I have a question

13 comments

1. Yes

2. Yeah, those are nazis, they just don’t want to go to jail by wearing swastikas, otherwise they would.

3. That’s a very weird thing to present on a backpack if you’re not proud of being a Nazi. Her story does not check out. If it does have any meaning to the person, she would be able to explain it easily (and that would be that she’s a Nazi).

   So stick with the simplest explanation: a Nazi is displaying a Ritterkreuz, which was an award created during the third Reich.

4. About the Iron Cross, we could get into discussions until the cows come home. It is not on its own a Nazi symbol, it is specifically **not** the cross of the Wehrmacht, however, but it looks like a Ritterkreuz, which was a Nazi medal. Apart from that, the Iron Cross is a common sight among people who would’ve want to wear Swastikas if they were legally allowed to. But not only. It is also a common sight among bikers, for example. Motörhead has it a merch.

   The eagle however is absolutely undoubtful. This is Nazi iconography censored just as much to stay legal.

   In this day and age, however, I sometimes doubt if people really understand what they are wearing, and I sometimes think about whether people are actually just too uneducated to grasp it. I don’t mean that in the sense of “They are stupid” or ” they are ignorant of obvious history” but rather in the sense of “education will have blind spots the farther we drift apart from the subject matter”.I hav emet too many people whose overall historic education hs them understand what a Swastika is, and that a Black sun is somewhat pretty Nazi, but whose historical education stopped at that point. Hitler Stach and Swastika = Nazi. All the other iconography is simply not in their mind as they lack the historic knowledge, plain and simple.

   When you look at Temu and similar sites, they offer you these kind of iconography on all kinds stuff just like that. Chinese sellers offer things that would be obvious dog whistles, loud as ship horns, in Germany as normal clothing. Thor Steiner is a choir boy compared to Temu and its ilk.

   Heck, I taught German to Chinese students who would sport a fucking Nazi eagle on theirclothes, not grasping at all what they were wearing. And ad this stage, I am not sure if some German people, who did not get or were not interested in a proper historic education, just don’t see or grasp what they purchased. At some point I am not sure if “It is not a Hakenkreuz, how is it Nazi?” is not a copout, but actually an honest question. A dumb one, arguably, but I don’t think getting high and mighty will help us to communicate the problem to these people.

   I distinctly remember working with a elementary school child some ten years ago who sported the same eagle, without the wreath, on their **sweat shirt**. We talked about it, we told the parents that this was not okay to wear in school at all – but the two parents combined were as bright as a 15 Watt bulb. They not even have understood what we were talking about when it comes to the rad eagle even when we banned it from the school campus.

5. how were you able to even get a photo of it?

6. If you see those things on a German soldier in uniform it’s alright. If you see them on a German in civilian clothes it’s 99.9 % to show their ultra-rightwing Nazi ideology and a replacement for the svastika symbols that they aren’t allowed to show.

7. > she claimed they weren’t nazi because they didn’t have swastikas…

   What kind of horseshit is that? “Oh, my copy of *Mein Kampf* doesn’t have a swastika printed on it so it can’t be anything to do with nazism!”

   Anyway: Nazis who want some plausible deniability *love* symbols like the iron cross and the imperial eagle. “Oh no, this is nothing to do with Nazism, I’m just a big fan of the Holy Roman Empire…”

   The deniability doesn’t really work in this case though, because that eagle is very clearly and specifically the *Parteiadler*, i.e. a form of the eagle symbol invented and used by the Nazi party, as [you can see for yourself here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsadler#Modern_history).

   In short: you’ve met either an idiot or a Nazi.

   > Also she is from Germany

   You’ve met a Nazi.

8. Just Nazis doing Nazi things….

9. dumb nazi scumbag…

10. > she claimed they weren’t nazi because they didn’t have swastikas

    Under German law, what you are showing us here doesn’t include any actual symbols of the Nazi regime; so in a purely legal sense, she’s 100% correct.

    That said, neo-Nazis very often use the Iron Cross to stand in for the swastika. That is, the Iron Cross isn’t actually a Nazi symbol (it predates the Nazis by a very long way, and a version of it is used as the emblem of the modern German army), but can be used in a way that is intended to be read as Nazi.

    Regarding the medal, the Iron Cross itself is a pre-Nazi version from the 1870s (or, more likely, a replica of one), but before 1939 it was a Prussian medal — so the ribbon would have been just black and white. The Nazis made it into a German medal, with the ribbon shown here.

    As for the eagle, that particular style of the eagle was used by the Nazis. When looking to its right it symbolizes the German Reich; but when (as here) it looks to its left, it symbolizes the Nazi Party (the Nazi regime was totalitarian, so the Party and the state were in effect two sides of the same coin). In both versions, the eagle holds an oak wreath containing a swastika. The eagle itself isn’t a banned symbol but the swastika is, so neo-Nazis will either leave the wreath empty or place in Iron Cross inside of it.

    So… yeah, these symbols are used almost exclusively by right-wing extremists, but in Germany at least are technically not illegal.

11. isn’t it just a symbol of germany?

12. > Also she is from Germany

    Is she really from Germany (born and raised here) or does she claim German heritage like a lot of Americans do?

13. nazis are always cowards

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