The Will to Totality: Semiotics and Philosophy of the Nazi Salute, 1920-1945
Archer A. Kerr
Abstract
The right-arm salute of the German National Socialists and Italian Fascists is one of the most recognizable hate symbols in history. This infamy notwithstanding, there is very limited scholarship dedicated to the salute’s ideological message or the question of why it was important to the Third Reich. Accordingly, this essay advances a critical and highly interdisciplinary approach to the Nazi salute, drawing on social semiotics and political philosophy and building off the historiographical work of Allert (2008) and Paxton (2005). Further, this research investigates the “Führergruß”, the physical variation of the salute preferred by the Nazi leadership, and its unique function for hierarchical reinforcement. Finally, the under-researched phrase “Sieg Heil” is explored and tied to the concept of the Nazi “Final Victory”. The Nazi salute has recently surged into the public and political mainstream in the United States, demanding this refreshed inquiry into the fascist ritual’s ideological underpinnings.
The main element of habit is the tendency to repeat any action which has been performed before.
Charles Sanders Peirce, 1881
“Heil Hitler” greeted thousands and died.
Bertolt Brecht, 1954
Introduction [1]
The years 2025 and 2026 have seen the return of the right-arm Nazi salute to the social and political mainstream. On 20 January 2026, at the re-inauguration of United States president Donald J. Trump, South African billionaire investor and far-right conspiracy theorist Elon Musk rendered two aggressive gestures resembling those of the German National Socialists and Italian Fascists (Newton and Squire). Precisely one month after Musk’s salutations, reactionary political strategist Steve Bannon did the same thing before the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference (Gold). On 2 October, a man named Sam Polyak burst into a lecture hall at the University of Washington and, while shouting slurs at the students and instructor, heaved his right arm upwards in the familiar fascist gesticulation (Chavez). In 2026, popular far-right activist Jake Lang has drawn condemnation for at least two separate public salutations in January and February (Jones; Gilson).
The Nazi salute has remained a popular hate symbol since the end of the Second World War, but has almost entirely stayed on the fringes of underground or ragtag alt-right hate groups, never emerging onto the public stage, at least without immediate and significant consequences, until very recently. The Musk and Bannon salutes, however, were something entirely different than those given by leaders of small, scrappy neo-Nazi bands; being delivered before large and jeering crowds, the images of Musk and Bannon’s salutations invoked the infamous balcony harangues of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and their fascist comrades. Musk’s startling actions on the inaugural stage caught global attention and sparked fierce debates about the nature of his motions and the intentions behind them. The Nazi salute is not illegal in the United States, qualifying for First Amendment protection since the Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, so it was impossible that Musk would face any substantial consequences for his behavior; even so, the criticisms were scathing. Equally impassioned were Musk’s defenders. Many, including Musk himself, shrugged off the accusations by claiming that he was merely expressing to the crowd that his “heart went out to them” (Wright 2025). Another common defense, made by Musk himself, was that his arm-raisings were “Roman salutes,” (Wright 2025) not truly Nazi, and therefore unproblematic.
A handful of historians and sociologists have led convincing discussions of the history and meaning of the Nazi salute: Tilman Allert’s 2008 monograph The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture remains the cornerstone of the contemporary literature. But times change quickly. We live in an age when fascist symbols ought to be thoroughly well understood. As such, it is the intention of this research to propose a framework for understanding the less well-studied elements of the ritual of greeting—that is, the more subtle and therefore overlooked mechanisms of the Nazi salute. In particular, the questions of how and why it became so pervasive in Nazi Germany require scrutiny.
This essay is situated at the crossroads of three distinct yet related fields of thought: historiography, social philosophy, and semiotics. Semiotics, a cousin of linguistics that has not yet become common in scholarship on the Third Reich, is, at its most basic, the study of communicative signs and meanings and the interpretation of such signs and meanings. For simplicity’s sake, this essay draws from the works and theories of scholars operating under the umbrella of “social semiotics.” Robert Hodges and Gunther Kress were among the first to argue that semiotic study ought to be positioned toward contexts of social processes, and that the “analytic practice” of semiotics—that is, the application of semiotic ideas to real-world societal issues such as politics and ideology—may be useful in developing the field of semiotics beyond strictly academic and theoretical spheres (Hodge and Kress 2). This paper attempts, then, to continue Hodges and Kress’ tradition insomuch as it examines the “social processes” of the Nazi salute through a semiotic lens. Semiotics is a dense field, and it is unnecessary to master all the nomenclature for our purposes, so a brief review of certain important principles will suffice.
Signs are communicative messages—such as words, phrases, and symbols—which are imbued with meaning. Anything which can be interpreted as representing or referring to something is a sign (Peirce 171). That to which a sign refers, or that for which the sign “stands,” is called the referent. Referents are often concepts or ideas; in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler declared that the imposing symbol of the Nazi Hakenkreuz, the swastika, represents German “victory” (Hitler 496-97). What, then, is the concept referred to by the semiotic sign of the Nazi salute?
The “Heil Hitler” greeting “militarized people’s individual identities while subordinating those identities to an overarching hierarchy. It combined hopes for salvation with the promise of a general, moral renewal [for Germany]” (Allert 53). In other words, and as will be elaborated on below, the raising of the right arm and the utterance “Heil Hitler” were miniature oaths to the Führer, his policies in Germany, and, centrally, his visions for the future which hinged on war. Implicit in the salute was the cultivation of frenzied loyalty to the Nazi order and all that it would take to achieve German “salvation,” a central concept which is discussed at length later. We may then summarize that the referent of the Nazi salute was allegiance to National Socialist ideology and support for its attendant social practices (such as the ostracization of Jewish Germans).
Holding this referent in mind, the essay below proposes a cross-disciplinary methodology for studying the salute, situated especially in the context of the rigid Nazi social hierarchy. The paper is broken into four interrelated sections. The first section applies certain strains of semiotic theory—particularly Ivan Fomin’s idea of logonomic reproduction—to the physical action of the Nazi salute. Following is an investigation of the unique referent of a second physical variation of the salute, preferred by state and NSDAP leaders [3], whereby the person receiving the salute would distinctively bend their right arm back at the elbow, with their palm facing the sky. The paper then moves into a discussion of the social-philosophical ideas of José Ortega y Gasset, a prominent twentieth-century European intellectual, insofar as they are useful for understanding rituals of greeting such as the Nazi salute. The fourth and final section turns its attention to the phrase “Sieg Heil,” shouted alongside the instantiation of the Nazi salute at party rallies and other massive propagandistic events. Considering the Nazi salute’s abrupt new popularity in mainstream U.S. politics, the contributions of this research are both novel and timely.
Social semiotics and the ideology of order
We must first establish the understanding that the right-arm Nazi salute is a sign laden with complex ideological meaning, such that its performance is invariably and permanently tied to this ideology (Voloshinov 21) [4]. For semiotician Valentin Voloshinov, and as elaborated on by Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress in Social Semiotics, an ideology “displays an image of the world as it ought to be, as seen from the vantage point of the dominant, or as it is, from the vantage point of the dominated group” (Hodge and Kress 3).
Every instantiation of the Nazi salute refers to the vitriolic National Socialist ideological complex that divides humanity into differently valued classes based on race, sex, age, accomplishment, religion, mental and physical ability, residential location (urban or rural), marital and parental status, and political leaning. Konrad H. Jarausch’s Out of Ashes summarizes that Nazi ideology mythologized a utopian Europe that was free of Jews and Communists, that had its vitality in the countrysides and farms, as opposed to decadent cities, and that largely rejected trends of religious devotion, humanism, modernization, feminism, pacifism, racial justice, and “partisan squabbles of democracy” (Jarausch 273-274). This ideology was extolled—hailed—with each salute, while Hitler himself was also implicitly or explicitly—depending on whether a person said “Heil Hitler” or merely raised their arm, which was also common—lauded at the same time.
Signs such as salutations which function to reaffirm the supremacy of a certain social group, in this case being the Nazi leaders, are termed by Hodge and Kress as “logonomic systems.” These logonomic systems are
… A logonomic system is a set of messages, part of an ideological complex but serving to make it unambiguous in practice. Where structures of domination are unchallenged, a logonomic system serves the dominant by ensuring that acts of semiosis ultimately assure their dominance.
(Hodge and Kress 4 [emphasis added])
In the context of the Third Reich’s state-prescribed social hierarchy, the “reception of meaning” that Hodge and Kress describe belonged to those in positions of power and privilege: Germans who were appropriately affiliated with the Nazi Party, state, or military as to warrant a high degree of respect. One’s worthiness of praise and loyalty, their entitlement to the “reception of meaning,” was parallel to their significance to Nazidom and their proximity to Hitler. The social systems of Nazism were designed to manufacture and then maintain the superiority of these leaders through the adherence of the ordinary population to certain behaviors, thereby qualifying the entire structure as a logonomic system—or a collection of many.
The producers of meaning in National Socialism’s domestic logonomic system of salutation were those who were obligated to salute when finding themselves in the presence of any member of the above-described dominant echelon [5]. It was these ordinary Germans, i.e., the workers, farmers, shopkeepers, and housewives, who communicated their own subservience to the recipients of their salute. [6]
The salute, being a sign with its rights of production and reception divided along class, military, and political lines, was a logonomic system that served the dominant class by validating their superiority in an act of semiosis (the act of raising one’s arm in salutation). However, the concept of logonomic systems was left underdeveloped by Hodge and Kress. Semiotician Ivan Fomin’s concept of logonomic signs elaborates on the original theory. Fomin defines logonomic signs as “socially devised signs that constrain multimodal semiosis by restricting who is able to produce and receive what signs under what circumstances” (36), reaffirming Hodge and Kress’ idea that signs are (or at least can be) used to maintain structures of dominance and oppression.
Fomin discusses the replicability of semiotic signs, a process he dubs “logonomic reproduction.” In logonomic reproduction, “past logonomic semioses are connected with future logonomic semioses via current logonomic semioses” (Fomin 42). In other words, the internalization of others’ semioses—such as their physical actions—that one has witnessed in the past inspires one to imitate these same actions when conditions are appropriate in the present, thereby sustaining the use of the semiotic action into the future, creating a cohesive cycle. Logonomic reproduction enables the creation of habit, “the tendency to repeat any action which has been performed before” (Peirce 533). With this understanding of semiotic concepts central to this study, being logonomic systems, logonomic signs, and logonomic reproduction, we can turn to applying them to the action of the Nazi salute. In particular, the relevance of logonomic reproduction to the Nazi salute is central.
In 1930s Germany, “symbolic acts of belonging in daily life, as in the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute” were “endlessly repeated” (Fulbrook 130). In July 1933, a national edict by Reich Interior Minister Dr. Wilhelm Frick officially mandated the right-arm salute’s use in the public civil service. In addition to the civil service, however, the Frick edict stated that any person’s failure to deliver the Nazi greeting in public would be understood as an act of dissidence (Evans 45). Consequently, Germans who reasonably wished to remain inconspicuous and not attract the ire of the Gestapo adopted habits of regular salutation in public [7]. As Germans were acculturated into these new social circumstances, the image of someone or multiple people raising their arm in salutations was ubiquitous. Witnesses of such actions were constantly inspired to mimic the behavior in the future, internalizing it. The person who was originally a witness of another’s salute became an actant, who was followed by yet others in the cycle of logonomic reproduction.
This idea of imitating other people, of participating in massive rituals or shared “norms,” is widely accepted by scholars of authoritarianism. Robert O. Paxton’s classic The Anatomy of Fascism argues that
The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually; the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; the thrill of domination.
(17)
Staunchly anti-Nazi Germans may not have been so easily swayed by simply seeing other people habitually salute. As such, more explicit demands probably held more persuasive power. All over Germany, the Nazis installed assertive propaganda posters reading “Our greeting is ‘Heil Hitler!’”. The exclusionary language of these signs in the collective “our” implied that to not say “Heil Hitler” and raise one’s arm was to therefore not actually be one of “us,” since “we” use this singular greeting and no others. Importantly, the “us” in this formulation was not just the Nazis—it was the Germans at large. An official name of the Nazi salute was der Deutsche Gruß, the German Greeting. Under Hitler, a person's Germanness was not complete without their adherence to “German” norms, including the German Greeting.
This greeting, however, was not homogenous in form across Nazi society. The proceeding section investigates the often-overlooked difference between the physical versions of the Nazi salute in the context of strict hierarchical division.
The two salutes
The National Socialists defined themselves against a handful of enemies, with Jews, Slavs, and communists chief among them, though the list goes on. These groups were placed below the “master race” of Nordic Germans. A further division existed in Nazi Germany, however, this one inside the very ranks of “Aryan” Germany. This was the gap between the leaders and the followers—in semiotic terms, between those who produced meaning and those who received it. This essay has already argued that the entitlement to praise and loyalty—that is, to the reception of a sign’s “meaning"—for the logonomic sign of the Nazi salute were determined by societal, political, and military rank or merit. Yet how can we be certain, eighty years since the fall of the Third Reich, that the boundaries of production and reception were not simply random or nonexistent?
A partial answer is found by analyzing the differences in body language between those of the Nazi ruling class and those of the ruled. While the straight-arm, forty-five-degree-angle Nazi salute is certainly the “standard” version of the salute, and thus the image that comes to mind when one says “Nazi salute,” there were in fact two different salutes inside the Third Reich. This straight-arm variation will be referred to as the Deutscher Gruß, the German Greeting. Existing alongside the German Greeting was what will be called the Führergruß, the Leader’s Greeting. The preferred gesture for state leaders, actants of the Leader’s Greeting bent their right arms back at the elbow, with the upward-facing palm held near the right ear. Many photos of Adolf Hitler show him in this distinct pose. The Führergruß may be called an “accent” upon the standard Nazi salute, a semiotic term for a “particular inflection which gives a different social meaning to an apparently common set of signs … which mark[s] class and regional identity” (Hodge and Kress 19). Members of the Nazi public—“ordinary” people with no remarkable status—would likely use the standard straight-arm German Greeting with one another, since neither explicitly outranked the other. This relatively egalitarian interaction fits neatly into what Allert dubs the “triadic sequence” of a greeting: offer, acceptance, and reciprocation (Allert 3; 20).
However, the Führergruß breaks out of this triadic sequence, as there is no reciprocation to speak of. Rather, there is only a “taking” of the salute by the actor who outranks the other. Consider Hitler’s or Hermann Göring’s habit of appearing on tall balconies in front of a crowd of civilians, who were officially subordinate to the Führer and his advisors. These ordinary civilians, eager to demonstrate their fealty, would render a straight-armed German Greeting, whereupon the political chiefs would bend their own arms back in the Leader’s Greeting. Though this interaction may take place with neither side saying anything aloud, the marked difference in body language was a clear indicator of the uneven power dynamic between the actors. This dualism was key in holding the Nazi hierarchy in place. The straight-arm Deutscher Gruß denoted subservience and loyalty and was synonymous with pledging oneself to the receiver. The Führergruß by the person on the receiving end signified the superiority of this actor, as a way of communicating the acceptance of the other’s loyalty. By performing the Leader’s Greeting, one was asserting themselves above the other in both power and importance. When a top-ranking Nazi actually reciprocated a straight-arm salute, or delivered one themselves, it was usually in dedication to the armed forces, heroes of the Nazi movement, or other symbols of German might. These rare moments of apparent humility for top-ranking Nazis made for excellent propaganda, insomuch as they demonstrated the doctrinal supremacy of the “nation” and the attendant inferiority of the individual. The centrality of the nation, the collective rather than the single citizen, is indeed a pillar of all fascisms (Paxton 11), and was referenced in the Third Reich by such rallying cries as “Nothing for us! Everything for Germany!” (Shirer 122).
Regular repetition of the paternalistic Führergruß by the powerful in response to a Deutscher Gruß by the less powerful slowly formalized uneven distributions of power and prestige in Nazi Germany. This dualism was never formalized, as historical photos show somewhat strange mixtures of salutary forms with no obvious distinction between who was a leader and who was a follower. That said, much of the time the contrasts were quite obvious, especially in the case of Hitler himself.
It should be clarified that the Führergruß was not reserved, per se, for Hitler alone [8]. The title is therefore at least slightly misleading: the German noun Führer has become inextricably linked to the personage of Adolf Hitler, and so distanced from its original and much simpler translations of leader, guide, boss, et cetera. The term “Führergruß” may thus be erroneously understood as “Führer’s Greeting,” just another way of saying “Hitler’s Greeting,” rather than retaining some of the flexibility of the more general label “Leader’s Greeting.” The latter term accurately suggests that any “leader” could use it. In theory, any German who was even of a slightly higher status than the other actor could use the Leader’s Greeting to help establish or maintain their aura of high standing, merited by their closeness to Hitler and his regime. For instance, photographic evidence establishes that Magda Goebbels, wife of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, was fond of using the Führergruß herself.
It may seem contradictory that leaders besides Hitler could enjoy a share of the same sort of praise that the Führer did. Official affairs in Nazi Germany operated under the Führer Principle, ascribing total power to Hitler. Why, then, should anyone besides Hitler have been allowed to accept fealty from Germans? History holds the answer. In Mein Kampf, Hitler fantasized about a state which would function on a two-way system of "authority of every leader downward and responsibility upward” (Hitler 449-50 [emphasis added]). Of course Hitler was clear in his manifesto about the necessity of an almighty executive, but he was also aware that no one can lead alone, and that a milieu of second- and third-ranking leaders, whom he calls “counselors,” would be needed, and who must be duly respected by their German subjects. Indeed, William L. Shirer writes in The Nightmare Years that the general German populace held the men around Hitler “in high esteem” (205).
The Leader’s Greeting and its connotations for social hierarchy are critical to any well-rounded study of the Nazi status quo, as they give insights into how this status quo was enacted in basic daily interactions. Little by little, differences in stature and repute were demarcated through this two-form semiotic action.
“Something really grave”: José Ortega y Gasset on salutation
The popular use of the fascist salute in the Third Reich cannot only be ascribed to citizens necessarily wanting to perform the gesture. It is a truism that millions of dedicated Nazis were indeed all too happy to praise their Führer and his vision every day, but this enthusiasm was certainly not shared across the entire German populace [9]. Rather, the prevalence of the salute was due partly to official mandate and legal intimidation, and partly to the development of habit. Logonomic systems and signs, which foster such habit, entail a curious phenomenon: namely that the semioses of the participants cannot be called original or personal actions, since they are borrowed or adopted from someone else. As such, and unlike traditional or regional forms of greeting in Germany like the Bavarian “Servus,” the Nazi greeting was wholly impersonal and often performed unwillingly.
On the question of impersonality, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset leads a virtuous dialogue over two chapters of his book Man and People, published after his death in 1955. Ortega y Gasset was an intellectual leader of the Second Spanish Republic who lived in exile in Argentina for most of World War II. In “Reflections on the Salutation”, Ortega y Gasset interrogates the originality of formal greetings, such as shaking hands or raising one’s arm, social practices which are adopted by individuals because we have seen “everybody else” do it first, and not because they have any particular function. To the philosopher, the “giving and taking hands in salutation” has “no purpose or meaning whatever” (Ortega y Gasset 188). His formidable protestation of greeting’s apparent banality warrants its replication here in full:
With each of us, then, keeping well in view what happens to him when he shakes hands, let us take intellectual possession of the most important characteristics that are clearly manifest in this act of ours. First, it is an act that I, a human being, execute. But, second, although I execute it, it did not occur to me, I did not invent it or think it on my own account, I copy and repeat it from others, from everybody else who does it, from ‘people.’ … Hence it is an action whose origin is extraindividual, it belongs neither to me nor to you nor to any specific person. Third, not only am I not—nor are you—the creator of this act, not only is it pure repetition in us, I also do not execute it of my own spontaneous will; indeed, I execute it reluctantly[.] Fourth, from all this it follows that I, a human being, find myself executing an act that lacks two of the indispensable characteristics of every strictly human action—originating intellectually in the subject who performs it and being engendered in his will. Hence it is much less like human behavior than like a mechanical inhuman movement.
(Ortega y Gasset 186-87 [italics in original])
Ortega y Gasset is fierce in his criticisms, but they are well founded. It cannot be doubted, as already stated, that all those besides the most dedicated Nazis could not have enjoyed praising the authoritarianism of Hitler at every coming and going. As much was said, for example, by the dissident Friedrich Kellner, who wrote in My Opposition that when the “tyranny by Nazi big shots has broken down, and I am asked which Nazi requirement gave me the biggest headache, I will say without hesitation it was the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’” (Kellner 152). But, as Ortega y Gasset tells us, “what is not done willingly is done unwillingly, and what is done unwillingly is done perforce or under compulsion” (Ortega y Gasset 189). Even if many Germans were obdurately resistant to the political promises and aspirations of the Nazis, they were still forced to use the greeting.
“Very well,” says Ortega y Gasset, “but who forces us? There is no doubt about the answer. It is usage” (Ortega y Gasset 190). The concept of this social phenomenon—usage—is quite similar to logonomic reproduction, although no such terminology is ever used by the philosopher. The outcomes of these phenomena are the same, being the consecration of social norms via the formation of habit:
Usage [is] custom, and custom is a certain mode of behavior, a type of action which has become customary, that is, habitual. Usage, then, would be a social habit. Habit is conduct that, by being frequently repeated, becomes automatic in the individual, and is produced or functions mechanically.
(Ortega y Gasset 192-93)
“Usage” is built by social practices that are so incessantly frequent that they become automatic; no one second-guesses their function or origin any longer, and therefore the practice is simply accepted, the behavior “fossilized” in people (Ortega y Gasset 212). However, a contradiction arises when translating Ortega y Gasset’s social philosophy onto the usage of the Nazi salute. The philosopher posits that the habits formed by usage have no singular starting point, and that people adopt social norms because a vague “everybody else” has adopted them first and thereafter used them nonstop. The Nazi salute, though, did not appear nebulously, nor did it originate in some time-honored Germanic tradition. Contrarily, the injection of the Nazi salute into German daily life had at least three primary perpetrators: Hitler, his deputy, Rudolf Heß, and Interior Minister Frick. One can easily pinpoint the exact timing of the salute’s introduction into daily life.
Ortega y Gasset is aware of this, having watched the rituals of arm-raising in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from afar. These aggressive forms of greeting he calls “bellicose salutations,” which are “decreed by a man who even signs his name to the order imposing it” (Ortega y Gasset 213)—indeed, Hitler, Heß, and Frick did as much. The author then examines how formalized aggressive forms of greeting are often signals of partisanship:
Unquestionably the person who raises his fist or stretches out his arm means: “By this gesture I announce my enlistment in a party. I am above all a partisan; hence I am against the other parts of society that are not mine. I am a combatant, and what I seek with others is not peace but open battle. To him who opposes me, to him who is not of my party even though he does not oppose me, I offer neither coexistence nor pact; what I offer is first to fight him and vanquish him, then to treat him as vanquished.
(213)
In his discussions, Ortega y Gasset encapsulates the social-philosophical and distinctly hostile ethos of the Nazi salute, which applied to it for its entire lifespan inside Nazidom, 1921-1945 [10]. The gesture was indeed a marker of NSDAP membership during the “Time of Struggle” before Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933. The “other parts of society,” as has already been described, were all those elements of the interwar era decried by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda as decadent, weak, impure, “Jewish,” and all things and people not truly “German.” The Nazis’ doctrinal approach to these Others was certainly not “pact,” but rather to engage them in struggle, Kampf, even if not immediately.
Refusing to voluntarily render or reciprocate the bellicose act of the Nazi greeting was the act of a politically mischievous enemy who was to be vanquished at some point or another, or so the official narrative went [11]. The use of violence (“vanquishing”) as a tool of coercion is central to Ortega y Gasset’s argument, who states that
sooner or later—and it is important to note this—sooner or later, but in the last analysis always—there is the eventuality of physical violence.
In Europe not so many years ago, when anyone refused a salutation, he would automatically receive a slap in the face, and the next day he had to fight with sword, saber, or pistol. That is why I say that here we do indeed have “something really grave.”
(Ortega y Gasset 196)
Indeed, violence was a common method by which the Nazi regime enforced the salute’s mandate. At the Munich Feldherrnhalle where Hitler’s 1923 “Beer Hall Putsch” failed, armed Schutzstaffel honor guards harassed and beat passersby who failed the salute to the sacralized stone monument [12]. Such was the Nazi strategy of regulating the behavior of German citizens—a logonomic system in and of itself—in a manner desirable to the dictatorial regime. The authoritarian will to totality, writes Victor Klemperer, entails “an excess of organization” (105).
Of course, the Nazi regime could not only spread or implement their salute in Germany through obvious threats of violence, at least not at first. Threatening a nation and offering nothing in return is no way to win over or maintain supporters, even if one has already demolished democratic elections. Before violence, then, must come the “euphemism[s] of moral coercion” (Ortega y Gasset 196), the systematic attempt to convince people that the adherence to new norms is beneficial to them, and that by adopting such norms they will be doing something just and worthy. This deception is a core characteristic of Hodge and Kress’ “ideological complexes”: communicators of hierarchical ideology which disingenuously purvey a system as being beneficial for the dominated, not just the dominant (Hodge and Kress 3).
What about Nazism was attractively “beneficial” for ordinary Germans? The answer must be situated in the context of the post-World War I and Depression-era Weimar Republic, and the conspiracies towards national redemption that thrived in the era, as will be examined in the next and final section.
Victory and salvation
The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the decisive defeat in World War I and the economic disasters of the Great Depression shocked the German state in rapid succession. In particular, the defeat in the Great War and the subsequent demands for disarmament and reparations in the Versailles Treaty debilitated the traditional Prussian-militaristic ego of Germany, humiliating the population and driving scores of Germans to think of themselves as abject victims. In a stupor, Germans who could not cope with the new circumstances quickly became obsessed with a return to national pride. Agitated reactionaries on the political right proclaimed the need for a reassertion of German greatness, to be accomplished through military and political domination over their enemies—particularly over that group which, according to the propaganda of the day, was most responsible for Germany’s defeat in the war: influential European Jews (Rees 24).
The National Socialists capitalized on the popular thirst for a lasting triumph, with Hitler speaking of the existential need for a “victory of the Aryan” at least as early as 12 April 1922 (Hitler; Baynes 14). This victory was not one to be achieved through compromises, appeasement, or moderation; it could only be seized through the absolute annihilation of an enemy, “through blood and iron” (Hitler; Baynes 39). In a speech in Munich on 13 April 1923, Hitler posited that the “whole world of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness—an eternal victory of the strong over the weak” (Hitler; Baynes 45 [emphasis added]). For the Nazis, struggle and redemption were inseparable concepts. In Hitler’s “Existenzdeutung,” his interpretation of reality which he called “Nature,” there existed an immutable “Zusammenhang zwischen Sieg und Heil” (Behrenbeck 111), a connection between victory and salvation that precluded the existence of one if the other were not also accomplished. Over time, the utopic Nazi fantasy of a redeeming “eternal victory” would be formalized into the concept of the Endsieg, “the Final Victory,” and ultra-reactionary idea at the very center of National Socialist ideology.
The Final Victory was an intentionally vague amalgamation of lofty nationalistic and racist goals concerning the “redemption” of Germany after World War I and the prevention of a conquest of “Jewry” and communism in Europe (Hitler). The victory was to be achieved through territorial conquest on the European continent, the acceleration of Aryan German reproduction, and the permanent eradication of all Jews, Slavs, Roma and Sinti, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, political dissidents, religious sects, and other “undesirables.” Morbidly, the Final Solution—the Holocaust—was but one step on the path to Final Victory. This path to ultimate triumph was only known to the Leader figure, whose orders were to be obeyed in every instance until death, and on whose shoulders alone rested the fate of the entire German nation.
Of the characteristics above, the most important was the Final Victory’s vagueness; in other words, its intangibility. No triumph that the Nazis ever accomplished, no matter how substantial, satisfied them. Even if the Axis Powers had won World War II, it can be supposed with some certainty that the Nazis would not have declared their eternal victory. To do so would be to commit ideological suicide, so to speak. Robert O. Paxton reminds us that fascism always requires movement, struggle, action, and unending fanaticism, or else it will lose all vitality and cease to exist (Paxton 219). The aggression and social Darwinism of the Nazis was incompatible with lasting peace and constantly required a far-off victory to be actively and violently chased. In Mein Kampf, Hitler was clear on the matter: “Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish” (134-35). When success appeared to be near, then, the goalpost had to be moved. The Endsieg’s intangibility, its being just too far off to grasp, necessitated a kind of frenzy in the pursuit of it, an unbridled loyalty to the belief in it. The chain that shackled the Nazis to the fantasy of the Final Victory was the same as the one that chained them to Hitler himself: the right-arm salute.
“Sieg Heil,” shouted with the right arm outstretched, translates to “Hail Victory” and was the preferred cry at NSDAP rallies, Reichstag sessions, special celebrations and dedications, funerals, and other similar mass events. It was often the cap of a very distinct leadup: the orator rendering the motto would first enumerate some list of people, accomplishments, events, or concepts, before raising their rigid right arm and shouting “Sieg Heil!” or simply “Sieg!”, to which the crowd would respond with a raucous “Heil!”, as a dedication to the personalities or merits just listed. The “Sieg Heil” salute and its call-and-response form—another “accent” —were not analogous to the “Heil Hitler” form. Professional historians are aware of this, but have not gone any further in their scrutiny than simply stating that this difference existed: in The Hitler Salute, Tilman Allert states that “It [the ‘Heil Hitler’ version of the greeting] was different from the ritual used at mass rallies, where enthusiastic crowds answered Heil to the call of Sieg (‘victory’)” (Allert 32). The author is certainly correct, but he leaves readers wanting to know exactly what made this variation of the salute “different.” The difference may be explained as such: although Hitler himself was often the honoree of the rallying cry “Sieg Heil,” its reference to the Final Victory inherently widened its scope, so to speak, beyond the narrow personage of the man Adolf Hitler. Unlike the more popular adage “Heil Hitler,” the referent of the semiotic message “Sieg Heil”—being the salvation of Germany—enveloped the entire nation. The populace at large was bound up in the phrase because their collective existence doctrinally depended on their victory.
H. R. Kedward convincingly argues in Facsism in Western Europe, 1900-1945 that “rituals of obedience” such as screaming “Sieg Heil!” at enormous rallies were “agents of mass intoxication” (228) for the German population; the end product of such rituals was the more or less sincere belief in the subject of the propaganda to which the participating Germans were so effectively contributing. In other words, repeatedly joining in the collective hysteria of a Nazi Party rally, or any similar event, and screaming out “Sieg Heil” for hours and days on end encouraged individual Germans—members of the Nazi “community of practice” (Beaver and Stanley 26)—to come to believe in the Final Victory. From this belief, says Kedward, then came “unquestioning action.” (228). Here again, therefore, we see the power of habit.
Unsurprisingly, the Endsieg became ever more coveted by German propagandists as the Second World War was being lost. In his famous 1943 “Total War” speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, Propaganda Minister Goebbels used the word “victory” all of twenty-two times. Towards the end of the feverish speech, Goebbels blithely declared that “We are on the way to Final Victory. That victory rests on our faith in the Führer” (Goebbels). Perhaps, though, by that late date, reality was starting to set in for the Germans. Indeed, Victor Klemperer reports in Volume I of I Will Bear Witness that the Nazi salute and the phrase “Heil Hitler” decreased noticeably in everyday use as the German war effort worsened, and as some civilians lost faith in their Leader (429).
And yet, “Sieg Heil” remains a popular slogan for those on the right-most fringes of political thought in the modern day, despite the phrase’s illegality in most of Europe [13]. Perhaps the processes of logonomic reproduction are likely impossible in such small and radical groups, but we must still worry. For these terroristic true believers, the sadistic Final Victory is still a fantasy worth fighting for, a fantasy which eventually demands the elimination of “the enemy.” From the history of Nazism, as well as that of other genocidal belief systems like Manifest Destiny and Zionism, humanity must heed the pressing warnings against seductive partisan promises of “victory,” a euphemistic label which almost invariably precedes the perpetration of abhorrent tragedy.
Conclusion
This essay has proposed a new methodology for the study of the Nazi salute: a methodology that centers around semiotic and social-philosophical ideas about the replicability of signs and behaviors, particularly in the context of powerful hierarchies and uneven distributions of power. Further, it has attempted to pave the way for reinvigorated public study of an instrument of Nazi and fascist social control at a time when its performance is becoming alarmingly common.
Modern instantiations of the Nazi salute—such as those by Elon Musk—are borne out of cynical desires to subvert expectations of “political correctness” (Browning). The manifest lack of any pressure to render a Nazi salute (and indeed the unspoken expectation to do anything but) makes modern salutes extremely difficult to compare to those inside Nazi Germany, in terms of reasons for their being rendered. Germans under the National Socialist dictatorship, as this essay has shown, often saluted to fit in with the dominant society. However, the coercive social processes of logonomic reproduction and Ortega y Gasset’s “formation of habit” are nonexistent today in this context. Contemporary Nazis in the U.S. and elsewhere are, through their salutations, doing the exact opposite of trying to fit in; they mean to agitate crowds, frighten their targets, and subvert and insult social norms. Their actions are consequently all the more serious.
In all contexts, historical or contemporary, the Nazi salute is a declaration of its actant’s loyalty to fascist ideology and their opposition to one or more out-groups. Should the salute be popularly repeated on a large enough scale in the modern day, whether done “as a joke” or not, it will certainly become trivialized. That is, people will no longer take it seriously. This would not only grievously offend the memory of the victims of fascism but would simultaneously greatly weaken the safeguards of modern society—particularly in the United States, which differs from many European countries, including Germany and Austria, insofar as National Socialism and the outward expression of one’s allegiance to National Socialism are not illegal, and in fact are protected under constitutional law. If we do not take the resurgence of the Nazi salute seriously, we risk becoming jaded to its ideological meaning, the consequences of which humanity has already suffered in the heinousness of the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.
Notes
[1] Research advised by Professor Kristopher Imbrigotta, Chair of German Studies, University of Puget Sound, and generously supported by the Agricola Summer Research Grant.
[2] The weakness of this argument is outside the scope of this essay, so it will suffice to summarize Martin M. Winkler’s The Roman Salute (2008) by stating that there is no evidence to suggest that the ancient Romans ever used a salute anything like that of the fascists. The “Roman salute” is an ahistorical myth and nothing more (Winkler 6).
[3] Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; the Nazi Party.
[4] It should also be established that the inextricability of sign/ideology rendered it impossible to “fake” the Nazi salute. See Mary Fulbrook in Bystander Society: “Raising an arm in the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute looks much the same in a photograph whether done out of conviction, habit or pressure” (19). And on another page: “While Oppler noted with relief that the so-called German greeting of ‘Heil Hitler’ had not become widely accepted in this Catholic region, the Opplers themselves used it when they felt under observation. Inadvertently, in this way they—like millions of other Germans—contributed to the external picture of a nation united behind Hitler” (95). Due to the well-established socio-linguistic principle that something’s meaning often relies more on the interpretation of a hearer than the intention of a speaker (see, for example, Hodge and Kress 4), we may conclude that if a German, whether Nazi or not, witnesses another German who is secretly anti-Nazi render the salute in order to avoid suspicion, the first German in this formulation will of course have no idea that the latter one is performing the salute as an act of self-protective deception, and they will instead conclude that they—the anti-Nazi—is indeed a Nazi.[4] The German verb salutieren takes the dative case. Linguistically, then, it is a fact that salutation is an action done to and/or for something or someone.
[5] This assertion takes as its base the sociological idea of descriptive normativity. Sally Haslanger explains that “Members of a group take the culture’s concepts, scripts, and meanings to be normative for members of the group in the following sense: when encountering others who are similarly socialized, we implicitly begin with the assumption that they will do things in a particular way, taken to be the ‘right way’” (quoted in Beaver and Stanley 77). Citizens of Nazi Germany were, of course, similarly socialized as one another, and it does not need saying that part of this socialization was the lesson that one must respect one’s superiors. Therefore, it was entirely normative for “ordinary” Nazi civilians to impulsively demonstrate their loyalty when encountering a higher authority.
[6] The German verb salutieren takes the dative case. Linguistically, then, it is a fact that salutation is an action done to something or someone.
[7] Klaus Michael-Mallmann and Gerhard Paul’s essay “Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent? Gestapo, society and resistance” corrects long-running historiographical misconceptions of the abilities of the Gestapo. Analyzing the realities of the Gestapo as a small and “propagandistically-inflated” organization, the authors establish that “...fears of the Gestapo were largely homemade” (Michael-Mallmann and Paul 1994, 184). Even so, fears of the supposedly-mighty Gestapo were powerful enough to discourage many individual acts of dissent during the Nazi dictatorship.
[6] Analysis of surviving photographs of the Nazi political leadership has the potential to give insight on–or at least create new questions regarding–internal power struggles and rivalries, using the leaders’ own habits of salutation as a metric. For instance, somewhat confusingly, Göring often used the Führergruß when greeting Hitler, who, of course, also used the Leader’s Greeting. In this interaction, neither leader was actually saluting “to” the other one, and both were simultaneously accepting a salute that was never explicitly rendered. This odd, self-centered tendency makes a fresh addition to the already well-known documentation of Göring’s absurd pomp and ego.
[7] It should be remembered that the NSDAP never received an outright majority (above 50%) in any free and fair election. Even in March 1933 (an election which was neither free nor fair), the Party earned only 43% of the total vote.
[8] Analysis of surviving photographs of the Nazi political leadership has the potential to give insight on—or at least create new questions regarding—internal power struggles and rivalries, using the leaders’ own habits of salutation as a metric. For instance, and somewhat confusingly, Hermann Göring often used the Führergruß when greeting Hitler, who, of course, also used the Leader’s Greeting. In this interaction, neither Nazi was actually saluting “to” the other one, and both were simultaneously accepting a dedication that was never actually rendered. This odd, self-centered tendency makes a fresh addition to the already rich documentation of Göring’s pomp and ego.
[9] It should be remembered that the National Socialist Party never received an outright majority in any free and fair national election (Kedward 225). Even in March 1933, an election which was neither free nor fair, the NSDAP earned only 43% of the total vote.
[10] Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Heß, introduced the right-arm salute into the National Socialist German Worker’s Party via a decree in 1926. The salute had first been used by the Italian Fascists, who themselves had taken it from the Italian proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, finally, had himself taken it from dramatized theatrical representations of ancient Rome (hence the misleading name “Roman salute”). The real source of the right-arm salute is the famous Jacques-Louis David painting The Oath of the Horatii (Winkler 42-57; 94-109).
[11] Recall Wilhelm Frick’s edict mandating the salute for public servants in the summer of 1933, and his ominous warning that “anyone not wishing to come under suspicion of behaving in a consciously negative fashion will therefore render the Hitler Greeting” (Kershaw 60).
[12] Specifically, passersby were expected salute an ad hoc memorial to the dead on the east side of the Feldhernhalle, which the regime dubbed the Mahnmal der Bewegung, the “Memorial to the Movement.”
[13] See, for instance, Al Jazeera’s 2018 article on French far-right hate crimes (Al Jazeera).
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Archer A. Kerr is an undergraduate student of German Studies at the University of Puget Sound, with a minor in Politics & Government. Archer is primarily interested in the study of political propaganda in a historical context, as well as the broader study of communicative messaging, social linguistics, and the philosophy of language. Additionally, he is interested in U.S. and comparative constitutional law and international human rights. This paper was made possible by the generous support of the Puget Sound Agricola Summer Research Grant.
Picture: “Unser der Sieg! Heil Hitler!”, 1932, Alexander Schaaff. From Wikimedia Commons. This image is licensed under Creative Commons.
