- 5 hours ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:02Two Sieg runes, the symbol for the Schutzstaffel, the SS.
00:14It was rugged. It was aggressive.
00:18They stand for terror and oppression, for the most serious crimes against humanity.
00:27What is so fascinating about that jagged S?
00:36They had black pennants with a Sieg rune on them. I thought that was great.
00:42The runes supposedly have their origins among the Teutons, the people of the north, considered by the Nazis to be
00:49a superior race.
00:54The SS rune stands for Germanic culture, which the Nazis wanted to convey as part of their myth.
01:01But the symbol of the SS has, of all things, a Semitic origin.
01:07And those Sieg runes are still used today, for instance in popular music, in order to cause a sensation.
01:14And with right-wing radicals.
01:16They sometimes use it in a modified form to avoid prosecution, but also present it unaltered.
01:27Today they're used to symbolize strength. It says, we're prepared to use violence.
01:33So how should Germany deal with the old runes of the SS? Is a ban the correct approach?
01:42You can ban symbols, but the conviction itself has to come about through democratic means.
01:50The signs of evil. The work of an impoverished graphic designer.
01:56We go on the trail of the history of a dangerous symbol.
02:14East-Westphalia, the heartland of ancient Germania.
02:17It's a focus for delusions of race and native soil.
02:22The extant steiner, 40 meters high, became a Germanic sacred site.
02:27And Hermann, the Cherusk, became a symbol of the superiority of the German race.
02:34The Weyvelsburg was of special interest to the Nazis.
02:38The Renaissance structure, once a bishop's palace, simply needed the right history.
02:42And SS historians obliged.
02:45The Weyvelsburg was declared to supposedly have ancient Germanic heritage.
02:55Immediately after visiting for the first time, SS commander Heinrich Himmler made it the headquarters of his Black Order.
03:03The martial new nobility, as Himmler called the SS, was to have a kind of camelot here.
03:11The SS considered itself to be the avant-garde and assumed that the majority of Germans were not mature enough.
03:19That applied to their horrible racist policies, their murderous policies, as well as to their bizarre cultic ideas.
03:28Himmler's castle was only the beginning.
03:31The village of Weyvelsburg was to be moved.
03:33And the castle complex was to provide space for an SS academy, an elite school for the master race.
03:40Construction was set to start after the final victory.
03:48Himmler gradually expanded the power and size of the SS.
03:51Out of Adolf Hitler's household and security guards, Himmler created a state within a state.
03:57The SS took over control of the police and the concentration camps.
04:01Later, it unleashed the Holocaust.
04:07Himmler, who was shy and very introverted, was, if you will, the ideal head of a secret police and apparatus
04:13of repression that operated covertly.
04:17The genocide began on the Eastern Front.
04:20A memorial on the northern outskirts of Kiev commemorates one of the worst SS crimes of 1941.
04:27In the ravine at Babi Yar, 33,000 Jews were shot dead over two days.
04:32A survivor remembers.
04:36They had to lie face down on the bodies of the murdered and wait for the shots from above.
04:43Then came the next group.
04:45Jews died for 36 hours.
04:51The runes were the symbol uniting the perpetrators.
04:55They considered themselves guardians of blood purity.
04:59Ultimately, the SS would have 800,000 members.
05:10They were mobilized by propaganda that states, we are superior to the others.
05:15But for that, they need someone who is unequivocally beneath them.
05:18And the anti-Semitic insanity, the world conspiracy theories, led to an explosion of violent excess.
05:27And within the framework of this dynamic, symbols like this help.
05:35Graphic artist Walter Heck from the Rhineland developed the double rune in 1929.
05:41Later, he wrote.
05:44The initial designs were unsuccessful because I didn't like the soft lines of the customary S,
05:50which also did not at all correspond to the character of the Schutzstaffel.
05:58I had the idea of representing the two S's in the form of two lightning bolts,
06:03and so unconsciously came upon the runes.
06:10It was the birth of the SS symbol.
06:14Heck himself was an SS first lieutenant and kept his head above water with casual labor.
06:19He got this assignment through Josef Groé, the Gau director of southern Rhineland.
06:25Considering the later significance of the SS runes,
06:28his payment was modest, just two and a half rice marks.
06:39Walter Heck completely relinquished the rights to his design.
06:43Five years later, once Himmler had eliminated all of his rivals,
06:47the jagged lightning bolts came to signify the terror spread by the self-proclaimed Aryan elite.
06:59Victor Klemperer, a journalist from a Jewish family, closely observed the signs of that time.
07:05He wrote.
07:09Long before the Nazi SS existed,
07:12you could see their symbols in red paint on transformer sheds,
07:15with a warning below.
07:17Danger. High voltage.
07:21Here, the jagged S was apparently a stylized image of a lightning bolt.
07:27Lightning, which in its energy storage and speed,
07:30is such a beloved symbol of Nazism.
07:33So the SS characters could also be a pictorial expression of lightning.
07:50The SS rune has aggression in it, and the way it's designed, it stands for the lightning bolts that it
07:56transmits,
07:57but also for the Germanic, which the National Socialists wanted to convey in the form of myth.
08:30Runes were the written characters of the Germanic peoples.
08:49The Romans had long had a complex written language, in which, like the Persians and Greeks, they wrote documents and
09:01literature.
09:02They looked down on the barbarians in the north, whom they considered to be simple savages.
09:11Today, only a few experts are truly familiar with the runic characters of the Germanic tribes.
09:20Professor Klaus Duvel from Göttingen provides an example of how the comparatively primitive writing can be interpreted.
09:35This stone says, King Sven had this stone set for Skarthi, his liege man.
09:43It reads up here, then down, up again, then down again.
09:47And he travelled far to the west and died here, near Haithabu.
09:54Historically, all Germanic languages come from the Proto-Germanic.
09:58That's supposedly the origin of the word runo, or rune, which means secret.
10:22But researchers are still unsure about the origin of runes.
10:26Of the 6,500 runic inscriptions that have been found so far, several are based on an alphabet with 24
10:32letters.
10:33They are related to other European writing.
10:42Basically, there are four major theories that ascribe the runic writing system to one of the southern European alphabets.
10:50Either Greek, Latin, Etruscan, or, and that has been investigated again in the modern era, directly to Phoenician.
11:05Whatever route runic writing took until it arrived among the peoples in the north,
11:09whether it came to the Teutons from the Etruscans, ancient Rome, or ancient Greece,
11:16its origin is most likely Phoenician.
11:20The cradle of all European written language, including Germanic runic script,
11:25lies in the Middle East, in what is today Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.
11:31A small strip along the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
11:43The Phoenicians were a seafaring people, who influenced the world of the Mediterranean for centuries.
11:50They belonged to the family of Semitic peoples, and considered themselves descendants of Abraham.
12:00Did Heinrich Himmler and his Germanic racists know all of that?
12:07Probably not, as the researchers of the 1930s still knew very little about the history of languages.
12:17So it is a cruel irony of fate that perpetrators of the Holocaust carried out their murderous campaigns
12:24while wearing insignia with Semitic roots.
12:30But for scholars today, runes remain a worthwhile subject of research.
12:39Runes are exceptional in that they have both a name and a meaning.
12:44This dual aspect of the runes, as letters and as symbols, is unique.
12:51The M rune stands for the letter M, but also for the word for person.
12:57The S rune stands for the letter S, but also for the word for son.
13:02The Teutons themselves could not explain where their graphic characters came from.
13:06They attributed magical powers to the characters and told stories about their energy and power.
13:11A few literate people feared the characters' power and changed their names.
13:18Klaus Duvel demonstrates using the example of a clothing clasp.
13:25The name of the person who made this inscription is hidden here.
13:29So that its magic would not work on him, we suspect that he altered his name.
13:35He should be called Borisso, but what's written is Bujasso.
13:46The runes have yet to reveal all of their secrets.
13:52Runology is characterized by a number of open questions.
13:55So basically, there's a lot we don't yet know.
13:58And that leads to lay people and enthusiasts getting involved.
14:04That includes fantasists like the so-called folkish movement.
14:09Aggressively anti-Semitic, this populist movement laid the groundwork in the late 19th century for that which was to come
14:15later.
14:17Guido von List was one of them.
14:19He believed in supernatural messages.
14:25During an illness, when he nearly went blind, Guido von List had an inspiration, an intuition, perhaps also a vision.
14:36And he said that showed him this runic alphabet.
14:43Guido von List coined the term Sieg-Rune.
14:46It's a neologism by a charlatan.
14:51You can't completely deny that we're dealing with runic forms.
14:55But he combined these runic forms and above all changed them and gave them fake names
15:01by assigning the runes designations that sounded like the real ones, but were slightly changed.
15:09With Guido von List, terms that the Nazis end up adopting are mixed with crude ideas about Germanic culture.
15:15It's a mixture that was then turned against the supposed root of all evil, against Jews.
15:26The folkish thinkers of the 19th century undertook a racist, folkish reinterpretation of the entire runic system.
15:34The Nazis incorporated it because it fitted in very well with their so-called ideology.
15:44To that end, scholars at the University of Göttingen were brought into line.
15:48Starting in 1938, there was a dedicated institute of runology.
15:55The faculty were meant to provide proof for the belief at the core of the Nazi madness,
16:00the superiority of the Germanic race.
16:07They asserted that it wasn't the Greeks, Romans or Phoenicians who invented written language, but the Teutons.
16:14Back in 1935, Himmler had created an ancestral heritage research team,
16:19to which he appointed dubious experts, more motivated by ideology than serious scholarship.
16:28Many of them were esotericists and occultists.
16:31They dug, grave robbed, and reinterpreted.
16:37To them, simple ornamentation was enough to prove an ideology.
16:42And if they couldn't find the proof they wanted, sometimes they helped it along.
16:49In 1938, Himmler sent his men to the roof of the world.
16:54They were meant to find traces of the Aryans in Tibet.
16:58Himmler imagined them as descendants of a civilization that survived the downfall of Atlantis in the Himalayas.
17:07The expedition found that the Tibetan nobility especially showed Aryan elements,
17:12and was certainly suited to be a partner people to the Germans.
17:24Of course, Himmler lived in part in a fantasy world that was dominated by those sorts of Germanic myths and
17:30occult topics.
17:31But one mustn't overlook the fact that, even with all these private hobbies,
17:35he by no means neglected the power political realities he had to deal with as SS Reichsführer.
17:42The SS Reichsführer loved to surround himself with willing henchmen.
17:48Those included Karl Maria Willigut, an occultist from Austria with supposed psychic abilities.
17:58Himmler believed that in Willigut he had found a descendant of an ancient clan,
18:03in which ancient knowledge had been handed down through the generations.
18:06So when he dealt with them and asked him questions,
18:08he believed that he was thus able to communicate with the Germanic primeval world.
18:15The SS brigadier-general became Himmler's advisor for symbols and ceremonies.
18:23Willigut was also able to work as a designer.
18:26The notorious skull ring was his creation.
18:31He also had the rendering removed from the outer walls of the Weywelsberg,
18:35in order to make it look more Germanic.
18:41But in 1939, Karl Maria Willigut had to leave the SS.
18:46He had failed to reveal the fact that he was an escaped patient from an insane asylum.
18:51Nonetheless, Himmler continued to maintain a discreet contact with him.
18:59The Nazis didn't care so much about demonstrating a development.
19:03Rather, they wanted to prove above all that history was based on the permanence of races.
19:09Investigating the past was meant to prove that there is a superior race in human history.
19:17The SS was meant to wage war not only for the state, but for the Aryan race.
19:23That included especially fanatical frontline combat units, as well as task forces for killing Jews.
19:29And the units assigned to the death camps.
19:36What they all had in common was the SS runes.
19:42In his messages to the front, the leadership of the SS Senior District Southwest expressed his enthusiasm for the symbols.
19:52It's not for nothing that the SIG runes on the black lapels of the Waffen SS seem so mysterious, and
19:58yet are so simple to interpret.
20:00Victory. Again and again, victory.
20:03Victory. Soon, the double lightning bolts are given their own key on typewriters.
20:13The trademark of the supposed Nazi elite is to be typed in a Germanic style, even in official documents.
20:25The fact that the symbol of the SS, the double SIG rune, was made a character on typewriters is unprecedented.
20:33The new key was also meant to help make typing more efficient.
20:38Since the occupation of areas in the East, the bureaucracy had swelled.
20:43The runes of the SS became seen more commonly in Germany.
20:50People began to notice that apparently those wearing this label were allowed to do things that a government is normally
20:55not allowed to do.
20:58And this label was in great demand.
21:01It represented power and advantages.
21:05There was also an opposite label.
21:09And that was the yellow Jewish badge.
21:13Those who had to wear that were nothing.
21:16They had no power.
21:18They were vermin to be eliminated.
21:20They were ungetrieffed.
21:24They were ungetrieffed.
21:25Victor Klemperer observed the coarsening of German society.
21:29He wrote...
21:33Today I asked myself again, which was the worst day for the Jews?
21:39September 19th, 1941.
21:41From that day on, they had to wear the yellow badge.
21:45Now that it's been introduced, it doesn't matter anymore if Jewish homes are far apart or form their own neighborhood.
21:52Because every Jew with a yellow star carries the ghetto with them, like a snail with its shell.
22:02Victor Klemperer, son of a rabbi, survived the Nazi regime thanks to the help of his wife, considered Aryan in
22:09Nazi parlance.
22:15Gauleiter Josef Groet put in a good word for the creator of the SS symbol, graphic artist Walter Heck.
22:23Groet asked Himmler for some money for the impoverished designer, arguing that such a deserving comrade should not come away
22:30empty-handed.
22:32Groet wrote...
22:35Despite his plight, Heck did not lay claim to any copyright, and agreed to a very small payment.
22:43He got two and a half Reichmarks.
22:47It should be taken under consideration whether SS Obersturmführer Walter Heck could not be accorded recognition.
23:01SS leader Himmler wanted to show his gratitude.
23:04Four months later, he wrote to Walter Heck.
23:08Once the war is over, I intend to give you a single family house with a garden, as a visible
23:14sign of my appreciation.
23:17However, I expect you to have already started a family by then, with at least two children.
23:26Shortly before that, Himmler had ordered his highest officers to Wewelsburg.
23:31He wants to prepare them for what was being called a struggle of annihilation.
23:35A few days before the start of the Russia offensive, there was a meeting at Wewelsburg of high-ranking SS
23:43leaders,
23:44who were to be put in the mood, so to speak, for the imminent historic war against the Soviet Union.
23:50And that required a certain intimate atmosphere.
23:56Later, one of the SS officers would say that Himmler spoke of the decimation of the Slavic race by 30
24:03million.
24:06For his speech, Himmler used a hall called the Obergruppenführersaal.
24:14Here, around the so-called Black Sun, the race fanatics forged their plans for the Third Reich, as Himmler imagined
24:21it.
24:30This hall, designed by the SS during the remodeling of the Wewelsburg, today has special significance for neo-Nazis.
24:37In its Black Sun, they see 12 Sieg runes, or three swastikas laid on top of each other.
24:45Graphic designer Andreas Korb studied the symbol extensively.
24:49Some see it as a black sun, others simply as a sunwheel.
24:56The strength of this symbol is that it leaves a lot of room for interpretations like that.
25:02Everyone can see in it what he wants to see.
25:05And as with the SS rune itself, the design of the symbol is one thing,
25:09but the loading of it with meaning is something else again.
25:14Some of Himmler's esoterics believe the Black Sun produced the light from which the Proto-Aryans arose.
25:23Others see a connection with the Teutonic Order, with the Nordic Edda saga, or even with King Arthur.
25:34Right below the ornament is a hall with a decorated dome.
25:37It feels like a crypt.
25:40To make it, several floors in the Wewelsburg's North Tower were removed.
25:45That kind of work was done by forced labourers from the nearby Niederhagen concentration camp.
25:54It's still not clear what the domed hall was meant to be used for.
26:01These occult symbols and rituals had great meaning for the SS when you consider the cohesion of the organisation
26:09and its differentiation from the rest of the world.
26:14Himmler's SS provided thousands of perpetrators of the Holocaust.
26:21Many of them were motivated to kill by a deep, racist delusion.
26:29Hitler was aware of how valuable his loyal Heinrich, as he called him, was.
26:35But he was suspicious of his fondness for the supernatural.
26:42There are very clear statements from Hitler, made in trusted company, where he considered this, as he called it,
26:48occult nonsense, as advocated by Himmler, to be out of the question, and thought it was a very unfortunate development.
26:57In his culture speech at the party rally, he said decidedly that the Nazi party was not a cult movement,
27:03but a political movement.
27:04It should be legal.
27:06At the Nuremberg rally in 1938, Hitler declared that the insinuation into the movement of mystically inclined occult explorers of
27:15the beyond must not be tolerated,
27:17saying that National Socialism was a cool doctrine of reality.
27:21Hitler and the SS began wrestling over interpretational sovereignty.
27:27What do the signs of evil really stand for?
27:30Back in May 1933, the Nazi regime passed a law protecting national symbols.
27:43The Nazis had a great awareness that symbols were hugely important for the cohesion of the organization that must not
27:52be allowed to be sentimentalized.
27:54That's why there was that early law against the misuse of Nazi symbols.
27:59There was a real industry that produced the most outlandish things, and which of course tended to contribute to making
28:05those symbols look ridiculous.
28:11Christmas tree ornaments with Hitler's face, Nazi party boxes, and swastika clothing were banned.
28:17The party alone was allowed to decide where and when its symbols would be used.
28:26The dictator learned from his opponents. In Mein Kampf, he wrote...
28:34After the war, I experienced a mass Marxist rally in Berlin, in front of the royal palace and gardens.
28:43A sea of red flags, red armbands and red flowers gave this rally, which was attended by about 120,000
28:51people.
28:51A tremendous appearance, purely superficially.
28:55I myself could sense and understand how easily an ordinary man could succumb to the suggestive allure of such a
29:02terrifically potent spectacle.
29:09Nazism was supposed to exude a similarly potent allure.
29:14Nazi symbols decorated city centers on holidays.
29:21The party marketed itself with flags and bunting.
29:29Afer Sternberg was a member of the League of German Girls, and was thrilled by all the symbols.
29:41I liked the Siegrune, and I envied the Jungfolk, the parallel organization to the Young Girls League, for boys ages
29:4910 to 14.
29:51They had black pennants with a Siegrune on them, and I thought that was great.
29:56So I stole a Siegrune pennant, and appointed my Young Girls group with it.
30:02But that didn't go down so well with one of my rivals, and they got in trouble.
30:11The Nazi signs and symbols seem made for each other, homogeneous, as if they'd been created by an agency.
30:24The color code the Nazis used fit very well into their whole ideology.
30:30You have the brown, which stands for the militaristic aspect, for the SA and the SS.
30:36Then you have black, of course, which was later used for the SS, and which exuded an incredible aggressiveness and
30:41brutality, especially in connection with the image of the skull.
30:44And you have the signal color of red, used along with the swastika, which has a great pithiness and recognizability.
30:56It's an ensemble of terror.
31:01Nazi propaganda was aggressive.
31:07It was accusatory and direct.
31:21The blatant, the loud, the openly propagandistic elements certainly helped this regime be very effective and efficient back then.
31:31Not least because, before this, no one else in politics had used these mass media in such an intense way.
31:40So the effect on the population was, of course, especially intense.
31:46But appearances are deceiving. The design of the Nazis, their signs and symbols, were not part of a unified strategy.
31:53What unified them was simply their style.
31:56Even font choices were ideologically determined. Gothic or Fractur were all the rage.
32:02They were considered Teutonic, German fonts.
32:09Traditionally, in those folkish circles, there was the notion that the German or Aryan person also had to distinguish himself
32:15through a special font.
32:16So there was a real cult surrounding these Fractur typefaces, German typefaces.
32:23Official documents were printed in Fractur, and film posters used the old-fashioned fonts.
32:28In 1937, Jewish-owned publishers were forbidden from using Gothic typefaces.
32:37Designer Andreas Korp has studied the effect of Fractur typefaces.
32:48Here we have an original poster for a speech by Hitler in 1923, typeset in a Fractur font, a broken
32:56script.
32:57And next to it, redesigned.
32:59I think you can clearly see here what a great role the typeface plays.
33:04A font can almost have a textual influence.
33:07I believe the message is clearly rich.
33:10It simply has something folkish, populist, not elitist.
33:14And if you compare it to this reconstruction of the poster, it's almost like a technical lecture.
33:19It has a completely different feel, which does not correspond to that of Hitler.
33:26But from 1941, Hitler, along with Martin Bormann, suddenly espoused Roman type.
33:32It was an about-face, away from the allegedly old Germanic.
33:41Bormann issued a circular, in which he polemically stated that for him, Fractur was only made up of Schwabacher Jewish
33:48letters.
33:49Presumably a reference to the fact that Jewish publishers had earlier dealt in books printed with the Schwabach Fractur typeface.
33:58They came from the Fractur typeface, which of course had a strongly Germanic heritage, and which was meant to demonstrate
34:06how important it was to the Nazis to carry on this German-ness and this tradition.
34:11Later they switched to a more modern antiqua font, which was meant to symbolize, we are also a modern progressive,
34:18and above all global movement.
34:23That was the point, expressing the idea to the people out there that the Nazis represented a movement that would
34:29eventually conquer the world, which luckily didn't happen.
34:35Hitler wanted to use the new typeface as an ideological message.
34:39In a hundred years, our language will be the European language, he asserted in a speech.
34:44And the prerequisite for that was Roman type.
34:49It's understandable that Hitler preferred antiqua.
34:52This font, in capital letters, ideally centered along the central axis, is the typographical expression of power.
35:04Fractur typefaces had to disappear from party pamphlets, newspapers and announcements, to be replaced by Roman type, the script of
35:12the ancient Romans.
35:19The entire presence of the Nazis was of course completely aimed at preventing any kind of individuality.
35:26Essentially you can say that democracy stands for colourfulness, and dictatorships stand for monotony.
35:32That has a lot to do with the concept of humanity behind it, meaning that they wanted to bring everyone
35:38into line, in the truest sense of the word.
35:44With the memory of defeat still fresh, the Nazi regime adheres to its signs of evil.
35:53Under their impact, resistance is opposed with deadly rigour.
36:00Deserters are hanged.
36:03Prisoners are executed.
36:09Obedience until the bitter end.
36:11Many believe to the last in a final victory, under the banner of the SS ruins.
36:16In our memory, they stand for Auschwitz, for a time when there was no room for humanity, at least in
36:25Germany.
36:27They stand for World War II, and for a totalitarian regime that was unique in its ideological power of destruction.
36:36And they stand for an entire country, and the many people in that country who looked away.
36:47After the surrender, hundreds of thousands of people were arrested by the allies.
36:52And suddenly the SS ruins were revealing.
36:56The symbol of evil identified perpetrators.
37:06Sometimes, a tattoo indicating a blood group was the key evidence.
37:13Often, simply belonging to Himmler's SS was enough for the victors as proof of guilt.
37:20Some prisoners were executed immediately.
37:24Others were put on trial.
37:27For Eva Sternheim, the end of the war meant the end of her world.
37:32That scene in the Reichskanzlei, above was a big imperial eagle, holding a laurel wreath in its talons, with a
37:43swastika on it.
37:44And that was blown up.
37:47That still really affects me.
37:49Because that was the downfall.
37:51It was all over.
37:52The end.
37:55Later, she reckoned with her own history and with Germany's.
37:58The German title of her book means, Was I the only one who cheered?
38:06In October of 1945, the Allies passed a law forbidding the Nazi Party and all its organizations, including the SS.
38:18The newly founded Federal Republic of Germany went one step further, penalizing the use of Nazi symbols.
38:32After that massive phase of propaganda, which really did permeate the entire German population, it was important to ban those
38:42symbols from public life, in order to expedite denazification, just as it was right to ban certain literature, certain statements
38:50in order to rebuild democracy.
38:55But the fatal attraction has not gone away.
38:58The old symbols appear again and again, whether out of ignorance, an assertion of convictions, or as a provocation.
39:10The rock band KISS gained notoriety worldwide by using the double lightning bolts, especially when the runes appeared at their
39:19concerts in Germany.
39:25Of course, it leads to real conflicts when a foreign band uses SS runes in its name, and this band
39:31sells albums here in Germany or goes on tour here, and then comes into conflict with the peculiarities of German
39:38law.
39:42When lawyers and fans protested, the band's German record company offered to change KISS's logo.
39:48Shortly thereafter, the label announced in a statement.
39:52We would never dream of suspecting the band of glorifying Nazism because of their logo.
39:57We're pleased that the band's management has agreed to the change.
40:03So KISS with the double S runes becomes KISS without them, but only for a short time.
40:09The band's singer insists it's not meant to be a Nazi symbol since he himself is Jewish.
40:19An incident from 2015 shows how sensitive many people are to these signs of evil.
40:24At Berlin's eternally unfinished new airport, already a public laughing stock, suddenly SS runes appeared on a wall.
40:35They can especially be seen online, but rarely on the wall itself.
40:39Closer investigation reveals that fixtures for hanging advertising signs were casting compromising shadows under certain lighting conditions.
41:05Once you find you have to seriously consider whether there is someone deliberately behind the fact that,
41:11whenever it's sunny, the main entrance of the airport is covered in these runes due to the way the shadows
41:17fall,
41:18then you need to take action simply to avoid misunderstandings.
41:25Right-wing extremists like to cause provocation using slightly altered symbols.
41:32They know exactly what is allowed and what is not.
41:37Extremism and racism signalled through slight variations of the old symbols.
41:45The inhuman messages of Heinrich Himmler and his henchmen are still behind these tattoos and posters.
41:53And the black sun continues to be used.
42:02In this country, you are allowed to have and to express extremist views.
42:07As painful as that might be, it's a part of our liberty.
42:12The line is drawn either where other persons are disparaged,
42:16or where specifically outlawed organisations are promoted or advertised.
42:22And that does not apply to the black sun.
42:28The black sun falls through the cracks of German criminal law.
42:32It was not the symbol of a Nazi organisation, so it has not been banned.
42:38Twelve runes which the SS used for their purposes.
42:42Back then, as today, signalling right-wing views and a threat to all who believe differently.
42:52We Germans are a special case.
42:54Germany is more than just the Federal Republic of Germany.
42:57And it isn't we who are the wrong-way drivers, but everyone else is a wrong-way driver.
43:02And I am showing these wrong-way drivers.
43:05Watch out! Bear in mind what this symbol once meant, and I, who now wear it, think it is right.
43:11I think it is wrong that Hitler was unable to complete the job, and now I am here to do
43:16it.
43:23So how should a nation of law deal with this sort of provocation?
43:30Can it combat dangerous views with the code of law?
43:38Or does it require, above all, courage, conviction and fortitude in order to break the spell of the signs of
43:47evil?
43:49How watchful must democracy be?
43:55We are witnessing how people have no inhibitions to say things about other people that, at best, are insulting,
44:02and at worst, are formulated with the energy of spiritual arson and violence.
44:07And we are seeing how this spiritual arson becomes real arson.
44:14According to the law, only what is expressed publicly can be penalized.
44:18It was only when neo-Nazi and MPD politician Marcel Zedd was photographed shirtless at a swimming pool that he
44:25became culpable.
44:26His back is tattooed with the slogan from the Buchenwald concentration camp.
44:30Everyone gets what he deserves.
44:37You may indeed have yourself tattooed with Nazi symbols, but you are not allowed to display them publicly.
44:44Marcel Zedd, who was seen at a swimming pool with a concentration camp tattoo, was convicted of hate speech.
44:53Paragraph 130 of the Criminal Code also condemns denying, condoning or making light of the crimes against humanity committed by
45:01the Nazis.
45:06Marcel Zedd also lost his case on appeal. In November 2016, he was sentenced to eight months in prison without
45:13parole.
45:19Many right-wing extremists want a society without tolerance and without solidarity for the marginalized, like back then.
45:27They identify themselves through the clothes they wear.
45:30A favorite label of many radicals is Tor Steiner.
45:38What set the Tor Steiner logo apart was that it combined two runes that were widely known and familiar in
45:47Nazi circles.
45:49The company's symbol consists of the S rune and the Tuaz rune, the Germanic symbol for battle.
45:55The label has been taken to court in Germany.
46:00Initially, the courts focused on the individual components, the Siegruhm and the Tierruhm, and they said both are unconstitutional symbols.
46:11The label lost its first case and then won on appeal.
46:16When you take different symbols, each of which is actionable on its own, and create a new symbol that has
46:25its own optical content but has never been used by a banned organization, then it truly does not have the
46:31elements of an offense.
46:35Until the court lifted its ban, the company briefly used a new logo.
46:38In the meantime, it has returned to the previous two runes.
46:48These fashion labels are important for the right-wing camp to project their views outwardly and make themselves identifiable while
46:56at the same time strengthening the community inwardly.
47:01A small group from the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern uses humor to take aim at the right-wing label.
47:07Its owners have created the label Storchheiner, Storkheiner, an entire Stork-themed collection with similar designs to those of Torsteiner.
47:18Sales of Storchheiner products are donated to projects working against right-wing extremists.
47:29They are doing exactly that which should distinguish a democratic state.
47:36These initiatives work with words on the one hand, but also with the distortion of the original symbols.
47:42In doing so, they make fun of the things the other side takes especially seriously and wants to venerate.
47:48In the right-wing of the world, Tooteiners.
47:51Torsteiner took the Paradists to court and lost.
47:56But how should Germany proceed?
48:02Some in the country think lifting the ban on Nazi symbols would make them less appealing as a gesture of
48:08rebellion.
48:15again.
48:16What signal would it send if these were no longer banned?
48:20The message would be spread that they were allowed, and if the symbolism were allowed,
48:25it would seem that there would no longer be anything questionable about the thoughts and
48:29convictions behind them.
48:37There are certain symbols that can very easily be exploited.
48:41That includes of course these symbols from the Nazi era.
48:44For some people they still have a great identification potential, they still have appeal.
48:50And that's why it is right to keep these symbols out of the public eye as much as possible,
48:54so as not to encourage these people to fall prey to this ideology again.
49:04Combating the signs of evil is about more than just a right-wing clothing label or historical
49:10details. It's about liberty and the future.
49:17The ban on using these symbols will surely be maintained for a long time to come. As long
49:24as there are still people who suffered under the Nazis, for instance people whose parents
49:29were killed back then, the sensitivity is so great that these symbols will continue to
49:35be banned.
49:35The symbol is now, as they will continue to be in place.
49:52In the world of the military, the
Comments