The Nazis modelled their pageantry on ancient Rome, and nowhere more openly than in their standards. Just as the Roman legions had marched behind the aquila, the eagle on a pole, so each SS and party formation carried a Feldzeichen — a staff topped with a gilded eagle and swastika, a name-plaque, and a swastika banner. The one this man bears reads "Deutschland Erwache," "Germany Awake," one of the movement's oldest and most infamous slogans. It was all deliberate theatre: by borrowing the symbols of a two-thousand-year-old empire, the regime dressed a twelve-year dictatorship in the costume of eternal destiny, the "Thousand-Year Reich." The standards were even treated as sacred objects, consecrated by touching the movement's holy relic, the Blood Flag.

The figure is an SS standard-bearer in black uniform, frozen mid-goose-step — the stiff, straight-legged parade march the regime used to project mechanical, unbreakable discipline. He carries his eagle-topped standard past the reviewing stand as part of the endless choreographed columns of the party rallies. He belongs with the sacred Blood Flag that consecrated standards like his, his fellow marcher the SS Flagbearer, and the Nuremberg rally stand they all paraded past. In a display of the regime's pageantry, a column of goose-stepping bannermen is the image the propaganda cameras lived for.

Model: LAH178 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set