Travel about 20 miles northeast of Yuma on Laguna Dam Road to where the pavement ends. Travel just a few hundred feet past that point, and you will find this bridge, covered in swastikas. Not painted mind you, but cast in concrete on both sides of the bridge.
Swastika on an American bridge? How can that be? The mind boggles with possibilities. Was it built by German prisoners of war during the Second World War as there were POW camps nearby? By Nazi sympathizers prior to war’s outbreak?
Actually, the truth is stranger than fiction. You see this bridge was completed in 1907. Hitler was only 18 years old so the Nazi Party wasn’t even conceived yet. That was at least 21 years in the future.
No, this bridge was built by the United States Government…specifically the Department of the Interior through the Bureau of Reclamation (then called the U.S. Reclamation Service). This bridge spans a now-unused agricultural spillway that was part of the first dam ever built on the Colorado River.
To make a long story short, because of existing geological considerations, the design for the dam was taken from an existing dam in India. While there, U.S. government representatives heard the story of the ancient Hindu God, Indra, who at one time, represented thunder, lighting and rain. Indra (who had four arms and was represented by the swastika with its four arms) had the power to control water.
There were those in the U.S. government who thought the swastika would be a fitting symbol for the Bureau. During its early years the United States Bureau of Reclamation used the swastika for its symbol. The swastikas on Laguna Dam are a legacy of that period. The Bureau also designed a Reclamation flag with a large swastika at its center with the U S R S letters in the four corners.
During WWII, guards had to be posted round the clock to protect the bridge as local citizens threatened to destroy the bridge, or at least remove the swastikas. Today, the bridge is the only government project left standing in the United States where swastikas are an integrated part of the structure.
As I said, it is a strange, but all to true tale of our past. I thank my son Eric who first told me about this bridge and did the initial research.
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