Defiance

Here we have Savitri Devi's impassioned prison memoirs. On 7 September 1948, Savitri Deve entered Germany with eleven thousand propaganda posters and leaflets condemning the Allies, proclaiming Adolf Hitler was still alive (which she believed to be true at the time), and urging Germans to resist occupation and hope and wait for his return. It was a quixotic and futile gesture, born of a spirit of defiance and thirst for martyrdom. For more than four hours, Savitri Devi travelled throughout Western Germany distributing propaganda, making contact with the underground network of faithful National Socialists, and writing her book Gold in the Furnace. Arrested in Cologne, she was interrogated and imprisoned. In April 1949, she was tried and sentenced to three imprisonment in Werl. While there, Savitri Devi befriended a number of German women imprisoned as war criminals and completed Gold in the Furnace and her magnum opus The Lightning and the Sun. 'Defiance' is an apt title for this tome, which is also a profound philosophical meditation. It also reads like a novel, with a gripping first-person narrative. A fascinating book by the most extreme and elitist female thinker in the world.