Sieg Heil was a ritualistic chant used at mass rallies, where enthusiastic crowds answered Heil to the call of Sieg ("victory"). For example, at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, Rudolf Hess ends his climactic speech with, "The Party is Hitler. But Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler. Hitler! Sieg Heil!" At his total war speech delivered in 1943, audiences shouted Sieg Heil as Joseph Goebbels solicited from them "a kind of plebiscitary 'Ja' to self destruction in a war which Germany could by now neither win nor end through negotiated peace". In correspondence with high-ranking Nazi officials, letters were usually signed with "Heil Hitler".
On 11 March 1945, less than two months before the capitulation of Nazi Germany, a memorial for the dead of the war was held in Marktschellenberg, a small town near Hitler's Berghof residence. The historian Ian Kershaw reports, "When the leader of the Wehrmacht unit at the end of his speech called for a Sieg Heil for the Führer, it was returned neither by the Wehrmacht present, nor by the Volkssturm, nor by the spectators of the civilian population who had turned up. This silence of the masses... probably reflects better than anything else, the attitudes of the population."
The Swing Kids (German: Swing Jugend) were a group of middle-class teenagers who consciously separated themselves from Nazism and its culture, greeting each other with 'Swing-Heil!' and addressing one another as 'old-hot-boy'. This playful behaviour was dangerous for participants in the subculture; on 2 January 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered that the leaders be put in concentration camps to be drilled and beaten.
Because of the similarity between the Bellamy salute in the United States and the Nazi salute, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the hand-over-the-heart gesture as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in the United States, instead of the Bellamy salute. This was done when Congress officially adopted the Flag Code on 22 June 1942.
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