The Connection between Nazism and the Occult

World War II began September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. Over 7,000,000 people, the majority of whom were civilians, were killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. The Nazis were behind it all.

And behind the Nazis, was Hitler. Most of us think of the Nazis as simply a political party, but Hitler did not. For him, Nazism was identified with the German psyche, and the  with politics, and more to with a strange religious cult. The Nazis were the first to take a political mass movement and imbue it with mystical symbolism, and tapping into the strange idea of  Teutonic destiny.  The very symbol of Nazism, the swastika, was a magical symbol of luck and fortune in religions across the world.

The humiliation of Germany’s defeat in World War I, and the resulting political chaos, coupled with the 1929 Depression, stripped the Germans of their belief in the effectiveness a democratic parliamentary system.
 Hitler satisfied the flagging German ego with the idea (not totally new to Eastern Europe) that a subset of humans were to blame for all of Germany’s problems, that their nation’s destiny had yet to be fulfilled, and that their very physical nature was the epitome of evolution and as supermen, Germans were fated to, and deserved, mastery of the world. Germans accepted this easily because they had already been conditioned by 70 years of  Prussian militarism and obedience to authority. The idea of Manifest Teutonic Destiny was powerful and yet simplistic and appealed to a people sick of breadlines, runaway inflation and being the whipping boys for World War I.

At the end of World War I, in 1918, Germany was a wreck, and this destiny seemed far away. .

This is when an occult organization called the Thule Society enters into the story. The Thule Society was originally formed as a group devoted to occult and esoteric studies, chiefly the origins of the Aryan race, which they believed arose in ‘Ultima Thule’, a mystical land said to be in the far north, now destroyed. By 1919, the Thule Society had become heavily politicized, and founded the German Worker’s Party to promote right-wing causes, chief among them anti-semitism and anti-communism. That year, Adolf Hitler joined the German Worker’s Party and it was then renamed the National Socialist Workers Party,   or “Nazi” Party.

To the left is the Signet of the Black Sun, one of Nazism's secret symbols. Today it is illegal to display this symbol in Germany.
Publicly, the Nazis downplayed or completely ignored how their movement's association with the Thule Society.  In fact, after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, he suppressed all esoteric organizations and clubs. How can it be that Hitler publicly disapproved of occultists, while his own top henchmen were avid practitioners, chief among them Rudolf Hess, his deputy and Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS? Himmler in particular was vocal in elevating Nazism to a pseudo-religion, going so far as to redesign Wewelburg Castle as an SS School, based on occult architectural motifs. Dietrich Eckart, the wealthy publisher of a right-wing newspaper, was a Thule Society member and was instrumental in coaching Hitler as a speaker and tutoring him with the dramatic intonation of movement and voice that characterized Hitler’s harangues. Also a member of the Society was one of Nazism’s founding members, Alfred Rosenberg, an early proponent of Nordic racial supremacy, even going so far as to claim that Jesus was in fact, an Aryan who was part of a racial enclave within Palestine. It was Rosenberg who espoused fully the notion that Christianity had no place in the new order, and instead, should be replaced by Nordic pagan ideals.

It is possible that the Nazis banned all esoteric and occult organizations, fortune tellers, bookstores and lodges because they were trying to eradicate what they regarded as competing occult ideas and philosophies which might undermine their own occult program. In an authoritarian society, there is no marketplace of different politics or esoteric creeds. The Nazis made no distinction between a communist and an astrologer. Indeed, the only accepted occult activity was by Hitler’s own inner circle.