Part One: Behind the Swastika

a wonderful premise for a show. How are you doing today, Chelsea.

a religious symbol that goes back real far. And so the fact that it's primarily most people have the same reaction you have, which is like swasika, that's like the Nazi thing, which causes problems for people for whom it's like an old a religious symbol that goes back a long time. So that's that's what we're going to talk about this week because there's a lot of history here that most people are unaware of. So, yeah, are you ready to learn all about swastika's?

country who is of Jewish ancestry. He introduces the Nuremberg Laws and I think nineteen thirty five, which bring international attention to a growing stream of outrages that are going to culminate in the Holocaust. And while all this is happening over in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, the congregants of the Adath emmanual synagogue watch in stultified horror is Hitler's bigotry empowers anti Semites across the globe like many Ds for a Jews, they raise money to help their relatives

immigrate from Europe. They write furious letters to newspapers ignoring Hitler's crimes. And you know, they worry more than anything else, right, which is understandable. You know, how much further will this

hate spread? Are they safe even in New Jersey? And while they're coping with all this, which is a lot to have on your mind, your conscience, one of their congregants notices something during a service, which is that in the vestibule of their synagogue there's a mosaic, a beautiful handmade mosaic that features dozens and dozens and dozens of swastikas.

Now this is obviously a problem, right, you don't want to have that in your synagogue in the nineteen thirties, and after a quick discussion, they decide to pave the swastikas out. Fast forward about one hundred years, you know, you have World War Two, all that that horrible stuff happens.

You know, the rebuilding process occurs afterwards, you know, life goes on, and on December fifth, twenty twenty one, for the first time in like ninety years or so, the Adath Emmanual Synagogue finds itself again with a swastika near the vestibule. Now this one had been applied by a sticker wielded by some unknown Nazi who adds in writing the message we are everywhere. Now that's a chilling, horrifying,

depressing story. But in between those two incidents, the the swastikas that had been placed inside the vestibule of the synagogue long before the rise of Hitler, and the swastika added there in the twenty twenties by a Nazi. In between those two incidents is a really fascinating and strange story, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. Unlike a lot of you know, the swastika is almost certainly the most well known hate symbol in the world.

But unlike a lot of other particularly famous hate symbols, the Confederate flag, for example, the Klansman's hood, the SS lightning bolts, the swastika is not in and of itself problematic. And what I mean by that is the swastika was not created as a symbol of hate. It was turned into one later. And one of the things that you understand, like you start to learn when you look into this, is that not only is the swastika something that predates the Nazis, it may be one of, if not the

oldest complex symbols created by human beings. Now there's a lot of debate about this. Scholarship over the swastika has invited vigorous debate for very obvious reasons, over both the geographic and the temporal nature of its origins. When it comes to the word itself, we do have a lot clearer of an origin. We know exactly where the word swastika came from, and its origins are Sanskrit, and it does mean, as you noted, well being, good luck, and fortune.

That is like the meaning of the word swastika. And in fact, the first recorded instance of the word swastika predates the first recorded instance of the symbol swastika in the Mdus Valley, right so in you know, India, that kind of region. The word swastika seems to predate the actual use of the symbol. This is again, whenever you're talking about stuff that's old, the dates are kind of fluid.

But best sort of assumption is that like around the fourth millennium BCE is when the swastika first shows up in the Indus Valley, right, So that's pretty old, you know.

or whatever, but like the oldest complex shape. There's no way to prove that right, that's an absolutely unprovable just because of the age of everything involved here. But there's not really anything that's like a clearer like like bet for the oldest symbol. By the way, we're talking about like this within the context of the swastika arising in the fourth millennium BCE in the Indus Valley. It goes back way further than that now for a long time.

And most people, if you ask, most people who are kind of casually familiar, they say, oh, yeah, it was a symbol in India right well before the Nazis picked it up. That is not the oldest recorded instance of the use of the swastika. And I'm going to quote now from an article in the BBC. If you want to see just how deeply rooted the swastika pattern is in Europe, a good place to start is Kiev, where the National Museum of the History of Ukraine has an

impressive range of exhibits. Among the museum's most highly prized treasures is a small ivory figurine of a female bird made from the tusk of a mammoth. It was found in nineteen oh eight at the Paleolithic settlement of Mizine near the Russian border. On the torso of the bird is engraved an intricate meander pattern of joined up swastikas. It is the oldest identified swastika pattern in the world and has been radiocarbon dated to an astonishing fifth teen

thousand years ago. Whoa, So we were making swastikas way before we had cities, right Like, there's yeah, like, this is an ancient, ancient symbol. It was found with a bunch of phallic a bunch of dicks, right like, it was found with a bunch of dicks, because it's a fertility symbol. You know, you see that kind of stuff

all over the world. Now, I think people might expect us to given the present war in Ukraine and the fact that both Ukraine and Russia have serious problems with far right neo Nazi combat organizations, you might expect us to go into that here, but it's not really relevant. We're talking fifteen thousand years ago, so one way or the other, it has nothing to do with the present

issues with the far right in that part of the world. Again, this is it like predates the First City by like five thousand years and despite the shocking age of the Ukrainian swastik is. This does not mean that they originate, that the symbol itself was first used near Kiev or any you know, anywhere in that region, Because there's a fascinating theory, and I was completely unaware of this until I started doing my research as to where the swastika

came from. Now, again, when scholarship around the swastika starts in kind of the eighteen hundreds, one of the assumptions is that, and this is going to play into the Nazis later, it has to have started at a single place.

the case. The swastika probably arose independently in a number of parts of the world, and the kind of best explanation as to how came in nineteen sixty five from a paleontologist named Valentina Bibikova, who was looking at this Ukrainian piece of art with swastikas in it, depositive that a probable origin for the symbol itself is the actual structure of mammoth ivory, because when you cut mammoth ivory into cross sections, there's a naturally occurring pattern within the

ivory that looks kind of like a swastika. And that could explain very easily why there's variations of the same symbol all over the world. It was people hunting that and other kind of animals with ivory that might make a similar pattern in the cross sections.

world kind of arrive at the swastika independently. One noteworthy example of the use of the symbol comes from the Akan people of Ghana, who used it in their gold weights at around fourteen hundred a d. You can find some photos of these online and they look like Nazi gold, right, Like look that you would guess that's probably like some stolen Nazi gold, But these predate the Nazis by you know,

five hundred something years. Fascinating, right, so fascinating, yeah, yeah, and it is kind of we'll be talking about this. But it also the fact that when you see this you immediately are like, oh, that's some stolen Nazi gold does point to how potent the symbol remains as a symbol of evil too, just like because of you know,

dem Nazis. But yeah, So in eighteen ninety four, a historian named Thomas Wilson wrote one of the it might have been the first modern histories of the swastika, attempting to use kind of modern historiography and scientific method to determine where it came from. And it was Thomas Wilson, who first made the claim that the swastika was quote probably the first symbol made with definite intention in human history.

By this, he means not just a representative image, but one that was passed from person to person, tribe to tribe, and traveled intentionally with meaning intact across cultures. There is no way of proving this, and it seems like Wilson, it's probably fair to say now he was coming on a little strong, but it's not too much to say that the swastika would have been one of the first symbols to spread around the world. And there is some

mystery as to why. While these symbols presence in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and North Africa can be explained via the known and documented patterns of trade, really kind of the only way to just like it's also been found as we're going to talk about all over the Americas. And this is why I started by talking about that piece of mammoth ivory, because this is really the only explanation, right like there was not people were not like walking from Kiev to or the location of modern day Kiev

to North America fifteen thousand years ago. From what we can tell people indigenous people in the Americas who were here much longer than that, we're using swastika's much further back than that. Whenever you talk about kind of the timing here, you know that's a complicated and very politically, shall we say, dicey story. But we do know that

swastikas were in use. And I'm going to stop calling them swastikas in a second, because the people of the Americas didn't call them that, But we're in use, particularly in what is now the Americans southwest and West coast,

for a very long time. The Navajo people who have for a considerable period of time inhabited a large portion of modern Arizona, New Mexico southern California, have been using the swastika since kind of the prehistoric period, and they called it, and what we'll be calling it when we refer to their use of it, is the whirling log. Right that is the name of the symbol, not just for the Navajo, but for a number of other tribes kind of in that part of the Americas, and it

is it is representative. It's called the whirling log because it's representative of a specific story. And without getting into too much detail about spiritual beliefs that are outside of my depth. It's one of these tales where like you've got a heroic character who is forced on a dangerous journey. He receives the aid of gods, gods and spirits and he kind of learns mystic lessons along the way, right,

and the whirling log is representative of this story. The Navajo are not the only indigenous people of the Americas to use variants of the whirling log, but they're probably the most well documented ancient American users. We don't know how long the symbol has been in use over here because the primary way in which they used it was for these kind of sand drawings as part of religious rituals. So it was in a way that most of the time when it was used, it was not kind of being preserved long term.

very far outside of my wheeledhouse. But it was. It was used widely, and it was used widely in a fashion that, like most of the uses, would not have been preserved for long periods of time, because that was not the point of using the symbol. So I want to quote from an article in the Collector's Guide of New Mexico talking about some of the historiography on the

use of the whirling log. In his book The Swastika Symbol in Navajo Textiles, Dennis J. Anger cites Thomas Wilson's research in the eighteen nineties that the earliest evidence of the swastika in America was found in excavations in Tennessee and Ohio. That the swastika found its way to the Western hemisphere in prehistoric times cannot be doubted. Anger quotes Wilson's writing one of the specimens shows its antiquity and its manufacture by the Aborigines, untainted by contact with the whites.

That's obviously eighteen nineties language here. But it does originate it. You find it in a number of parts of North America. I believe there's evidence of it in South America Iyo, Yeah, Ohio and Tennessee. It was a big brass swastika that

was found like underground as part of an excavation. And you know, so again, this goes back quite as far as we can tell, like the likeliest I think the likeliest assumption is that it was created, it was developed or whatever independently by people in the Americas, right, which happens with a bunch of stuff, right kind of Famously, the bow and arrow is developed independently by a number of different cultures. You know this, There's no reason why

the swastika wouldn't. It's not more complex than a bow and arrow, for sure. But yeah, so I have a.

something that maybe like a spindle whirl, you know. Who knows where it came, like how it first got used, because it's its earliest documented use kind of is outside of the whirling log use that the Navajo are using in the southeast part of the continent, because we're talking about like Tennessee, Ohio. So we probably will never know specifically who had it first in the Americas, but maybe even it might have originated in a couple of different

cultures in the Americas independently. You know, there's no reason why that wouldn't have been the case. Now, that book I just cited from the swastika symbol in Navajo textiles was written in the eighteen nineties, because the swastika happened to be a very big topic at just that point in time. And this does bring us back to the Nazis. It all starts with a very what I would call a stupid genius, a guy named Heinrich Schleimann, and Heinrich Schleiman is the man who's going to find the ruins

of Troy, and he's really bad at it. He does succeed in finding the ruins of Troy, but he's like the worst guy to find the ruins of Troy, such an idiot. So Schleman's an interesting character. Thato was born December twenty sixth, eighteen twenty two in a town that I'm not going to try to pronounce. It's in Germany. It's one of those German towns with just a mess of a name. He's the fifth of nine chow and

his dad is a dirt poor pastor. And when Heinrich is seven, he becomes fascinated with the myth of the Trojan War. Now, at that point in time and kind of the mid to late eighteen hundreds, when he's going to school and whatnot, the Trojan War is seen as probably an apocryphal story. Most serious scholars at least don't believe that it's a literal story about a literal war for Troy. It's kind of more of a mythological tale. But he falls in love with this story, and he

certainly doesn't assume that it's a myth. Like many poor kids of his era, he was sent by his father to go live and work with a relative. You hear this kind of story a lot. We've covered a lot of Germans on this show, interestingly enough, and a lot of them have a similar background where it's like, we're kind of poor my dad's you know, his dad sent him off to live with his uncle or whatever, and when he's nine, he enrolls in a school where he lives away from his family for a couple of years.

He was a lonely kid. One of the few constants in his early life which was difficult was his obsession with Greek and Roman mythology. His dad encourages this at first, but starts to get worried about it kind of later on because Heinrich just doesn't give it up. But then his father gets accused of embezzling church funds, which puts an end to Heinrich's education and forces him to apprentice

as a grocer. He would later claim that his love of Homer really blossomed while he was walking home from work one day and he comes across this drunk guy in the street who's just kind of reciting parts of the odyssey. I don't know why that hit him so hard, but it did. And Schleimann spent the next few years going through something of an odyssey himself. He lost his job after he started coughing up blood randomly one day.

This is the eighteen hundreds, and yeah, the thing you do, and what do you do when you start coughing up blood randomly? You get a job as a cabin boy on a boat, so that way they can at least throw your body overboard when you die. Right, But he doesn't die. Even though the boat he's on crashes in a storm, he survives and makes it to age twenty two, which point he gets a gig for an import export firm. This is where he's going to actually like shine because

he has an excellent head for business. He's extremely successful. He makes a bunch of money, picks up Dutch in Russian, and by the time he's like thirty six years old, he's rich and respected. And he decides, I'm going to retire. Right, I've already stared death in the face a whole bunch of times. I'm not working anymore. I'm going to take my money and I am going to roll the dice on what's always been my life dream, finding the city

of Troy and proving that it was real. And I know you're wondering, where do the swastikas come in?

ever existed. Now, since ancient times, there had been a general area in Anatolia, which today is just kind of like we call Turkey, but that's like the name for the geographical region, and that area called there was a part of anatolia called the Troad that had been in like ancient times when the Romans are running shit. This is where everyone had just like said, Troy had been. And this is kind of one of the first, one of the first like pieces of nerd culture, right, because

Western nerd culture really starts with the Ily in the Odyssey. Right, So in ancient Roman days, we're talking two thousand years ago, rich nerds are like traveling to the Troad to like visit the sites that they think the Iliad took place in, right, Like they're probably dressing up as like Hector and Achilles, you know that. Yeah, Yeah, that's the birth of nerd culture right there. Anyway, whatever, there's no evidence. Again, there was not hard evidence that the city of Troy had

been there. It's just the place people had gone to. Schleiman, though, was certain that it was real and certain that the Troad, somewhere in there was the actual ruins of Troy. Since he had money and time, he decided to travel to the likeliest spot and dig the fucker up.

easy to persuade. Now, this is a time when Calvert, you know, kind of convinced is Shleman that like he's got a spot to dig that he thinks is where Troy is. This is a period of time where the Ottoman Empire, which governs the area is kind of the sick man of Europe, and so it's it's a great place to be a rich guy who wants to like

pay to fuck around. Because normally most countries, if you're like, I want to dig up one of your like historical landmarks just to see what's under there, they'd be like, well, no, you're not allowed to do that. But Shleman is kind of just able to bribe his way into things. It's a little bit messier of a period of time, and shockingly Calvert was right. He picks the right area. He does, in fact know where the ruins of Troy are, but

it's not immediately obvious. They start finding like ruins and shit aphemera, but it's not obvious to them because they don't really know what they're doing that these are ruins of Troy that they found. They're just kind of coming across pieces of pottery, old bits of buildings. But in Shleiman's mind, Troy is this like wealthy city and everything's plated in gold and colorful, and they're just finding like old crap because like that's what everything old looks like.

Unless you really know what you're looking at, it's just like junk most of the.

they keep going deeper. And I'm gonna quote from the Smithsonian magazine now, as after his first excavation season failed to yield promising results, Schleiman adopted a new tactic, instructing his team to dig an enormous forty five foot deep trench. His methods a note Jill Rubikalba and Eric H. Klein and digging for Troy from Homer to Hissarlik were savage and brutal, even by the standards of the nineteenth century.

The authors add, he plowed through layers of soil and everything in them without proper record keeping, no mapping of finds, few descriptions of discoveries. So he finds Troy, but he digs past it and destroys most of the ruins of Troy, or at least a lot of them, until he finds some gold that he decides must have belonged to the famous king Priam. Archaeologists will later prove it's way older

than that. Like, he did find some cool looking gold shit, but it is not from fucking Priam, and he he obliterates most of the actual traces of historic Troy because Schliemann is kind of a we aboo, right, Like he's a Homer we aboo right. Anyway, very funny story. How this relates back to our premise today is that one of the clear discoveries that Heinrich did make was he finds a bunch of pottery in this mound, adorned with a fascinating symbol, the swastika. Now at this point people

knew the swastika is in use. Not only are the you know, the Navajo and other peoples in the Southwest using it, but it's in use all over you know, Southeast Asia, right. It is a religious symbol for Hindu people, it's a religious symbol for Buddhist people. You find it all over stuff in China. It's a very common symbol

in China as well, not just for Buddhists. So this is kind of and the reason why this sort of electrifies people is that when you're talking about the late eighteen hundreds, you know, think back to the episodes we've done on Helena Blovatsky and stuff. This is the origins of the stuff that's going to become Nazi race science

people are already talking about Aryans. They're talking about this kind of mythical precursor civilization that they believe seeded, you know, high civilization around the world that presumably to a lot of Europeans is like white, right, Like that's a big like belief at the time. And we know that like these Indo Aryan people that kind of start off in the Indus Valley have traveled around like up in through Southeast Asia, up through like modern day Russia and into Europe.

And the fact that they find swastikas in these ruins of Troy is kind of evidence of this root race, this precursor Aryan people. Right, That's how it gets interpreted by a lot of folks at the time. Right, this is proof of these theories that are starting to gain a lot of purchase among chunks of European society. Schleeman is fascinated by the swastika, and he continues, you know, it's a big deal when he finds what he thinks

is Troy, that we now know is something else. But he keeps doing archaeology around the world, often illegal archaeology, generally bad archaeology. But because a lot of people had not been digging in the place as he was, he also does find a lot of shit. And some of the shit he finds is that he keeps finding swastikas on stuff. Right. He would later decide that the swastika because he finds a bunch of swastikas in like old Jewish,

like religious icons and like temples and stuff. He decides that it's related to the Hebrew letter Tau, which is the sign of life and was ritualistically drawn on the foreheads of believers, which incidentally is how Charles Manson would later explain why he put a swastika on his forehead. Now note that I said how Manson explained, not why

he actually did it. But that is there. Manson is where like Manson is reading this kind of stuff decades later, right, because it's still relevant and sort of weird fringe occult communities and whatnot. Speaking of Charles Manson, why you know, who would have been a lot better at running a cult? Who's that our sponsors?

Let's continue with the episode. Schleiman's findings of the swastika are read attentively by growing communities of Aryan nerds, these kind of proto Nazis, and anthropologist Gwendolin Lake will later write, quote, when Heinrich Schleiman discovered swastika like decorations on pottery fragments and all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants

of the site had been Aryan all along. The link between the swastika and Indo European origin, once forged, was impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto a universal symbol which hint served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non Aryan, or rather non German and German identity. So this is going to take off, particularly among the Germans right, which are just starting to be a thing. You know, he's in Troy eighteen sixty eight.

Germany gets invented two years later, right, Maybe I don't know, we could have just done Belgium too, and probably saved ourselves a lot of trouble. But you know, whatever would have been nice would have been nice. So the growing swastika craze among European intellectual weirdos and Americans who are themselves weird fanboys of European intellectual weirdos leads us right

back to the Navajo. Now, up until the late eighteen hundreds, the swastika or the whirling log in this context was used only in religious ceremonies by at least by by the Navajo and other peoples in the Southwest, primarily like sand paintings. But there's these two Americans who start opening like Caucasian Americans who start opening trading posts in Navajo Territory.

And these guys names are Lorenzo Hubble and JB. Moore, And they're aware of the swastika craze that's sweeping across Europe as a result of Schleiman's work, and they start they become aware of the fact that the whirling log

is in use throughout the Southwest. Now, another thing that's happening at this time is that the quote unquote West, you know, in that sort of conception of life like the Wild West whatever, which is obviously flawed at inaccurate historical conception, but it is a popular conception in the minds of a lot of Americans, particularly in the East Coast,

has ignited a craze for all things Native American. Right, both Americans and the coasts are kind of obsessing over generally inaccurate stories and pieces of you iconography, items that had been owned or made by Native Americans. And this is also a huge deal over in Europe.

Bosque Redondo. Fascinating book, really interesting piece of history about how effectively the Navajo averted a genocide that was, you know, being carried out by the United States. Really interesting story. But anyway, there's a lot of like really good silver products being made and there's tremendous demand for them, particularly over in the cities of the East Coast and in Europe, and win Hubble and Moore, see that the swastika is, you know, or in this case, the whirling log is

a simple in use here. They're like, you guys, got to start putting that on some of this silver stuff and some of this other artwork that you're putting out,

because that shit'll sell. People love the like white people love swastikas, right now, you got to start making this on stuff, right and so yeah, and again a lot of the stuff that's been made is being made by folks in the area, like Pueblo people, but it all kind of gets marketed as like you know, a specific you know, these are you know, Navajo relics and whatnot that we're selling to you in New York or whatever.

And the two most popular motifs in the artwork that's being taken from the south West and sold over in the cities of the East coasts are Indian heads and swastikas. Those are the two like things that that white people want to buy when they're buying this stuff.

The item was years made years earlier, probably in the late eighteen hundreds, but like like that's where it was sold, so probably it was made and then it got stamped with a date later on so it could be sold at this big expo where there's a ton of tourists, right, presumably Europeans who are coming over to the Americas for this World's Fair, and they want to buy something that's like native American, right, because that's a craze over in Europe,

and the people selling this stuff know that, like, well, Europeans love them some swastikas, they're all they can't shut up about it. So let's get some of that shit out and let's put it on the fucking table.

but like they're lying, you know. In nineteen oh six, More starts offering swastika spoons in his catalog, and by the time the spoon craze dies out, and around nineteen fifteen, as Klan writes, quote, you had so many stamps and dies with swastikas that the symbol appears on bracelets, sides of rings, ash trays, salt sellers. Any silver stamped item

was fair game for the swastika camp. And again this is the like yeah, uh uh yeah, that's so, that's that's kind of how the swastika becomes a big popular thing in the Americas as like an actual uh chashki, right, Like that's how it's this sacred symbol that's used in religious observances. And then Americans are like, see what's happening with Schleimann, see this kind of craze over Native American products, and are like, well, let's just fucking take this shit

and sell it at world's fairs and stuff. What's capitalize on this baby, you know, that's what we fucking do.

from marketing and product logos in the country. If I could compare the swastika in the Americas in the early nineteen hundreds to any modern symbol. It would probably be the peace sign like it is used. Think about like a peace sign on a can of Arizona iced t That's how they use the swastika in this period of time. And again, some Americans, particularly in the cities, would be familiar with it as an aryan symbol. Many of the would have seen it in purported Indian artwork, you know,

spoons and the like. But they also wouldn't have looked askance at seeing a swastika printed on the label of a cigar, which happened regularly, or on a color for a ad for Coca Cola, who used the swastika freely in both print ads and decorative chatch games. Oh yeah, this actually, this causes a problem last year because there's this guy in Chattanooga with a metal detector who's just kind of like walking around the woods or whatever, and he finds an old metal swastika with a Coca Cola

logo on it. Wow, advertising bottles for just five cents. And Sophie's going to show you this this Coca gar I.

magazine the Swastika. That was the Girls Club's official magazine. From nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen, Every Girls Club member would receive a colorful magazine studded with the future symbol of the Third Reich. Members would save for weeks in order to be able to afford the club's most coveted piece of merch, a diamond covered swastika pin. One add cheerfully proclaims what every girl wants her own swastika.

von Liebenfels or Adolph Lands is his real name. He calls himself again, whenever you see one of these guys who doesn't, who decides to pick up a name with a Vaughan in it, they're trying to pretend to be German nobility. So Adolph Lands is a Christian gnostic and a former member of the Cistercian Order, or at least an initiate into the Cistercian Order. I don't think he've

everfunk comes a full member. In eighteen ninety two, he experienced a vision that caused convinced him that there was a coming war between Arian and the lesser races of the world. So he decides to dedicate his life to preparing the ground for such a conflict. In eighteen ninety nine, he founds what he calls the Order of the New Templar. It focuses on advocating for racial purity and controlled breeding. It also pushed what Lands calls an aero Christian doctrine,

which is in many ways a precursor for Nazism. Now. Lands is very much a medievalist, and he is obsessed with a somewhat historically questionable view that the Templars of the Crusades had been fighting a secret war to wipe out evil rather than they were operating like a bank basically right, Like that's you know. So he decides he's going to revive the order and he runs it from Cassel Werfenstein. Yes, if you're a fan of those video games, this is the actual origin of all of that shit. Yeah,

castl Werfenstein. So he starts carrying out ceremonies, occult ceremonies there dedicated to the Aryans and sort of this like coming war with the lesser races, and all of those ceremonies are conducted under a new flag that he has designed for himself, a red swastika and blue lilies on a golden background. In nineteen oh five, he founds a magazine Ostara, which is the most racist magazine that you can imagine, more or less, and the cover of it, the logo is a drawing of a knight wearing robes

that look a little clanny, and they're bedecked with swastikas. Right, just this fucking night couldn't have more swastikas on sass. So midway through World War One and like nineteen sixteen, Lonz creates the term ariosophie to describe his new brand of Aryan race science. Among other things, he advocates for keeping brood mothers in convents for Aryan stud males to impregnate. This is more or less the policy that Heinrich Himmler, who also later will have a castle where he carries

out occult rituals, would attempt to follow. For the SS right, they have a Libans born program that is very much based on lands as ideas I actually read, you might find this fascinating, Jelsey. I read a book recently. It's called Swastikan Night, and it is a kind of dystopian future fiction about a future world where like the Nazis and Japan kind of split the world between them, and seven hundred years after the victory of the Nazis, they have basically wiped out the concept of women as like

a part of the human race. They're only used for breeding. The Nazis are all kind of like, it's kind of this almost Greek thing where they like, you know, have a lot of these sort of like relationships with each

other that are It's an odd book. What's interesting about it is that it was written in nineteen thirty seven by an early feminist, So it's this like treatise because her attitude is that the root of like Nazi authoritarianism was the domination of women by men, and so it's this her kind of meditation on what society men would build if they could eliminate women effectively. It's a really

interesting book. It is probably the book that inspires nineteen eighty four or Well takes a number of structural elements from the book fascinating. The Feminist Press has a version of it that they put out with a really good forward. I devoured it in about an afternoon. Really interesting book, Swastika Night. But it's very much based because again, nineteen

thirty seven is when this book gets written. One of the interesting things about it is that, like in Envisioning a Nazi Future, there's no reference to Himmler or the SS because in thirty seven he wasn't really as big of a figure in the Nazis that like somebody in

the UK or whatever would have known about. But the author of that book is really familiar with Lands and with a lot of the stuff Lands is saying about his desire to sort of take women out of society and make them into brood mares for the anyway, interesting stuff. Check out swastika Knight. If you're interested in that kind of thing, it's a fascinating piece of history. So LANs has his castle, he's doing his proto Nazi rituals, right.

He's got this magazine Ostara, and he's got this swastika flag that's becoming increasingly influential on like this chunk of the occult anti Semitic rite. And one of the things we know is that Hitler is a frequent enough reader of Ostara that kind of during his rise to power, he visits Lands to get copies of issues of the magazine that he had been missing. Lanza's ideas and his use of the swastika were hugely influential in the growing far right, which is going to be supercharged when the

German army collapses in nineteen eighteen. Now, nineteen eighteen is coincidentally the year the Girls Club stops using the swastika for their magazine. Yeah, this might have had something to do with the fact that after the Germany loses you start seeing a lot more swastikas on a lot more like murderous far right militias. Maybe the Girls Club didn't want that press, you know that it might have been a fall.

it's confused. You can refer back to our Karl May episodes for sort of more on that. But yeah. The first use documented use by like a far right millet militia in Germany using a swastika was in nineteen nineteen, when a specific unit of Freikorps veterans who gunned down socialists in the street, like have a bunch of swastikas on their shit, Like that's the symbol that they fight under.

This is after the empire kind of collapses. The use of swastika's buy the different right wing militant groups is seen as a hopeful sign by the Aryan nerds and anti Semitic wizards of the Tula Society, which strongly pushed for the use of swastikas among the far right in Weimar Germany. The Nazi Party is going to adopt the symbol in nineteen twenty, and Hitler probably picks the swastika because of Lonz's use of it in his flag, because

again Hitler's reading Ostara. But there's other stories you'll get as to why Hitler picked it that are a little weirder. One that you sometimes hear that's almost certainly not true, almost like ninety nine percent definitely apocryphal, is that his mom had a swastika on her headstone when she was buried, and the symbols stuck in Hitler's mind ever since. People were because it was kind of a good luck symbol. There's definitely people that get like a swastika on their

gravestone back in the day. It's not like I don't think it's impossible. But this is much less credible to me than the explanation Stephen Heller gives in his book and excerpts from Minkomf devoted to symbolism. He wrote in a stupa defyingly formal prose, replete with euphemisms and epithets that enforced his own self styled heroism, yet convincingly argued the need for a powerful symbol, emblem, logo for his

nascent party. The lack of such symbols, he wrote, had not only disadvantages for the moment, but it was unbearable for the future. The disadvantages were above all, that the party members lacked every outward sign of their belonging together. Well for the future, it was unbearable to lack an emblem that had the character of a symbol of the movement and that as such could be put up in

opposition to the international the Communists. Hitler called the first time he witnessed a large Communist Party rally, where he saw a sea of red on flags, scarves, and flowers among the one hundred thousand in attendants, I personally could feel and understand how easily a man of the people succumbs to the suggestive charms of such a grand and

massive spectacle. And so that's probably like that's realistically, he's looking for a powerful symbol that can be like that red flag that people can like you nine under that's already iconic, and the swastikas everywhere. People are comfortable with it.

People like it. It's a striking symbol. The fact that it's been around for so long is proof that it's just some people are just drawn to swastika's right even today, Like the best if you're writing a fucking book that it involves in any way the fucking Nazis, right, best thing you do is stick a swastika on the cover because motherfucker's walking past and the book stopped. Like they'll stop at a swastika to look at it, right.

only person who ever does this. Where Hitler is unique is that he tilts his hogen Kroi forty five degrees from horizont And this is the way you're going to see it in like the nineteen thirty five national flag

of Germany, his swastika is usually tilted right. There is one more point that kind of argues for the fact that Lansa's swastika flag in his magazine Ostara was the influence for Hitler, which is that when the Nazis come to power, Hitler bans Lonzo's writing, and Heller suggests, quote, this is perhaps a way for Hitler to disavow the fact that he was influenced by anything other than his own immaculate conceptions.

the swastika in any fucking product imaginable. And I think my favorite in retrospac funny swastika themed product is probably this tube of fresh antiseptic deodorant cream, which also heals and suits tender sore feet for just ten cents, little, just a little, swastika underneath the picture of this lady who smells nice thanks to the cream.

it to self fucking deodorant, right. Yeah, that is a big part of why it's a useful symbol for the Nazis. And this kind of comes back to We talk a lot on the show when we're talking about fascism. We talk a lot about Umberdo Echoes definition of fascism. And one of the things Echo notes that is among his kind of most salient observations is that fascism. One an inherent characteristic of fascism is that it is syncretic. And

here's how he describes what that means. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, the combination of different forms of belief or practice, such a combination which tall must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and wherever they seem to say different or incompatible things, it is only because all are eluding allegorically to the

same primeval truth. If you browse in the shelves that in American bookstores are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and stone Hinge, that is a symbol of her fascism. And one of the things that Echoes talking about here is this use of pieces of history, of iconography, of mythology that you can adopt into a fascist understanding of the world, and that acts as kind of a llure to different groups

of people. Right, you know, you're into stone Hinge, you're into Aliens, you're into you know, Saint Augustine. If you can find a way to kind of like it's this thing QAnon does, right. It absorbs everything sort of into itself as part of its ability to spread, and.

That's just sort of inherent in most cultures at least, But back in the day, basically everyone felt fine with the swastika. So you make that your thing, and it's one of the things that can help draw It makes you seem come like less scary, it makes you seem more approachable. It's just one of the things that helps build the appeal of this movement. And yeah, this is

good stuff, just good, good shit. So beyond this. By the time the Nazis draw close to power in the early thirties, they had been marching and bleeding and fighting

under the swastika for a full decade. Some four hundred of them have died in sundry assassinations and street fights in the Weimar era, and these men, along with the dead of the beer Hall Putsch, had become sainted by the party and the bloody flags they fought under, bloody swastika flags started to gain a religious significance to the

devoted in Germany. George L. Moss, one of the twentieth centuries historians of Nazi Germany and also a survivor of the Holocaust himself, later observed it was the strength of fascism in general that it realized as other political movements and parties did not, that with the nineteenth century, Europe had entered a visual age, the age of political symbols such as the national flag or national anthem, which as instruments of mass politics, in the end proved more effective

than any didactic speeches. And that's where we're going to end today.

see they see red and they go after it. Uh. And you know, we don't quite do that, otherwise hospitals would be much scarier places. But we do react a certain way when we see that color, and it's effective for doing certain.

reacting to the world. Uh, on an unconscious is biological, animalistic level, And there seems to be I don't know, there's something about the swastika that feels like a collective consciousness type of symbol.

is going to be wildly different. But you and I cannot see a swastika even knowing intellectually this stuff and not see it as that right even you know, yeah, exactly, that's just the way it is. But you know what I can see and view objectively is your excellent podcast, American Hysteria. Well I can't see it, but I can listen to it.

anywhere that you find your podcast. We're on Instagram at American Hysteria Podcast. And I hope you guys come listen.