The Curious Case of Swastika and Hakenkreuz: My Independent Investigation
tl;dr: Many people believe Hitler never misappropriated the Swastika. His symbol was called Hakenkreuz (Hooked Cross) and it had Christian origins. My investigation revealed that Hitler did in fact misappropriate the Swastika (Evidence from a direct Hitler quote about Hakenkreuz) and offers a better explanation for why he called it Hakenkreuz. I also offer a better argument for using separate terms and how we can do a natural slow pivot to achieve this goal in academia.
In 2018, I read an article in which a new idea was proposed that Hitler never actually used the Swastika. The author speculated that the symbol that Hitler used was called Hakenkreuz which literally means hooked cross and that its origins were Christian. He elaborates further that the only reason why the world thinks that Hitler’s symbol was a swastika was because of a mistranslation mischief of Mein Kampf- that the translator, in bad faith, had translated the word Hakenkreuz to Swastika.
On the surface, everything that the author proposed made sense. Subsequently, many more such articles started appearing in Indian mainstream media. Today, a large section of the people from India truly believes that Hitler’s symbol had nothing to do with Swastika. Is that true though? Was the whole world simply duped by a mere mistranslation mischief? I was curious but didn’t bother investigating further at the time.
A few months ago, out of sheer curiosity, I decided to investigate it all again. The first thing to do was Wikipedia search. It was a helpful resource to conclude that Hitler was probably not a very religious man. His position on religion kept shifting much like that of any contemporary politician today. The next thing I did was search the city library for any books on Swastika. Luckily, I found Dr T.K. Nakagaki’s “Buddhist Swastika and Hitler’s Cross.”
The book was an encyclopedia on Swastika. Everything from its history to its contemporary importance was there in it. And while the author of the book did speculate that Hitler’s Hakenkreuz was distinct from swastika of the east, he did mention this quote from a Hitler speech in the book.
Even if this force is not expressed in this far north could, it became capable of becoming effective at the moment when the chains of ice sank and man descended to the south into a favorable, happy, free nature. We know that all these people have one sign in common remained: the sign of the sun. They build all their cults on light, and they find that Sign, the tool of fire making, the whorl, the cross. You will find this Cross as a Hakenkreuz not only here, but also in India and Japan carved into the temple post. It is the Hakenkreuz of the communities once founded by Aryan culture.
This made one thing absolutely clear: There is evidence that Hitler had misappropriated the Swastika for sure. Dr Nakagaki further speculates in the book that Hitler gave his symbol more meanings because of his upbringing, influence of Richard Wagner and Protestant monk Martin Luther. The points are well articulated and seem to be written in good faith.
Thus far the story was this: Hitler misappropriated the Swastika but added new meanings to it based on the influence of Protestantism’s antisemitism prevalent in Germany at that time. But something was still not adding up. Multiple resources on the internet suggested that Hitler was not a very religious man. Would he really be that influenced by religion while choosing his party’s motif? Sure, he may have subsequently given new meanings to it but what was the original motivation behind picking up that symbol? I was also curious about the quote from the book that mentioned temples in India and Japan. I decided to find out the original text of the speech.
So I went to Wikipedia again, this time, searching for Hitler speeches. One of them matched the date mentioned in the book. August 13, 1920. I searched for the speech online and managed to find it. (Both in original German and English). It confirmed the quote mentioned in the book.
Now I had primary source based evidence that Hitler definitely misappropriated the Swastika.
As disturbing and antisemitic as the speech was, I went through all of it and many more things became clear:
1. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was purely race based.
2. He believed that only ‘Aryan’ people were capable of doing any creative work such as building things, art etc.
3. He believed Hindus had declined because of racial intermixing.
4. He mocked the Bible several times. So he definitely wasn’t too religious. I further confirmed this from reading the book “Hitler’s Religion” where a whole chapter is dedicated to examining if Christianity was responsible for Hitler’s own antisemitism. The conclusions of that chapter match with my own conclusions which I drew from reading his speech.
Things were starting to make sense. To Hitler, the Swastika represented his imagined Aryan ancestors. His anti-Semitism was pure racial hatred and he was no devout Christian.
Conclusion 1: Hitler misappropriated the Swastika. He saw it as a symbol of imagined Aryan race and till at least 1920, his hate against jews was race based. Religion may have played some role in his antisemitism but probably not in the choice of the symbol.
The obvious question that still wasn’t answered was this: Why did he not call this symbol Swastika? Why did he call it Hakenkreuz?
The answer was obvious to me by now but I had to confirm it through some documentary evidence. The only reason why Hitler would have used the word Hakenkreuz for Swastika-the word that Germans still use- had to be that people in Germany were most likely already using that word. Let’s be honest, Hitler was no linguist. He wouldn’t just decide to randomly give a name to a symbol.
So I started tracing the history of the word. Read about its Sanskrit origins. Found Emille Louis Bernouff’s book ‘The science of Religion’ where he discussed it (and funnily enough, even related it to the sign of the cross). I mostly reached dead ends.
Then I remembered how it was Heinrich Schliemann who had first claimed to find Swastikas in a city he believed was ‘Troy’. So I went to Wikipedia again and looked up his bibliography to see if he had written any books on his Troy discoveries. While all his books were in German, one book stood out as it seemed to be written in English
Ilios, the city and country of the Trojans
I found that book on the internet as it was in public domain. In the book, the word ‘Suastika’ was used multiple times throughout. I was excited. Surely that book would have been written in German too. And if I was able to find what word was used in German, maybe I’d be able to connect the dots. I went to Google Translate and translated the name of the book from English to German. Lo and Behold the German copy of the book ( Ilios, Stadt und Land der Trojaner) was also available. I searched for Suastika and I found this in the preface of the book.
But wait a minute, how come both words are there. What does it say in English version, on the same page? Well it’s Hooked cross (Suastika), of course
So now, I had found at least one example (possibly the first instance), where the word Suastika and Hakenkreuz were connected, in the most direct way. I have been gaining some knowledge of linguistics in the past few weeks. So I wanted to dig even further. Is there any further evidence of usage of the word Hakenkreuz, after this but before Hitler’s time. So I did a simple search on Google Books for the word Hakenkreuz and refined search for results from 19th century only. And indeed I found one article in a journal published in 1899. (Hitler was about 10 at this point.) The author first uses to term Hakenkreuz to refer to Svastika (Notice another spelling change by now) but then almost exclusively uses the term Hakenkreuz for it. Thus, it was clear that the two words were already becoming synonymous in Germany. You can search for further documents on Google Books and will easily be able to draw the same conclusions.
Conclusion 2: By the time Hitler was still a child, the word Hakenkreuz was already in use in Germany to refer to the Swastika. This is very likely the only reason why Hitler referred to the symbol as Hakenkreuz.
So now that we know for sure that the word Hakenkreuz simply referred to Swastika only, even before Hitler, is there any merit in using distinct words depending on the context? I believe so.
A better case for using the word Hakenkreuz in the context of everything hateful.
As Hindus, we don’t need to disown history in order to reclaim the Swastika in the Western world. (If you’re someone who’s never been to India, you will be shocked to know that the Swastika is ubiquitous and is not a taboo symbol in the non-western world). All said and done, Nazism and antisemitism originated in Europe. The fact that Germans chose to call the symbol Hakenkreuz, instead of Swastika, shows they did not exactly revere the symbol because they chose to call it simply by its descriptive name, not its original Sanskrit name (which they were also clearly aware of). In fact, they continue to use that word even today, and it ONLY has hateful connotations attached to it. In fact the Hakenkreuz is banned. Therefore, the word Hakenkreuz, already used to refer to the banned symbol, already highly reviled everywhere, makes perfect sense to be used when describing the symbol in the context of Nazism and antisemitism. The Sanskrit word Swastika, which means “well-being”, is in fact a confusing word to describe hate ideologies and should therefore be used solely to describe the Eastern symbol of peace.
This nuance will be hard to build but with efforts, it can be done. But to establish it, we will need to confront some realities:
a) It needs to be accepted that the symbols look exactly the same. It’s disingenuous when people think that Hitler’s Hakenkreuz was tilted or was differently oriented. Watch the documentary “Hitler: A Career” on Netflix. Hakenkreuz was not always tilted at 45 degrees.
b) It needs to be emphasized that 'Hakenkreuz' was the word that Hitler used to describe the symbol.
c) Keep the argument simple:
Hakenkreuz=Hate
Swastika=Safety & Success
Slow Pivot: Bringing this change will and should take time. It should be a slow process because a generation has grown up hating the symbol of Swastika. I propose that we do a slow pivot and the 19th century German articles above can guide us. For example, instead of simply mentioning Swastika, we can start mentioning Hakenkreuz (Swastika) in history books. Familiarize a generation with both words so that they are able to understand that nuances attached. In a decade or so, perhaps, the word Hakenkreuz can be exclusively used to describe the Nazi symbol.
It’s important though, that we teach history properly because there are many lessons to be learnt about perils of cultural appropriation, racism, and believing unsubstantiated claims (Both in case of Europeans believing race theories that ultimately led to the appropriation of the Hindu symbol, as well as Hindus believing the Hakenkreuz mistranslation theory)
Why did I bother researching this issue?
I initially just wanted to make a video on how Swastika and Hakenkreuz had nothing to do with each other, only to discover some uncomfortable truths. I am writing this post because I want the world to understand history with direct evidence and hopefully end silly feuds on social media about the whole issue, which I feel are starting to get a bit out of control and will inevitably lead to conflicts in real life between various communities. I also want my fellow Hindus to make better arguments to reclaim the Swastika in the Western world.
