GOLD IN THE FURNACE is an ardent National Socialist's vivid and moving account of life in occupied Germany in the aftermath of World War II. Savitri Devie, is scathing in her description of Allied brutality and hypocrisy: millions of German civilians died from Allied firebombing; millions more perished after the war, driven from their homes by Russians, Czechs, and Poles; more than a million prisoners of war perished from planned starvation or outright murder in Allied concentration camps; untold thousands disappeared into slave labour camps from the Congo to Siberia.

Savitri Devi describes in vivid detail how individual National Socialists were subjected to 'de-Nazification' by Germany's democratic 'liberators': murder, torture, starvation, show-trials, imprisonment, and execution for the higher echelons: petty indignities and recantations extorted under the threat of imprisonment, hunger, and the denial of livelihood for ordinary party members. She also chronicles the systematic plunder of Germany by the Allies: the clear-cutting of ancient forests, the dismantling of factories, the theft of natural resources.

In spite of the disaster, Devi did not view it as the end of National Socialism, but as a purification - a trial by fire separating the base metal from the gold - a prelude to a new beginning. Thus she also devotes chapters to presenting the basic philosophy and constructive political programme of National Socialism.

GOLD IN THE FURNACE has been almost impossible to find. Published in a tiny edition by Savitri Devi's husband AK Mukherji in Calcutta in 1952, it was distributed privately by the authoress to her friends and comrades. A German translation appeared in 1982, a Spanish translation in 1995, but this is the first commercially available English-language edition of this classic work. This edition is published in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Savitri Devi's birth, on 30 September 1905.

The front cover shows a facsimile reproduction of the 1952 Calcutta edition of Gold in the Furnace.