During the Second World War a brooch inscribed with ancient Norse runes (letters) was discovered in a field at Værløse Airfield in Denmark telling a sinister story of the Nazi’s efforts to abuse ancient runic writings to enhance their dark agenda.

In 1944, a Danish citizen informed the National Museum of Denmark that “a skeleton and various pieces of jewelry” had been discovered “a meter below ground level” during construction at the airfield, according to a recent report in Science Nordic . The museum inspector at that time, C.L. Vebæk, “struggled with German authorities” to gain access to the site and when he was eventually permitted he “found skeletal remains and antique objects scattered randomly at the scene, including a brooch of the type that archeologists call a rosette fibula.”

One side of the brooch features the runic name ‘Alugod’ alongside a ‘dreaded’ swastika which was at one time an iconic ancient sun symbol used across Europe and corrupted by the Nazis in the 1930s as a prime motif of the Third Reich. This particular symbol had become so despised after the Second World War that when the National Museum of Denmark reported the discovery of the brooch to Danish newspapers in March 1945, they had “skillfully removed” the symbol from the photos, and none of the media reports mentioned it, according to the Science Nordic article.

Danish newspapers removed the swastika from the Værløse brooch when it was first reported after the Second World War. (Image: National Museum of Denmark )

This blatant censoring of the Værløse brooch was a natural backlash to the poisonous Nazi ideology that claimed the Germanic race was of a superior nature with roots in ancient Nordic civilizations; from which ‘culture’ itself was believed to have been born. And with the birth of culture came the first language and written form, the runic alphabet. Contrary to this claim Historians have always known that the Norse runic alphabet known as futhark , after the first six letters which are: f, u, th, a, r, and k, had Mediterranean origins.

This historical fact posed something of a problem for the ideologically minded Nazis who really ‘needed’ Germanic runes to be the first known alphabet; their solution being a complete rewriting of history in which futhark became the first runic alphabet from which all others descended, including the Mediterranean formats.

History in the Remaking

Nazi intellectuals projected their twisted ideology onto ancient runes and they transformed from being static characters making up sentences to having deep esoteric content and meaning: the Science Nordic article says Nazis believed that meaning “lay hidden in the soul of the Germanic people.” In 1929, Hitler’s SS (Schutzstaffel) adapted the meanings of ancient Norse runes, for example, the Sun rune, , was renamed ‘Siegrune’ meaning “the victory rune” and what is known as the O-rune, meaning inheritance, became the SS symbol of ‘Blut und Boden’ (blood and soil). The T-rune represented “war and struggle,” after Tyr, the old god of war and the R-rune became the symbol of life or death depending on the direction of the diagonal lines.

Today, all of the symbols which were used by Nazis are legally forbidden in the German constitution but in Denmark, runes have become an important part of the country’s national identity and culture, helping to maintain a sense of national and community identity. And, while you might be surprised, Nazi runes do not only appear illustrated on the artifacts and architecture of Scandinavian and Germanic nations, for example; only three months ago I filmed a rare carved swastika on the stone window lintel of an ancient Norse castle in Caithness on the northeast coast of Scotland. You can watch a short Facebook video on my Page about this curious ‘out of place’ Nazi symbol here.

Author at Old Wick Castle in Caithness pointing to a swastika. 07/18/18. (Image: Courtesy of Ashley Cowie)

According to Wick historian Harry Gray in his 2007 book Tale of Two Streets: Story of Wick Town Centre in the Mid-19th Century, this swastika was carved above the window by a captured Nazi POW working on the surrounding farm fields around 1944. What is more, according to an August Twitter post by David Graham Scot, the brilliantly original and controversial Scottish documentary maker and senior reporter at the Caithness Courier and John O'Groat Journal:

“Old Wick Castle is one of Scotland's oldest castles… The Roman numerals [beside the swastika] say MCMXLVI ie 1946 and there's a HEIL HITLER to the right of the swastika that's faded away now.”

David Graham Scott Twitter photograph , posted on 08/03/18. (Author supplied)

This lonely swastika tells us that even when German Nazis were being held as prisoners in remote locations such as the North Highlands of Scotland, they continued to project their corrupted ideology through the creation of ancient Norse runes on historic buildings. Where the runes on the Danish brooch are concerned, the artist was in no doubt that he was creating an artifact which would be symbolic of the believed ancient Norse origins of the Germanic people. However, I wonder if the Nazi POW in Scotland knew that his stone media, The Castle of Old Wick, was constructed in the twelfth century by Harald Maddadson, Earl of Orkney, a magnate of the King of Norway who held sway over Caithness and Sutherland at that time.

Whether he knew it or not, that Nazi was carving an ancient Norse rune on an ancient Norse castle and in an act of universal irony, for this reason, the swastika has remained effectively powerless in transmitting Nazi ideologies, for most historians since the Second World War have incorrectly interpreted it as having been carved in the 10th century by the Nordic Sea Kings who built this coastal tower as a sentinel in their Nordic empire. This Nazi symbol is therefore disguised by its environment and effectively powerless.

Top image: The brooch found at Værløse Airfield has been inscribed with Norse runes and the ancient sun symbol, the swastika, which the Nazis used to further their horrifying ideology. Source : National Museum of Denmark

By Ashley Cowie