A Very Early Use of the Nazi Swastika in the U.S., 1924.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2519

This Outsider-y political pamphlet attracted my attention for the swastika and the date (1924) more so than anything else, including an absolutely luxurious use of quotation marks, capitalizations, and bolds that the text would reveal. Ernst Goener's work looked like trouble in that mysterious way that some writers will use an now-unknown word or phrase upon which everything is balanced--in this case, "the Prize". That, and who "our People" might have been¹. 

The swastika is of course an ancient symbol mostly happy in its antiquity--its existence as a symbol didn't really become polluted and disgraced until the 20th century when it seemed to have made an impact on nationalist groups in Germany following some relatively popular (and innocnet?) exposure by  archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. And of course the existence of the symbol in modern usage is basically terminated by the NSDAP/Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler.  

With this pamphlet I was thinking that use of the swastika may have been an innocent/antiquarian thing, except that I stumbled over  the "Jew" in bold a number of time in the pamphlet's short little life (as in "the all-powerful Jew of Versailles" and so on--you get the picture). Goerner as it turns out was a vivid pro-German figure here in the U.S. during WWI, and was a Nazi sympathizer from the earliest days of that political movement at least through 1941, where I lose track of him. To finalize the connection I read that Hitler had designed the Nazi standard as far back as 1920², and that the use of the swastika in the Nazi flag began soon afterwards, well before 1924--so there was plenty of room for this pamphlet to employ the use of the Nazi swastika for its symbolic commentary on the cover.  

In the end Goerner winds up being a German propagandist through WWI, and was an American  supporter of the Nazis from the very earliest state of the party all the way into WWII.  He was indeed using the Nazi swastika as his calling card, in the U.S., in 1924.  Goerner was not an "Outsider" at all--he was a greased-rocket German/Nazi sympathizer and pamphleteer, with a lust for the NSDAP and a hate for Jewish people. 

Notes:

1.  It become pretty evident what Goerner was screaming about in this pamphlet--he was blaming a Jewish kabal for preventing his world peace plan from receiving a $10,000 prize in a competition for, well, plans for world peace.  He gets a little meshugena in explaining how the whole deal came down, mostly because of a Jewish-dominated-and-controlled Versaille treaty, among other things.  

I found the following article by William Z. Spiegelman  "Our New York Letter" (from the Chicago Chronicle, April 18, 1924) the WilliamZSpiegelman.com blog, here:  http://williamzspiegelman.blogspot.com/2012/02/our-new-york-letter_16.html

'With the sign of the Swastika on its cover, there has appeared a twenty-page booklet, many thousand copies of which have been circulated. The booklet contains a plan “to make peace prevail in the world.” The author, Ernst Goerner, probably, an American-German, submitted this plan to the Bok Peace Award Committee with full expectation of receiving its prize of $100,000. The Bok Committee did not consider this plan the best, however, and the disgruntled author now raves at the Committee, claiming that it is no more than a Jewish contrivance to win America for the League of Nations idea, in order that the “Jewish Treaty of Versailles” may be maintained. You, probably, would think that this [person] is a crank. You would misjudge. He has a well-known program – the program of the Swastika.

“The cause for the world’s unrest is the fact that during the time of the war Russia, Germany, Austria, England, France and America were represented, not by Aryans and Nordics, but by Jews. The trouble with the Versailles Treaty is the same: the nations and states were not represented, but misrepresented by the Jews, especially [in] America, which was misrepresented by Colonel House, the evil spirit of President Wilson, ‘The all-powerful Jew at Versailles.’ He was not the representative of the United States, but of world Jewry."

2. Here's what Adolf Hitler had to say in Mein Kampf:  

"I myself always came out for the retention of the old colors, not only because as a soldier they are to me the holiest thing I know, but because also in their esthetic effect they are by far the most compatible with my feeling. Nevertheless, I was obliged to reject without exception the numerous designs which poured in from the circles of the young movement, and which for the most part had drawn the swastika into the old flag I myself - as Leader - did not want to come out publicly at once with my own design, since after all it was possible that another should produce one just as good or perhaps even better. Actually, a dentist from Starnberg did deliver a design that was not bad at all, and, incidentally, was quite close to my own, having only the one fault that a swastika with curved legs was composed into a white disk.

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.

And this remained final.

Along the same lines arm-bands were immediately ordered for the monitor detachments, a red band, likewise with the white disk and black swastika.

The party insignia was also designed along the same lines: a white disk on a red field, with the swastika in the middle. A Munich goldsmith by the name of Füss furnished the first usable design, which was kept.

In midsummer of 1920 the new flag came before the public for the first time. It was excellently suited to our new movement. It was young and new, like the movement itself. No one had seen it before; it had the effect of a burning torch. We ourselves experienced an almost childlike joy when a faithful woman party comrade for the first time executed the design and delivered the flag. Only a few months later we had half a dozen of them in Munich, and the monitor troop, which was growing bigger and bigger, especially contributed to spreading the new symbol of the movement."