Did you know the Nazis banned the most "Nazi" typeface of all?

On January 3, 1941, almost exactly 85 years before the first publication of this article, Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and personal secretary to Hitler, released an internal memo to Nazi organizations. Its topic was rather surprising: banning the Gothic typeface, a style of lettering closely associated with Germany, from Nazi publications.

On the surface, the ban seemed to be ideologically motivated. The memo claimed that "Regarding and calling the so-called Gothic typeface as a German typeface is wrong. In fact, the Gothic typeface consists of Jew-letters from [the town of] Schwabach. […] Authorities will refrain from using the Schwabacher Jew-letters in future; certificates of appointment, road signs and similar will only be produced in normal typeface in future."

(As a matter of historical fact, Gothic typefaces were not actually Jewish: guild rules in the late 15th and early 16th century, when Gothic print was developed, excluded Jews from the printing business.)

If you've ever seen any World War II films, you've seen some member of the Gothic (or "blackletter") family of typefaces: they're dense, "spiky looking" letters that mimic writing with a quill. They've been very popular in Germany ever since the invention of the printing press. In fact, Bormann's very memo was written on a sheet whose letterhead declared itself property of the National Socialist German Worker's Party in the same Gothic letters it just banned, and the Nazi Party's newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, also used the same typeface. But why would the Nazis do this?

The German romantic movement had been caught up in a typographic debate since the 19th century. Some intellectuals hung on to the proud German past, and considered blackletter an expression of that. Others wanted German culture to better fit in with the future and the rest of Europe, which had long abandoned Gothic in favor of the Roman typeface, which is evocative of Latin letters chiseled into stone and which is what most modern printed writing is based on. Bormann's memo can be considered just one movement in this battle of typefaces.

We do know that Hitler personally disliked Gothic text. In an address to the Reichstag, he once said: "Your alleged Gothic internalization does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant [...] In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far [...]"

The quote above reveals a likely reason for the ban, one that goes deeper than just the Führer's personal antipathy: pure pragmatism. Gothic letters are very hard to read for anyone who didn't learn them as a child, and that included the citizens of all the countries the Third Reich had invaded and conquered. The subjugated civilian populations struggled with official German documents printed in Gothic, and local printing presses didn't have enough compatible fonts and machinery at hand to produce those documents. Illegibility was particularly bad when it came to Slavic languages, where the similarity of several Gothic letters made names particularly hard to figure out. It would therefore seem that the Nazis simply sacrificed their beloved Gothic typeface on the altar of conquest.