storiesThe swastika problem

Take this half first, because it is older, it is bigger, and it is going on today.

The word is Sanskrit — svastika, 'conducive to well-being'. The shape is an equilateral cross with each arm bent at a right angle, in two mirror forms: right-facing 卐 and left-facing 卍. It is in the remains of the Indus Valley Civilization and of the Neolithic Samarra culture of Mesopotamia.

In Hinduism the right-facing form symbolises Surya, prosperity and good luck; the left-facing, sometimes called sauvastika, connotes night and in tantric traditions stands for Kali. It goes on doorways of homes and temples, on the starting page of financial statements, and into mandalas for weddings and for welcoming a newborn — and at Diwali it is drawn in rangoli, coloured sand, or laid out in deepak lights on the floor outside a house.

In Buddhism it stands for the auspicious footprints of the Buddha, and a left-facing form is often imprinted on the chest, feet or palms of Buddha images. In the Bon tradition of Tibet it is the left-facing yungdrung.

In Jainism it is the emblem of Suparśvanātha, the seventh tīrthaṅkara, and in the Śvētāmbara tradition one of the eight auspicious aṣṭamaṅgala. All Jain temples and holy books must contain it, ceremonies begin and end by making the mark several times in rice around the altar with an offering set on it, and the four arms are read as the four places a soul may be reborn before it attains moksha.

East Asia took it with Buddhism. In 693, under the Tang, Wu Zetian declared it the source of all good fortune and named it wan; the character is a homonym for ten thousand, so it also reads as longevity.

None of that stopped in 1945. It is daily practice across South, Southeast and East Asia as this is written in September 2026.

The European story starts in an excavation and is traceable person to person.

Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Troy, 1871 to 1875, turned up objects decorated with the sign. Hearing of it, Émile-Louis Burnouf, director of the French School at Athens, wrote to Schliemann in 1872 that "the Swastika should be regarded as a sign of the Aryan race", adding that "It should also be noted that the Jews have completely rejected it". Schliemann accepted the reading, concluded the Trojans were Aryans, and then connected his Trojan finds to pot bottoms found near Königswalde on the Oder — his own ancestors, as he saw it. Sarah Boxer, writing in The New York Times in 2000, called that a "fateful link". Cathy Gere shows him straining to repeat the motif at Mycenae, writing that it "may often be seen" while his 1878 book carried no illustration of one.

The occultists took it from there. On 24 June 1875 Guido von List buried a swastika of eight wine bottles beneath the Heidentor at Carnuntum; between 1905 and 1907 he published articles calling it an Armanist occult sign concealed in German heraldry, and his 1908 Das Geheimnis der Runen made the case at length. On Christmas Day 1907 Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels hoisted the flag of his Order of the New Templars at Burg Werfenstein: a swastika gules on a field or.

Inference — every step in that chain is a European reading a sign that belonged to somebody else and assigning it to himself. The archaeology was real; the racial conclusion drawn from it was not in the objects.

The dates here are exact and the record states them plainly.

Before the Nazis, the shape tilted at 45 degrees was already in use by the German nationalist Völkisch movement. The newly established Nazi Party formally adopted it in 1920: a black swastika rotated 45 degrees on a white circle on a red background, used on flag, badge and armband.

Hitler claimed the design. In Mein Kampf, published in 1925, he wrote of laying down "a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle". He also set out what he meant by it — "in the hooked cross, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man" — and Nazi writing called it the "race emblem of Germanism". Alfred Rosenberg, the party's senior theorist on race, treated the Indo-Aryan peoples as both model and warning. The party co-opted the sign as a symbol of an Aryan master race.

Hitler also stated the identity the reclamation campaigns now dispute. Speaking in the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl in Munich on 13 August 1920: "You will find this cross as a swastika as far as India and Japan, carved in the temple pillars."

On 14 March 1933, shortly after Hitler became Chancellor, the NSDAP flag was hoisted alongside Germany's national colours. As part of the Nuremberg Laws, on 15 September 1935, it became the sole national flag of Germany. Under it the German state carried out the murder of six million Jews and of millions of others. That is the meaning the shape acquired in Europe and the Americas, and it stands on its own terms alongside the other half of this record.

Post-war Germany and Austria made public display of the sign a criminal matter, alongside the sig rune, the wolfsangel, the Odal SS-rune and the Totenkopf — with exemptions, and the swastikas on Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples are among them, because religious symbols cannot be banned in Germany.

The German courts then had to draw the line on protest imagery. On 15 March 2007 the Federal Court of Justice held that crossed-out symbols were "clearly directed against a revival of national-socialist endeavours". On 9 August 2018 Germany lifted the ban for video games.

Elsewhere the pattern repeats: a ban on the Nazi use, with the religious use carved out. Poland punishes display of Nazi symbols by up to eight years and holds religious use legal. Lithuania fines the Nazi version 150 to 300 euros and treats a non-Nazi swastika as legal. Latvia has banned Nazi and Soviet symbols at public events since 2013, while a Riga regional court held in 2007 that the sign may be used as an ethnographic symbol. Geneva passed a hate-symbols article in June 2024; Brazil criminalised propagation with Nazi intent in 1989 under federal statute 7.716; in 2022 Victoria became the first Australian state to ban the Nazi swastika. In the United States display is protected speech, though in Virginia v. Black in 2003 the Supreme Court allowed prohibition where the use is intended to intimidate.

An EU-wide ban was attempted in early 2005 and failed. When Berlin revived the proposal during its 2007 presidency, Hindu groups across Europe campaigned against it, pointing to five thousand years of the sign as a symbol of peace; the proposal was dropped on 29 January 2007.

Both sides here are organised, named and quotable, and this record gives both.

The Coalition of Hindus of North America runs a Swastika Education and Awareness Campaign under the tag #SwastikaIsSacred. Its position: "Hitler's symbol of hate was never called 'Swastika,' a Sanskrit word that means 'to be well.' He called his symbol a 'Hakenkreuz' (German for 'hooked cross')." On 27 May 2022, after California's Assembly passed AB 2282, CoHNA's president Nikunj Trivedi said the bill in that form "has essentially supported the false idea that there is a 'good Swastika' and a 'bad Swastika.'" In the same release the Reverend Dr T. K. Nakagaki, a Buddhist priest and president of the Heiwa Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, said: "You can say Nazi Hakenkreuz, Nazi hooked cross, Nazi hate symbol, but cannot call it 'Nazi Swastika.'"

The Hindu American Foundation asks reporters to make the same split, noting that early English translations of Mein Kampf substituted swastika for Hakenkreuz, and citing a 2008 Hindu-Jewish leadership summit declaration that recognised the swastika as an ancient and auspicious symbol of the Hindu tradition and called the Third Reich's version a distortion of it. On 28 July 2020 HAF's Taniel Koushakjian objected to New York's A8545 and S6648 for defining the swastika solely as a Nazi symbol.

California's AB 2282, by Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan, was chaptered on 18 September 2022. It targets "the Nazi Hakenkreuz (hooked cross), also known as the Nazi swastika" displayed to terrorise, and states: "This legislation is not intended to criminalize the placement or display of the ancient swastika symbols that are associated with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism and are symbols of peace." CoHNA's spokesperson Pushpita Prasad called the resulting law a victory.

The objection is equally on the record. The Anti-Defamation League downgraded the sign from its status as a Jewish hate symbol in 2010, saying that for some it had "become a more generalised symbol of hate" — but Mark Pitcavage of the ADL's Center on Extremism puts the limit plainly: "I don't think that its association with the Nazis can be completely eliminated." Steven Heller, whose book title asks whether the sign is beyond redemption: "A rose by any other name is a rose." Shelley Rood Wernick of the Jewish Federations of North America's Center on Holocaust Survivor Care: "I recognize the swastika as a symbol of hate." Quoted in the same piece are people taking the other view from inside the affected community, among them the Holocaust historian Jeff Kelman: "No one in the Jewish community wants to see Hitler's legacy continue to harm people."

One fact belongs to nobody's case and is printed because it is true: Hitler himself said in 1920 that the Nazi symbol was the same symbol.

Three notes on this project's own handling, stated so a reader can hold it to them.

The banned-word list this atlas enforces does not reach this subject. `tools/validate.py` refuses a set of words that decide, on a reader's behalf, whether somebody else's practice is real — and none of them is in play here. Nothing in the checker separates the auspicious sign from the Nazi emblem, and nothing could. The separation in this record is editorial, made deliberately, and it is the author's to answer for.

The sign record this essay stands behind is `data/nodes/motif/swastika-sign.json`. It describes the shape, both turns, the living practice and the twentieth-century adoption, and its `today` field carries the current legal position: living and daily across South, Southeast and East Asia, and prohibited in its Nazi use in Germany, Austria, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Brazil, Geneva and Victoria, with religious exemptions written into several of those laws.

The terminology dispute is reported, not settled. This atlas writes swastika for the sign in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain use, because that is the word those traditions use; where the Nazi emblem is meant, it says so in the same breath. Whether the two should ever share a word is the question CoHNA, the Hindu American Foundation and Reverend Nakagaki have put to newsrooms and legislatures, and it is not this project's to answer for them.