So was it a Hitler salute or wasn’t it?

Speaking at President Trump’s inauguration event this week, Elon Musk slapped his right hand on his chest before shooting his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down. He did it twice.

It looked a lot like the salute used in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. But almost immediately, a striking number of different interpretations began to circulate.

Some commentators called it a “Roman salute.” Others described it as a “heartfelt” expression of joy, or dismissed it as merely clumsy.

The website of the Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against anti-Semitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down,” and ranks it as “the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world.”

But after Mr. Musk’s stiff-arm salute, the Anti-Defamation League called it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Andrea Stroppa, known as Mr. Musk’s emissary in Italy, posted on the social media platform X: “The Roman Empire is back, starting from the Roman salute.” He later deleted the post, saying that people were interpreting “the whole thing as a reference to Nazi-fascism.”

Mr. Musk, who owns X, posted in response to the criticism: “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is soo tired.”

The straight-arm salute has meant very different things in different places and during different periods of history. But at a time when the far right is once again on the rise, the interpretation of this gesture being performed deliberately and publicly was straightforward — especially in Germany, where the salute’s history lingers most powerfully.

In Germany, gestures like the one Mr. Musk made are illegal, along with other symbols and slogans from the Nazi era. (On Wednesday night, anti-Musk protesters projected an image showing his salute and the words “Heil Tesla” onto the facade of his company’s German factory.)

For the German establishment, the situation was very clear.

“A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute,” the prominent German weekly Die Zeit wrote in an editorial.

“There is no need to make this unnecessarily complicated,” the editorial said. “Anyone on a political stage giving a political speech in front of a partly right-wing extremist audience,” — present at the inauguration were several far-right politicians from Germany, Italy, France and Britain — “anyone who raises their right arm in a swinging manner and at an angle several times is doing the Hitler salute.”

“Anyone who now thinks they have to discover the older ‘Roman salute’ as a supposed Musk reference is, above all, demonstrating their willingness to reinterpret it in a benign way,” it concluded.

“Roman salute” is indeed trending on social media — along with images of toga-clad actors in grainy films set in ancient Rome raising their right arm alongside Mr. Musk raising his.

But was there a Roman salute in ancient times? No: There is no evidence that the salute was ever used in ancient Rome.

The actual history of the salute is little-known — and much shorter: It was used in late 19th century theater productions and early 20th century films, which then inspired its use by fascists in Italy and Germany. And it was actually performed for decades by American school children for entirely different reasons.

“The Roman salute is a modern invention,” said Martin Winkler, professor of classics at George Mason University in Virginia, and author of “The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology.”

“There is no evidence whatsoever from the Roman art and paintings that survive that ancient Romans ever used that gesture,” he added.

The salute first became popular in stage productions and silent cinema, when films began using the gesture for costume dramas set in ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt.

“It’s simply a visual gesture that was heavily deployed in the silent cinema era when many films were set in antiquity,” Mr. Winkler said. “Why? Because in the absence of sound, dramatic gestures and what we would now consider overacting were pretty much ubiquitous. Saluting gestures were no exception.”

The salute had a real-life breakthrough in 1919. Gabriele D’Annunzio, a soldier and Italian poet turned nationalist (who had worked on “Cabiria,” an Italian silent film set in antiquity) invaded Fiume, a coastal city that is now part of Croatia.

He ruled Fiume for 15 months as a kind of mini-Caesar, calling his soldiers legionnaires and addressing them from his balcony. And he adopted a ceremony that involved a straight arm salute he called “Il saluto Romano,” or the Roman salute.

“This Roman salute resembled a stab: You extend your arm, angled upwards with your fingers together, as if it were a dagger that you symbolically thrust into an enemy’s throat,” Mr. Winkler said. “It’s a very militarized, politicized kind of gesture.”

The Roman salute was adopted soon after by the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1923. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party adopted it in 1926, calling it the German salute.

Intriguingly, there was an American salute that preceded both.

To modern eyes, it would be jarring to see a group of schoolchildren giving the stiff-armed salute to the American flag. But the gesture was commonplace for decades.

In 1892 — in the run-up to the Chicago World’s Fair marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus discovering America — Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister’s son from upstate New York, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, a version of which is recited by many American school children to this day.

Along with his boss, James Upton, Bellamy also came up with a salute to accompany the recital of the pledge: Stand up, hand on heart, then extend the right arm to salute the Stars and Stripes. It became known as the Bellamy salute.

The pledge itself was part of an Americanization program for immigrant children. But in 1942, when the United States was fighting the Nazis in World War II, the extended arm gesture was abandoned. “It looked too close to the Nazi salute,” Winkler said.

Whatever Elon Musk was trying to invoke on Monday, his salute looked pretty close to a Nazi salute even if it was not identical. He first put his hand on his chest, which is not part of the Nazi salute, and could be closer to what those American school children did until 1942.

But the pledge of allegience salute was dropped in a way that left no room for misinterpretation: The gesture had become inextricably tied to the Nazis.

“The common American perception was, ‘These are our enemies and we don’t want to be like them,’” Winkler said.

Mr. Musk is now courting far-right parties in several European countries. His audience in Washington on Inauguration Day included Tino Chrupalla, a co-leader of Germany’s Alternative for Germany party; Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, whose party is descended from the post-Fascist movement; Nigel Farage of Britain’s Reform Party; and Eric Zemmour of France, who is to the right even of the French National Rally’s Marine Le Pen.

“What is happening now is predictable,” Die Zeit said in its editorial. “Neo-Nazis and right-wing radicals can interpret the stretched right arm as a gesture of fraternization and empowerment.”

Emma Bubola in Rome contributed reporting.



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