Hitler giving the Nazi salute, 1939. Photo by Getty Images
By Aviya Kushner
May 18, 2025
The word “heil” is back in the news because of Ye’s latest song — titled, incredibly enough, “Heil Hitler.” While the name “Hitler” should be enough to understand why such a song might be problematic, the word “Heil,” too, has an uncomfortable history because of — well, its overt association with Hitler.
That Nazi history overshadows the word’s etymology and dictionary definition.
“Heil” is an interjection in German. It comes from Middle High German, and from heil, the adjective for “healthy” in from Old High German. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s entry on the English verb “heil” defines it as “to salute with the German exclamation heil.”
But even Merriam-Webster immediately notes that this “German exclamation” was used “by the Nazis in such phrases as Heil Hitler! Hail Hitler! and Sieg heil! Hail victory.”
Of course, the word was in use in English and German before Hitler, and variants of it appear in other languages.
According to the University of Michigan’s Middle English compendium, the noun “heil” had an association with health and with the concept of salvation. It defines “heil” as “(a) Health, welfare, good fortune; (b) a person’s health or good fortune drunk to with wine,” and also as (d) salvation, Savior.” In Icelandic and Norwegian, heil og sæl, deriving from the Old Norse heill ok sæll, roughly means “healthy and happy.”
It’s a very old Nordic greeting which you can still hear around Iceland, a bit like the English phrase “safe and sound.”
But in America today, when most people hear “heil,” they think German, not Norwegian, Icelandic, or English. In fact, the Collins English Dictionary defines the exclamation heil as “a German greeting of respect.”
But what we respect says a lot about us, and when Ye pairs it with Hitler, his respect for the man who tried to exterminate the entire Jewish people is evident. And the path to extermination was paved with utter acquiescence to Hitler, embodied by the phrase “Heil Hitler.”
Something that German Jews — who often loved the German language deeply — immediately noticed was how German, the language of high culture, was being co-opted to promote Nazism and coerce compliance. Accounts from the time often discuss “Heil Hitler” and its pernicious effect. My own grandfather told me that one by one, his classmates told him they could no longer speak with him. “Sorry, Siegmund, Heil Hitler,” they said, and then saluted. My grandfather left Germany in late 1935; he was the only survivor of his entire family.
In 1938, refugee Erica Mann published School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis, which detailed how the Nazis tried to use language — and specifically the term “Heil Hitler” — to indoctrinate children.
“Heil really means salvation, and used to be applied to relations between man and his God; one would speak of ewiges Heil (eternal salvation), and the adjective “holy” derives from the noun. But now there is the new usage,” Mann wrote.
It’s that “new usage” that is impossible to separate from any use of “heil” today. Mann’s account is very similar to what my grandfather related.
“Every child says “Heil Hitler!” from 50 to 150 times a day, immeasurably more often than the old neutral greetings,” Mann wrote. “The formula is required by law; if you meet a friend on the way to school, you say it; study periods are opened and closed with “Heil Hitler!”; “Heil Hitler!” says the postman, the street-car conductor, the girl who sells you notebooks at the stationery store; and if your parents’ first words when you come home for lunch are not “Heil Hitler!” they have been guilty of a punishable offense and can be denounced.
Mann also detailed the physicality of the greeting in Nazi Germany.
“Officially — when you say hello to your superiors in school or in a group — the words are accompanied by the act of throwing the right arm high; but an unofficial greeting among equals requires only a comparatively lax lifting of the forearm, with the fingers closed and pointing forward. This Hitler greeting, this “German” greeting, repeated countless times from morning to bedtime, stamps the whole day.”
Not so long ago, many thought that the murder of six million Jews — and the deaths of tens of millions of others during World War II — would make Hitler’s ideas, and his language, untouchable.
But sadly, the opposite has happened, and antisemitism is more and more acceptable in culture. Ye’s new song even includes excerpts from Hitler’s speeches, and incredibly and shamefully, some artists have rushed to defend him.
“‘Heil Hitler’ @kanyewest is uncancellable because he reached such a zenith in the culture that he couldn’t be killed,” Russell Brand wrote on X, which is of course owned by Elon Musk, who had his own Nazi salute moment. “I think people would like it if he died. Why? Because he’s a problem for their agenda. Also, let’s be honest; the hook is catchy.”
That word “catchy” — and the branding of “Heil Hitler” as a “hook — is both old and new. It was catchy then, and apparently, it’s still catchy to some now. But that, like Ye’s music, makes it more dangerous — not less.
