Why were the Nazis obsessed with werewolves? Did
Himmler want to have multiple wives at once? Why did the Nazis try to give all their soldiers
blow-up dolls? And why did Time magazine make Adolf Hitler the man of the year? Before
we answer all of these questions and more, let's start off with a lesser-known
fact about the infamous political party! Number 50:
Despite how synonymous he would become with the Nazis, did
you know that the actual political party was founded way before Hitler actually joined them?
That’s right, contrary to what you might think, he didn’t create the political party himself.
He only became a part of their organization and helped to rebrand them into the Nazi
Party more widely remembered by history. It was actually a man named Anton Drexler who was
responsible for founding what would later become known as the Nazi Party, then named the German
Workers’ Party, in 1919. They would frequently meet in a Munich beer hall to discuss political
matters, advocating for extreme change, hostility to the Treaty of Versailles, sharing concerns
about the changing culture in Germany at the time, and above all, a sense of nationalism. This is
where one Adolf Hitler would start to attend meetings, infiltrating the small political
party and encouraging their nationalist and anti-communist sentiment, eventually leading to
them changing their name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1920.
Number 49: Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler their Person of
the Year in 1938, praising his rearming of the German military following the First World War.
Time even praised Hitler’s invasion of Austria, boldly declaring it was an act of strength
“before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.”
Number 48: As a countermeasure against STDs on the front
lines, Hitler ordered the distribution of Aryan blow-up dolls to Nazi soldiers on the
front lines. Rather than taking the dolls, the army refused to hand out these blonde-haired,
blue-eyed synthetic companions on the grounds of their dignity. There was a prevailing fear that
if these dolls ever got seized by the Allies they could be used as a propaganda piece to further
drive down global opinion about the German people. Number 47:
Did you know the Nazi regime created a jazz band to spread propaganda?
They were called Charlie and his Orchestra. ‘Charlie’ – real name Karl Schwedler – and an
ensemble of musicians would play jazz that was popular with English and American listeners but
with modified lyrics. Schwedler would imbed each song with lyrics that enforced antisemitism as
well as mocked the leaders of Allied countries. In particular, ‘Charlie’ sang about Winston
Churchill being an alcoholic and a coward. Number 46:
Although the persecution and genocide of Jewish people in Nazi Germany are widely documented,
they sadly weren’t the only marginalized people targeted by demonizing propaganda and attempted
eradication. Given their obsessions with eugenics and the notion of so-called genetic purity,
the Nazis viewed anyone that opposed this idea as a threat to their nation. This included those
suffering from mental illnesses, and psychiatric patients – particularly those with schizophrenia.
It’s been estimated that about 220,000 to 269,000 schizophrenic people were sterilized or murdered
by the Nazis. However, this had no lasting effects on the rates of schizophrenia in Germany. This is
largely because the Nazis wrongly believed that conditions like schizophrenia could be passed
on through genetics, which we now know to be erroneous and provably false.
Number 45: You may already know that the Volkswagen
car company was created by the Nazis, but you probably didn’t know that their most famous
creation - the Volkswagen Beetle - was heavily influenced by Hitler himself, who told designers
to make the car look like an insect. However, the production of these cars came at the high cost
of forced labor from people consigned to camps by Nazis. Volkswagen even directly operated four
concentration camps, as well as a further eight specifically intended for forced labor.
Number 44: BMW was one of the biggest contributors to the
German arms industry since their engines gave Nazi fighter planes superiority over those of
the British and French. This was once again achieved on the backs of slave labor. Convicts and
prisoners from concentration camps were recruited to assist with manufacturing, and by the end of
the Second World War, almost half of the workforce at BMW – around 50,000 people – consisted of
prisoners and slaves from concentration camps. In March of 2016, on the company’s 100th
anniversary, BMW openly apologized for its dark past, expressing a profound sense of regret
for supplying the Nazis with vehicles created using slave labor.
Number 43: Syndrome K, otherwise known as tuberculosis,
was a fake disease created by Italian doctors in order to save persecuted Jewish people from
the Nazis. Giovanni Borromeo, the head physician of the Fatebenefratelli hospital in Rome, devised
K Syndrome as a coded way to hide Jewish people and other anti-fascists who had fled to their
hospital seeking protection from the Nazis. These ‘patients’ were quarantined and the Nazis
were told that they were suffering from a deadly, highly contagious illness that could permanently
disfigure anyone who caught it. The Nazis bought his story, and with his fellow physicians,
Borromeo used Syndrome K to save at least twenty people’s lives.
Number 42: It’s well known the Nazis had a strange
obsession with the supernatural. But did you know some of them were werewolves?
Well, not really, but they certainly thought of themselves as such. The widespread
belief in these supernatural beasts has a long history in Germany, dating back to medieval times.
This belief was given new life under the Nazi regime, with the image of Germany as a wolf being
used in a lot of their propaganda. They considered themselves to be the ‘good’ monsters of folklore
– the werewolves – relating to their strength, while they liked to portray people of other races,
particularly Jewish people, as ‘bad’ monsters like vampires contaminating Aryan blood.
Number 41: If you aren’t much of a Coca-Cola fan and would
like something different, then you might prefer the fruity-flavoured alternative, Fanta. What
you probably didn’t know is that the Nazis were responsible for the invention of Fanta. Yes,
we’re being serious. Coca-Cola, of course, owns Fanta and has controlled the company since
its creation in the early 1940s. But during the height of the Second World War, there was a
trade embargo on Nazi Germany, meaning the American Coca-Cola company couldn’t access the
ingredients to make their signature soft drink. Instead, they invented Fanta, an alternative
that ensured the brand’s continued popularity despite the ongoing war. Drinking Fanta
became a point of national pride for some, although given the limited wartime ingredients,
it was made using less-than-appetizing leftovers, including apple fibers, mash from cider presses,
and whey. Maybe it was an acquired taste? Number 40:
Although there are conflicting reports, its believed that the Nazis
forced captured civilians to aid them in clearing minefields. Supposedly, they were chased across
fields in order to detonate the buried explosives. While it’s hard to find concrete sources
on this, some indicate that around two to three thousand people were blown up while clearing
minefields on the eastern border of Belarus. However, in a little-known part of post-World
War Two history, Denmark – invaded by the Nazis in 1940 – was left with millions of undetonated
mines after the war ended. The British forces offered the Danish a number of German prisoners
of war in order to solve the problem, forcing two thousand former soldiers to clear the mines,
in what is considered to be a grave violation of the Geneva Convention.
Number 39: If you thought that car manufacturers and
orange-flavored soda were the only examples of major brands that collaborated with the Nazis
and still exist today, you’d be wrong. The fashionistas among you might have heard of Hugo
Boss. His fashion label originated in Metzingen, Germany, in 1931 – two years before the Nazi Party
would eventually seize power over the government. Boss himself had not only been a collaborator with
the party before they took control of the country, but would have them become one of his clients.
That’s right, Huge Boss designed and produced a range of Nazi uniforms in his factory. Being
part of the Nazi party brought his label a lot of business, creating uniforms for the SS, Hitler
Youth, and the standard Nazi Brownshirts. However, Boss wasn’t responsible for the black SS
uniforms that he’s often credited for. Number 38:
A human-skin lampshade supposedly turned up at a garage sale in New
Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Pretty gross, but what does that have to do with the Nazis?
It’s widely believed to have come from the Buchenwald concentration camp. There, lampshades
like this were supposedly made to order for Ilse Koch, who was married to the camp’s
Nazi commandant. While considered a myth by some historians, it’s believed that this
couple had a penchant for taking prisoners’ body parts and turning them into morbid pieces of
artwork. As recently as 2020, researchers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum discovered
a Nazi photo album with a cover that had also been made from the skin of concentration camp
prisoners, apparently by the same sadistic couple. Number 37:
Did you know the Nazi swastika wasn’t originally associated with the infamous fascist
party? Their version is actually a bastardization of an ancient symbol used within Hindu and
Buddhist cultures. The first ever instance of it was actually discovered on a 15,000-year-old
ivory carving of a bird made from a mammoth tusk. In its original context, the swastika symbol was
regarded as a positive encouragement of life, used by cultures around the world, not
only Hinduism and Buddhism. That meaning was permanently corrupted when Hitler adopted the
swastika as the central element of the National Socialist Party’s flag in 1920, to represent the
goal of their totalitarian conquest and racial purification of all of Europe. The symbol is
still used to this day to evoke ideas of fascism, military brutality, and genocide.
Number 36: Speaking of things they didn’t even come
up with themselves, most Nazis hardly ever actually used the term ‘Nazi.’ The word
was originally coined by the German press as a shortened form of the German name of the
National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Many of their political opponents also adopted the
term as a piece of colloquial, derogatory slang to dismiss and mock the radical party. Given
that it was considered to be a derogatory term, Hitler didn’t want its use circulating amongst his
party. As a result, he never used the word in any conversations or speeches.
Number 35: And speaking even more things the Nazis never did,
they didn’t even win the popular vote in Germany. Although he ran against the then-sitting President
Paul von Hindenburg, along with a host of other prospective candidates, Hitler only ever secured
around a third of the popular vote. His highest was the German presidential election of 1932,
where he won 36.8% of the vote, meaning that most of the country didn’t support his rise to power.
He would only achieve his self-appointed status as dictator after being appointed chancellor
by Hindenburg in 1933, then issuing decrees to nullify the protection of free speech and civil
liberties following the Reichstag Fire, an arson attack on the German parliamentary headquarters
in Berlin. Following Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler assumed the role of head of state,
then replaced it with the position of Führer, which he held until his death.
Number 34: Did you know the Nazis offered a bounty for
Albert Einstein's assassination? Despite his fame and success, Nazi physicists rejected Einstein’s
theory of relativity, calling it “Jewish science.” The party itself even sponsored book burnings and
conferences that denounced Einstein’s work and went as far as to pay other German physicists to
publish books refuting and denouncing his claims. Sensing the danger to his life, Albert Einstein
left Germany forever in 1932, however, a Nazi publication printed a picture of him in a magazine
with the caption ‘Not Yet Hanged,’ calling for the death of the famous physicist.
Number 33: As if they weren’t already bad enough, the Nazis
were also responsible for the abduction of around 200,000 children from Poland. This was done
under the claim that some of these children were the descendants of German parents who had
emigrated to Poland. The intention was to bring them back to Germany and forcibly indoctrinate
them. And if you think these children's parents got a say in this, you’d be wrong.
In truth, when the German army invaded Poland in 1939, they considered the
local children to fit the Aryan archetype, the collection of physical traits that Hitler
considered to be the most genetically pure and racially superior. Children who were considered
to be the most “Aryan-looking” were adopted by German families, with some so young that they
grew up believing they had been born in Germany, not Poland. Only an estimated 20% were reunited
with their families after the Second World War. Number 32: The most organized attempt to bring Nazism to
America took place during World War Two. The German-American Bund was founded in 1936 to spread
Nazi ideology in the United States and create a US counterpart to Germany’s Nazi Party. They
even held a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939.
Number 31: Did you know that the Nazi regime encouraged
the use of methamphetamine among its soldiers? During World War Two, Nazi scientists developed
an experimental performance enhancer called D-IX and found that subjects who took this concoction
could march up to 55 miles without experiencing any fatigue, all while carrying their heavy
military equipment. Although American, British, and Japanese forces were also known to take large
quantities of amphetamines, the Nazis were the most enthusiastic when it came to the early
adoption of popping pills on the battlefield. Inversely, though, their ideology took a pretty
fundamentalist stance against the use of drugs; it was considered a sign of personal weakness
and moral indecency to take them. However, methamphetamine was considered an exception,
touted as a miracle product in the late 1930s, whereas other drugs were banned. This was largely
because methamphetamines cause high levels of energy and alertness, and given the Nazis’
aspirations of becoming superhuman, their use was encouraged among soldiers and citizens.
Number 30: Ever wonder where the term ‘Stormtroopers’ comes
from in the Star Wars franchise? It’s actually the English translation of Sturmabteilung,
the name of an early Nazi paramilitary group, also called the ‘assault division’ or the
Brownshirts. These volunteers were recruited by Hitler to violently intimidate his political
opponents and ordinary Jewish citizens just trying to live their lives in Germany. The group became
a prominent political tool for the Nazis and was instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power.
Number 29: Did you know that Ernst Röhm - the head
of Hitler’s paramilitary force called the Brownshirts - was gay and appointed fellow gay men
to prominent positions within the Nazi Party? He was such close friends with Hitler that he’d even
call him nicknames like ‘Adi,’ short for Adolf, instead of ‘Mein Fuhrer.’ He was murdered during
the Night of Long Knives, also known as the Röhm Putsch, where Hitler had his political opponents
and “undesirables” within the Nazi party murdered. Number 28:
If you or someone you know is a punk and particularly fond of Doc Marten boots, then you
might have heard the term ‘lace theory’ before. This is a color code used to indicate certain
things about a person by wearing colorful laces with your Docs. But it’s important to remember
that sometimes they’re not used as a friendly way of expressing yourself. If you see someone
wearing red laces, it might be one such case, and you should probably run. Why? Because that
person is identifying themselves as a Neo-Nazi. As well as being widely adopted by punks and
members of the LGBTQ community – mainly in defiance of hateful groups – Doc Marten boots
are unfortunately often popular among various far-right extremists, including modern Neo-Nazis.
They will typically wear black boots with red laces, while those who are white supremacists
wear white laces. If a person wears white Doc Marten boots with red laces, however, this is
often considered a sign of standing in support of the Jewish community.
Number 27: One of the most powerful men in Nazi
Germany was SS Leader Heinrich Himmler, and he may have been a polygamist.
You see, Himmler, like many other leading Nazis, wanted to conquer vast swaths of Europe, and
have those areas populated by people who were considered pure German. However, they knew that
the war effort would cost the lives of a large portion of the German male population, men that
they’d need in order to produce German babies to live in those newly occupied places. So,
Himmler sought to legalize polygamy as a way to keep the birth rates up. He wanted surviving
German men – presumably including himself – to have multiple wives.
Number 26: The Nazis were so vehement in their
hatred of Jewish people that they went as far as to ban fonts that they believed
to be ‘Jewish fonts.’ Yes, that’s right, the Nazis were so radical in their ideology that
they believed typeface fonts for typewriters could have impactful political applications.
In the 19th Century, most German printing presses used one of two font families: Antiqua
and Fraktur. The latter of these came to be seen as the ‘more German’ of the two, until 1941,
when the attitude dramatically shifted. Hitler called for a ban on any future use of what he
called Judenlettern, including the Fraktur font. Ironically, the memo announcing the ban bore the
Nazi Party’s letterhead – which was printed in the Fraktur font.
Number 25: Despite ordering Jewish people and other
persecuted groups to be placed in deplorable concentration camps, it might surprise you to
know that Adolf Hitler never actually visited any of his own death camps. He distanced himself
and his dirtiest work, despite his fingerprints being all over the senseless killings that
took place to deliberately camouflage his role in what he called the Final Solution.
Heinrich Himmler, on the other hand, did visit these camps. He reportedly
witnessed a Jewish family being executed by a firing squad and was horrified. Not at the
despicable inhumane treatment of these people, though; Himmler was more concerned that
it would traumatize the Nazi soldiers. Number 24:
The Nazis were among the first in Europe to ban smoking. The now
long-established connection between smoking and lung cancer was first discovered and attributed
to Nazi doctors, leading to a widespread campaign that strongly condemned the practice. In an
effort to make the general German public quit, bans were imposed against smoking on public
transport and an increased tax on tobacco was introduced. The main aim of this, of course, was
to protect the Aryan race, so don’t be fooled into thinking that the Nazis would ever be selflessly
concerned for the health of their citizens. Number 23:
Although the Nazis treated people like animals, they surprisingly treated animals
quite well. In January 1933, the Nazi Party passed a comprehensive set of animal protection laws.
Hitler himself was quoted as saying, “In the new Reich, no more animal cruelty will be allowed.”
He was considered to be something of an animal lover, owning a German shepherd named Blondi and
even adopting a vegetarian diet towards the end of his life. The regulations they introduced
in order to protect animal welfare included a ban on hunting and more intense monitoring
of the treatment and slaughter of animals for food. It’s just a shame that they didn’t
extend the same level of care to human beings. Number 22:
You’ve probably heard of Hitler’s crazy Wunderwaffe projects. But did
you know that he was trying to build a Sun Gun? While it was never completed, Nazis were heavily
researching a way to put a giant mirror in space to reflect an intense beam of solar energy at
a chosen target. If you’re a Gears of War fan, think the Hammer of Dawn, and you’re
pretty much there. Then, there was their idea for a sonic cannon, using blasts of
soundwaves from huge speakers to disorient the enemy. As you can probably imagine, none of
these ideas worked all that well off paper. Number 21:
One Wunderwaffe that did work, though, was the V-2 rocket. Arguably the most
well-known of these projects, this was invented as a successor to the earlier V-1 rocket and was
the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. It could travel at supersonic speeds,
struck without warning, and made no sound before impact. Over 3,000 were launched during the
course of the Second World War, killing over 9,000 civilians in Allied cities. A further 12,000
slave laborers died in concentration camps as part of the production of V-2 rockets.
Number 20: Did you know that Nazi Germany’s head propaganda
filmmaker took a tour around Walt Disney studios? Leni Riefenstahl, one of Hitler’s favorite
filmmakers and creator of the infamous “Triumph of the Will” Nazi propaganda movie, visited Hollywood
in 1938 and was invited on a tour of Walt Disney Studios. No other Hollywood studio at the time
was willing to play host to a Nazi Filmmaker, but Walt took her on a three-hour tour and showed her
the work they were doing on Fantasia at the time. Number 19:
Before they began to use extermination camps more widely, the Nazis
established ghettos that they forced the Jewish population to relocate to. These were used to
isolate the Jewish community from the wider German population and had particularly miserable
living conditions. The conditions were so bad that a vast majority of the inhabitants made to live
in these ghettos ended up dying from disease or starvation. Those that survived were relocated
yet again, this time to concentration camps. Number 18:
Oddly, before deciding to enact his so-called Final Solution, Adolf Hitler
considered deporting Jewish people to… Madagascar? The Madagascar Plan was a proposed settlement,
which would have seen the mass emigration of Jewish refugees shipped overseas. This exodus of
Jewish people from Germany was the Nazi regime’s supposed ‘solution’ to what they considered to
be the ‘problem’ of Jewish people before they inevitably moved towards all-out extermination.
Number 17: While he might be more well-known for the role
he played in the landscape of American automobile manufacturing, Henry Ford was known to have
inspired Nazi ideology. As well as seeking to ‘Americanise’ any factory workers who had
immigrated from elsewhere in the world, Ford had a bitter opposition to labor unions,
and he would frequently describe them as a global Jewish conspiracy. Ford was also the only American
to be thanked by name in Hitler’s notorious book, Mein Kampf.
Number 16: Did you know that Josef Mengele, the evil
concentration camp scientist who was known as the “Angel of Death,” was never punished for his
crimes? Despite performing thousands of cruel and deadly experiments, many of them on children,
Mengele fled to South America after the war, evading any justice for his crimes until he
eventually died in 1979 after suffering a stroke and drowning as a result.
Number 15: Did you know Hitler would sometimes make major
governing decisions on the fly? Because the Nazi government became more and more centralized
under Hitler’s totalitarian rule over the course of the war, he’d sometimes make impulsive
orders that his cabinet had no choice but to put into place. Not exactly the most effective way
to run a country in the middle of a major war... Number 14:
In 1945, President Eisenhower made the almost prophetic
prediction that people would try to assert a claim that the Holocaust never happened. In order to
prepare for this, he ordered that any Nazi camps discovered should be extensively photographed
so that there existed documented evidence of the crimes committed. He hoped this would provide
a way to irrefutably prove any attempts to claim the Holocaust as a falsehood. Sadly, the
existence of hard proof does little to dissuade extremist right-wing – and often antisemitic –
conspiracy theories that still circulate today. Number 13:
Women living in Germany under the Nazi regime were prohibited from using cosmetics, as well as banned
from drinking and smoking. They were also actively discouraged from working, and expected to live
their lives by the ‘three Ks.’ These were kinder, küche, and kirche, or ‘Children, Kitchen,
and Church,’ a slogan that was actually first introduced under Kaiser Wilhelm.
Number 12: Did you know that the Nazis had a successful
plot to destroy the value of British currency? In 1939, the Nazis formulated an unorthodox plan
to create millions in counterfeit British pounds and drop them over the UK. This was intended
to cause hyperinflation and reduce the value of the enemy nation’s currency. Using concentration
camp prisoners as slave labor yet again, the Nazis oversaw the manufacture of around 130 million GBP,
the equivalent of about 7 billion pounds today. Number 11:
The Nazis founded two different youth divisions; the Hitler Youth and the League of German Maidens.
Both were encouraged to report their parents to SS authorities if they ever expressed frustration or
opposition to the Nazis, or if they knew of any Jewish citizens or anyone harboring them. Again,
these were literal children as young as six being indoctrinated to believe the Fuhrer's every word,
and in most cases, it worked all too well. The Hitler Youth were known to smash shop windows as
well as beat people on the streets. In one case, a group of Hitler Youth members broke the windows
of a teacher's home that had given them low marks at school.
Number 10: But did you know that some youths in Germany
formed groups that resisted the Nazi regime? They were a teenage organization known as the
Edelweiss Pirates. They resisted the cruelty of the Nazis and refused to be bullied into
obedience by intermingling with the opposite sex, growing out their hair, and singing songs
that the regime had banned. Some groups of the Edelweiss Pirates even fought in the streets
with the Hitler Youth. As the war ensued, many of the Pirates became active participants
in the underground resistance movement, aiding in sabotaging the Nazi war effort.
Number 9: There is a widely shared piece of historical
misinformation often stated as fact, that Hitler ordered the construction of the
German Autobahn, the country’s highway. However, this was the result of carefully manufactured
propaganda. In actuality, the construction of the Autobahn began in 1932 and had only been open
for a few months by the time Hitler assumed power. Number 8:
Shockingly, not everyone in the Nazi party went along with Hitler’s genocidal
plans. Wilm Hosenfeld was a Nazi officer who actively saved the lives of many Jewish and
Polish people during the invasion of Poland, including famous pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose
story was dramatized in the critically acclaimed 2002 movie The Pianist. Sadly, Wilm was captured
and sent to a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at the end of the war after surrendering to the Russian
army. Despite renouncing the Nazis and expressing his horror at seeing the way his fellow countrymen
treated Jewish people, he was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in a Soviet prison camp
for war crimes at the end of the war. There, he died from injuries suffered from torture
despite many petitioning for his release. Number 7:
The Nazi Party organized mass book burnings as a way to publicly and violently
destroy works of literature by Jewish authors, as well as those penned by gay writers and
anything they believed threatened their ideal of the ‘pure Aryan race.’ This included academic
research and advocacy for homosexual rights, as well as some of the earliest pioneering
work on understanding transgender people. During the Nazis’ very first book burnings,
one of the works destroyed was a play from 1821 written by Heinrich Heine that contained the
line: “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”
Number 6: Following the culmination of the Second World War,
the United States enacted Operation Paperclip, a program to allow German and Austrian scientists,
including those who had worked for the Nazis, to immigrate to America. This was in order for the US
to exploit their military and industrial knowledge for their own gain. As a result. the United States
gave asylum to many Nazi war criminals, with the operation remaining a closely guarded secret from
the American public and the world for decades. The operation wasn’t publicly confirmed until the
Freedom of Information Act was introduced in 2000. Number 5:
Who doesn’t love a good perfume? Do you know what smells pretty good?
Chanel! But what you probably don’t realize as you spritz on that No. 5 before a date is that Coco
Chanel, the brand’s founder, was a Nazi spy! Known to be a consummate opportunist, when the Nazis
were in power, Coco Chanel saw the opportunity to have some of that power for herself.
Her most famous perfume, the aforementioned Chanel No. 5, was actually stolen from the Jewish family
that financed it. With the help of the Nazis, Coco also forced them to also pay for her
living expenses after she stole the formula for the perfume.
Number 4: When you hear about ‘the Avengers,’ you
might associate the name with the Marvel superhero team, but that’s not where the name
originated from. There was a real-life group who called themselves ‘the Avengers,’ who
tasked themselves with tracking down Nazi war criminals. More widely known as Nakam,
the Hebrew word for ‘vengeance,’ they were a team of young Jewish Holocaust survivors,
with one goal in mind. Distributing justice. These vigilante assassins sought a mission of
revenge against the entire country of Germany after the atrocities they endured and realized
that antisemitic attacks on Holocaust survivors were continuing even after the Nazis surrendered.
Number 3: Members of the Nazi party were known to have
their own salute, consisting of a rigid, outstretched arm specifically to greet Hitler.
It was meant to be a display by party members of their commitment to the Nazis, as well as
a statement of their ideology to the outside world. However, the so-called Roman salute,
or Nazi salute, didn’t see full adoption in the German military – along with all other
organizations in Nazi Germany – until 1944. This was after a failed attempt by the German
resistance to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazis, and as such, soldiers were now expected to
physically show their loyalty using the salute. To this day, the Nazi salute is considered an act of
hate speech across the world, and in Germany and Austria, performing the gesture is still illegal,
as is displaying other Nazi-associated symbols. Number 2:
Did you know there was a wedding edition of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf? A free copy
of the book known as the Hochzeitsausgabe edition was sent out to newlywed couples in Germany.
Number 1: Given how much the Nazis were obsessed
with their symbolism and iconography, you’d think they didn’t care much for other
countries' iconic landmarks. But strangely, they reportedly used the famous Leaning Tower
of Pisa as an observation post. Apparently, neither the Nazis nor the Allied Forces wanted to
order artillery strikes in the area because they were so astounded by the beauty of the leaning
tower and the surrounding cathedral square. Now check out “Real Reason
Why Nazi Officers Fled to Argentina After WW2.” Or watch this video instead!