The name of the place where we were born or lived is usually not very important. Yes, there are places that are more or less historical or exotic, but usually the name is not important. Now if you say “my name is Pepito Pérez, I am from the Swastika”, things change. Because the swastika or the swastika is a symbol that has been used in Eastern cultures for thousands of years, but is essentially linked to Hitler’s Third Reich.

There is a Canadian town called Swastika or Swastika, and the history of this town is connected to the history of one of Hitler’s biggest fans.

Canadian swastikaIn the southeastern Canadian province of Ontario, a small mining community was founded around a gold mine that had been discovered a few months earlier in 1908. The gold rush was still happening in America, and this was something that attracted many people to the area in search of luck or good fortune. To be sure, one of the meanings of ‘swastika’ in Sanskrit (among others) is ‘good luck’, so it seemed like a fitting name for a gold mine.

By 1911 Swastika had a community of about 450 people related in some way to the mine of the same name or Lucky Cross, but interest in these operations soon waned. Swastika then concentrated on becoming a hub for rail transportation, with the richest mines at Kirkland Lake about five miles from town.

In fact, the swastika has lent its name not only to a town but also to two ice hockey teams: the Fernie Swastikas in British Columbia and the Windsor Swastikas in Nova Scotia. And there were several organizations in the West that used both the name and the symbol.

And the Nazis came. World War II came, and there’s no need to explain why the swastika no longer rang so beautifully. It had become the symbol of the Third Reich, and a campaign was launched in the West to erase the iconography from anything non-Nazi. This tide reached the small village of Swastika.

During the war, the provincial government removed both the symbol and the name, changing the city’s name to Winston. The idea was to take the name Churchill in honor of the British Prime Minister, but it was a change that did not work.

To hell with HitlerThe small community was formed under the name Swastika and will continue to be called Swastika. The residents thought so too, and when the government changed the name, they hung a new plaque in the city with the original name and the message, “Fuck Hitler, we invented our name first.” And so it remains in a city that is over a century old and currently has about 500 people.

The Mitford Family. The Swastika obviously has nothing to do with what was happening in Europe, but one name caught the eye of one person: Unity Mitford. Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford was born in London, but she was born in Swastika, where her family lived because of their gold mining interests. That family was the Mitfords, English aristocrats who were supposed to be the show at Christmas dinner.

Five of the Mitford sisters. Jessica is the first on the left. Diana is in the middle of the five, wearing a light-coloured Unity jacket next to her.

Why? David Mitford was a veteran of the First World War and a passionate defender of the British Empire. Moreover, she was an openly xenophobic, with a strong hatred of the French but also of the Germans. Her husband, Sydney Bowles, was a supporter of European fascism and two of her daughters (Diana and Unity) admired Hitler. Another daughter, Jessica, was a fervent anti-fascist who estranged herself from her family.

He was almost convinced by HitlerAlthough David did not sympathize with Hitler’s ideas, the family traveled to Germany in 1938 to attend the Nuremberg rally celebrating the annexation of Austria to Germany. This was not where Diana and Unity met Hitler, as they had been at the Nuremberg rally in 1933, but her father David allowed himself to be seduced by the German monarch. That is, of course, until Hitler declared war on England, and if there was one thing David loved, it was England, so once again he became anti-German.

Swastika Nazi. But Unity was in love with Hitler. What is now extremely curious is that he had signed a copy of Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. Hitler had signed it as if it were a young man’s yearbook: “No matter how far you are, I am always with you. You are always with me. I will never forget you. For my Walküre Unity,” Hitler signed it. Unity had the signatures of Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, Hess and Göring on the same page.

The Englishwoman’s dream did not last long, because when Great Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, the young woman tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the head in Munich. It went badly, but she suffered severe brain damage, which forced her mother to look after her in England until the young woman’s death in 1948, three years after Hitler had managed to shoot her in the head.

And it is extremely intriguing that from this coincidence, a connection between the name Swastika and a famous follower of Hitler emerged in a place thousands of miles away from home. And interestingly, Diana achieved her dream of marrying a fascist leader: the Englishman Oswald Ernald Mosley.

Pictures | The Mitford family

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