After reusing the Twoth Reich’s flag for merely two years, the Third Reich deprecated it for what would soon become the most infamous symbol of Fascism. Since World War II, the swastika in the West has become associated with white supremacy and tyranny, and despite minor efforts at reclamation (not universally regarded as a worthwhile enterprise), it shall likely remain so for a very long time, especially given the neofascists who are unafraid to show it. It didn’t help that the German Fascists liked to paste this shape on pretty much everything imaginable. But what was it that inspired them to misappropriate this symbol?

Quoting William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pages 43–4:

In the summer of 1920 Hitler, the frustrated artist but now becoming the master propagandist, came up with an inspiration which can only be described as a stroke of genius. What the party lacked, he saw, was an emblem, a flag, a symbol, which would express what the new organization stood for and appeal to the imagination of the masses, who, as Hitler reasoned, must have some striking banner to follow and to fight under.

After much thought and innumerable attempts at various designs he hit upon a flag with a red background and in the middle a white disk on which was imprinted a black swastika. The hooked cross—the hakenkreuz—of the swastika, borrowed though it was from more ancient times, was to become a mighty and frightening symbol of the [NSDAP] and ultimately of [the Third Reich]. Whence Hitler got the idea of using it for both the flag and the insignia of the party he does not say in a lengthy dissertation on the subject in Mein Kampf.

The hakenkreuz is as old, almost, as man on the planet. It has been found in the ruins of Troy and of Egypt and China. I myself have seen it in ancient Hindu and Buddhist relics in India. In more recent times it showed up as an official emblem in such Baltic states as Estonia and Finland, where the men of the German free corps saw it during the fighting of 1918–19. The Ehrhardt Brigade had it painted on their steel helmets when they entered Berlin during the Kapp putsch in 1920.

Hitler had undoubtedly seen it in Austria in the emblems of one or the other anti‐Semitic parties and perhaps he was struck by it when the Ehrhardt Brigade came to Munich. He says that numerous designs suggested to him by party members invariably included a swastika and that a “dentist from Sternberg” actually delivered a design for a flag that “was not bad at all and quite close to my own.”

For the colors Hitler had of course rejected the black, red and gold of the hated Weimar Republic. He declined to adopt the old imperial flag of red, white and black, but he liked its colors not only because, he says, they form “the most brilliant harmony in existence,” but because they were the colors of a Germany for which he had fought. But they had to be given a new form, and so a swastika was added.

Hitler reveled in his unique creation. “A symbol it really is!” he exclaims in Mein Kampf. “In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.”²⁰

Soon the swastika armband was devised for the uniforms of the storm troopers and the party members, and two years later Hitler designed the [Fascist] standards which would be carried in the massive parades and would adorn the stages of the mass meetings. Taken from old Roman designs, they consisted of a black metal swastika on top with a silver wreath surmounted by an eagle, and, below, the initials NSDAP on a metal rectangle from which hung cords with fringe and tassels, a square swastika flag with “Deutschland Erwache! (Germany Awake!)” emblazoned on it.

This may not have been “art,” but it was propaganda of the highest order. The [NSDAP] now had a symbol which no other party could match. The hooked cross seemed to possess some mystic power of its own, to beckon to action in a new direction the insecure lower middle classes which had been floundering in the uncertainty of the first chaotic postwar years. They began to flock under its banner.

(For a brief explanation on why the Germanic Fascists saw theirselves as ‘Aryans’, see here.)

Samuel Koehne’s The Nazis’ use of “Sieg Heil”: A Point of Continuity with the Völkisch Movement:

According to Nicholas Goodrick‐Clarke, some of the leaders in the early völkisch movement were interested in the idea that the swastika was especially ‘Germanic,’ leading to the esoteric writer Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (Adolf Lanz) hoisting a swastika flag in 1907.¹³ Indeed, there were a number of antisemitic organisations, including the Reichshammerbund (founded 1912 by Theodor Fritsch), which used the swastika as a symbol. This example comes from the Stuttgart chapter in around 1912.¹⁴

There were also ‘Yule’ celebrations by such groups that were held for winter solstice. This is a 1919 invitation issued by the Reichshammerbund and another major organisation, the Deutschvölkischer Schutz‐ und Trutzbund in Stuttgart.¹⁵ It included both the swastika and ‘Heil!’ (an expression used from 1902 by Georg von Schönerer).¹⁶

Neo‐pagan ‘secret societies’ like the Thule‐Society (Thulegesellschaft), the Germanic Order (Germanenorden) and the Order of Odin’s Children (Wälsungen‐Orden) also made use of the symbol. This is an example from the monthly publication of the Germanic Order Walvater in January 1918, the Runen paper that declared itself to be ‘for Germanic spiritual revelations and studies’ as well as the ‘pamphlet for the Friendship‐Grade of the Germanic Order’[.]

The Wälsungen‐Orden made use of both the swastika and the phrase ‘Heil und Sieg’ (Hail and Victory, or Salvation and Victory) around 1918 in their newsletter[.]

There were some common features: the swastika was believed to be a an ‘sunwheel,’ a particularly ‘Aryan’ symbol and an antisemitic sign. These points were reiterated by leading [German Fascists]. Hitler repeatedly argued of the [Fascist] flag that ‘The red is social, the white is national, and the swastika is antisemitic.¹⁷ In his Official Commentary on the NSDAP Programme, Gottfried Feder argued: ‘Our flags of attack (Sturm‐Fahnen) flutter before us…Eternally young, radiant and bright the sun‐wheel, the swastika, the symbol of reawakening life, rises before us.’¹⁸

While I have no proof of this, I suspect that it was no mere coincidence that this was also the day when the Third Reich officially passed the first Nuremberg Laws, since one of them reads ‘§ 4: Jews are forbidden to display the Reich and national flag or the national colors.’