NAZI (symbol Swastika ) - Essay Example

It wasn’t until the 1930’s that the Swastika began to denote evil implications. For example, the swastika was worn as a shoulder patch of a World War I U.S. Army Division and was a common decoration found on a myriad of objects. As Germany was behind other countries of the region in forming a formal nation (1871), its people felt susceptible to military and societal invasion from outside its borders. As an instrument to promote unification and national pride, German nationalists began to use the swastika from the mid 1800’s to represent the history of the Germanic and Aryan people.

The swastika could be found on nationalist German ‘volkish’ publications by the end of the 1800’s and by the turn of the twentieth century, the swastika had grown in popularity throughout many German organizations. It was frequently used as the symbol for German nationalism. The Nazi Party’s aspiration to appeal to a wide German audience led them to chose the symbol in 1920. “Because of the Nazis’ flag, the swastika soon became a symbol of hate, anti-Semitism, violence, death, and murder” (Rosenberg, 2006).

As the industrial age swept across Europe in the mid-1800’s it brought society new opportunities but also inadvertently served to increase the individual’s feeling of remoteness and a loss of personal belonging (Mosse, 1964, p. 13). As Germany became modernized, its people began to feel alone in their own culture and began to desire closer association to their community. “Joining the Volk (the people of Germany) was a way to intellectually rebel against this new, modern world. The Volk was an intermediary between the extremes of individuality and the quest for cosmic identity” (Mosse, 1964, p. 15). The effect of this National Socialist movement was that it served to replace the capitalist philosophy and ended chances for personal upward mobility. Third