The Occult Roots of Nazism

The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935, later published under the title The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology, is a book about Ariosophy and Nazi occultism by historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who traces some of its roots back to esotericism in Germany and Austria between 1880 and 1945. The foreword is by Rohan Butler, who had written The Roots of National Socialism in the 1930s. The book is based on Goodrick-Clarke's 1982 Ph.D. thesis.

It was first published by The Aquarian Press in 1985, and republished in paperback form by New York University Press in 1992. The book was highly regarded upon its publication and has been called the seminal work on the topic of Nazism and occultism and as Goodrick-Clarke's most influential work. It received praise for being a serious scholarly effort on a subject which otherwise attracted many fringe or mythical claims.

Background

The connections between Nazism and occultism had been subject to many explorations previously, but they tended to be sensationalistic with little basis in fact. Goodrick-Clarke wrote that he found the previous discussion of the connection to be "a literature rich in mystery and suggestion, but short on facts and hard evidence". Nevertheless, the question of how Nazism had come to have such an association with occultism in the first place interested him, and so he started researching contemporary fringe resources, only to find that "there was a hard kernel of truth" to the connection.

The book is based on Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's 1982 Ph.D. thesis The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935: Reactionary Political Fantasy in Relation to Social Anxiety, of which it is a revised version.