About

"This Is a Flammenwerfer. It Werfs Flammen" is a statement which highlights the peculiarity of German cognate words that bear some phonetic resemblance to their English equivalents. On 4chan's /v/ (video games) and /tg/ (traditional games) boards, the phrase is often used in reference to Flammenwefer, a World War II-era German flamethrower, as it appears in the World War II tabletop miniatures wargame Flames of War.

Origin

The earliest known examples can dated back to July 31th, 2009, when a thread was posted on one of the boards on 4chan. The thread was later screen-captured to highlight a series of chain posts featuring derivative examples.

Spread

The original 4chan post was soon turned into an image macro based on a World War II-era photograph of a German Wehrmacht soldier with a flamethrower, which has been also (pictured below). On December 3rd, 2009, it appeared in a thread about the then-upcoming second season of the anime series Strike Witches on 4chan /a/ (anime and manga) board.^[1]

On October 6th, 2011, a Reddit user VikingSlayer posted^[2] an image macro depicting an American soldier mounting a M2 Browning machine gun, pointing out how the way things are described appears in the eyes of a person who knows German language. In over three years, the post had gotten around 729 upvotes.

Hans, Get the Flammenwerfer

In early 2017, "Hans, Get ze Flammenwerfer" became a popular comment meme on 9GAG left on stories or images the poster found particularly heinous. A variation first appeared on 4chan on January 13th^[8] in response to a picture of white girls sitting on the shoulders of black men in a pool.

Shortly after, the phrase "Get ze Flammenwefer" began making its way to 9GAG and was generally used in racist, transphobic, misogynist, and homophobic contexts, similar to how Titus Get the Cross was used. On February 7th, the caption was used for a post using Cereal Guy reacting to prominent awards given to Caitlyn Jenner and Emma Sulkowicz.

The phrase continued trending on 9GAG for the following month. On February 27th, 9GAG user dafuqbutwhy^[7] used the phrase to title a post featuring images of a headline about German lawmakers considering legalizing incest and Wojak in Nazi gear (shown below). The post was the most popular use of the phrase, gaining over 11,000 points on the site.

Various Examples

The phrase has spawned a series of derivative statements centered around the snowclone "This is a XY, It Ys X."

External References