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Showing posts with label Hand Gestures.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hand Gestures.. Show all posts

Meaning of Hitler's Sieg Heil Salute and or the Nazi Salute

The Nazi or Hitler salute was appropriated from a German hand signal that meant "Hail Victory." It debuted in Nazi Germany in the 1930s to pay homage to Adolf Hitler. It consists of raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down. In Nazi Germany, it was often accompanied by chanting or shouting "Heil Hitler" or "Sieg Heil." Hitler appropriated the chant of Heil Hitler from American Football fight Songs because he loved the favored energy they created in the crowd.

Since World War II, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have continued to use the salute, making it the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world. (Other hand signs of white supremacist https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols?cat_id[153]=153

Germans were ordered under penalty to give the Nazi Salute. Under a decree issued by Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick on 13 July 1933 (one day before the ban on all non-Nazi parties), all German public employees were required by law to use the salute. The decree also required the salute during the singing of the national anthem and the "Horst-Wessel-Lied." It stipulated that "anyone not wishing to come under suspicion of behaving in a consciously negative fashion will therefore render the Hitler Greeting."  

A rider to the decree added two weeks later stipulated that if physical disability prevented raising the right arm, "then it is correct to carry out the Greeting with the left arm. It became a way of showing inclusion and creating patriotic inclusion and a way of excluding others. Eventually, On 27 September, prison inmates were forbidden to use the salute, as were Jews by 1937.

Hitler used the full hand and arm held out and away from the body in his speeches, and the less formal hand and arm held straight up tight to the body in personal Greeting.