The Nazi Sieg Heil chant originated from a Harvard football fight song

Evidence

It was during the Munich years, too, that Hitler first began to conclude his speeches by leading his audiences in a rousing and angry chant. A confidant from those years, Ernst Hanfstaengl, had gone to Harvard, and been impressed with the fight songs used at football games. With Hanfstaengl’s guidance, “Fight, Harvard, Fight” thus became “Sieg…Heil! Sieg…Heil! Sieg…Heil!…Heil Hitler!” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 398

Categorization

• CANDY: A delightfully dark trivia fact — the Nazi chant literally descends from a college football song — perfect for a dinner conversation.
• XREF: A striking cross-domain parallel: American commercial/entertainment techniques (sports chanting, advertising) being borrowed into totalitarian mass politics, echoing Wu’s running theme of attention capture.
• SHARE: Send to anyone with an interest in the unlikely cultural origins of fascist iconography or in sports-adjacent trivia.