Nazism and Occultism - Goodrick-Clarke, The Völkisch Movement, and Ariosophy

Goodrick-Clarke, The Völkisch Movement, and Ariosophy

Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's 1985 book The Occult Roots of Nazism discussed the possibility of links between the ideas of the Occult and the ideas of Nazism. The book's main subject was the racist-occult movement of Ariosophy, a major strand of nationalist Esotericism in Germany and Austria, during the 1800s and early 1900s. He described his work as a "an underground history, concerned with the myths, symbols, and fantasies that bear on the development of reactionary, authoritarian, and Nazi styles of thinking". He focused on this unexamined topic of history because "fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups."

He describes the Völkisch movement as a sort of anti-modernist, anti-liberal reaction to the many political, social, and economic changes occurring in Germanic Europe in the late 1800s. Part of his argument is that the rapid industrialization and rise of cities was changing the "traditional, rural social order" and running into conflict with the "pre-capitalist attitudes and institutions" of the area. He described the racially elitist Pan-Germanism movement of ethnic German Austrians as a reaction to Austria not being included in the German Empire of Bismarck.

Goodrick-Clarke opined that the Ariosophist movement took Völkisch ideas but added occultish themes about things like Freemasonry, Cabbalism, & Rosicrucianism in order to "prove the modern world was based on false and evil principles". The Ariosophist "ideas and symbols filtered through to several anti-Semitic and nationalist groups in late Wilhelmian Germany, from which the early Nazi Party emerged in Munich after the First World War". He showed some links between two Ariosophists and Heinrich Himmler.