Pictured: A knight holding a Fascist standard.

Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide, pages 27–9, 35, 37–8 & 63:

To the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s, hearing the call of their medieval and Prussian forebears, the ‘German East’ signified a ‘return to the pristine, lost past of the Teutonic Order and Frederick the Great, and heralded a paradise to be regained’,⁸ a paradise, the [Fascists] said, of blood and soil (Blut und Boden).

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Pictured: A Fascist knight defending a peasant from communism.

The Order of the Teutonic Knights was a crusading military order which conquered territory in the eastern Baltic lands during the Middle Ages. Founded in the Holy Land [today occupied Palestine], in 1190, in the midst of the crusades — as a military organization to care for sick and wounded crusaders — the Order drew its members from the ranks of German nobility.

The Order soon began a systematic conquest of lands along the Baltic coast, conquering what was then Prussia and Livonia (the medieval name for Estonia and Latvia). As a result of its Baltic crusades, by 1400, the Order controlled a large territory along the Baltic coast. During their Baltic crusades, the Teutonic Knights adopted a harsh policy towards the region’s indigenous peoples — slaughtering any who opposed them and ‘removing’ others from their ancestral grounds.

In the wake of the Order’s conquests, tens of thousands of German settlers flooded these lands, as part of a state‐sponsored German immigration and ‘Germanization’ of these lands. Desirous of more lands, the Teutonic Knights launched a pre‐emptive strike against the Polish–Lithuanian state near the village of Tannenberg, in July 1410.

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Pictured: A Gautag 1936 Hildesheim postcard featuring a round swastika in the background and a giant knight in front of it.

The strategy backfired, however, resulting in a disastrous defeat which left half the knights dead on the battlefield and severely weakened the Order. The Order of the Teutonic Knights never regained its influence, prestige or success.¹⁰

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Pictured: A 2nd Saxon War Wounded and Veterans' Day (Nationalsozialistische Kriegsopferversorgung or National ‘Socialist’ War Casualty Assistance Organisation) NSKOV postcard. It depicts a knight holding a tower shield that bears a swastika in its centre. Behind him is the Wehrmacht holding dozens of Fascist banners.

For late‐nineteenth century and early‐twentieth century Germans, the turn to ‘the East’ was, in their view a ‘return’, a chance to complete the plan started by their thirteenth‐century ancestors when crusading Teutonic Knights had conquered and ‘Germanized’ ‘the East’ by ‘the sword’. The example of the Teutonic Knights’ Baltic crusade would provide a powerful historical precedent for twentieth‐century Germans committed to continuing what they saw as the inevitable and timeless German ‘drive to the East’ (Drang nach Osten) and expansion onto Slavic lands.

Under [his brand of fascism], Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, his new Reich would ‘march on the road of the Knights of the Teutonic Order of yore’ who obtained ‘sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation’ by the sword, to win new ‘living space’ [Lebensraum] in ‘the East’ for the German people.¹¹ Hitler’s second (and largest) war for ‘living space’ — the assault on the Soviet Union — was named Operation Barbarossa after a crusading twelfth‐century German emperor.

In [the Third Reich], Himmler depicted the Schutzstaffel/protection squad (or SS) as a revival of the Order of the Teutonic Knights, taking the Order as a model for his SS.¹² In their propaganda, the [Fascists] portrayed the Teutonic Knights crusade as the forerunner of Hitler’s wars for ‘living space’ in ‘the East’. In short, the [German Fascists] saw themselves (amongst other things) as the Teutonic Knights of the twentieth century.¹³

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Pictured: Vichy propaganda depicting an Axis soldier as literally embodying a Crusader.

During the World War I era, wartime German soldiers on the Eastern front, as well as the post‐war German Baltic Freikorps fighters, saw themselves as resurrected thirteenth‐century Teutonic Knights seeking new ‘living space’ in the ‘German East’. These two episodes also reminded their fellow Germans of the glories of the medieval past, when crusading Teutonic Knights had conquered and ‘Germanized’ the Slavic East ‘by the sword’.

Pictured: A knight inside of a Fascist swastika. He holds a sword in his right hand and a Fascist standard in the other.

In a huge battle, lasting 26–31 August 1914, the German Army defeated the Russian Army, a battle christened the Battle of Tannenberg — redeeming in German expansionist eyes the 1410 defeat of the Teutonic Knights by a combined Lithuanian and Polish force. The victory at Tannenberg was followed by further German eastern victories during 1915. […] Intoxicated with ‘the East’, the Baltic Freikorps, as one of its members later recollected, saw themselves as resurrected Teutonic Knights, as a ‘new race of military farmerhood, a battle‐ready chain of colonizers, which believed that it had a Teutonic Knight mission to fulfill’.

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Pictured: A mid‐1930s postcard depicting the Reich’s head of state as a knight.

Drawn by [Fascist] intentions in ‘the East’ (which sought to mirror earlier Baltic Freikorps aims of conquest, expansion, settlement and colonization), many Freikorps fighters joined the fledging [Fascist] movement. Citing historical precedent, the [German Fascists] saw themselves as reconquering land that the Germanic Teutonic Knights had won and settled many centuries before.

In their view, they were merely ‘taking back’ land that had once been ‘German’ and, in Hitler’s spatial fantasy, making this land ‘German again’.⁶¹ […] On the morning of 22 August 1939, [Berlin] exhorted [its] generals to ‘have no pity’ during the coming war with Poland; the coming Polish campaign (dubbed ‘Operation Tannenberg’, aimed at avenging the 1410 defeat of the Teutonic Knights) was to be carried out, [it] said, with ‘the greatest brutality and without mercy’.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

On a minor note, the Fascists’ infamous desire to create a ‘Thousand Year Reich’ was likely inspired by the opinion that the First Reich began in 800 C.E. and finally ended in 1806 C.E. (I say ‘opinion’ because some argue that it actually began in 962 C.E.)

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Click here for events that happened today (March 18).

1903: Galeazzo Ciano, Axis diplomat, was born in Livorno, Toscana.
1913: Werner Mölders, Axis pilot, came into existence.
1920: Adolf Schicklgruber departed Berlin after a planned coup failed to start.
1933: Iwane Matsui became a member of the Imperial Japanese Supreme War Council as Major General Kennosuke Otsuka became the Taiwan Army’s chief of staff.
1937: In an attempt to improve his image in the Arab world and symbolize hisself as its supposed protector, Benito Mussolini staged a propaganda event in which he received a ceremonial sword from Arab leaders from Fascist‐occupied Libya. Likewise, the Fascists in Guadalajara faced off antifascist forces around the same time that the Blackshirt Division ‘Dio lo vuole’ in Spain disbanded.
1938: Adolf Schicklgruber and Benito Mussolini met at Brennero in the Brenner Pass on the Italian–Austrian border; Mussolini agreed to enter a war on the Reich’s side at an opportune moment. Additionally, Imperial troops captured Tengxian, Jiangsu Province, China after a two‐day battle.
1939: While in Vienna in Reich‐occupied Austria, Adolf Schicklgruber approved the formation of a German protectorate in Slovakia. As well, some Imperial troops boarded barges at Xingzi, Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, China, sailed south ten kilometers on the Yangtze River, and disembarked to assault Chinese positions at Wucheng.
1940: Luftwaffe bombers attacked a Netherlandish trawler off Ijmuiden, the Netherlands, killing several folk including the captain and the first mate.
1941: The Reich centralized all coal mining and distribution, and the Reich’s head of state met with Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, and Erich Raeder; Raeder urged Berlin to convince the Empire of Japan to attack Singapore and recommended that Berlin reveal the plans for Operation Barbarossa to the Empire of Japan. Aside from that, Erwin Rommel departed North Africa for a meeting with his Chancellor, and Axis submarine U‐105 attacked Allied convoy SL‐68 west of Senegal at 0400 hours, sinking one British ship and slaughtering the entire crew.
1942: The first A4 rocket exploded on Test Stand VII at Peenemünde, Germany during a combustion chamber test, and Axis aircraft assaulted Port Moresby, Australian Papua.
1943: Vichy France repealed some antisemitic laws, it seems. Meanwhile, Oswald Mosley and Diana Mosley received Norah Elam and Dudley Elam while in imprisonment in London, and the Allies accidentally(?) struck civilian facilities in the Reich, killing one hundred eight folk and wounding over one hundred.
1944: At 1100 hours, Auschwitz prisoner Rudolf Friemel married neoslave Margarita Ferrer at the camp’s Registry Office. This was the only case where a prisoner was allowed to marry in the camp. Apart from that, the Axis airfield at Lechfeld experienced an Allied bombing raid, and so did Hamburg.
1945: Albert Speer, sensing his Chancellor’s wish to potentially order the Greater German Reich’s destruction so as to prevent Allied capture, attempted to persuade him not to destroy Germany’s future. The Axis lost both Boppard and Kolberg to the Allies. Still, an Axis V‐2 rocket hit the Speaker’s Corner at the edge of Hyde Park in London that morning, massacring three folk and seriously injuring nine.
1956: Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Fascist collaborator, dropped dead.
1967: Erik Hansen, Axis general, died.