When Swastikas on Uniforms Meant Luck By RICHARD SANDOMIR APRIL 19, 2014 debunked

Please help to correct the New York Times article When Swastikas on Uniforms Meant Luck
By RICHARD SANDOMIR (April 19, 2014) that references the Baseball Researcher blog article at

http://baseballresearcher.blogspot.com/2010/02/rabbit-maranville-is-not-nazi.html

The NYT (and the Baseball Researcher Blog) perpetuates the lie that the Germans called themselves "Nazis," that they called their symbol a "swastika," and that the symbol "traveled" to Germany from India (there is no evidence of that). The Germans called themselves "National Socialists" and they called their symbol a "Hakenkreuz," which means "hooked cross" because their symbol was a type of cross.
http://rexcurry.net/45th-infantry-division-swastika-sooner-soldiers.html

It was also not a swastika in that they used it to represent crossed "S" letters for their dogma -"socialism"- as alphabetical symbolism (see the book about the work of the symbologist Dr. Rex Curry) by turning it 45 degrees from the horizontal and always pointing it in the "S" letter direction. That is another reason why the baseball cap symbol in the photo at the Baseball Researcher Blog has a distinctly different meaning from the "socialist" alphabetical meaning from Germany. http://rexcurry.net

Germans did not "hijack" the symbol. The hijacking of the symbol was done by people who did not want to disparage the Christian cross, so they began deliberately mis-identifying the German socialist symbol as a "swastika." That continues to this day.

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If the swastikas are remarkable, then baseball researchers and other readers might enjoy finding photos of this: At that time, the Pledge of Allegiance used the pledge's early stiff-armed salute. Did players and spectators start the games with the National Anthem (as they do now)? Or even the pledge itself? If so, there might be photos of the players and the crowds performing the early pledge stiff-armed salute, as the players and spectators often do today at sporting events (but with the modern hand-over-the-heart that replaced the straight-arm salute). The Pledge Of Allegiance was the origin of the salute adopted later by German National Socialists (again see the work of Dr. Rex Curry). There are even examples of the early pledge salute being used outside of the pledge, so there might be examples of the gesture used as a "cheer" or as a physical exclamation/salute by excited fans.