The Swastika was a long time good luck charm of the Hindus. When Adolf Hitler came to power, he took the symbol and turned it on its side, because he thought it symbolized his power over people or something I guess. But anyway, ironic isn’t it how a good luck symbol was turned into something quickly associated with Anti-Semitism and racism.
The Swastika as a political symbol was first used during the civil war like riots in Germany in 1919-1920 by the rightwing paramilitary Freikorps unit Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, which was recruiting mainly from Naval soldiers from Kiel and was commanded by Korvettenkapitän Hermann Ehrhardt.
Ehrhardt originally supported Hitler, who’s background was from similar militias made up of disgrunteled WW1 veterans from Southern Germany, but later fell out with Hitler (Hitler actually ordered Ehrhardt to be executed during the “Night of the long knives”, also known as the Röhm-Affäre in June 1934, but Ehrhardt got warned by friends and decided to hide, armed with hunting rifles, in the extended forest of his residence. The city goons sent by Himmler to kill him didn’t dare to look for several armed men in the forest…). The reason of the arguments was that Ehrhardt was more of a monarchist, who wanted to have the Kaiser back instead of an all powerfull Hitler.
Ehrhardt’s group was also implicated in the Kapp-Putsch of 1921 and in the murder of the Republican foreign minister Rathenau, who, besides being Jewish, was also accused by the rightwingers of having sold out German interests in Versailles.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinebrigade_Ehrhardt
A good book about the Freikorps is “Der Fragebogen” (The Questionaire) by Ernst von Salomon, a former officer of the imperial navy and later follower of Ehrhardt. He himself was active in the Rathenau murder (he was standing guard while his comrades threw a grenade into the car of Rathenau), served time in a Weimar Republic gaol, and later fell out with Hitler himself (he was one of the friends protecting Ehrhardt with the rifles in the forest against Himmler’s SS thugs).
Jan
The Swastika appeared in many different cultures.
Wikipedia to the rescue!
Stoatman,
I mean the use of the Swastika in the modern, political sense. Somewhere I have seen a picture of an armoured car of said Marinebrigade Ehrhardt during the streetfighting in Berlin between Freikorps and communists in 1919, which had a Swastika painted on as recognition mark.
Jan