Made a few comments yesterday on a thread by @omarali50 where he retweeted an old tweet of @ARanganathan72 about the mistranslation of the Nazi symbol 'Hakenkreuz' as 'Swastika' in english. https://twitter.com/omarali50/status/1340735980366483456
The ensuing exchange threw up some interesting questions... 1/n

1. When was the word Swastika used to describe the Hakenkreuz in English?

2. When was Hakenkreuz adopted as a symbol of Nazi ideology?

3. Was the symbolism of Hakenkreuz influenced by an ancient Aryan identity or christianity?

Did I get it right @vgan15? 2/n

Swastika started getting attention from western academicians in late 19th century and really shot up in popularity during the 1880's. In late 19th or early 20th century, Swastika would been one of the most popular good luck charm appropriated by the west 3/n

A report by Thomas Wilson for the US National museums in 1894 wonderfully compiled the then existing knowledge of Swastika. It is meticulous and very clearly written with almost no bias from Mr. Wilson. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40812/40812-h/40812-h.htm 4/n

This also happens to be the first recorded instance where an English speaker tried to compile all the crooked cross like symbols and used the umbrella term of Swastika in English. Until then, the word Swastika did not exist in any english dictionary or encyclopedia 5/n

Wilson examined different forms of cross and concludes that Swastika is the most ancient one of them all. He complied various definitions of Swastika as recorded by different researchers and it is understood that it means 'good being' in Sanskrit and is an auspicious sign. 6/n

Until then, Swastika, as a symbol was known by different names in different languages because the symbol existed almost everywhere in the world, in Asia, Europe, northern Africa and the Americas. Also in Great Britain. So, what did the English call the symbol? Fylfot. 7/n

Although Swastika was an auspicious symbol in India, the symbol meant different things for different people. So, using Swastika as an umbrella term for all crooked crosses was a little ham-fisted attempt by Wilson. Even Max Mueller objects to this as you can read below 8/n

So, is this when the German 'Hakenkreuz' started being called as Swastika? Interestingly, no! In fact, the report mentions finding variants of swastika in Germany but mentions no name in German. 'Hakenkreuz' was barely used until then and was relegated to vocabulary books 9/n

So, to answer the first question, 'Hakenkreuz' wasn't actually translated into English. By the time germans started using Hakenkreuz as an anti-semitic symbol, the English speaking world had already picked up on the word Swastika and called any crooked cross symbol as such. 10/n

Nazi adoption of the symbol is curiously tied with the discovery of the ruins of the ancient city of Troy. It's an interesting story.

Read here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/man-who-brought-swastika-germany-and-how-nazis-stole-it-180962812/

11/n

What the above and many other articles don't mention is what happened between the discovery of Swastikas in Troy in 1870's and adoption of Hakenkreuz by Hitler in 1920's. Schliemann was an amateur archaeologist. He did not understand the significance of his find 12/n

So, he consulted his friends Max Mueller(yes, the same guy who didn't want to call 'Swastika' found outside India as Swastika) and Émile-Louis Burnouf, an orientalist and a leading expert of Sanskrit. Aaand, he was also an anti-semite and a propounder of Aryan master race 13/n

Burnoud made a bunch of dubious claims (debunked by Wilson in his monumental report on Swastika) which was covered in Schliemann's book 'Troy and its remains' and concluded that Suastika is an essential symbol of the Aryan race.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45190/45190-h/45190-h.htm#page_047 14/n

Quick detour: It's funny how Schliemann sucks up to Burnouf in his book showering him with adjectives every time he is mentioned in the text. He also shamelessly lays claim to the treasure he discovered and refuses to share it with the Turkish government. 15/n

In any case, the popularization of the flawed idea of Swastika as the symbol of Aryan race led to the appropriation of the symbol by the German 'Völkische' national movement gaining steam at the juncture of 19th and 20th century. 16/n

Poetically, the year Burnouf breathed his last, 1907, was also the year when the Swastika was first used as a symbol of Aryan dominance by a secret society called 'Order of the New Templars' (Ordo Novi Templi, or ONT) in Austria by Lanz von Liebenfels, an Austrian racialist. 17/n

So, in early 20th century, as most of the west started embracing Swastika as a 'cool' motif, it was also being appropriated secretly by an anti-semitic and racist underground movement, kinda like 14/88 or 18 today, culminating in becoming the Nazi symbol we know today. 18/n

Coming to the last question. Did Hitler derive the Hakenkreuz symbolism from Aryan theory or christianity? I mentioned in my tweet yesterday about the influence of Hakenkreuz in the Austrian Lambach abbey where Hitler studied. 19/n https://twitter.com/anonymityismyth/status/1340776313112698880

But @omarali50 wasn't convinced. Fair enough. That single reason isn't very convincing. To understand it better, we have to examine if Swastika was ever used in Christian symbolism. For that, we turn to our good friend Wilson again and see what he writes. 20/n

According to Wilson's literature survey, there is quite some evidence to the use of Swastika in early Christian religious symbology, even going as far as to propose a theory where different symbols, including Swastika were considered before settling on the Cross we see today 21/n

Being an overtly Christian symbol is one thing but being anti-semitic is another. It's not like the cross is considered anti-semitic today. So, what makes Swastika anti-semitic? Wilson offers some clues.

In addition to being Aryan, Swastika actively excludes the semites 22/n

Religion was a complicated affair in the Nazi party. The progenitor of Nazism, the Völkisch movement was both pagan and Christian. Hitler set out to create a new religion, positive christianity, which retained some aspects of christianity while also paganizing it 23/n

In his examination of the Völkisch roots of Nazi party, Samuel Koehne notes that they party initially embraced aspects of both christianity and German paganism to further their political agenda but increasingly turned anti-christian in later years 24/n https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/central-european-history/article/were-the-national-socialists-a-volkisch-party-paganism-christianity-and-the-nazi-christmas/C1CBB1170357D162E61B7764E45F57E9

You can see the support Nazi party got from the Völkisch crowd not only in Germany but also Norway. As noted in a book about anti-semitism in Norway, the followers had a mishmash of religious ideas where they constructed some kind of Aryan Christ 25/n

So, the answer to the third question is, maybe both. But from all these readings I can only see Hitler as the megalomaniac that he was. He appropriated whatever ideas he could to get a broad support, grab complete power and became that 'Aryan Jesus' that his followers wanted. n/n