Ramana Hearted Hitler?!?

File under: The Siddhi of PR

[Ed.note: We've changed the category to The Siddhi of PR as what follows has turned out to be neo-Nazi propaganda. Please see the update at the bottom of this post.] It pains us greatly to put Ramana Maharshi in the category of Wackadoo Gurus, but after reading this, we just couldn't think of anything else that would fit:

In a 1980 article "Hitlerism & the Hindu World" published, in The National Socialist, Savitri explained the basis of Esoteric Hitlerism and related some of her experiences with the Hindus during the war. Quoting Ramana Maharishi, "one of the greatest spiritual personalities of modern India", the sage's reply to a question on Hitler was that "He is a gnani". Here is thus an unequivocal connection between the Hindu fanatic Maharishi and Hitler. This 'gnani', Devi explains, is a sage, one who is fully conscious through personal experience "of the eternal truths that express the Essence of the Universe." Indeed, Hitler's extermination of Semitic Jews was merely a later re-enactment of the Vedic Hindu-Aryan extermination of 'Asuras' (Assyrians) and 'Panis' (Phoenicians).

Of course, this may all be fabricated propaganda. At least, we hope it is.

Ramana Maharshi experts are invited to confirm our suspicions.

Update: It all turns out to be the hard spin of an ultra-rightist writer. Harlemgrrl does a little digging and comes up this:

In neo-Nazi circles, it is even claimed (here by Claudio Mutti on p.26), on the authority of one Sadhu Arunachala: A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi (1994, p.52) that Ramana Maharshi (d.1950), indisputably one of the greatest Hindu yogis of the 20th century, had declared: "It is possible that Hitler is a jnani, a divine instrument." If the account is true, Ramana's utterance sounds to me like the answer to a question posed by a visitor eager to hear a confirmation of his own idealization of Hitler: the sage did not commit himself to such a confirmation, but politely allowed that it was "possible",– like most things. Note the difference with Savitri Devi's rendering of Ramana Maharshi's opinion: "Someone asked Ramana Maharshi (..) what he thought of Hitler. The answer was brief and simple: 'He's a jnâni', i.e. a sage (…)." (p.73) This is her word against Sadhu Arunachala's. Either the latter has rendered Ramana's words softer and more conditional in deference to the anti-Hitlerian mood of the times, or she has rendered his words more decisive and unconditional to satisfy her own ideological preferences.

That's much more plausible. We are indebted to Harlemgrrl for providing the answer to what could have been the most vexing question in the history of gurudom.