Everyone knows (or ought to) that the swastika had a long and varied history throughout the world as a symbol of various and sundry religions and philosophies and so on for thousands of years before being picked up by the Nazis. It can also be drawn many various ways and was indeed drawn many various ways, both clockwise and counter-clockwise and straight and curvy, long before the Nazis. But there is one specific variant I’ve never seen used by anyone except the Nazis: A swastika drawn to fit snugly inside a diamond with very sharply acute angles top and bottom and very widely oblique angles left and right. This swastika design also has very thick lines. Here is an example. Did anyone use this design before the Nazis?
I read, I searched, I failed.
i’ve definitely seen the swastika rotated at an angle like that in tibet and among the Miao hilltribes of china. not within a diamond though.
tibetan buddhist swastika is writtren so the spokes are clockwise. the pre-buddhist tibetan bon religion has the spokes counter clockwise
wag that the nazi diamond was for the colors to show clearly
Yeah, the diamond in specific is what I noticed. A “tilted” swastika isn’t all that much of a difference from the more usual designs.
It’s always good to reiterate this point. A surprising number of people seem to think that you can tell a “good” swastika from a “bad” swastika based on which way it’s rotating.
Possibly. I’m beginning to think I have indeed found a single swastika variant unique to the Nazis. (Not that it’s a big deal. Nazi iconography is so distinctive in other ways it doesn’t matter whether the swastika is used or not. The Nazis usually didn’t use the diamond swastika anyway.)
I don’t have access to it anymore, but The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? by Steven Heller is a damn good book and might have the answer.
Or for collar pins/cufflinks/other jewelry.