Gesture politics
A royal home movie from 1933 apparently showed the future Queen, aged seven, and her mother giving a Nazi salute. Like the Swastika, the stiff-armed salute was not invented by the Nazis. In this case they took it from the Mussolini and his Fascists, who thought it came from ancient Rome. Three Roman soldiers are shown making such a gesture in Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting ‘Oath of the Horatii’.But the US beat both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy by using the gesture to accompany the pledge of allegiance.
Hitler himself claimed the salute was one of peace, saying it meant ‘Look! I am holding no weapon.’ But like the royal family, he and his followers never quite agreed on how to do it: while Hitler raised his arm no more than 20 degrees above the horizontal, other senior Nazis raised theirs 45 degrees and members of the Hitler Youth — like the future Edward VIII in the home movie — favoured 70 degrees or even more.
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