The Nazis turned their movement into a political religion, and the Blood Flag was its holiest relic. The Blutfahne was an ordinary party banner until 9 November 1923, when it was carried in Hitler's failed Munich putsch and stained with the blood of a follower shot dead by police. From then on the regime treated it as sacred. At the great Nuremberg rallies it became the centrepiece of a quasi-religious rite: Hitler would grip the Blood Flag in one hand and a new party or SS standard in the other, "consecrating" the new banner by touch, as if transferring the blood of the movement's "martyrs" into it. It was pure manufactured mysticism — a dictatorship dressing its cult of violence in the borrowed robes of faith.

For nearly twenty years the relic was carried by a single man, the SS standard-bearer Jakob Grimminger, whom the figure depicts presenting it — black SS uniform, steel helmet, the blood-red banner on its silver-topped staff. It belongs at the heart of the collection's ceremonial pieces: the Nuremberg rally stand where the consecrations took place, the Hitler who performed them, and the goose-stepping SS Bannerman whose standards it sanctified. The flag itself vanished in the last months of the war — last seen in October 1944, then gone, its fate a mystery to this day. In a display it is the dark sacred object the whole spectacle revolved around.

Model: LAH141 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set