The relationship between National Socialism and occultism is one of the most documented and most misunderstood areas of 20th-century history. It is not a fringe conspiracy theory — it is extensively documented in German archives, Nuremberg trial records, and decades of serious academic scholarship. The SS under Heinrich Himmler was deliberately modelled on a chivalric-mystical order; the Ahnenerbe organisation spent millions of Reichsmarks pursuing occult archaeology; and the ideological foundations of Nazism drew heavily on pre-war German esoteric movements. This page examines the historical record without romanticisation or sensationalism.
The occult dimension of Nazism did not emerge from nowhere. It grew from a specific current of late 19th and early 20th-century German and Austrian esotericism — the völkisch (ethnic-national) occult movement — that combined German romantic nationalism with racial pseudoscience, runic mysticism, and neo-pagan spirituality. These movements developed during a period of intense social anxiety in the German-speaking world: industrialisation, urbanisation, the perceived decline of traditional values, and the trauma of World War I all created fertile ground for ideologies that promised racial destiny, mythic roots, and spiritual certainty.
Guido von List (1848–1919) was among the most influential of these proto-Nazi occultists. A self-proclaimed seer who claimed to have rediscovered the secret runic wisdom of the ancient Aryans during a period of temporary blindness, List developed the Armanen rune system — a set of 18 runes he believed encoded the primordial Aryan worldview. His books sold widely and his Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft attracted thousands of followers. His ideas fed directly into the ideology of groups that would later nurture the Nazi movement.
Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954) took List's racial mysticism further, founding the Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Templars) in 1900 and publishing the magazine Ostara — which the young Adolf Hitler reportedly read avidly in Vienna. Lanz's worldview was a toxic mixture of medieval Templar mythology, racial hierarchy, and violent fantasy about the supremacy of the "Aryan-heroic" race over "dark" races. The intellectual seeds of Nazi racial ideology were planted in these pre-war occult publications.
The Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society) was a Munich-based occultist group founded in 1918 by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, ostensibly as a branch of the Germanenorden but quickly developing its own identity. Named after the mythical northern land of Thule — believed by some occultists to be the original homeland of the Aryan race — the society combined Germanic runic mysticism, racial ideology, and anti-Semitism in a cocktail that was typical of the völkisch occult milieu of the period.
The Thule Society's historical significance lies in its direct connection to the founding of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party) in 1919 — the organisation that Hitler joined, renamed the NSDAP, and led to power. Several Thule members were founding members of the DAP, and the society's newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter, became the Völkischer Beobachter — the main Nazi party newspaper. The swastika, which the Thule Society used as its symbol, was adopted by the Nazi party from this milieu.
Hitler and occultism: A persistent misconception holds that Hitler himself was a committed occultist. The historical record is more nuanced. Hitler was contemptuous of Himmler's more extreme occult interests, and Nazi ideology was primarily political and racial rather than esoteric. However, Hitler was clearly influenced by the völkisch occult milieu of pre-war Vienna and Munich, and he used mythological and quasi-religious language extensively in his rhetoric. The distinction between Hitler's political opportunism and Himmler's genuine occult conviction is important for understanding how occultism actually functioned within the Third Reich.
Under Heinrich Himmler's leadership from 1929, the SS was systematically transformed from a bodyguard unit into something unprecedented: a self-consciously mythologised elite order modelled simultaneously on the Jesuit order (for its discipline and hierarchy) and on the medieval Teutonic Knights (for its quasi-religious warrior ideology). Himmler, who had a lifelong obsession with Germanic mythology, medieval history, and various forms of occultism, intended the SS to be the vanguard of a new Germanic nobility — a racial and spiritual elite who would reshape Europe in the image of his mythologised past.
The Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) was founded by Himmler in 1935 as an SS research organisation with the stated purpose of studying "the space, spirit, deed and heritage of the Indo-Germanic peoples." In practice, it was a large and expensively funded organisation that sent expeditions across the world searching for archaeological and cultural evidence to support Nazi racial ideology — and finding, or manufacturing, whatever it needed to find.
The Ahnenerbe's projects ranged from the academically serious to the openly absurd. It conducted legitimate archaeological excavations alongside pseudo-scientific racial measurements of skulls. It sent expeditions to Tibet (1938–39, led by zoologist Ernst Schäfer) to search for the origins of the Aryan race and collect data on Tibetan culture. It investigated megalithic sites across Europe seeking evidence of ancient Aryan civilisation. It studied runic inscriptions, Germanic folk customs, medieval manuscripts, and prehistoric cave paintings — all in service of the same ideological goal: proving that a superior Aryan race had once dominated the world and would do so again under National Socialist leadership.
The Ahnenerbe's darkest chapter came during the war, when some of its researchers became directly involved in atrocities. SS doctor August Hirt used Ahnenerbe resources to assemble a collection of Jewish skeletons — murdered concentration camp prisoners — for a planned anatomical collection at the University of Strasbourg. This project represents the most direct connection between Ahnenerbe pseudo-science and the Holocaust. Several Ahnenerbe researchers were convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial.
We must begin by rejecting any notion that Nazi occultism was harmless fantasy. It was ideology with consequences — ideology that contributed to the rationalisation of mass murder by placing it within a mythological framework of racial destiny and historical necessity.
— Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of NazismIn 1938–39, the Ahnenerbe sponsored an expedition to Tibet led by Ernst Schäfer, a zoologist and SS-Hauptsturmführer. The expedition's official purpose was zoological and anthropological research, but its ideological context was Himmler's belief that Tibet might hold evidence of the original Aryan homeland — or at least of an ancient superior race whose descendants might still survive in the Himalayan isolation.
The expedition collected significant scientific material — zoological specimens, ethnographic data, film footage — that had genuine research value. It also took extensive measurements of Tibetan skulls and bodies in an attempt to find "Aryan" racial characteristics. The team was received warmly by the Tibetan government under the Regent (the 14th Dalai Lama was a child at the time) and returned to Germany shortly before World War II began.
The expedition found no evidence for Aryan origins in Tibet because none exists. The Aryan race, as conceived by Nazi ideology, was a fabrication — a pseudoscientific myth constructed to justify racial hierarchy and genocidal policy. The expedition's genuine scientific contributions were real; its ideological mission was based on fantasy that had catastrophic real-world consequences.
The academic consensus on Nazi occultism, established particularly through the work of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (The Occult Roots of Nazism, 1985) and subsequent historians, is nuanced. Nazi occultism was real — it influenced the SS's self-presentation, Himmler's personal beliefs, the Ahnenerbe's research agenda, and the symbolic vocabulary of the Third Reich. It was not, however, the primary driver of Nazi policy. The Holocaust was not caused by occult ritual; it was caused by racist ideology, bureaucratic organisation, and the willing participation of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.
The danger of over-emphasising the occult dimension of Nazism is that it risks making the Third Reich seem exotic and abnormal — a uniquely evil supernatural phenomenon rather than a human political catastrophe with identifiable historical causes. The genocide was carried out not by mystical initiates but by bureaucrats, soldiers, train drivers, and administrators — ordinary people operating within an extraordinary system of organised murder.
The danger of ignoring the occult dimension is that it misses something real about how the Nazi leadership — particularly Himmler — understood their own project. Himmler genuinely believed in Germanic racial destiny, in the spiritual significance of SS ritual, and in the quasi-mystical mission of his Black Order. This belief motivated specific decisions and specific projects that had real consequences. Understanding it is part of understanding the full historical picture.
Post-war neo-Nazism has extensively recycled Nazi occult symbolism — the Black Sun, the Sig runes, Wewelsburg imagery — in ways that attempt to give fascist ideology a pseudo-spiritual legitimacy it does not have. Recognising the historical origins of these symbols is essential for understanding their contemporary use and the movements that employ them.