I don’t know. James Upham is credited with inventing the Bellamy salute and may have been inspired by the Roman Empire, or more likely by contemporary portrayals of it. Anyway, by 1930, nobody was heiling Caesar that way, but the salute was in use by American schoolchildren. On that basis, I stand by the claim that the Nazis stole it, directly or indirectly, from either the US, the Roman Empire, or Mussolini’s Italy. It’s a kind of cultural appropriation I find more palatable when done by people who don’t then proceed to violently annex most of Europe.

The Bellamy salute was invented in the United States for peaceful purposes. The Nazis stole it (as they did with the swastika and the term Aryan) and applied it to evil. As Nazi symbols, they became more strongly associated with the humanitarian atrocities of that regime than with their original meanings, to the extent that decent people hesitate to use them anymore.