaeologist, which is not weird for the time. Most of the archaeologists of this period are gentlemen adventurers who just get our nerds, basically, and start digging. The people in the mummy movies who are just wearing tackies and have money, the people in Tarzan. That was the most accurate thing about the mummy movie, other than the way mummies react to shotguns.

They're all named Clayton, yeah. So Schleiman, yeah, throughout the mid-1800s had been a very successful German arms merchant trading raw materials for the ingredients to make ammunition, and he'd nursed a deep obsession with the Ili at his entire life. In his late middle age, he decided to take his fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover the true location of the ancient city of Troy. Unlike pretty much any traditional archaeologist, Schleiman used the Iliad as a guide. He thought this book was basically essentially accurate, and he followed the poem as if it

had been a work of serious historical scholarship. And shockingly enough, this kind of worked. In 1871, 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 does find what a lot of people think was the site of Troy. It's just other shit was built there and he dug up the wrong shit. Anyway, it's fucked up. Yes. Yes. Well, his research or his digging, despite all the shit it destroyed, produced hundreds

upon hundreds upon hundreds of artifacts, which people at the time believed to be Trojan. And many of those artifacts, more than 1,800 of them, were emblazoned with various types of swastika. And I'm going to 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 Schleiman'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 unearthed by Dr. Schleiman at Troy acquire for us a double interest, wrote British linguist Archibald Sase in 1896. They carry us back to the later stone ages of the Aryan race. Oh, dear. And Coca-Cola products? Robert, what if that was just a product or service advertised?

But it wasn't a nuts. I spent some time living in India, and it's fucking, there's swastikas all over the day. And it is weird. It takes, you never really get used to it because of what it means to the West. It's always like, there's so many swastikas around here. That is, I mean, and that is fascinating to track the history of a symbol and how it affects different areas of the world differently, that sounds extremely jarring.

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 swastikas, but they're close enough that people will be like, what's up? Oh, no. Hi, Robert. We're two out there. I need to leave your home right now.

Yeah. I mean, they're, yeah. You're like, oh no, the swastikas are pretty small. It's Indian. So most people aren't getting close enough to the blankets. They're not Nazi ones. They're, oh my. They're not Nazi swastikas.

See, Robert, 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 Nazi swastikas, so calm down. Yeah. It's like that. And they offer me a Miller light. They're not Nazi swastikas. No.

Would you like a Miller light? No. That's exactly my standard greeting to people. Yeah. Yeah. I would greet all your guests. That's specifically how I say to hello to the officers who pull me over for speeding. No.

No, I would be interested. I know I've gone down that Wikipedia hole at one point of just like tracking the symbol, the symbology of the swastikas. Yeah. It's, it goes back so far. There's criticism to Schleeman honestly for his methods, but he's not in any way a Nazi. Like he's just a guy who finds a bunch of swastikas buried underground and. He's just an unqualified archeologist.

Doing his money in a weird way. He's very controversial still. There are aspects of what he did that a lot of people praise because he got a lot of shit right, but he also destroyed a huge amount of cultural antiquities. He's an interesting person. You should read about Schleeman if you're interested in archeology. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. God damn it. It seems like a lot of those gentlemen explorers really delighted in, you know, like destroying and selling off pieces of ancient history that had nothing to do with them. All of them are problematic. Yeah. Love that. I will say Schleeman is one who comes from like a pure place of just being really into

this history. But yeah, you know, they're all problematic. So. Hashtag problematic. Yeah. Now, the, the swastikas 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-Arian language group. It was never a racial classification. The term started being used because early linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu Urdu and 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 1800s. 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 multi-racial societies, which at that point, like meant Italians and Slavs bring with Germans and British people. And we're getting concerned about this fact. And I'm going to refer back to Smithsonian Magazine again, quote, the rising interest in eugenics in Rachel Hygiene, however, led some to corrupt Arian into a descriptor for an ancient master racial identity with a clear throughline to contemporary Germany.

As the Washington Post reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several years before the start of World War II, Arianism was an intellectual dispute between bewiscered scholars as to the existence of a pure and undefiled Arian race at one stage of Earth's history. In the 19th century, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and others made the connection between the mythical Aryans and the Germans, who were the superior descendants of the early people, now destined to lead the world to greater advancement by conquering their neighbors. The findings of Schlemans dig in Turkey then suddenly had a deeper ideological meaning. For the nationalists, the purely Aryan symbol Schlemen uncovered was no longer an archaeological

mystery. It was a stand-in for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the Reichschmerbund, a 1912 anti-Semitic group, and the Bavarian Freikor, paramilitary, basically the proud boys of the era, used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity as the master race. Now the reality is that swastika has 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 relax, they're pretty small. Nowadays, the swastika is the swastika, like it's a Nazi thing unless you're in India because the world's big. But back in these days, like if you're looking at like ancient history, it's best to kind of look at the swastika, like you remember that weird-esque doodle we all put on our trapper keepers back in the 90s? 100% yes.

Like no one invented that, it just showed up everywhere. That's the fucking swastika in prehistory. It's just all over the damn place. I would get that blanket. Yeah, oh, I have that blanket. It was not seen as this, though, by a lot of people. An anthropologist Gwendolyn Lake notes, quote, when Heinrich Schleeman discovered swastika-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 Aryan 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 hence served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non-Aryan or rather non-German and German identity. That's fascinating. 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. And that's why all this happened. Robert, my dog worked on the shadow app, so really watch your mouth. Your dog was the smartest person involved with that app. Sunny invested in the shadow app. I have to say it's a bad dog.

This math adds up. Yeah. I mean, of course, he kept, he was talking about shadow app for, and I'm like, that can't be real. He probably thought it was the dog from, what was that movie with the dogs and cat that talk and they find their family. Oh, that sounds terrible. I don't know.

It's a good movie. Homeward bound. Homeward. Oh, I haven't seen Homeward bound. Sunny definitely just wanted to harm people and he wanted to harm the discourse and that's why he invested in shadow app. Word. That's fair.

That's fair. Go off. You could call him the Hitler of the Iowa caucuses, which a lot of people do. We have, but it makes me uncomfortable. Sitting in Athens, reading the news of Hitler's movement in Germany, and staring at ancient swastikas on beloved Greek artifacts, things started to come together in Maximilani Portas' mind. She moved to Greece permanently in 1928 after finishing college and renouncing her French

citizenship. The very next year, 1929, 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, Maximilani had never been very religious. Her mother and aunt were, though, and while they failed to inculcate a love of Christ in Maximilani, they did succeed in making her hate Jewish people, which is not the part of Christianity to transfer if you're going to pick one. Of all, I mean, there's so many different horrible things to take away from Christianity

and that is the worst of all that's been. She got none of the good stuff, just the anti-Semitism. Yeah. 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 Maximilani was so in love with Greek culture and she was really pissed off because she was like particularly in 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 this 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 other people weren't as in-degree history

as she was. Oh my God. Like this is like the core of it for her. She's in love with like Zeus and shit and she's like, why don't people like this as much as I do? It's the Jews. She's become a chaos nerd. No.

Yeah. Yeah. 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. No. Okay.

I mean, okay. I'm listening. 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 biographers words, overwhelmed and repelled by the exotic nature of the Jews, their attire, their customs, observances and festivals, the strange dark men in broad brimmed hats and long black coats hastening to prayers at the wailing wall.

Okay. Now, it's interesting that Goodwin-Clark, Portis' biographer, mentions this specifically seeing these Jewish people and being like horrified by the way they look in their coats and hair locks and long black coats. Yeah. 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 Mein Kampf. This takes place in Linz, no, sorry, in Austria. Maybe his boy wrote this part. We don't know. Vienna. Once as I was strolling through the inner city, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew?

Was my first thought for, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz where he grew up. They 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 Portis writes her own thing, like her own story this way, is that she's hearkening to Mein Kampf, because again, she writes about this

later. It's also possible they just were similar people and had a similar moment. Well, if she's the primary resource for her. For herself and seems to have like a fair grasp on storytelling, it makes sense that she would pull from these. It does make sense. It does make sense. She's like, oh, this is the end of Act One.

Where's my inciting? Exactly. She wrote her own inciting incident, if it didn't. Yeah. I'll take a leaf out of, you know, it's like, you know, George Lucas stole from great Japanese cinema to make Star Wars. And in a very similar fashion, Savitri Devi stole from Adolf Hitler, the Kurosawa of Natria.

True artist, Steele or Robert, it's what they, it's what they have 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 there has to be a story that goes with this dish and sometimes you're like, sometimes it just is. Sometimes it just is. Sometimes you just cook some fucking food, asshole.

Sometimes you just make some food and it's bad. And it's terrible. Yeah. So 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.

And this is the first time she realizes that she's 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. 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 Nazism, but focused around a religious component that involved a return to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon. I mean, always with this woman. Yeah. Now, by this point, the ancient Greeks had become sort of the ubermensch in her own mind and this conception was nursed by the bits of Hitler's speeches that made their way over into the press in her part of the world. By 1930, she finally read Mein Kampf 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, gelled remarkably well with Maximiani's own beliefs about the ancient Greeks and the Jews. She became increasingly obsessed with the Aryans 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 Aryans. Many among the weirder Nazi sets saw Hinduism as an example of a pure Aryan pagan tradition

uncorrupted by Judaism. They found the Hindu caste 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 1932, 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 Aryans. It's like a Nazi version of Eat, Pray, Love in another world. This is a very cute movie and she just took every wrong cue from it.

It is the same. It is. You remember that horrible Cameron Crow movie, Elizabeth Towne, where Orlando Bloom drives across the country with his dad's ashes and it's like, I'm glad we had this talk. You're like, what the fuck are you doing? That sounds like 40 different movies, Jamie. It's no, it's the same. Yeah.

All my Elizabeth Towne heads will know it's the same. Polly Dean's in that movie. Cursed. Oh God. Cursed. Speaking of Nazis. Cursed. Now, so Savitri decided she's going to go to fucking India and she's not the only person

with this idea of going to India to seek out the Aryans. In fact, in 1935, Heinrich Himmler's SS founded the Ananerbi, a scientific think tank dedicated to finding evidence of the ancient Aryans, and they actually sent multiple expeditions into India and Tibet. Maximilani went to India to find evidence of the Aryans 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 8,000 after

6,000 years of Nazi rule. Very specific woman. 8,000. The Jonas brothers didn't even think that far. No, but they're huge, the Nazi Jonas brothers are huge in the area. Robert, shut up. Enjoy this moment. That was, that was great.

That one was great. I do not get that joke. The Jonas brothers first single in 2006 or maybe seven was a song called Year 3000. They said, not much has changed, but we live under water. That's all they knew about. That's a lot to change, Jamie. Well, they say right before it, we live under water that not much has changed. They couch it.

Year 3000. Not much has changed. I've been to Year 3000. No, I can't do anything else. I don't know. We live under water. It's a weird lyric. No, no, no.

It makes no sense. Okay. Sorry, Robert. Continue your podcast. But she's thinking you're 8,000. 8,000. I refuse to think further than Kevin Jonas already has. You have to give her credit.

She is eight times as ambitious as Hitler. God. Yeah. 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 definitely Indian. But it was not uncommon for Europeans who were attracted to India in this period to decide that a number of ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white. This was like a common thing. And in fact, Maximiani's favorite poet, who we talked about earlier, Laconte Delisle, 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, yeah, not shocking. And if you're interested in the story of Rama, one thing I would recommend that's 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's free. It's one of those beautiful pieces of animation. It's why I went to India in the first place. It's an incredible movie. Oh, wow. And one of the things it does really well is it has all these scenes where individual myths from Hindu mythology are explained by groups of people arguing about them, which

if you actually go to India is how you learn about myths. If you talk about the myth of Sita and Rama to a family, everyone in the family, you'll get multiple different versions of the story, and people will argue with each other. It's not like Christian orthodoxy or whatever. It's very, very complicated stuff, but fascinating. So yeah, Maximiyani is convinced that this guy's white, though, and she falls in love with India 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 1936, she adopted a Hindu name, Savitri Devi, taken from a Hindu solar goddess. This woman is obsessed with some gods and goddesses. She loves gods and goddesses so much. She's such a dork. Yeah, it's specifically some gods and goddesses. She's fucking obsessed with Akhenaten too.

It's weird. There was a girl in my middle school who was like, call me Artemis. And we were like, no, no, no, we did. We did. And I was also a dork, but not that kind of dork. No, no, no, 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 going to push that behavior. Well, she was Artemis for all of eighth grade, and then she went back to just Alex for the rest of, as far as I know, her life. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

Any other name, really. Early on in her time in India, Savitri had hiked to the top of a hill and seen a beautiful Indian fortress, one of many such colossal ancient relics that dot the country. She was taken by its beauty and equally horrified by 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 Judeo-Christian taint. Starting in 1937, 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 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, she declared that she conceived of her reconversion mission as an exercise in deception. From the racist Aryan 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, and I'm going to quote again from Elst's 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 1838, she used the slogan, make every Hindu and Indian nationalist and every Indian nationalist a Hindu.

Now, this seems to be something she did 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 castes 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 Savitri 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 and advancing Nazism.

That was her 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. She takes on a lot of Hindu beliefs. This is a weird story, and there's no super simple answer to it, but it's not as simple as she just becomes Hindu and also Nazi. It's weirder than that too. No one edit this out.

I need people to know what I've been forced to endure. You just like literally did that into the microphone. It was hard. I had to. I'm sorry. I can see Robert right now, and he wiped his nose on the mic, and then licked it. You licked Robert Evans. All of this gets edited out.

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 the enemy of my enemy. 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 they're Nazis. Again, I'm going to paint everybody with the same brush, but Savitri got along very well with the set of Hindu nationalists who were like, yeah, the Nazis seem good, and she was particularly taken with Dr. Asit Krishna Mukherjee, one of India's few actual committed Nazis.

In 1937 and 38, Mukherjee started to publish a bi-monthly pro-Nazi magazine, The New Mercury. Savitri met him in early 1938, and they didn't instantly fall in love, but she fell in love with his mind. She was probably bisexual, but certainly wasn't interested in Mukherjee in any way, but she falls in love with this guy's Nazism, basically. They're that kind of attached. So they're, God, that's so, I mean, yeah, that's bleak, because it's like, I mean, if you're going to marry a Nazi, and you're not even attracted to them, no excuse.

No excuse either way, but you know what I mean. She has a little bit of an excuse, but we're getting to it. You are cutting this lady all kinds of slack, Robert. I'm just explaining her. Do you have a crush? Now, so she doesn't, they don't get together right away. She loves his understanding of Nazi ideology, and particularly his emphasis on the myths of the old Aryans, and Mukherjee was obsessed with the Thule society, the Thule society,

and it acquired a lot of their occult writings, so he's that kind of nerd, and Mukherjee seems to 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 rose to the heights of its power. In early 1939, 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 Aryan strong and white awake, go to him who is 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 Savitri 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 Rashtriya Swayamsavek Sangh, or RSS, an Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar to the Nazis.

The founder or one of the founders, K.B. Hedgewar, 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 Lothys and to learn about Hindutva, Hindu nationalism. In 1939, Savitri wrote A Warning to the Hindus. The book's foreword was written by G.D. Savarkar, brother to one of the co-founders of the RSS.

And according to an article by South Asian Affairs analyst Peter Friedrich, quote, Devi advanced V.D. 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 Hindus should tell non-Hindus, we represent India, not you. For India is ours, not yours. She urged Hindus to recover, along with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old, to re-become 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, Narendra 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. Modi 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 lurch by India at 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, 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.

Uh-huh. We just have so much extra ground to cover. We have so much to cover. We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today. We have some time. We have. Okay. Okay.

We'll make time. We'll make time for the fascist dictatorship. In 1940, Britain and Germany went to war. Savitri's extremist beliefs were well known at this point, and she was forced to marry Mukherjee in order to stay in the country. So that's why they get married. It's basically a green card thing. Yeah.

Got it. She described it as a secular 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 Axis and facilitating communication between Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the National Indian Army, a 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 II went the way it did, and Hitler eventually shot himself in a bunker

to avoid capture. I'm familiar with this. Savitri 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. In the end of the belief system, she had dedicated her life to championing. But Mukherjee 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, part one of this episode must now end. Okay. But this dark age will continue on Thursday with part two of the story of Savitri Devi. No. Okay. How are you doing, Jamie? I'm okay.

I'm just unclenching. That's important. For the next two minutes, then we got to talk about it again. I got it. ABK. Always be clenching. Nope. Plug your plugables first.

Oh, right. Leave that in. I want people to know. Yeah. I had to be overshare. I had to pee. And also leave in Robert blowing his nose on the mic and licking it off. Chris, leave that in.

No, that's going to be horrible. Chris, you can edit out the part where Robert is like, yum, delicious after licking his own snot off the mic, but everything else should probably stay in. I feel like this is legally abuse. You could probably report me to HR. It could be fun. It could be fun. My Twitter is at JamieLoftisHelp and my Instagram is at JamieKrisSuperstar and I'm touring for

the better part of February, you can go to my website, JamieLoftisisinnocent.com to find out where. Yay. Yeah. And you can find Sophie on Twitter. Yes. You can find her at Y underscore Sophie underscore Y. And that's it. That's all you can find of us online, which are on BehindTheVasterds.com, including the

full free text of Hitler's Priestess if you want to read this book. The episode's over. Go stop the French from murdering cats. Yes. Great. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about

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