The Meaning of Dunkirk

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Editor’s Note:

The following text is excerpted from chapter 14 of Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun ^[2]. The title is editorial.–Greg Johnson

Not only had Adolf Hitler done all he possibly could to avoid war, but he did everything he possibly could to stop it. Again and again—first, in October 1939, immediately after the victorious end of the Polish campaign; then, on the 22nd of June 1940, immediately after the truce with defeated France—he held out his hand to England; not the hand of a supplicant, still less that of a man afraid, but that of a far-sighted and generous victor whose whole life was centred around a creative idea, whose programme was a constructive programme, and who had no quarrel with the misled blood-brothers of his own people, nay, who saw in them, despite their hatred of his name, his future friends and collaborators.

And nearly a month before his second peace offer to England, the Führer had already given the Nordic sister-nation a tangible sign of his generosity—nay, of his friendship, in spite of all, in the midst of the bitterest struggle—and such an extraordinary one that history writers have not hesitated to characterise it as “a wonder.” The Allied armies—the British Expeditionary Corps and a remnant of the French troops—were fleeing towards Dunkirk as fast as they possibly could before the German advance; fleeing from the Germans towards the sea. And the German Commander in Chief, General von Brauchitsch had, on the 23rd of May, given the order to press them in from all sides and take the lot of them prisoners before they had time to embark. It was, from the military point of view—and from the normal political point of view; from the point of view of immediate success—the thing to do. But Adolf Hitler appeared unexpectedly at General von Rundstedt’s Headquarters in Charleville and cancelled the order of attack on Dunkirk. The German armoured divisions—the “A” Heeresgruppe, as well as the “D” Heeresgruppe, which was, under General von Bock, pressing towards Dunkirk from the East—where to slow down their speed and leave ten kilometres between their foremost ranks and the fleeing enemy. These counter-orders, “that held back the German advance for two days, and gave the British time to bring home safe and sound the most valuable section of their army,”[1] ^[3] are utterly incomprehensible unless one boldly admits that they were dictated by considerations which exceed by far the domain of “politics” no less than that of strategy; considerations not of a statesman but of a seer.

The generals did not know what to think, but they obeyed: orders were orders.

To anyone who, in the name of a pan-Aryan view of things (or merely in the name of “Europe’s” interest) stood—and stands—without reservations, on the side of National Socialist Germany, the tragedy of the situation was—and remains, retrospectively—maddening. The capture or destruction of the whole British Expeditionary Corps at Dunkirk, and the immediate invasion of Great Britain—by parachuted troops, if a proper landing was, on account of the British fleet, impossible—could have, one feels, put an end to the war: crushed rotten, Jew-ridden, West European democracy before the USA had time to save it, and united all Europe under the strong hand of the greatest European of all ages. And that new unity in the spirit of National Socialism would have made Europe the bulwark of higher mankind, not “against Asia,” but against the Dark Forces “in Time” embodied in the latest and lowest form of the old superstition of the “value of every man”: Marxism; against the Dark Forces which are, with the help of the Marxist doctrine, threatening Europe and Asia and the whole world. And the Führer himself destroyed that possibility with one word.

That is, at least, the spontaneous (and superficial) view of the average racially-conscious Aryan, Adolf Hitler’s German or foreign disciple. But that was not Adolf Hitler’s own view. The Führer’s more-than-political and more than strategic intuition reached “far beyond any quickly concluded, timely peace.”[2] ^[4] It grasped—whether he was himself in a position to exteriorise that vision of things or not—the only real earthly peace that ever was and ever can be: the peace of the coming Golden Age, of the far-gone latest one, and of all successive Golden Ages; the peace of this earth whenever the visible world-order is in full harmony with “the original meaning of things,”[3] ^[5] i.e., with the invisible and eternal cosmic Order, as it is, in fact, at every great new Beginning and at no other time. That peace excludes such bitterness as is bound to arise as the consequence of the humiliation of a great people. Adolf Hitler did, therefore, all he could to spare England the humiliation of total defeat. The baffling orders he gave on that fatal 23rd of May 1940—the date Germany “began to lose the war”[4] ^[6]—and the astoundingly generous peace proposals he laid a month later before the English, have no other significance.

Rudolf Hess’ much misunderstood, lonely heroic flight to Scotland as a desperate, self-appointed peace-maker, on the 10th of May 1941, has also no other significance. It was, on Hess’ part, neither the rash action of a man half-insane (as it had to be described, officially, for the sake of convenience, and as Rudolf Hess himself wished it to be described, in case of failure) and still less an attempt at rebellion against the Führer’s policy; an effort to end the war against his will. Quite the contrary! Rudolf Hess undertook his long-planned flight, doubtless without Adolf Hitler’s knowledge, as all the details of the event (and especially Hess’ own last letter to the Führer), clearly show. But he was guided from the start by the unfailing certitude that his was the supreme chance—if any—to bring about, in the teeth of the most adverse circumstances, that which the Führer had, in vain, always wanted, and always striven for: lasting peace with England—the sister-nation, in spite of all the insults of her Jew-ridden government and press; the great Aryan power, in spite of her betrayal of the Aryan Cause—constructive collaboration with England, first step towards the constructive collaboration of all peoples of the best Nordic blood.

Rudolf Hess failed—in the realm of visible facts, at least—as Adolf Hitler himself was destined to fail, and for the very same basic reason: namely because he is, like he, one of those uncompromising idealists and men of action whose intuition of permanent earthly realities exceeds and overshadows the vision even of the most compelling emergency; one of those men, “against Time”—both “Sun” and “Lightning”—who have in their make-up too little “lightning” in proportion to their enormous amount of “sun.” (In fact, of all the Führer’s paladins, none—not even Hermann Göring; not even Goebbels, who was so passionately devoted to him—seems to be so deeply like him as Rudolf Hess.)

England’s answer to Adolf Hitler’s repeated peace proposals was, after a categorical “no,” an intensification of her war effort, and a hardening of her war methods.[5] ^[7] England’s answer to Rudolf Hess’ supreme appeal to her sense of responsibility before the dead, before the living, and before the yet unborn was . . . a cell in the Tower of London (and, later on, in Nuremberg, and finally in Spandau, to this day) for the daring self-appointed messenger of peace. England’s answer to all the understanding and friendliness that National Socialist Germany had showed her from the very beginning, her answer to Adolf Hitler’s sincere profession of faith in Anglo-German collaboration; her answer to his unheard-of generosity at Dunkirk was . . . war to the finish: hundreds and thousands of bombers—one wave after the other, in tight formations—pouring night after night (and often in the daytime) streams of fire and brimstone over the German towns, and on the other hand—unlimited, enthusiastic aid to Soviet Russia, no sooner had Adolf Hitler declared war on her. England’s answer to the German Führer’s repeated plea for honest pan-European anti-Bolshevistic solidarity rooted in the consciousness of common Aryan blood (or of a high proportion of it at least) resounded in Churchill’s jubilation at the news of the “second front,” thanks to which the German forces were now divided. Churchill—the anti-Communist, but still wilder anti-Nazi—declared: “The cause of Soviet Russia is now the cause of every Englishman.” England’s answer was, in August 1941, the Atlantic Charter—an open alliance with the main tool of Jewry in the USA, President Roosevelt, who (although the USA were not yet at war with Germany) now ordered actual firing at every German ship the Americans met on the high seas. England’s answer was two years later the Yalta and then the Potsdam Agreements between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin: the sinister coalition of the Western plutocracies and of the Marxist Empire—of all the forces “in Time”—against National Socialist Germany; the cold-blooded planning of Germany’s dismemberment and enslavement forever; and the relentless advance of the crusaders of hatred from the East and from the West, until their two hosts of hundreds of thousands, in one of which there were Englishmen, had met and merged into each other over the martyred Land. England’s answer was, through British accusers along with others, the shameful distortion of history in the Nuremberg Trial, the condemnation of the peace-maker Rudolf Hess for “crimes against peace,” and the prolongation of the whole propaganda of infamy against both the National Socialist doctrine and the German Nation, to this day.

Maybe, the Jew-ridden United States of America have, under the Freemason Franklin Roosevelt, played an even greater part than that of England in the preparation, conduct, and gruesome conclusion of the Second World War. But England is the nation to which Adolf Hitler had, over and over again, the most sincerely, the most appealingly held out his hand, in the name of the natural brotherhood of Nordic blood, in the name of the peaceful regeneration of the West. Her crime against him, against his people, against herself and the whole Aryan race, is therefore greater than that of any other of the Allies of 1945. And nothing—absolutely nothing—can ever make good for it.

Notes

[1] ^[8] Kleist, Auch Du warst dabei. Ein Buch des Ärgernisses und der Hoffnung [You Were There Too: A Book of Scandal and Hope] (Heidelberg: Vowinckel 1952), p. 278 (quoted by Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, pp. 364–65).

[2] ^[9] Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, p. 367.

[3] ^[10] Mein Kampf, p. 440.

[4] ^[11] Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, p. 367.

[5] ^[12] It is now proved that England began her mass bombing of civilian populations on the 11th of May 1940; see on that point J. M. Spaight’s book Bombing Vindicated (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1944).