I’ve recently read an article that stated hundreds of Tibetan Monks were found dead in Germany during WWII . Apparently these monks were wearing nazi uniforms. Has anyone else heard of this?
I think I was at the concert where they opened for the Sex Pistols.
Without knowing which source your referring to, venus13, I’d say the article was getting confused with a roleplaying game.
My compliments to Ice Wolf for finding the likely solution.
It seems possible too that a legend linking Tibetans with Nazis may have developed in part because of the prevalence of swastikas in Buddhist art from Tibet.
The swastika is such a basic design that it turns up in numerous cultures. In Tibetan iconography it represents the sun, one meaning ascribed to it by the Nazis. This was also its use in art from various southwestern Native American tribes.
Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theoposphical Society, claimed to have been in contact with “Secret Chiefs” in Tibet who were the source of her religious revelations. The Theosophists made great use of the swastika in their art.
Guido von Liszt, an Austrian racist who devised a religion in the late 19th Century based on ancient Norse beliefs, made numerous appropriations from the Theosophists. Among them were the swastika, and the belief in an Aryan race.
During World War I, the swastika, made familiar in Germany in large part because of von Liszt’s writings, was taken up by soldiers as a good luck symbol, particularly in the last days of the war, when nothing else was working. IIRC, there is a photo of Himmler during the First World War, wearing a helmet on which he was drawn a swastika which was backwards from the usual Nazi symbol.
The Nazis, in turn, adopted the swastika as their symbol after it was firmly associated in Germany with patriotism or, anyway, the failed war effort), and with von Liszt, who had written extensively about Aryan superiority and the need to unite Austria and Germany.
The upshot of all this is that when people in the western world see a swastika today they reflexively associate it with the Nazis, which can be very disconcerting when looking at pictures of a Tibetan temple.
It’s even more disconcerting when you find a swastika as one of the symbols decorating the synagogue in Roman Capernaum.
slipster, thanks so much for saving me some research!
I just received a Buddhist art piece as gift from my girlfriend and it took me a while before I noticed the subtle swastikas embedded the art. I knew they weren’t Nazi in meaning, but wondered the history of the symbol. I was going to look into that as soon as I found the time. Anyway, thanks again.
If you look closely at the design of The swastika, you will notice that Nazi’s symbol is facing the opposite direction as the buddhist’s. Which may be a sign of good and evil.
Also when you see a row of them on a pre-WW2, hand-woven Navajo rug.
It was actually a very common design before the Nazis appropriated it.
Is the name of a man who claims that God came to him in a vision and told him to reclaim the swastika as a symbol for good.
ManWoman has hair past his shoulders. This is a subtle sign to others that despite his numerous swastika tatoos, he is not a skinhead.
ManWoman was featured in an articl in Heeb magazine. Among other things, he makes buttons featuring a swastika smiley. The buttons also say “Screw Hitler!”
BTW-Fenris would likely be the one to ask, but IIRC one of the Doc Savage stories (again IIRC the title was The King Of Fear) featured a Tibetan monastery that was actually an SS base.
No, the roleplaying game is recycling an existing ‘fact’. Root around and you’ll find dozens of other websites mentioning it. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it is true. This page provides one possible explanation.
http://www.berzinarchives.com/kalachakra/mistaken_foreign_myths.html
Uncle Cecil himself has discussed the history of the swastika.
Sorry, nope: the ancient swastika, in India, Tibet, the Americas, the Greco-Roman world, etc., came in both right- and left-handed forms. Rudyard Kipling used it in some of his drawings after he saw it in India, and some of his are the right-handed (?) or “Nazi” variety.
Trinopus
Our Indian neighbors had Swastikas on their daughter’s wedding invitations and I believe they faced right (the Nazi’s style.)
I’m almost postive that the direction of the Eastern Swastika is inconsequential.
The ancient swastika can be both left and right handed. However, the standard modern Buddhist swastika, at least as widely used in Japan and China, is opposite to the Nazi symbol.
This symbol (the Buddhist swastika) is a recognized Chinese character (read wan4 in Mandarin, and manji in Japanese).
Though, like I said, the symbol that you find on maps and on modern temples is swirling clockwise, my Mandarin dictionary notes that direction in classical Buddhist texts was indeed inconsistent.
Just thought I’d clarify.
Note that there is a certain thin connection between Tibet and the Nazi party, in the person of Heinrich Harrer who wrote “Seven Years in Tibet”. He was, prior to going to Tibet, a member of the SS, though you should probably read what he has to say about that:
http://www.tibet.ca/wtnarchive/1997/7/6_3.html
It is interesting that various posters refer to “right hand” and “left hand” swastikas. I prefer these terms to “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise”, terminology I have encountered many times.
The standard Nazi swastika is referred to as “counter-clockwise”, apparently on the assumption that the extensions from the center “X” are trailing behind if the swastika is imagined to be rotating. This seems like an arbitrary distincion; it is the Nazi swastika which I would think of as clockwise in design, on the assumption that the extensions are thrusting forward, like the prongs on a harrow.
I suspect that the Nazi swastika is assumed to be counter-clockwise in orientation largely as a matter of hindsight; counter-clockwise orientations (also sometimes called “widdershins”), are commonly associated with various magical rituals and are thought to be “evil”. For instance, in Roman Catholic churches it is standard for priestly processions, when they make a circuit of a church, to go in clockwise fashion. It is said that some practicioners of Black Masses do the reverse as part of a purposeful effort to follow conventional practices backwards.
Hitler is credited with having personally chosen the conventional design for the Nazi swastika. I have read that he said that he chose this because if the sun is pictured as a ball rotating in the heavens, it looks as though it is turning counter-clockwise from the point of view of an observor in the northern hemisphere. This is, in fact, backwards; a wheel traveling from east to west, seen from the north, should ordinarily appear to be going in a clockwise fashion.
The Nazis also sometimes used an “upright” swastika, such that the centerpiece was a cross rather than an “X”. I recall that at the Wester German pavilion at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York one could buy, tackily enough, knives which looked precisely like SS daggers except that the Nazi identifications, including an upright swastika, had been deleted.
Michael Feldman’s radio program Whadya Know? once featured as its Town of the Week a small western community, formerly a mining town, which was the site of the Swastika Mine and Swastika Hotel. I remember that there used to be a Swastika laundry chain in London.
As for other uses of the swastika which now seem incongruous, here are some examples:
The facade of the old Magestic Theater in downtown East St. Louis, Illinois, a long-shuttered grandiose movie palace, is decorated with dozens and dozens of tiles, each bearing a decorative motif. There are starbursts and fluers-de-lis, and there are swastikas–bright green ones.
In the 1920s Saks 5th Avenue sold sterling silver swastika ear rings.
One of the old-time American magicians (Thurston or Kellar, I think), had a full-color advertising poster which showed him standing on a Tibetan-style rug, with a huge red swastika in the center.
One U.S. college sorority used Klan-like robes marked with swastikas early in the 20th century for initiation ceremonies.
A few years back I watched a documentary about tatoos. I don’t know if it was ever completed; I saw it as a work in progress when I was on a committee which issued art grant money. In any case, a highlight was an interview with a biker type who expressed chagrin over his decision to decorate his forehead with a “clockwise” swastika. He had meant it as a salute to southwestern Indians, and seemed generally surprised that people were taking it differently. Thus can the enthusiasm of a moment become the regret of a lifetime.
yes id say that has a decent chance at being true, as the tibetan monks had a prophicy that said the nazi’s would show up seeking entrance into there caves n what not to look for inner earth, they believed the nazi’s were going to usher in a new age, n the transision from the age of pieces to the age of Aquarius
More information, please. (Try writing in English.)
That sounds like something out of Good Omens. Why would the Tibetans give a damn about Greek astrology?
In those famous torchlight demonstrations (featured iirc in Triumph of the Will), which way do they have the swastika rotate?
A few comments: the swastika is a very old symbol-the palace of the (former) king of Nepal has them on the doors.
Second: Hitler and many of the Nazis were very much into the occult and folklore. Hitler belived that the germans were “aryans”-a people who originated in Persia. Along with his obsession about “racial purity”, he was attempting to revive many of the old pagan religion of the Germans-Himmler worshipped “Wotan”, and other prominent Nazis were also into germanic mythology-the “Ring” cycle of Wagner was especially popular with these guys.
The adoption of the swastika was very much in line with the general weirdness and anti-scientific bent of the Nazis-one reason why Einstein and many fellow physicists left Germany, is because they were accused of practicing “jewish” science-Hitler preferred the senile ravings of physicists like Philip Lienard (who was a senule old man).
In a way, it is a good thing that Hitler had these belifes-it probably prevented him from building an atomic bomb.
Possibly due to indirect Graeco-Bactrian influence, such as was present throughout the Buddhist art of the region.
I think the monk story comes from Ravenscroft, a speculative historian not to be relied on for fact. On the other hand the nazis were interested in Tibet, at least three expeditions being sent there just before and during the war. I recommend a book called “Himmler’s Crusade”, very interesting. Nazi anthropology at its most fascinatingly bizarre, but without the mysterious transport of several thousand monks to Germany.