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.
