Roman's did most of that first.
Thus the paragraph below the one you quoted
:
Having said that, a lot of that stuff, as was mentioned by other people, derives from Roman iconography which the Nazis adopted (save the skulls).
However, the Space Marine banners really are more like the Nazi parade banners than anything Roman. The Romans for their standards used a pole with multiple metal icons on it, most of the time, sans cloth, IIRC. I mean, I wouldn't say that the Space Marines
are Nazis or anything so sensational, but I think that GW has quite intentionally made some connections. And why not? Space Marines hate aliens, passionately and without exception, and different races in fantasy and sci-fi really represent different aspects of humanity, though are not usually direct analogs of actual human races/cultures/societies. They are also genetically enhanced supersoldiers, an idea that is often associated with Nazi concepts of racial superiority and how they related to warfare. Space Marines are
ubermensch!
In spite of all that, they owe, as an idea, just as much to Medieval knightly orders, though the Nazi-Teutonic Knights connection has some bearing there too. The Ultramarines are clearly based more directly on Roman legionnaires. And the concept of Marines as knightly orders is more in keeping with the image of the Imperium as a whole, which is less totalitarian dictatorship and more feudal aristocracy, with a powerful religious establishment--far more redolent of Medieval Europe than anything else.
To change topics, that stuff about
Fulgrim is really weird. One would imagine that virtually all knowledge of those things would have been lost during the Age of Strife, if not long before. (If there were some catastrophe on Earth a hundred years from now, the 40K timeline that we have wouldn't mention it; it doesn't deal with the near future hardly at all.) Of course, I suppose the Emperor being around would help a bit
. And why mention Herodotus, Napoleon, and Erasmus, rather than any of the probably more notable and impressive figures from the freaking tens of thousands of years between now and the Dark Age of Technology? That would be like me, when I talk about history, referencing only the events and people of the years 1200-1100 BCE, for example, to the exclusion of all else, which would be very odd. Now I haven't read the book so, if he does indeed mention other "historical" figures from
our future, then I can't take issue with this really, but otherwise it sounds like some funky writing in that regard.