It wasn’t actually stolen from India/Buddhism/whatever. It has always been used in Europe to some degree, but before the rise of fascism, a funny thing happened:
An obsessive nerd found Troy. And the city had apparently gone through a period where they slapped swastikas on literally everything, there were thousands of examples excavated.
The public excitement over the find popularized the symbol throughout Europe again, and then Nazis stole it as a symbol for pretty much their whole schtick, including their (wildly incorrect) beliefs on Aryan race theory.
the earliest known swastika is from 10,000 BCE – part of “an intricate meander pattern of joined-up swastikas” found on a late paleolithic figurine of a bird, carved from mammoth ivory, found in Mezine, Ukraine
It’s interesting how archaeological finds can produce weird modern behavior. When Lenin died in 1924 he was mummified because of the contemporaneous worldwide fascination with Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb, not because of any Russian tradition of preserving their dead leaders’ corpses.
It wasn’t actually stolen from India/Buddhism/whatever. It has always been used in Europe to some degree, but before the rise of fascism, a funny thing happened:
An obsessive nerd found Troy. And the city had apparently gone through a period where they slapped swastikas on literally everything, there were thousands of examples excavated.
The public excitement over the find popularized the symbol throughout Europe again, and then Nazis stole it as a symbol for pretty much their whole schtick, including their (wildly incorrect) beliefs on Aryan race theory.
Turns out we’ve always being using them
It’s interesting how archaeological finds can produce weird modern behavior. When Lenin died in 1924 he was mummified because of the contemporaneous worldwide fascination with Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb, not because of any Russian tradition of preserving their dead leaders’ corpses.