The Universal Language of Freemasonry - ArchiMeD - Johannes ...

Chapter 9 - Masonic and Anti-Masonic Literature 747
Distress, given by a Mason in the time of danger. He describes the German
Hailing Sign which is made differently from the American one (in German
Masonry, the folded hands with the palms outward are laid on the forehead,
while in America, both hands are raised. Cf. illustration in Section 5.8).
Ludendorff uses a parallelism, first citing the Masonic Hailing Sign of Distress
("Oh Lord my God, is there no help for the widow's son?"), and then showing his
own hailing sign, in the time of "distress" of Germany, the swastika,
accompanied by the words "come to this sign, children of the German people,
free Germans, and you cheated Masons, men and women!"
Wenn der Freimaurer sich in Lebensgefahr befindet, so gibt er zu seiner
Rettung [...]
das große Notzeichen,
das doppelte gleichseitige Dreieck Jehowahs, durch Legen der
gefalteten Hände an die Stirn, die Handflächen nach vorn und ruft:
A moi, a l'enfant de la veuve de Naphthalie! [...]
In der Todesnot des Deutschen Volkes zeige ich ihm das heilige
Zeichen seines Bluts
Das Hakenkreuz
und rufe ihm zu:
Zu ihm, ihr Kinder des Deutschen Volkes, ihr freien Deutschen und
ihr betrogenen Freimaurer, Männer wie Frauen! 1865
9.2.3.2 The New Vocabulary of the
"Christliche Orden"
In order to avoid liquidation under the Nazi persecution, the Große National-
Mutterloge sought to save the old Prussian Freemasonry by adopting a new name
and an "Arierparagraphen," thus reserving the institution for 'Aryan' Germans
and Christians only, and interrupting the international lodge correspondence. The
changes to the ritual itself were comparatively minor and focused mainly on the
elimination of non-Aryan vocabulary and anything that could be seen as a threat
to the Nazis, like secrecy. In a letter to Dr. Frick, Reichsminister des Innern,
dated Berlin, April 12 th , 1933, the Grand Masters Dr. Bordes and Dorr wrote:
Sehr geehrter Herr Reichsminister!
Die unterzeichneten Großmeister erlauben sich, Ihnen die Mitteilung zu
machen, daß die Große National-Mutterloge zu den drei Weltkugeln
sich fortan nennt: "Nationaler Christlicher Orden Friedrich der Große".
1865 Ibid, p. 77. Bold print, spelling errors, and capitalization errors as in the original.