Nazi Salute - Origins and Adoption

Origins and Adoption

See also: Roman salute

The oral greeting Heil became popular in the pan-German movement around 1900. As a manner of address, Führer was introduced by Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who considered himself leader of the Austrian Germans.

The salute gesture is widely believed to be based on an ancient Roman custom. However, no surviving Roman work of art depicts it, nor does any extant Roman text describe it. Jacques-Louis David's painting Oath of the Horatii (1784) seems to be the starting point for the gesture that became known as the Roman Salute. The gesture and its identification with ancient Rome was advanced in other French neoclassic art. This was further elaborated upon in popular culture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in plays and films that portrayed the salute as an ancient Roman custom. This included the silent film Cabiria (1914), whose screenplay was written by the Italian ultra-nationalist Gabriele d'Annunzio, arguably the forerunner of Benito Mussolini. In 1919, when he led the occupation of Fiume, d'Annunzio adopted the style of salute depicted in the film as a neo-Imperialist ritual; and it was quickly adopted by the Italian Fascist Party.

By autumn 1923, some members of the Nazi Party were using the rigid, outstretched right arm salute to greet their leader, and the leader responded by raising his own right hand crooked back at the elbow, palm opened upwards, in a gesture of acceptance. In 1926, the Heil Hitler salute was made compulsory. It functioned as a display of commitment to the Party and a declaration of principle to the outside world. Yet the drive to gain acceptance did not go unchallenged.

Some party members challenged the legitimacy of the so-called Roman salute, employed by Fascist Italy, as not Germanic. In response, efforts were made to establish its pedigree by inventing a tradition after the fact. In June 1928, Rudolf Hess published an article titled "The Fascist Greeting", which claimed that the gesture was used in Germany as early as 1921, before the Nazis had heard about the Italian Fascists. He admits in the article: "The NSDAP's introduction of the raised-arm greeting approximately two years ago still gets some people's blood boiling. Its opponents suspect the greeting of being un-Germanic. They accuse it of merely aping the (Italian) Fascists", but goes on to ask, "and even if the decree from two years ago (Hess's order that all party members use it) is seen as an adaption of the Fascist gesture, is that really so terrible"? Ian Kershaw points out that Hess did not deny the likely influence from Fascist Italy, even if indeed the salute had been used sporadically in 1921 as Hess claimed.

On the night of 3 January 1942, Hitler said of the origins of the salute:

I made it the salute of the Party long after the Duce had adopted it. I'd read the description of the sitting of the Diet of Worms, in the course of which Luther was greeted with the German salute. It was to show him that he was not being confronted with arms, but with peaceful intentions. In the days of Frederick the Great, people still saluted with their hats, with pompous gestures. In the Middle Ages the serfs humbly doffed their bonnets, whilst the noblemen gave the German salute. It was in the Ratskeller at Bremen, about the year 1921, that I first saw this style of salute. It must be regarded as a survival of an ancient custom, which originally signified: "See, I have no weapon in my hand!" I introduced the salute into the Party at our first meeting in Weimar. The SS at once gave it a soldierly style. It's from that moment that our opponents honored us with the epithet "dogs of Fascists". —Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk