Now And Then: A Bizarre Episode Of History

What you are looking at here is Pósthustræti 2 — one of the relatively few buildings in Reykjavík that has simply stood, more or less unaltered, since 1919. The building was designed by Iceland’s State Architect Guðjón Samúelsson, who managed during his 30 year tenure to build the bulk of Reykjavík’s most prominent buildings, including Hallgrímskirkja, the main building of the University of Iceland, Hotel Borg, The Iceland Art Museum, The National Museum, the old Hospital building and the first indoor swimming pool in Reykjavík, to name a few.

The was originally built as the offices of Iceland’s first shipping company Eimskip, founded in 1914. It became a hotel in 2004, but until then the front of the building featured Eimskip’s original logo; a swastika. Because the building was on the list of historical sites in Iceland, the symbol could not be destroyed, so it was simply covered up when Radisson SAS renovated the building into a hotel. The shipping company stopped using the building during World War 2, but why the swastika was displayed until 2004, we have no clue.

Eimskip adopted the logo some years earlier than an at-the-time obscure political party in Weimar era Germany. Prior to the Nazi’s adopting it, the symbol was used for various purposes by various parties all over the world, from an Irish laundry company to the Finnish Air Force. Nobody cared who used it first, because it was stigmatized beyond repair — making the fact that the symbol remained for so long even less comprehensible.

While Eimskip generally discontinued the usage of the logo during the war, the logo remained in a roundel on the prow of the MV Gullfoss, where it remained until that ship was decommissioned in 1972. This meant that when that ship sailed to Hamburg, Germany — which it did frequently — the prow had to be covered up to avoid breaking German anti-nazi laws. Now, this whole bizarre episode is consigned to history, shown only in photos like this one.