Was digging on the recurring usage of symbols eagles, thunderbolts, serpents, etc.

found this, thought i'd share it.

By claiming

the NSDAP administration was the Third Reich, it implied that the Wilhelmine Empire of

Bismark of 1871 was the Second Reich, which in turn implied that the Holy Roman

Empire (962-1806 CE) was the First (Winkler 122), and before that, Charlemagne was

crowned Roman Emperor in 800 CE (Winkler 122). The remainder of the years that

existed between this crowning and the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE were

written off as a “mere suspension of Roman History” (Winkler 122). By this genealogy,

the German leaders in 1933 “could claim long-standing connections to ancient Rome [as

well as] a Roman influenced ancestry” (Winkler 122). Indeed Adolf Hitler remarked that

“it was in Greece and Italy that the Germanic spirit found its first terrain favorable to its

blossoming” (Winkler 123), attempting to claim that the Greco-Roman and Germanic

peoples were one and the same. It is an ironic statement, considering the fact that in the

eyes of the Greeks and Romans, the Germans were barbarians. In addition to the

possibility of the use of such a connection as a sort of legitimizing agent of imperialism,

this huge effort to stress a classical lineage can in part also be explained by Hitler’s academic interest and obsession with antiquity.

https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://duckduckgo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1260&context=senior_capstone