Was Baden-Powell a Nazi sympathiser?

Police were no match for the Black Lives Matter mob that pulled down a statue of Edward Colston last week and threw it in Bristol harbour. But the Scouts are evidently a force to be reckoned with. No sooner had Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council announced that it was planning to take down a statue of Lord Robert Baden-Powell on the harbour front at Poole than the Scouts had mobilised themselves to defend it, setting up camp at its base. The council decided to board it up instead, to protect it from protestors.

The ‘Topple the racists’ website had identified Baden-Powell among its targets, claiming that the creator of the Scout movement had ‘committed atrocities against the Zulus in his military career and was a Nazi sympathiser’. It is true that Baden-Powell wrote in his diary, in 1939, that he had been reading Mein Kampf, describing it as ‘a wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation’ (although the same diary entry also lambasted Adolf Hitler for not following the ideals identified in the book). It is hard not to notice, either, the similarities in uniform between Scouts and the Hitler Youth. But is it in any way possible that Scouting was influenced by fascism?

The obvious answer is no, for simple chronological reasons. The first Scout camp organised by Baden-Powell was in 1907, when the then 18-year-old Hitler would have been nearly young enough to join in. The following year, the Scouting movement was formally established and the style of its uniform set. The Hitler Youth may have been influenced by the Scouts, however. An early Scout badge from 1911 was emblazoned with a swastika, then known only as an Indian symbol for luck.