Several early members of the Nazi Party were part of the Thule Society, a study group for German antiquity. While it is postulated that occult elements played an important role in the formative phase of Nazism, and of the SS in particular, after his rise to power Adolf Hitler discouraged such pursuits. Point 24 of the National Socialist Program stated that the party endorsed "Positive Christianity."
The eclectic German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung), founded by the Sanskrit scholar Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, enjoyed a degree of popularity during the Nazi period. Some Germanic mysticists were victimized by the Nazis: Friedrich Bernhard Marby spent 99 months in KZ Dachau, and Siegfried Adolf Kummer's fate is unknown.
Several books published by the Nazi party including Die Gestaltung der Feste im Jahres- und Lebenslauf in der SS-Familie (The Celebrations in the Life of the SS Family) by Fritz Weitzel, as well as the SS Tante Friede illustrate how the National Socialists thought traditional Germanic Heathenry was primitive superstition which needed reworking to better serve the state. Celebrating the traditional festivals like Jul and Sommersonnenwende were encouraged and recast into veneration of the Nazi state and Fuhrer.
The appropriation of "Germanic antiquity" by the Nazis was at first regarded with skepticism and sarcasm by British Scandophiles. W. H. Auden in his Letters from Iceland (1936) makes fun of the idea of Iceland as an "Aryan vestige". but with the outbreak of World War II, Nordic romanticism in Britain became too much associated with the enemy's ideology to remain palatable, to the point that J. R. R. Tolkien, an ardent Septentrionalist, in 1941 found himself moved to state that he had a "burning private grudge ... against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler" for "ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
Downloadable books (free):
Aleister Crowley - Magick In Theory And PracticeKenaz Filan - Pagans In Prison Our Brothers And Sisters Behind Bars
Naomi Janowitz - Magic In The Roman World
