No movement of the body ever expressed a political idea so exactly. The goose-step — the stiff, straight-legged parade march this SS man performs — began in the drill of Frederick the Great's Prussia, but it was Nazi Germany that made it a symbol dreaded around the world. George Orwell understood why. Writing in 1941, he called it an affirmation of naked power, containing, in his words, "a boot crashing down on a face," and noted that a soldier could only perform it where nobody dared laugh at him. That is its whole purpose — not use in battle, but intimidation, the visible promise that the men marching would do precisely as ordered, to anyone.

The figure carries a red swastika standard on a spear-topped staff, frozen at the top of the goose-step, one leg locked out straight — the black-uniformed SS at its most theatrical. He is the marching companion to the SS Bannerman, part of the same endless columns, and paraded past the same reviewing platform, the Nuremberg rally stand, that the sacred Blood Flag presided over. In a parade diorama, a rank of goose-stepping flagbearers is the single most recognisable image of the regime — and, as Orwell saw, the most chilling.

Model: LAH179 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set