Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  The study of ancient Nordic runes had been an integral part of Völkisch New Age literature. Guido von List had understood the importance of runes and had made them an integral part of his doctrine. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels also was a student of ancient symbols, and he was probably the first member of the Völkisch New Age to use the symbol that became the icon of Nazism. Known in German as the Hakenkreuz, meaning “crooked cross,” or “hooked cross,” the emblem is best known by the Sanskrit term swastika, meaning “well-being” or “auspicious.” From a runic perspective, the hakenkreuz can be seen as two Sig, or Sigel, runes superimposed on one another at a ninety-degree angle.

  Though it was not exactly unique, the swastika certainly qualified as primeval. Indeed, it had been used by ancient, albeit unrelated, cultures all over the world. It still is. It is often used to represent the sun, and often it implies, as in the Sanskrit word, good fortune. The author Joseph Campbell, best known for his popular works on comparative religion and mythology, has noted that the swastika had been depicted in human artifacts since at least 10,000 BC, when one was carved into a mammoth tusk by a paleolithic person near what is now Kiev in Ukraine. Since then, it has appeared often in decorative arts, from carvings to textiles, and in religious art around the world.

  Known in German as the Hakenkreuz, meaning “crooked cross” or “hooked cross,” this symbol is best known by the Sanskrit term “swastika,” meaning “well-being” or “auspicious.” Though it had been used globally for centuries, by such diverse peoples as the Buddhists in India and the Navajo in Arizona, the Nazis seized it and made it their ubiquitous emblem. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “An effective insignia can in hundreds of thousands of cases give the first impetus toward interest in a movement.” Author’s collection

  Archaeologists and anthropologists still argue whether it was passed around the world hand to hand, or whether the shape just occurred naturally to many people, as part of what the psychologist Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Some have suggested that it is a geometric form that occurred naturally in basket weaving. Astronomer Carl Sagan notes that jets of gas from spinning comets can pinwheel into the hooked-arm shape of a swastika. In his book Comet, Sagan published a Chinese illustration of such a comet from the Han Dynasty period (circa 150 BC).

  Archaeologists have found swastikas on Bronze Age pottery, and its use in Hinduism and Buddhism long predates the birth of Christianity and the use of the Christian cross as a symbol. Oriented both clockwise and counterclockwise, the swastika has also been found in numerous pre-Christian sites across Europe, from Ireland to the Balkans. It was used in ancient Greece, where it was known as the gammadion. In the regions of northern Europe that List and Lanz imagined as the origin of the Aryan race, swastikas were associated with the hammer of Thor. Swastikas later appeared on Christian churches, in association with secret societies such as the Teutonic Knights, and even in Jewish Kabalistic literature. It was also widely used as an official symbol in Finland and Estonia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  The archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, when excavating the site of ancient Troy in the 1860s, found swastikas in the ruins. Linking these with others that had been unearthed in Greece and northern Europe, he hypothesized ancient Indo-Europeans, migrating between India and Europe, shared a common religion, or at least a common religious symbol.

  And then Madame Blavatsky had used a swastika in the Theosophical Society’s seal, along with an ancient Egyptian ankh, the Star of David, and the ancient Ouroboros, a symbol of eternity that depicts a dragon eating its own tail.

  Though the Ariosophists would make a big deal of the swastika’s presence throughout the geography of Indo-European culture—from India and Tibet to northern Europe—swastikas were also widely used in pre-Columbian North America, especially among the Navajo. Indeed, because of the Navajo, swastikas appeared as an emblem on Arizona state-highway signage until the 1940s.

  While it was certainly a religious symbol in certain contexts, the swastika was also used as a decorative symbol from architectural motifs to nineteenth-century greeting cards. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was widely used in advertising and packaging. For example, in the United States alone, the swastika could be found promoting or selling American Biscuit Company Snow Flake biscuits, Buffum Tool Company products, Crane Valve Company products, Duplex adding machines, Federal Milling flour, Good Luck canning jars, Iron City produce, IVW Brown Estate California eating fruit, KRIT automobiles, the Miller Brothers Wild West Rodeo, Pacific Coast matzos, Peoria Corporation grain alcohol, Standard Quality cigars, Swastika surf boards, and United States Playing Card cards and chips, as well as a popular soft drink called Coca-Cola.

  When he first flew his swastika flag in 1907, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels was probably the first to use the symbol in the context of Aryan superiority, unless you count its use by Madame Blavatsky in her literature and in talismans that she created.

  The Germanenorden used various runes, and in 1916, they began using a swastika in ceremonial decoration and superimposed on a cross in their newsletter. The Thule Society, which was probably a spin-off of the Germanenorden, was using the swastika by 1918. Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff of the Thule Society also used the rune called Ar to symbolize a rising eagle and hence the rebirth of Germany.

  In 1919, Friedrich Krohn, a dentist from Starnberg, a longtime Völkisch researcher, and a member of both the Germanenorden and Thule Society, may have been the first to suggest the swastika become a symbol of the Nazi Party. Other sources suggest that Hitler himself may have fixated on swastikas that he probably saw at the Benedictine Abbey in Lambach-am-Traum, Austria, when he lived in the town with his parents in around 1898. Coincidentally, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels spent some time studying manuscripts in the same abbey at about the same time, although only a few conspiracy theorists have suggested that he met Hitler, who would have been only nine or ten years old. Lanz also often used swastikas in his magazine Ostara, which Hitler read when he was a struggling art student in Vienna.

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler devoted several pages to his version of the story of how the NSDAP developed its flag. He wrote that the flag “had to be equally a symbol of our own struggle” and “highly effective as a poster,” adding that “anyone who has to concern himself much with the masses will recognize these apparent trifles to be very important matters. An effective insignia can in hundreds of thousands of cases give the first impetus toward interest in a movement.”

  Apparently the swastika figured into the majority of the flag designs that were proposed to Hitler. However, Hitler complains in Mein Kampf that “I was obliged to reject without exception the numerous designs which poured in from the circles of the young movement, and which for the most part had drawn the swastika into the old [German Imperial] flag. I myself—as Führer—did not want to come out publicly at once with my own design, since after all it was possible that another should produce one just as good or perhaps even better.”

  The German national flag (1933–1945) originated as the Nazi Party flag. Adolf Hitler himself claimed to have designed it, writing in Mein Kampf, “I myself … after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.” Author’s collection

  He finally confirms that the basic design came from Friedrich Krohn, observing that “actually, a dentist from Starnberg did deliver a design that was not bad at all, and, incidentally, was quite close to my own, having only the one fault that a swastika with curved legs was composed into a white disk.”

  At last, writes Hitler, “I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of th
e flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.”

  In discussing the colors, the former art student went on to thoughtfully explain that “white is not a stirring color. It is suitable for chaste virgins’ clubs, but not for world-changing movements in a revolutionary epoch,” while black “contained nothing … that could in any way be interpreted as a picture of the will of our movement.”

  Ruling out blue because of its presence on the Bavarian state flag, Hitler came to a combination of black, white, and red, the colors of the old imperial flag, which he calls “the most brilliant harmony in existence.” He contined, “As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red we see the social ideal of the movement, in white the nationalistic ideal in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.”

  Adopted in 1932, the logo of Heinrich Himmler’s SS was actually a pair of Sig runes from the Armanen Futharkh of Guido von List. The corresponding runes in earlier runic systems mean “sun,” but List’s Sig rune means “victory.” The Sig rune is also the rune for the letter s. Therefore, by using a pair of Sigs, the SS logo literally reads “SS,” and it screams “Victory, Victory!”

  The flag of the Schutzstaffel showed the SS logo in white against a black background. The flag and innovative logo were designed by SS Sturmführer Walther Heck, a graphic designer who worked for the firm of Ferdinand Hoffstatter in Bonn, a manufacturer of emblems and insignias. The logo was also later referred to as “lightning bolts.”

  This rendering of the SS runic logo is from a typesetting font, circa 1933. The logo was so ubiquitous that it was actually typeset in place of a double s. Typewriters made in Germany during the Third Reich era had a key that typed the logo.

  The symbol known as the Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) has long been used in Germanic heraldry. Without the crossbar, the vertical variant seen here is similar to the Eoh rune in the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc and the Eihwaz rune in the Elder Futhark. The vertical Wolfsangel is associated with the Donnerkeil (thunderbolt) in heraldry.

  The horizontal form of the Wolfsangel, also used in Germanic heraldry, has been used to symbolize werewolves. Among other Third Reich uses, it was the insignia of the Number 2 SS Panzer Division Das Reich and the Number 34 SS Freiwilliger Grenadier Division Landstorm Nederland.

  The Totenkopf, or death’s head, was also part of the SS iconography. Death’s head emblems of one sort or another have been used off and on throughout history as a military insignia. As such, they serve the dual purpose of frightening the enemy and reminding the wearer that—if necessary—he is to give up his life for his corps. The SS used their Totenkopf for diverse applications, such as on banners and insignia, but most prominently on the uniform caps of SS officers.

  Author’s collection

  Hitler then goes on to say that “in midsummer of 1920 the new flag came before the public for the first time. It was excellently suited to our new movement. It was young and new, like the movement itself. No one had seen it before; it had the effect of a burning torch. We ourselves experienced an almost childlike joy when a faithful woman party comrade for the first time executed the design and delivered the flag.”

  Thereafter, the swastika became ubiquitous within the party, appearing on everything from posters to tie tacks, in addition to flags by the hundred and the armbands of both SA and SS members. The official emblem of the party was an eagle, its wings spread, atop a swastika inside a circle. In most applications, the swastika was tipped at a forty-five-degree angle, so its perimeter was that of a diamond, rather than a square.

  “And a symbol it really is!” Hitler gushed when describing the Nazi flag. “Not only that the unique colors, which all of us so passionately love and which once won so much honor for the German people, attest our veneration for the past; they were also the best embodiment of the movement’s will.”

  Meanwhile, Heinrich Himmler was contemplating the vestments and trappings that would underscore the status of the SS as the elite within the movement. For the design of its insignia, the SS turned in to the rune Sig from Guido von List’s Armanen Futharkh. This rune was derived from the Elder Futhark rune signifying the sun. At its origins, perhaps in the second century, the rune was the four-stroke shape of a Greek Sigma (Σ) and was called Sól in Old Norse, Sôwilô in Old German, and Sigel in Anglo-Saxon. After about the fifth century, in the Younger Futhark, the old rune was simplified by the removal of the bottom stroke, rendering a rune similar in appearance to a letter S.

  In his 1915 book Runic and Heroic Poems, Bruce Dickins includes a couple poems that summarize the “character” of the rune Sig. In an Old Norse rune poem, the author writes that “Sól [the sun] is the light of the world; I bow to the divine decree.” In another poem from Iceland, the ancient writer states that “Sól is the shield of the clouds and shining ray and destroyer of ice.”

  The Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) organization, specifically the Deutsches Jungvolk section for boys from age ten to fourteen, used a single Sig rune in their insignia. As with the SS, it was used against a dark background. U.S. National Archives

  Such metaphors must certainly have gotten Heinrich Himmler’s juices flowing. Also to Himmler’s mystic pleasure had to have been List’s having shortened “Sigel” to “Sig,” implying the German word Seig, thus transforming the meaning from “sun” to “victory.”

  The person specifically responsible for turning the rune Sig into the SS logo was SS-Sturmführer (sergeant) Walther Heck, a graphic designer who worked for the firm of Ferdinand Hoffstatter, a manufacturer of emblems and insignias, in Bonn. Heck’s clever design, rolled out in 1932, involved a pair of Sigs. Because the rune Sig looks like the letter S, especially a Gothic letter S, the SS logo was “SS” rendered in a pair of runes that literally screamed “Victory, victory!” The logo later was referred to as “lightning bolts,” because of its appearance. Again, Himmler would have been pleased.

  The Nazis were so impressed with the logo that in contemporary literature, when the term “SS” appeared in a narrative, it was often typeset using runes rather than letters, regardless of what typeface was used for the other text on the page. On many German typewriters manufactured in the 1930s and 1940s, there was even a single key that typed the pair of Sigs logo. Many documents typed with such machines still exist, and there are still probably a few such typewriters around.

  The runic insignia was also used, of course, on SS uniforms, unit badges, and other materials. The most prominent use of the emblem was on flags and banners.

  A flag with a single Sig was also later used by the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth Organization), but not as its primary insignia. The Hitlerjugend also used the Armanen Rune Tyr, borrowed directly from the Younger Futhark Tyr, which looks like an arrow pointing straight up. The rune is named for the Norse god of solo combat, who is identified as Wotan’s son in some ancient literature. (Fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien—an avid rune scholar himself—used the rune Sig, with its Anglo-Saxon name, “Sigel,” to identify an imaginary place called Sigelwara Land. This land first figured in an essay of the same name that was published in 1932, the same year that Himmler turned to the rune Sig for the SS.)

  The use of the runes as an SS symbol was preceded by Julius Schreck’s adoption of the Totenkopf, or death’s head, as an SS insignia. Resembling a skull and crossbones or Jolly Roger, this image was used as the insignia of several eighteenth-century pirates, and it survives as the familiar symbol on pirate flags in modern pop culture. Of course, the display of a human skull to threaten death goes back to the dawn of human conflict. Himmler probably imagined the ancient warriors of the antediluvian Armanenist past being decked out in death’s heads.

  As an official military insignia, the Totenkopf was used often throughout history. For example, in the early eighteenth century, Hussars fighting in the Prussian army of Fre
derick the Great used it. During the Napoleonic Wars, it appeared on the uniform of the troops of the duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg and remained in use by units from Braunschweig through World War I. After the war, it cropped up on the uniforms of various freikorps. For many military units, the death’s head was adopted to symbolize the willingness of the wearer to die for the unit or the cause. Such was the case with the SS, who pledged their lives to the objectives of the Third Reich.

  While pirates and other early users of the Totenkopf depicted the skull straight on, the SS turned it slightly to the right. It was used on various banners and insignia, but most prominently on the uniform caps of SS officers, directly beneath the eagle-and-swastika insignia of the NSDAP and of the Third Reich.

  Symbols are important not in themselves, but for that which the minds of the masses can and do read into them. Both Hitler and Himmler understood this as well or better than anyone. The age-old meaning of the death’s head needed no explanation. The swastika came into the Nazi fold with many meanings, most of them warm and fuzzy. However, after the Nazis were through with it, no one would ever look at it the same way again. Even Hindus and Buddhists understand that it now has a double meaning.

  While neither the swastika nor the Totenkopf was unique to the Nazis, Walther Heck’s lightning-bolt double runic logo was. The paired Sig runes of the SS became an emblem that, more even than the swastika itself, embodied the malice and brutality that would emanate from Germany to engulf Europe. Even today, the insignia has the ability to bring chills to the spine. To paraphrase Hitler, what a symbol it really was.