Being an intern at a German landscaping company during 1992 meant Ökoland Dederow was handed
the tedious task of looking through aerial photographs for irrigation lines in a forest
located in East Germany.
During the course of this, Dederow came across something that definitely was not an irrigation
line in photo 106/88.
Approximately 140 larch trees in the middle of forest of green pine trees had turned brown
in the autumn, forming a large swastika.
He immediately showed the picture to his boss, Günter Reschke, who chartered a plane to
take him over the section of forest and saw the symbol with his own eyes.
The forest swastika in Brandenburg, Germany most likely had been around since the 1930s,
based on estimates of the age of the trees.
Why did it take more than a half a century for anyone to discover it?
One factor was that the larch trees only changed color, making the swastika visible, for a
short period of time in the fall.
The other factor was that the symbol can only be seen from the air and private planes were
for a time banned from flying over the region.
Any commercial planes flying over the area would have been too high for the passengers
or pilots to see this.
No one knows who bears responsibility for the forest swastika in Brandenburg.
A number of rumors surfaced shortly after Dederow discovered the symbol.
One possible explanation places the blame on nearby villagers.
One of their own was caught listening to a BBC radio broadcast in secret and ultimately
sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for this act.
The story goes that the villagers then planted the trees in the shape of a swastika to show
their loyalty to the Nazi Party.
One more version claims the planting occurred in honor of Hitler’s birthday when a local
Nazi leader ordered it done.
Alternatively, a newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, wrote that the Reich Labor Service constructed
a road in a nearby village and the trees were planted in gratitude for this road.
Whoever really planted it, the forest swastika in Brandenburg is not the only one discovered
in Germany after World War II.
National Socialist foresters commonly created swastikas via planting trees during the Nazi
regime, many of which have only been discovered relatively recently.
For instance, in the 1970s, United States soldiers in Hesse discovered such a swastika
and the numbers “1933” on a hillside.
Another such swastika was discovered in Hesse during the 1980s, and a backwards swastika
constructed of Douglas firs was found in Wiesbaden in 2000.
Three years after Dederow discovered the Brandenburg swastika, in 1995, the local German officials
took action.
Foresters armed with chainsaws cut down forty of the larch trees and reported back to their
superiors that the symbol was no longer recognizable.
However, a picture published in 2000 showed the foresters had been wrong.
Those larches that remained after they cut others down filled in the spots left open,
allowing the trees to still form the symbol, albeit slightly frayed, when they changed
to yellow and then brown.
Officials in Brandenburg worried that if the swastika remained in the forest, it would
become a pilgrimage site for Neo-Nazis.
They also wanted to avoid a situation where the stumps were left behind and continued
to show a swastika-shaped outline between the trees.
To get around these issues, they planned to remove all the trees in that section of the
forest, but ran into legal issues in doing so as the ownership of some of the land was
in dispute.
In the end, the Bodenverwertungs- und -verwaltungs GmbH (BVVG), the federal entity in charge
of property management, only granted a permit to cut down twenty-five of the remaining trees.
Foresters again headed to the tree swastika on December 4, 2000; they strategically marked
and cut down twenty-five trees ensuring the swastika would no longer appear from the air.
This all might have you wondering how the Nazis came up with the swastika in the first
place.
It turns out, the Nazis weren’t the first to use this symbol prominently.
The first known record of this symbol popping up was over 12,000 years ago in the region
of present day Ukraine, with a version of the swastika carved into a tusk of a mammoth.
As we traverse through history, we find the swastika, or some version of it, was prevalent
pretty much all over the world in a remarkable number of cultures- from the Navajo and Hopi
Native Americans (among others) to the Celts, the Jews, the early Christians, the Indus
Valley Civilization, the ancient Greek and Romans, the Egyptians, etc.
How is this possible?
Some of it can be explained by cultural diffusion.
Beyond that, it has been theorized that the swastika shape would necessarily be something
any society that weaves baskets would be familiar with as, when weaving baskets via a square
weave, this basic shape is readily apparent.
An alternative possible origin was put forth by Carl Sagan in 1985.
He noted in his book, Comet, when studying a Chinese text from the Han dynasty (second
century BC) that included drawn comet tails, one of the depictions showed a comet with
a tail that had four bent arms, strongly resembling a swastika.
Sagan theorized that a comet, or comets over time, could have approached so close to the
Earth that the jets of gas streaming from the spinning comet(s), could form these arms,
making the swastika shape in the sky and thus leading to the adoption of the swastika as
a symbol of importance across the world almost literally overnight.
So why did the Nazi’s use the swastika?
Heinrich Schliemann found the symbol in the site of ancient Troy in the late 19th century.
He theorized that the symbol thus linked the Greek and Germanic cultures as this symbol
was also often found on ancient Germanic pottery.
The work of Schliemann eventually was used by the völkisch movement, which in turn ultimately
influenced Nazism.
As Hitler later stated in Mein Kampf, “The basic ideas of the National-Socialist movement
are populist (völkisch) and the populist (völkisch) ideas are National-Socialist.”
Matilde_MoisantAt this time, partially thanks to Schliemann’s work, the symbol experienced
something of a resurgence across the Western world.
For instance, the picture to the right shows famed American aviator Matilde E. Moisant
(the second woman in the U.S. to receive a pilot’s license after Harriet Quimby) in
1912 wearing a version of the symbol as a good luck charm, which is also why certain
sports teams, such as the British Columbian Fernie Swastikas women’s hockey team used
it in the early 20th century.
(In fact, the name “swastika” derives from the Sanskrit “svastika-s,” meaning
“being fortunate.”)
The swastika was also still a commonly used symbol at this time among various groups of
Native Americans, with it having slightly different meanings depending on the group.
In any event, Hitler was familiar with the symbol, thinking it connected Ancient Greece
to the Germanic peoples as Schliemann had theorized.
Whether he remembered it later in life or not, Hitler likely first encountered it as
a boy at the Benedictine choir school at Lambach Abbey, Upper Austria, which Hitler attended
when a child.
The school had a swastika chiseled into the monastery portal and also in the wall above
the spring grotto in the courtyard.
Hitler stated of why the symbol was chosen for the Nazi flag, among other design elements,
“I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag
with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle.
After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and
the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika…”
“Those revered colors expressive of our homage to the glorious past and which once
brought so much honor to the German nation…”
“As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag.
In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea; in the swastika,
the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token,
the victory of the idea of creative work.”
Given the Nazi’s usurping of this once ubiquitously symbol, today it’s firmly taboo outside
of regions where Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism (although with slightly different orientations)
particularly are prominent.
Needless to say, this has on occasion created a bit of cross-cultural misunderstandings
in the ensuing decades, such as in 1999 when a 10 year old from New York bought Pokémon
cards imported from Japan that contained the Buddhist version of the symbol on two of the
cards in the set.
This created quite a stir when the media got a hold of the story after the parents filed
a complaint with the company, with many misinterpreting the symbol.
Ultimately, the manufacturer removed those cards from the sets exported to North America
to avoid further misunderstandings.