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The Finnish air force was created in March 1918 following independence from Russia and actually predates the founding of Britain’s RAF. Its first military aircraft was donated to the fledgling air force that same year by Swedish aristocrat Count Eric von Rosen whose personal symbol just happened to be a swastika. This image, which was later to become a symbol of Nazi Germany was at the time considered to be quite acceptable and became part of the livery of Finnish air force planes for decades. Perhaps ironically, von Rosen supported the concept of National Socialism and was the brother-in-law of...

Finland has belatedly admitted its air force flags probably should not have a huge swastika in the middle. The Nordic country is set to remove the symbol from the standard because its presence has created 'awkward situations with foreign visitors'. The nation adopted the insignia as the emblem of its airborne military when it was founded in 1918.

Adolf Hitler did not create the Third Reich – it created him. What started as a nationalist movement dominated by butch male homosexuals grew from an idea to an empire, and as it did these ambitious men literally groomed the young Adolf in both the modern and the old-school meaning of the term.The Third Reich was a German inevitability: No nation ever escapes the dream of recapturing its former greatness, which in Germany's history was no less a world power than Charlemagne's thousand-year Holy Roman Empire. Otto von Bismarck tried to recreate it in 1871 with his Second Reich, which...

A century ago today, seven hostages taken from the German pre-Nazi Thule Society were executed by the short-lived Munich Soviet just before it was crushed by right-wing militias. The Thule Society (logo at right) was a Bavarian volkisch club with a profound interest in stuff like crackpot race theory and Teutonic mythology; its very name alludes to a legendary territory hypothesized since antiquity to lie at the fringes of the world, often associated with Scandinavia and with the origins of the Aryan race.* Society members figured in the founding of the German Workers’ Party (DAP), the party which became the...