A Bavarian toy company called Playmobil is selling blonde haired Greek gods to children through a charity, and nobody seems to find the Nazism origin story strange?

Headquartered in Zirndorf the company launched its “History” line of Greek mythology figures in 2016. The series now includes all twelve Olympian gods, Alexander the Great, Achilles, the Argonauts, and Heracles.

Hermes – 9524: blonde.

Artemis – 9525: blonde.

Alexander – 70950: blonde.

Apollo – 70218: blonde.

Hera – 70214: blonde

Demeter – 9526: blonde

Aphrodite – 70213: blonde

The entire Greek pantheon are presented as Nordic blondes. Originally, the figures were produced exclusively for the Greek market, sold at the Acropolis Museum gift shop in Athens and Greek toy stores, allegedly with proceeds going to the Orama Elpidas (Vision of Hope) bone marrow donor association.

In case you don’t recognize that twist, there’s a known tradition of groups who weaponize charity. Their atrocities become harder to criticize. It’s the foot in the door to normalize harms.

That’s how this disinformation campaign pivoted from its start in Greece back to Germany, even though Germans should know better. The Pergamon Museum, for example, as a monument to German archaeological extraction from Turkey, Iraq, and the ancient Near East sells the blonde Greek gods alongside displays of the looted friezes and gates.

It’s an appropriation loop closed tight.

The architecture doesn’t change

The Nazis were addicts of such appropriation. They did not invent a “fair Apollo” trope, but they forever weaponized the existing ones. Classical studies of “whitened” antiquity became central and integrated into ideological education set forth by Hitler.

Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi regime’s chief ideological theorist, laid out the “blonde blueprint” in The Myth of the 20th Century (1930).

Playmobil perhaps knows: the Greek gods were appropriated and reframed to “represent the Aryan white ideal of their race.” Apollo symbolized Nordic virtues of “pure thought and rationality”. The fabricated “true Greeks” were the Achaeans and Dorians, who Rosenberg claimed were “of Nordic-Germanic descent” and “the ones who created the magnificent Greek culture.” He went so far as to say darker-skinned Mediterranean populations were, in his racist hierarchy, contaminated by “Pelasgian and Semitic origins.”

Rosenberg rewrote Heracles and Jason as “representations of the ideal Aryan Nordic masculine type” no longer Greek. The Nazi tribalist Gunther classified Plato himself as “a pure-blooded aspect of the northern blood of primitive Hellenism.” Friedrich Hildebrandt declared Plato “a teacher for our time” whose ideal state prefigured the racial hierarchy of National Socialism, completely ignoring Plato’s actual work.

This was an extremist racist fringe becoming state doctrine, taught in German schools, promoted by the regime’s most toxic intellectuals, and backed by the full apparatus of the Third Reich’s cultural production machine for genocide.

Did this German effect on classical studies experience denazification after Hitler’s suicide? No. While racial theory collapsed, the discipline infrastructure remained intact. Those who had served dutifully to enact genocide remained in position, continued teaching and curating the “blonde blueprint”.

Denazification screened for party membership cards, not for intellectual content. Steven Remy’s The Heidelberg Myth (Harvard, 2002) documents how it actually worked: Karl Heinrich Bauer, an outspoken supporter of Nazi sterilization law, became Heidelberg’s first postwar rector — then used the position to reinstate compromised colleagues. The university remained dominated by former Nazis throughout the 1950s. Professors constructed what Remy calls “elaborate narratives of defense and justification” to absolve themselves, while continuing the same research programs, the same curricula, the same visual conventions.

At Göttingen, many professors simply lied on their questionnaires. A 2025 review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review concluded that the history of humanities at German universities under Nazism “was not a deviation from its true mission, but a continuation of traditions that had existed before.”

The traditions continued after, too.

Albert Norden’s 1965 Braunbuch documented 1,800 former Nazis still holding high-ranking positions across West German state, economy, administration, army, justice, and science.

Bettina Arnold’s research on Nazi archaeology documents that instructional posters produced under the Third Reich, depicting ancient peoples as tall, muscled, with blond hair and light eyes, continued to be used in Germany after 1945. The blonde Greeks weren’t flagged because they weren’t swastikas. They were just how the discipline depicted antiquity.

The Fragebogen asked who you were in the party. It never asked if you were teaching heavily corrupted classics.

What evidence actually shows

The proof of Nazis being wrong isn’t necessary, given their self-described supremacy over facts, but we do it anyway.

A 2017 study on the genetic origins of Minoans and Mycenaeans found both populations shared roughly 75% of their ancestry with early Neolithic farmers from Anatolia, with additional ties to the Caucasus and Iran. The Mycenaeans had a small northern European genetic contribution of around 10-15%, so their genetic makeup remained predominantly Mediterranean and Near Eastern.

Ancient Greek art consistently shows this. Mycenaean frescoes, Greek pottery, mosaics, and sculptures overwhelmingly depict figures with dark hair and dark eyes. Minoan men at Knossos appear with long dark hair and reddish-brown skin. In addition, modern research has shown Greek statues were vividly painted and not white.

Homer, just one of many storytellers, used “ξανθὸς Ἀχιλλεύς (“xanthos Achilles”). He was marking the man as exceptional and shocking. In other words, he’s saying Achilles is radiant as in light, heroically visible and physically striking. Calling something light therefore blond, is like calling a candle flame or the sun yellow. It’s not actually how anything works. Light isn’t yellow, it’s luminous across a rainbow. Homer was describing something in the way it draws attention because it catches light, something radiant. Imagine writing “he was brilliant” and having a toy designer make him blond because… brilliant means blonde. Nope.

Several Greek gods were explicitly described as dark-haired in ancient sources. Poseidon, Hades, and Dionysus were called kyanokhaitis — “dark-haired,” with the “kyan” referring to a blue-black color. Poseidon’s dark hair correlated with the sea. These weren’t peripheral figures.

Even the Antiquipop academic review of Playmobil’s Greek sets noted diplomatically that “the skin colour of the characters remain quite uniform and white for Mediterranean people.”

They could have said Hitler directly influenced their interpretation. Nazism radicalized embedded Greek antiquity and Germany has retained this radicalism as an aesthetic convention.

Mass-market products continue flattening Greek history through Northern European mysticism.

The transaction

Rosenberg’s racial theory for Hitler stripped of its explicit ideology, laundered through ninety years of “that’s just what heroes look like” visual grammar — sits on a shelf next to the cash register at the Pergamon Museum.

Nobody at Playmobil’s Zirndorf headquarters needed to read The Myth of the 20th Century. They didn’t have to. The Nazi aesthetic was so thoroughly untouched in German cultural production that blonde-equals-heroic just feels natural. Unremarkable. Default. That’s how successful cultural appropriation works: it makes itself invisible.

The charity shield

The “Play & Give” branding is worth examining as a structure, not just a partnership. Playmobil Hellas has donated over €80,000 to the Orama Elpidas association through this program. The cause is real. Children with cancer need bone marrow donors.

But wrapping racially coded cultural products in charity branding creates a shield that deflects criticism. Who wants to be the person attacking a toy that helps kids with cancer? The structure is elegant: you can’t critique the product without appearing to critique the cause.

This is a pattern that repeats across institutional capture. Wrap the extraction in something nobody can oppose. Philanthropy as packaging. The charity is genuine; the deflection is structural.

What sits on the shelf

It’s 2026. A German toy company is selling blonde Greek gods at a building full of artifacts Germany removed from the lands where those gods were worshipped, and the packaging says it’s for charity.

The Playmobil figures aren’t just bizarrely blonde “for fun”; they exist inside a long, persistent visual grammar that Nazis weaponized, and which survived decades of postwar German cultural production.

The racial theory that made Mediterranean gods look Northern European is ninety-six years old, its author was hanged at Nuremberg, and his aesthetic choices are still moving product.

The product has changed. The architecture hasn’t.

FTC Chairman Ferguson’s “warning letter” to Apple CEO Tim Cook on February 12, 2026, threatening enforcement action over Apple News allegedly boosting “left-wing sources,” is state coercion of editorial decisions.

It follows a documented historical pattern with precision.

Ferguson sent an almost identical letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in August 2025, accusing Gmail of “partisan filtering” in its spam detection.

Same three-pronged legal threat, same “consumers’ reasonable expectations” language, same implicit enforcement action. He’s clearly pumping a template. Each letter builds momentum for the next target.

The three-pronged fraud Ferguson engages in has been designed to be impossible to satisfy:

• Prong one says curation “inconsistent with terms of service” violates the FTC Act. But every platform’s ToS grants broad editorial discretion — so this prong only activates when Ferguson decides the discretion was exercised in the wrong ideological direction.
• Prong two says curation violating “consumers’ reasonable expectations” is a material omission. But “reasonable expectations” of ideological balance in a news aggregator is completely undefined. Ferguson defines what balance looks like. By assertion.
• Prong three says curation causing “substantial injury” violates the Act. But the alleged “injury” is that consumers received news from sources Ferguson considers left-wing. That’s editorial disagreement reframed as regulatory violation.

This is the state telling a private news aggregator which sources to elevate and which to suppress, under nothing other than his personal threat of federal investigation.

It’s Un-Constitutional

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in NRA v. Vullo (2024) that “government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” The test: whether conduct “viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress speech.” Ferguson’s letter meets every element. He holds enforcement authority over Apple. The letter explicitly references potential enforcement action. And it targets editorial curation decisions based on their perceived ideological orientation.

The irony, oh the irony.

The entire Murthy v. Missouri case was brought by Republicans arguing that the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies about misinformation constituted unconstitutional government coercion of private speech. Justice Alito warned in dissent that such pressure campaigns could “stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.” Ferguson is now executing exactly what Alito described — using regulatory authority to pressure platforms into changing editorial decisions based on ideological grievance — except he’s doing it with signed letters on FTC letterhead, which is considerably more explicit than anything alleged in Murthy.

What a Historian Knows

Ferguson’s approach maps precisely onto the early phases of Nazi press consolidation.

The mechanism is not analogy.

This is the structural repetition of Nazism.

The critical structural parallel is not the end state. We know ICE has been bidding to convert huge warehouses into concentration camps for housing political prisoners, which presumably includes journalists. Already Don Lemon was very publicly attacked and arrested for doing what journalists do.

The parallel is the mechanism: a government official with enforcement authority using vaguely defined legal standards to pressure private editorial operations into compliance with ideological preferences, where the cost of resistance (investigation, enforcement action and potential jail) exceeds the cost of compliance (adjust the algorithm).

Even before the Schriftleitergesetz was formally enacted, German journalists had already become dependent on the regime’s goodwill. The formal law came after the informal pressure had already done its work.

Ferguson’s letters operate the same. He doesn’t need to follow through on enforcement. Apple’s lawyers are meant to calculate the cost of an FTC investigation driven by Trump loyalty and adjust the algorithm. The letter is the initial enforcement.

Trump Asset Architecture

Ferguson clerked for Clarence Thomas. He served as chief counsel to Mitch McConnell, functioning as “judicial confirmation strategist.” He was Republican counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. His entire professional life has been spent in the infrastructure of conservative legal movement-building.

His stated purpose, documented in his own pre-appointment materials, is using regulatory power to control perceived ideological imbalances in private media.

His communications director came from the Washington Free Beacon. His Bureau of Competition director was selected specifically to target companies accused of suppressing conservative speech. The FTC’s enforcement apparatus has been staffed for a political mission.

This is what competent complicity looks like at institutional scale: skilled legal professionals who understand exactly what they’re doing, executing a program of editorial coercion through regulatory authority, using consumer protection language as cover for viewpoint-based government pressure on private publishers.

The Weimar Republic had a free press. The architecture of its elimination was not secret. It was documented, prosecuted at Nuremberg, and taught in every competent history program for eighty years.

The Nazi warning signs were the warning letters. So too with Trump.

The technology changes. The architecture doesn’t.

First of all, let’s just admit that the British love the spectacle of suffering and gore. London is littered with “museums” glorifying the worst chapters in human history, almost as joyful interpretations of others’ suffering.

Perhaps you could call it the “keep calm and carry on” being a deeper cultural pun about “keep calm and carrion”? Or perhaps I spent too much time in the dank, dark corridors of the London Dungeon.

Notably, a compelling new Samurai exhibit is being held away from Japan.

…some of the country’s most formidable warriors were a group of female samurai called the Onna-bugeisha.

They were every bit as deadly and powerful as their male counterparts and were trained using the same self-defense and offensive maneuvers. They used a special weapon called a naginata…

Eeeeeek. Nails on chalkboard?

This weapon analysis is bullshit. The naginata polearm was used by samurai, foot soldiers, and warrior monks from the Heian period onward.

It was a primary weapon during the Genpei War (1180–1185) and Nanboku-chō period (1336–1392). When it became associated with women, it was centuries later during the Edo period’s long peace (1603–1868). The weapon was dated, as they always are, and lost battlefield relevance. Women of the samurai class carried it when it had been repurposed as a status symbol and for self-defense. The association therefore was a Tokugawa-era development, not an origin story.

Dare I say this exhibit’s source material retrojects a gendered identity onto a weapon that spent centuries as a general-purpose military tool primarily used by men, because a fraudulent “designed for women” framing creates modern narrative more useful than the actual history?

So, second of all, this exhibit sees ideology in the past but not in its own mirror. It tells us why it deconstructs Meiji myth-making, while it is performing 2026 myth-making.

This British exhibit could have led with the insight that the West fundamentally misunderstands what being a “samurai” meant. It could have used the women’s history to blow open that misunderstanding for everyone, male and female. Instead it drives deeper into a narrow definition and pushes women into it. That makes it representation without revision.

Notice the reporters who focus on fierceness and brutality of woman, which I’m not sure is the correct path towards redeeming women in history.

“It’s a surprise that comes from a narrow use or a narrow understanding of the word samurai, because samurai doesn’t mean warrior,” Dr Rosina Buckland, Asahi Shimbun curator of Japanese Collections, told The Independent.

According to the exhibition, the most celebrated female samurai was Tomoe Gozen who died in 1247, and whose exploits are the subject of The Tale of the Heike. She was reported to have ripped off the head of the samurai Uchida Saburo leyoshi who tried to capture her for ransom.

The curator literally says “samurai doesn’t mean warrior”, an arguably radical claim because it reframes everything, and then the exhibit’s marquee story becomes a woman warrior ripping someone’s head off. I’m only left wondering if she also shit down his neck?

The corrective gets completely swallowed by the very framework it’s supposedly correcting.

The exhibit claims “women made up half of the samurai class” by expanding “samurai” to mean social class rather than warrior caste, then promotes the exhibit with gorified stories that rely on a narrow warrior definition. It’s using both definitions simultaneously depending on which one serves the current sentence.

That’s not scholarship, it’s rhetoric.

Third, something smells off about this whole thing. The Huo Family Foundation sponsorship is a buried detail. A China-based foundation sponsoring an exhibit in Britain to re-frame Japan’s martial identity raises, well, red flags. The funding source may be the context.

Others have pointed out the curation within context is problematic. The object selection gives us a tsuba with a world map (exceedingly rare) cherry-picked to suggest Edo-period global consciousness that wasn’t representative. It offers ornate ceremonial armor that the Japanese don’t consider authentic to samurai identity. Neither curator is a weapon or armor specialist, a fact I find almost impossible to believe given the British adoration of weapons and armor in their exhibits. They seem to have set up evidence which coincidentally fits a Chinese thesis about Japan, rather than building from evidence.

To be fair, Broderick and Buckland clearly agree that the samurai meant more than warrior. The failure becomes that their exhibit couldn’t commit to this story without also promoting gratuitous violence to seek attention in the British market.

Fourth, and finally, this is a familiar pattern: women are admitted to the canon by demonstrating they can meet criteria, not by challenging whether those criteria are correct. The Onna-bugeisha become legible to a museum audience not because samurai culture encompassed governance, education, estate management, arts, and social organization — important recognition of the proper definition and all things women were deeply embedded in — but because a woman ripped the head off someone. The entry ticket to historical recognition is unnecessarily reset to brutality.

It reminds me how Hillary Clinton worked for Goldwater. She didn’t enter politics by articulating an alternative vision; she entered by proving she could operate within the most aggressive, unfit for rule, existing framework available, then spent decades unable to fully shed her origin story. The price of admission shaped the thing it would allow her to be.