Post-war Nazi activism
After World War II, she travelled to England in 1945 under the name Savitri Devi Mukherji as the wife of a British subject from India, with a British Indian passport. She briefly stopped in England, then she visited her mother in France, with whom she would quarrel over the latter's support for the French Resistance. She then traveled to Iceland, where she witnessed the eruption of Mount Hekla on 5–6 April 1947. While in Iceland, she also adopted the Norse pantheon. She briefly returned to England, then she traveled to Sweden, where she met Sven Hedin.
On 15 June 1948, she boarded the Nord Express and traveled from Denmark to Germany, where she distributed thousands of copies of handwritten leaflets in which she encouraged the "Men and women of Germany" to "hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist!" She recounted her experience in Gold in the Furnace (which was re-edited and released as Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of her birth).
Arrested for posting bills, she was tried in Düsseldorf on 5 April 1949 for the promotion of Nazi ideas on German territory as a subject of the Allied Control Council, and sentenced to three years imprisonment. She served time in Werl Prison, where she befriended her fellow Nazi and SS prisoners (recounted in Defiance), before she was released early in August 1949 and expelled from Germany. She then resided in Lyon, France.
In April 1953, she obtained a Greek passport in her maiden name in order to re-enter Germany, and while she was there, she went on a pilgrimage, as she called it, to Nazi "holy" sites. She flew from Athens to Rome and then she traveled by rail over the Brenner Pass into "Greater Germany", which she regarded as "the spiritual home of all racially conscious modern Aryans". She traveled to a number of sites which were significant in the life of Adolf Hitler and the history of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), as well as German nationalist and heathen monuments, as recounted in her 1958 book Pilgrimage.
Savitri Devi became a friend of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and she completed her manuscript of The Lightning and the Sun at his home in March 1956. Through his introductions, she was able to meet a number of Nazi émigrés in Spain and the Middle East. In 1957, she visited Johann von Leers in Egypt and traveled across the Middle East before she returned to her home in New Delhi, making stops in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, and Zahedan. In 1961 she stayed with Otto Skorzeny in Madrid.
Savitri Devi took employment teaching in France during the 1960s, spending her summer holidays with friends at Berchtesgaden. In the spring of 1961, while she was on her Easter holiday in London, she learned about the existence of the original British National Party (BNP). This group emerged after the Second World War when a handful of former members of the British Union of Fascists took on the name. She met BNP president Andrew Fountaine. Beginning a correspondence with Colin Jordan, she became a devoted supporter of the National Socialist Movement. Savitri was an associate in the post-war years of Françoise Dior, Otto Skorzeny, Johann von Leers, and Hans-Ulrich Rudel.
In August 1962 Savitri signed the Cotswold Agreement which established the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS), and attended Colin Jordan's Gloucestershire conference. At this conference she met, and was greatly impressed by, George Lincoln Rockwell. When Rockwell became the leader of the WUNS, he appointed William Luther Pierce the editor of its new magazine: National Socialist World (1966–1968). Along with articles by Jordan and Rockwell, Pierce devoted nearly eighty pages of the first issue of the magazine to a condensed edition of The Lightning and the Sun. Because of the enthusiastic response, Pierce included chapters from Gold in the Furnace and Defiance in subsequent issues.
After retiring from teaching in 1970, Savitri Devi spent nine months at the Normandy home of her close friend Françoise Dior while she was working on her memoirs; although she was welcome at first, her annoying personal habits began to disrupt life at the presbytery (among her habits, she did not take baths during her stay and she continually chewed garlic). Concluding that her pension would go much further in India and encouraged by Françoise Dior, she flew from Paris to Bombay on 23 June 1971. In August, she moved to New Delhi, where she lived alone, with a number of cats and at least one cobra.
Savitri Devi continued to correspond with Nazi enthusiasts in Europe and the Americas, particularly with Colin Jordan, Matt Koehl and other neo-Nazis. Ernst Zündel proposed a series of taped interviews and published a new edition of The Lightning and the Sun in 1979.
