(Just for clarification: ancient Sparta was by no means the German Fascists’ only inspiration, as anybody who regularly reads this subcommunity can attest.)

Although admiration of Sparta in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was by no means universal, it is nevertheless possible to trace a significant tradition, originally formulated by Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829), in which the Dorian Greek Stamm (race) — and the Spartans in particular — were seen as the most truly and typically Hellenic people.⁵

This idea was taken up by a number of scholars during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most importantly by Karl Ottfried Müller (1797–1840), who popularised and reinterpreted the concept of the Dorians in accordance with contemporary political views. In his monumental work on the history and antiquities of the Dorian race, Die Dorier (1820), Müller portrayed Sparta as a pattern-state for all Greece: the Dorian polis par excellence.⁶

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this Dorian conception of Sparta was favoured by those with an interest in questions of racialised historiography who wished to propagate theories regarding the Nordic/Aryan nature of the Dorians.⁷ In particular, such ideas appealed to German nationalists, who found them useful in presenting their German forefathers as closely related to the Dorian Greeks.

Theories of Spartan racial superiority stemming from this matrix of ideas also led to the widespread assumption that Sparta’s ‘eugenic’ laws concerning marriage and children were formulated from a conscious desire for racial purity. Ideas of Sparta thus came to form a part of the prevalent early twentieth-century European discourse on racial hygiene and cultural degeneration.⁸

Nevertheless, it was the [German Fascists] who were to bring many of these disparate elements of the German ‘Sparta-theme’ together — as Losemann points out, with the advent of the Third Reich, the Spartan tradition in Germany became ‘radicalised’, and was pushed to hitherto unknown extremes.

During the Third Reich, politicians, academics and amateur scholars in widely-differing fields claimed Sparta as an archetype;⁹ her all-important identification as a Nordic state, which led Spartan blood to be identified with the blood of the German people,¹⁰ became the catalyst for numerous works praising various aspects of Spartan society.¹¹

Hitler himself set Sparta at the head of his hierarchy of Classical inspirations; for him she was the ‘purest racial state in antiquity’, an archaic precursor of the Third Reich.¹² He praised her birth policy explicitly in his so-called Secret Book, written in 1928 (known in German as his Zweites Buch),¹³ and saw her ‘naked power’ as a model for his own projected Eastern European power structure.¹⁴

Preferring to see [Dorian] Greeks as the ultimate forefathers of the German race, he even claimed that a particular affinity between Germans and Spartans could be proved by the resemblance of peasant soup in Schleswig Holstein to Spartan black broth.¹⁵

What, then, of Sparta’s significance in [Fascist] education? It was an educational precept of the Third Reich that all subjects should be recast in the service of [Fascist] ideology and Wehrgeistigkeit (militaristic spirit).

The aim of this ‘new pedagogy’ was to mould children of the right ‘character’, so that they might form a ‘master race’ endowed with all the virtues of a [mindlessly] obedient ‘political soldier’,¹⁶ desirous of war and victory in order to gain Lebensraum (living-space taken from conquered non-Germanic peoples), and entirely committed to all [Fascist] racial and political beliefs and policies.¹⁷

History was particularly subject to reworking under the [German Fascists’] new Geschichtsdogmatik (historical credo) — all epochs were reassessed as programmatic for [Fascism].¹⁸ For example, the syllabuses of the Humanistische Gymnasien (classical grammar schools) were transformed to present Greeks and Romans as ‘Nordic culture-bearing peoples’ closely related to the Germans. All great political and cultural achievements were portrayed as the product of Nordic peoples, and the downfall of civilisations (whether Persian, Greek or Roman) was presented as the result of ‘de-Nordification’ (Entnordung).¹⁹

Sparta, as the Nordic state par excellence, therefore achieved a doubly-heightened significance. Whatever her inclinations, her history would have been rewritten in a manner favourable to [Fascism]. However, since so many of the values of her kosmos seemed to bear an active resemblance to the values of the [Reich’s] leadership, her importance as a legitimising example was widely extolled, and the (supposed) similarities in her political, racial and constitutional outlook were emphasised far beyond the walls of the Gymnasien.

One needed to look no further than ‘the Socialist Warrior State of the Dorian Spartans’ for an ancient precedent for the glorification of war and sacrificial heroism, or for the institutionalisation of tough physical training allied with eugenic racial policies.²⁰

From this perspective, the Spartans could truly be hailed as [German Fascists] avant la lettre.²¹ On at least one occasion, Bernhard Rust, the Reich Minister for Education, completely identified the objectives of his own office with the rearing of young Spartans.²²

Many German classicists also followed this pro-Spartan trend, making a point of discussing Spartan topics in their new, ideologically influenced research: ‘none of the many programmatic pamphlets advocating a specifically National Socialist conception of the ancient world failed to mention Sparta’.²³ According to some scholars, non-German classicists were incapable of studying Spartan history properly.²⁴

In particular, Helmut Berve, the second major contributor to Sparta: Der Lebenskampf, who held the title of ‘Kriegsbeauftragter der deutschen Altertumswissenschaft’ (‘War-representative of German Classical Scholarship’),²⁵ was notorious for his systematic attempts to ‘nazify’ his discipline.²⁶

Berve’s short monograph, Sparta, which was published in 1937 and intended for a general readership, was insistent in its assimilation of Sparta with [the Third Reich].²⁷ So important did Berve consider the Spartan model that he gave lectures on Sparta to numerous soldiers’, teachers’ and working men’s associations, and often wrote on Spartan subjects in the popular press.²⁸

Vacano himself, while enjoying a high reputation as a Classical archaeologist, was sufficiently dedicated to disseminating the [Fascist] view of ancient history to the young that he became first an Erzieher (teacher/educator) of the Adolf Hitler Schools, and later a chief officer of the Adolf Hitler School teacher training academy.²⁹ He was therefore particularly well-placed to produce a textbook whose description of Spartan education would have resonated with the experience of pupils at the Adolf Hitler Schools.

Ancient Sparta continues to be a source of inspiration for white neofascists, as it epitomized nearly all of the characteristics that they fetishize: militarism, ableism, adventurous conquest, toxic masculinity, and ‘Europeanity’. (Ancient Sparta’s looser sexual mores are normally unincluded.) Given how many neofascists have military backgrounds, such fetishisation should be unsurprising.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with having a fascination in a premodern civilization, neofascists take this a step further and seriously argue that most or all of a premodern civilization’s worst aspects are worth emulating today. This is analogous to being content seeing a crocodile in the wild versus wanting to bring one home as a pet.

Further reading: Sparta’s German Children: The ideal of ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps, 1818–1920, and in Nationalist Socialist elite schools (the Napolas), 1933–1945

Sparta and the Nazis (audio)