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When German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann traveled to Ithaca, Greece, in 1868, one goal was foremost in his mind: discovering the ancient city of Troy using Homer’s Iliad. Many historians believed the epic poem to be no more than a myth, but Schliemann was convinced otherwise. For him, it was a map to the hidden locations of long-lost cities from the ancient world.
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Over the next several years, the German businessman, who had made his fortune as a military contractor, tramped around the Mediterranean. He took Homer’s advice on everything from understanding local customs to treating physical maladies, and he used Homer’s verses to identify what he thought were the epic’s real-world locations. “One of his greatest strengths is that he had a genuine historical interest,” wrote classics scholar D.F. Easton in the journal The Classical World in 1998. “What he wanted was to uncover the Homeric world, to know whether it existed, whether the Trojan War happened.”
It wasn’t until the 1870s that Schliemann achieved his dream. The discovery would catapult him to fame, spurring a burst of interest in all that he uncovered. The intrepid archaeologist found his Homeric city, but he also came across something else: the swastika, a symbol that would later be manipulated to shape world history.
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Schliemann discovered his epic city—and encountered the swastika—on the Aegean coast of Turkey. There, he continued the excavations started by British archaeologist Frank Calvert at a site known as the Hisarlik mound. Schliemann’s methods were brutal—he used crowbars and battering rams to excavate—but effective. He quickly realized the site held many different layers from societies going back thousands of years. Schliemann had found Troy—and the remains of civilizations coming before and after it. And on shards of pottery and other artifacts, he found at least 1,800 variations on the same symbol: spindle-whorls, or swastikas.
He would go on to see the swastika elsewhere in his travels, from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa. As news of Schliemann’s exploits spread, the swastika experienced a resurgence in popularity, appearing on Coca-Cola products, Boy Scouts and Girls’ Club materials, and even American military uniforms, per BBC News. In most cases, it was used as a symbol of good fortune—just as it had been for thousands of years. However, the swastika also became tied to a volatile movement: a wave of nationalism spreading across Germany after the First World War, fueled in part by belief in the superiority of a so-called Aryan race.
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The rise of Aryan nationalism
Initially, “Aryan” was used to describe the Indo-European language group. It was a linguistic term, not a racial classification. However, the rising interest in eugenics and “racial hygiene” in the late 19th century led some to transform the term into a descriptor for an ancient “master race” with a clear throughline to contemporary Germany. In the mid-1800s, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau made the connection between the mythical Aryans and the Germans in his “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races,” asserting Germans were the superior descendants of the early people, now destined to lead the world toward greater advancement by conquering their neighbors.
For the nationalists, the findings of Schliemann’s dig in Turkey took on a new ideological meaning. They saw the swastika—the “purely Aryan symbol” Schliemann uncovered—as a symbol of their superiority. German groups like the Reichshammerbund (an antisemitic movement founded in 1912) and the Bavarian Freikorps (paramilitary forces who wanted to overthrow the Weimar Republic) used the swastika to reflect their “newly discovered” identity as the master race. It didn’t matter that the symbol was traditionally tied to good fortune, or that it was found everywhere—from Native American sites to Greek monuments to Buddhist and Hindu artifacts—or that no one was truly certain of its origins.
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“When Heinrich Schliemann … discovered swastika-like decorations on pottery fragments in all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of the site had been Aryan all along,” wrote anthropologist Gwendolyn Leick in the journal Folklore in 1997. “The link between the swastika and Indo-European origin, once forged, was impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto a universal symbol, which hence served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non-Aryan, or rather non-German, and German identity.”
How the swastika became the Nazi symbol
As the swastika became more and more intertwined with German nationalism, Adolf Hitler’s influence grew—and he adopted the hooked cross as the Nazi party symbol in 1920. “He was attracted to it because it was already being used in other nationalist, racialist groups,” says Steven Heller, author of The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? and Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State. “I think he also understood instinctually that there had to be a symbol as powerful as the [communist] hammer and sickle, which was their nearest enemy.”
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To further enshrine the swastika as a symbol of Nazi power, Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s minister of propaganda) issued a decree on May 19, 1933, that prevented unauthorized commercial use of the hooked cross. The symbol also featured prominently in director Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 propagandist film Triumph of the Will. As historian Malcolm Quinn writes in The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol, “When Hitler is absent in Riefenstahl’s film, his place is taken by the swastika, which, like the image of the Führer, becomes a switching station for personal and national identities.” The symbol graced uniforms, decorated flags and even served as a marching formation at rallies.
What the swastika means today
In the postwar years, Germany banned the public use of the swastika and the Nazi salute. While there are exceptions—the swastika can, for example, be used in educational settings—displaying the symbol in prohibited contexts can result in harsh penalties.
However, some historians think such efforts have only sustained the symbol’s power. Today, the swastika is used by white supremacist organizations around the world. Antisemitic vandals frequently make headlines for spray-painting it on synagogues, Jewish community centers, children’s playgrounds and even Holocaust memorials.
“I think you can’t win,” says Heller. “Either you try to extinguish it—and if that’s the case, you’ve got to brainwash an awful lot of people—or you let it continue, and it will brainwash a lot of people. As long as it captures people’s imaginations, as long as it represents evil, as long as that symbol retains its charge, it’s going to be very hard to cleanse it.”
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