Edited: Words.

Hitler was a fanatic for appealing to Germanic folklore. Nazi 'lineages' are all farcical and often bastardized what they claimed to represent, but regardless Hitler frequently attempted to invoke Prussian and Ancient Germanic heritage to invoke a sense of pride in the soldiery.

This doesn't just extend to German formations, ex-patriot formations under German command were often given patches that alluded to some ancient (and great) ancestry. Italian units often had the 'Wolf of Rome' or other allusions to the Republic and Empire. The message here is clear, I think.

Finally many of these had not only a cultural significance, but an occult one as well. The runic symbol for the 11.SS "Norland" (Danish ex-pats) was a Sun Wheel, an allusion to the Occult "Black Sun" as well as to common Germanic origins.

Source: The Waffen SS; Volume 3 - Divisions 11 to 23. Williamson, Gordon et al. Osprey Publishing, 2004.

As a follow up question, was the Nazi's use of symbols more prolific than other European cultures of the time or was that sort of thing just more common in that era?

For some reason the radical right found a taste for random symbols in the 1920s. Italian Fascists used the fasces, the Iron Guard used a hashtag, the British union of fascists used a lightning bolt.

Modernist thinkers such as Durkheim and Sorel have touted common rituals, symbols and myths as something essential about all imagined communities. Apparently that has caught on.

The nazi runes and swastikas in particular were picked up from Langbehm and his "Theozoological" scriptures. Langbehm, in turn, will've been inspired by Edward Butts, Zmigradski or Blavatsky.

source: Lorenz Jäger's Das Hakenkreuz