It is not surprising that this famed example of a warrior state should have found echoes in Germany. The Prussian elite who had ruled Bismarck’s Reich had adopted the ideals of Sparta; Nietzsche had drawn much from the same source. If Himmler read and spoke more of the ancient Indian warriors of the Kshatriya caste and the Vedic scriptures, nevertheless he had absorbed the spirit of Sparta through his pores from earliest boyhood.
