Today, many people associate occultism with far-right politics, Fascism, and National Socialism. From a historical viewpoint, however, the relationship between occultism and politics is far more complex. Although a range of important studies have shown that this is the case, a distorted and historically ill-informed image persists even in present-day academic scholarship. To a large extent, this is due to the depiction of links between the Nazis and esotericism in popular culture, ranging from books, music, comics, and video games to Hollywood blockbuster movies. Some of these media were very influential in coining certain clichés about “Nazi occultism” and related subjects. These popular artefacts can be regarded as sedimentations of two general developments since the end of World War II. On the one hand, a genre of sensationalist literature has evolved especially since the 1960s, which developed many of the topoi that determine present-day popular culture: the alleged black magical rituals of the Nazis, their “occult” ideology, their adherence to Satanism, their hunt for the Holy Grail, their origin in secret societies, and so on. Two of the most famous representatives of this genre are Le matin des magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, published in 1960 and selling millions of copies, and the slightley less successful yet influential Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, published in 1972. Its ambivalent fetishisation of National Socialism notwithstanding, this genre is usually hostile towards the Nazis.

The other development, in contrast, can be classified as a kind of “esoteric neo-Nazism.” Since the 1950s, former Nazis and their sympathisers were coming to terms with the downfall of the Third Reich by combining older esoteric and recent New Age notions with Nazi revivalist ambitions. Instrumental in this process was a Viennese group surrounding Wilhelm Landig (1909-1997), Rudolf Mund (1920-1985), and Erich Halik (1926-1995). Landig and Mund had been members of the Waffen-SS and focused, among others, on the ideas of the Italian esotericist and fascist sympathiser Julius Evola (1898-1974) as well as on the Atlantis theories of Herman Wirth (1885-1981), who had been a founding member of the SS Ahnenerbe in 1935 and would publish in Landig's Volkstum Verlag after the war. While this demonstrates certain historical continuities, the fantastical ideas of the Vienna group were largely detached from facts.