HOW THE NAZIS STOLE THE SWASTIKA
Heinrich Schliemann had grown obsessed with finding Troy, the lost city of Greek mythology, and believed the epics of Homer would show him the way. A wealthy businessman from Germany, in 1868 he set out with his copy of The Iliad to search the Mediterranean. Several years passed, the findings proved disappointing and he came close to giving up before a British amateur archaeologist named Frank Calvert made a suggestion: Schliemann should dig at the mysterious mound of Hisarlik on the Aegean coast of Turkey.
There, during the 1870s, Schliemann unearthed layers of civilisations dating back thousands of years, and declared the oldest to be Troy. The city of legend had been found – although it turned out to be a different layer than the one Schliemann thought – as well as a cache of jewellery, bronze, silver and gold. It was more than he had dared to hope. Yet in the ancient ruins he made another fateful discovery: some 1,800 depictions of a symbol that resembled a cross with bent arms: the swastika.
“THE SWASTIKA CAME TO STAND FOR HATRED, FEAR, RACIAL INTOLERANCE AND GENOCIDE”
News of Schliemann’s sensational excavations spread far and wide,
