Hate Symbols

How to use this guide

A recognition tool, not a catalog.

Antisemitism travels through symbols. A swastika sprayed on a synagogue, a number stitched onto a jacket, a pair of parentheses around a name online — each is a piece of shorthand that carries a long history and a specific meaning to the people who use it. The purpose of this guide is plain: to let a student, parent, teacher, or administrator recognize that shorthand on sight, understand what it means and where it came from, and respond appropriately. The same recognition serves the broader goal the platform was built for — because the machinery of coded hate is turned on many groups, learning to read it for one is learning to read it for all.

This guide describes the symbols; it does not display them. Reproducing hate imagery — even to educate — risks normalizing it, and many of these symbols are most harmful precisely as images. So each entry explains the symbol in words and links to the Anti-Defamation League's Hate Symbols Database, the authoritative, continuously updated reference, where the visual and the full description can be consulted by an adult who needs them. Entries are written for the secondary grade band (6–12).

A necessary caution

Why context decides meaning.

The single most important rule in reading hate symbols is the one the ADL places at the top of its own database: a symbol must be evaluated in the context in which it appears. Few of these symbols mean only one thing, and several have entirely ordinary uses. The number 88 is a year, an age, and a street address far more often than it is a code. The sunwheel is an ancient and widespread decorative motif. Many of the appropriated symbols — the swastika among them — were peaceful cultural or religious emblems for centuries before they were taken up for hate.

Recognition, then, is not the same as accusation. The presence of one of these symbols is a reason to look more closely — at who is using it, alongside what, and to what end — not a conclusion on its own. This guide gives the historical meaning so that a reader can make that closer judgment; it does not license treating every instance as proof of intent. Used well, the guide makes a reader more careful, not less.

Nazi-era symbols

The symbols inherited from the Third Reich.

The core of the modern hate-symbol vocabulary was either created or adopted by Nazi Germany and has been handed down to neo-Nazi and white-supremacist movements since 1945. These are the most widely recognized, and the most direct in meaning.

• The swastika. An ancient symbol used for thousands of years across many cultures — in South Asian, European, and Indigenous American traditions, where it carried meanings of good fortune and the sun — before it was adopted by the Nazi Party in the 1920s and placed at the center of the German flag in 1935. Since then it has been the single most recognizable symbol of Nazism, genocide, and antisemitism worldwide. Its older, unrelated religious use continues in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, which is part of why context matters; in Western public space, however, it reads almost universally as a Nazi symbol. It remains the most common symbol left at the scene of antisemitic vandalism.
• SS bolts (the lightning runes). A pair of stylized lightning bolts — the runic insignia of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi organization that ran the concentration and death camps. Neo-Nazis and racist skinheads use the bolts to signal allegiance to that legacy. The same double-bolt is sometimes made as a hand sign.
• The Sonnenrad (sunwheel / "Black Sun"). One of several ancient European sun symbols the Nazis appropriated to invent an idealized "Aryan" heritage. One specific circular design, associated with an SS castle, became known as the "Black Sun" and now serves as a neo-Nazi symbol that can stand in for the swastika where the swastika would draw immediate condemnation or is illegal. Most sunwheel designs are entirely unrelated to hate.
• The Totenkopf ("death's head"). A skull-and-crossbones emblem worn by SS units, including concentration-camp guards. It is used today by neo-Nazis to signal the same allegiance, and appears in the insignia of some contemporary extremist groups.
• The Nazi eagle (Parteiadler). The eagle-over-wreath emblem of the Nazi Party. Modern users often substitute a different image inside the wreath to evade moderation while preserving the reference.
• The SA / stormtrooper symbols. Emblems of the Sturmabteilung, the brownshirted paramilitary that intimidated Jews and political opponents during Hitler's rise. Less common today than the SS bolts but still in circulation.

The Nazi-era symbols connect directly to the history documented elsewhere on the platform — the machinery of the Holocaust and, in the Arabic-language theater, the Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa.

Where the imagery came from

Nazi-era propaganda posters and narratives.

Most of the visual antisemitic vocabulary in circulation today was assembled, or given its modern form, by the Nazi propaganda apparatus of the 1930s and 1940s. Understanding that machinery is part of recognizing what its descendants are doing now. A few of its principal instruments:

• Der Stürmer ("The Attacker"). The antisemitic newspaper founded in 1923 by Julius Streicher and circulated to hundreds of thousands of readers, displayed in public cases on German streets. Its grotesque caricatures — the hook-nosed schemer, the predatory financier, the ritual-murder accusation revived from the medieval blood libel — set the visual template for racial antisemitism. Streicher was later convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg for his role in inciting hatred.
• Der ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew"). Both a 1937 Munich museum exhibition that drew more than 400,000 visitors, and a 1940 film directed by Fritz Hippler with input from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The exhibition poster — described in this guide's companion material — fused the greed and conspiracy myths in a single figure; the film compared Jews to rats carrying contagion. It is the clearest example of state propaganda assembling older myths into one argument.
• Racial "science" wall charts. Pseudo-scientific charts produced for use in German schools, teaching children to classify and rank human beings by supposed racial type — the visual companion to the racial turn the platform documents elsewhere.
• The Propaganda Ministry's wider machine. Under Goebbels, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda coordinated film, radio, press, posters, and public exhibitions into a single apparatus — the same apparatus that, in its Arabic-language division, carried this material into the Middle East and North Africa, documented in that Topic.

The narratives these instruments pushed are the same myths catalogued throughout this guide and the Contemporary Antisemitism Topic — power, greed, disloyalty, conspiracy — which is precisely why studying the propaganda is a recognition tool and not only a history lesson. The fuller historical treatment of how the Nazi state built and deployed this machine belongs with the platform's account of the Nazi rise to power; this guide points to the primary collections below.

How images persuade

Reading the imagery critically.

A symbol or a poster is not a neutral picture; it is an argument made in visual form, built to bypass reasoning and land as a feeling. Understanding the techniques is part of recognizing them — and the same skills that let a student read a piece of hate propaganda also let them read the campaigns that fought it.

How hate imagery is built. The propaganda of the kind catalogued above relies on a small set of recurring visual techniques: caricature, the exaggeration of features to make a whole people look alien or grotesque; dehumanization, the depiction of human beings as vermin, disease, or parasites, as in the rat imagery of Der ewige Jude; false association, the visual linking of a target to whatever an audience already fears — money, communism, disease, conspiracy; and repetition, the same figure restated until it feels like common knowledge. None of these makes an argument that survives scrutiny; all of them are designed to work before scrutiny begins.

How the imagery has been countered. The visual battle has never been one-sided. The banner of this page is a detail from the American Jewish Committee's 1937 "Confronting Hate" campaign — posters, comics, and cartoons by New York illustrators that answered antisemitic and racist propaganda with images championing pluralism and democratic values. The counter-tradition matters because it shows that visual rhetoric is a tool, not a weapon belonging only to one side: the same techniques of composition and emphasis can be turned toward recognition, solidarity, and truth-telling.

The underlying skill is what the critic John Berger called learning to question "the way we see things" — that every image embodies a way of seeing, and that a viewer who knows the history and the techniques is harder to manipulate. That critical visual literacy is the real defense, and it is teachable. The sources below include both the primary propaganda record and scholarship on how images do their work.

Numeric codes

Numbers used as shorthand.

White-supremacist movements developed an extensive set of numeric codes — letters of the alphabet rendered as their position-numbers, or numbers with an agreed coded meaning. The codes let users signal to one another while passing unnoticed by outsiders, which is exactly why recognizing them matters. Nearly all of these have innocent everyday uses as well; the meaning depends entirely on context.

• 88. The eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled — "HH," for "Heil Hitler." Among the most common codes. Frequently combined with 14 as "1488."
• 14 (the "Fourteen Words"). Shorthand for a fourteen-word white-supremacist slogan coined by an American neo-Nazi, David Lane. The number stands in for the slogan as a rallying signal among white nationalists internationally.
• 18. The first and eighth letters, A and H — "Adolf Hitler." Also embedded in the name of the violent group "Combat 18."
• 109 / 110. A code for the antisemitic claim that Jews have been expelled from 109 countries throughout history, with "110" implying the user's own country should be the next. A compressed version of the conspiratorial "the Jews are always driven out for a reason" myth.
• 311. The eleventh letter, K, three times — "KKK," the Ku Klux Klan.
• 100%. Used by some white supremacists to mean "100% white." Also, obviously, an ordinary expression — a clear case where context is everything.

Online-era memes and coded text

The symbols built for the internet.

The open distribution of social media produced a newer layer of antisemitic signaling — memes and typographic codes designed to spread quickly, to be deniable, and to be legible to insiders while reading as innocent to everyone else. They are the contemporary form of a very old practice.

• Triple parentheses — the "(((echo)))." Three pairs of parentheses placed around a name — (((like this))) — to mark a person, or an organization, as Jewish, typically as a prelude to harassment. Created on an antisemitic podcast around 2014 and used to target Jewish journalists and public figures online. After the symbol became publicly known, many Jewish and non-Jewish users placed the parentheses around their own names in a gesture of solidarity — an act of reclaiming the symbol.
• The "Happy Merchant." A cartoon caricature of a Jewish man with grossly exaggerated features, rubbing his hands together — a drawing built to carry the greed and conspiracy myths in a single image. It originated with a racist cartoonist in the 1980s–1990s and became the most widely circulated antisemitic meme online. It is the direct descendant of the caricatures studied in the platform's Racial Turn and Protocols Topics; the image is the same argument the Der ewige Jude poster made, redrawn for the feed.
• Appropriated mascots. Ordinarily harmless internet characters are sometimes adopted as carriers for hate content, then adorned with Nazi or other symbols. Because the base image is innocent, this is among the clearest cases where the surrounding context, not the character itself, determines meaning.
• Coded substitutions in text. Beyond images, antisemitic content travels through deliberate misspellings, emoji substitutions, and "dog-whistle" phrasing engineered to evade automated moderation while remaining clear to the intended audience.
• The inverted red triangle. A downward-pointing red triangle. In the Nazi camps, the SS used colored triangles to label prisoners by category, and a red one marked political prisoners — so the shape already carries a history of marking people for persecution. Since the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, the symbol has been used to mark Jewish targets: painted on synagogues and Jewish institutions, placed on the homes of Jewish individuals, and aimed at Jewish organizations and public figures. The Anti-Defamation League documents this use and notes that context decides meaning — the same shape appears in settings where no antisemitic intent is present. Where it is used to single out Jewish people or institutions, it functions as a threat. ADL backgrounder.
• The octopus, the puppet-master, and the money caricature. Not a single emblem but a family of images that all make one claim: that Jews secretly control money, media, and governments. The recurring forms are an octopus or spider whose tentacles wrap a globe, a hidden hand pulling puppet-strings over world leaders, and a hook-nosed banker clutching the world or the purse. Nazi propaganda used the octopus-over-the-globe to picture "international Jewry"; the same compositions resurface today on social media, often re-labeled with a contemporary name in place of an older one. The image carries the conspiracy argument without a word of text, which is exactly what makes it travel. It descends directly from the material in the platform's Protocols and Racial Turn Topics. ADL, "Antisemitism Uncovered: Power".

Klan and other movement symbols

Symbols of organized hate groups.

Beyond the Nazi inheritance and the numeric codes, a number of symbols mark specific organized movements. They appear less often in everyday encounters but are important for recognizing the affiliations behind a given incident.

• The blood drop cross. The principal emblem of the Ku Klux Klan: a cross with a blood drop at its center. It marks Klan affiliation specifically.
• The Celtic cross (in this context). A cross within a circle. In its ordinary form it is an ancient and common Christian and cultural symbol; one specific squared-off version has been adopted by white-supremacist movements as a symbol of "white pride." A textbook context-dependent case.
• The Confederate battle flag (in this context). A historical military flag that has been adopted by some white-supremacist groups; its meaning is contested and heavily context-dependent, which is why it is read carefully rather than automatically.
• Group-specific insignia. Organized extremist groups maintain their own logos, runes, and numeric tags, catalogued in the ADL database. When an unfamiliar symbol appears alongside any of the core symbols above, the database is the place to identify it.

The pattern beneath the symbols

How the symbols work.

Across all four groups above, the same few mechanics recur — and naming them is more durable than memorizing any single symbol, because the symbols change while the mechanics do not.

• Deniability. Most modern symbols are built so a user can claim innocence — "it's just a number," "it's just punctuation." The deniability is a feature, not an accident; it is what lets the signal travel in public.
• Dual coding. The same mark reads as innocent to outsiders and as a signal to insiders. This is why the same symbol can be harmless in one setting and a threat in another, and why context is the deciding factor every time.
• Appropriation. Old, neutral, or sacred symbols are repurposed — the swastika, the sunwheel, the Celtic cross — both to borrow their resonance and to muddy recognition.
• Substitution. When a symbol becomes too recognizable or is banned, the movement swaps in a less-known one carrying the same meaning. The Black Sun standing in for the swastika is the clearest example.

A reader who knows these four mechanics can often identify a new or unfamiliar symbol as hate signaling even without having seen it before — which is the real aim of the guide. The mechanics map onto the recognition tools set out on the Contemporary Antisemitism Topic.

For educators and districts

Using this guide in a school setting.

This page is designed to be usable at the level of an individual classroom and at the level of a district policy office. A few notes for that use:

• As an incident reference. When a symbol appears on school property, the ADL database linked throughout this guide is the fastest authoritative way to identify it and understand its meaning. This page provides the plain-language explanation to accompany that identification.
• As a teaching unit. The guide pairs with the Contemporary Antisemitism Topic and the platform's broader treatment of the history these symbols carry. The "how the symbols work" section is the part most worth teaching directly, because it transfers to recognizing coded hate aimed at any group.
• The context rule, taught first. The most important thing to convey to students is the context rule — that recognition is a reason to look closer, not a verdict. This protects students from both under-reaction and over-reaction.
• Reporting. Recognition is the first step; districts should pair this guide with their own reporting and response procedures. The ADL and other institutions maintain incident-reporting channels for the public.

For educators: responding to an incident

• How to address antisemitism in K–12 schools. The ADL’s 6 Key Steps — a practical framework for schools and districts on preventing, responding to, and following up on antisemitic incidents.
• Report an incident. The ADL’s incident-reporting form for antisemitic, bias, or hate incidents.
• File a civil-rights complaint. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights treats antisemitism as discrimination based on shared ancestry under Title VI; its guide to filing a complaint explains the process.

The platform offers this as a free resource for any school, district, or community that needs it.

For a focused classroom exercise, the platform also offers a printable handout, Recognizing Propaganda: Then and Now, which pairs each recurring antisemitic myth with its modern form and gives students a recognition routine.