I see a lot of people flying flags with symbols like this and this when I watch footage of Neo Nazi/ White supremacy rallies and gatherings. But I don't understand what it means in relation to Nazism and/or white supremacy. I know it's an occult image usually refereed to as the "black sun" and I know it's carved onto the floor of the Wewelsburg castle in Germany but other than that one instance I don't see how it's tied to Nazi Germany or Germany at all. I can not seem to recall it ever being used by the Germans during WW2, so does it have some sort of deeper historical ties to racial supremacy that goes further back than the Nazis? Why are Neo Nazis using it today and what does it mean?
The Schwarze Sonne (black sun) now associated with neo-Nazis does derive from pre-Christian Germanic and Slavic sunwheels. The 'language' is pre-nationalist, but the 'dialect' - if you like - is firmly völkisch (the belief in the mystical connection between German race/blood and German land/soil) as it's constructed using sig (victory) runes from the Armanen set radiating outward like spokes.
The Armanen runes were created by Austrian mystic and father of völkisch ideology Guido von List (who claimed they came to him in a vision), through List the Armanen runes are very much a signifier of the later 19th Century/early 20th Century racist/nationalist foundation that NSDAP eventually grew out of, especially some of the more prominent figures around Hitler such as Heinrich Himmler who used the Armanen runes for SS insignia, purchased Wewelsburg and under the direction of the esoteric thinker Karl Maria Wiligut, laid out plans for an elaborate renovation and expansion. (Wiligut is a fascinating figure, he claimed to be able to channel ancestral memories and come from an unbroken line of pre-Christian Germanic pagan priests)
The Wewelsburg floor you've mentioned is the only recorded use of it during the Third Reich, and it entered the visual language of the Far Right post-war as part of the flood of credulous writings on Nazi occultism in the 1950s, inspired in no small measure by the former SS man Wilhelm Landig who built a following in Austria using the black sun as a symbol to circumnavigate the banning of more conventional Nazi iconography. Landig is also the patient zero for a lot of the Nazi occult mythology that seems to keep low budget broadcasters so busy - secret Nazi UFOs and hollow earth expeditions etc.
What it actually meant to Himmler and the SS is difficult to know, but Wiligut believed in the black sun as a source of cosmic energy that could be harnessed through, among other things, yoga. Which of course doesn't mean it's the secret SS yoga chamber or anything, but could represent the symbolic centre of the National Socialist world, which is what Himmler envisaged Wewelsburg as being. Landig built on this occult association, saying the black sun was a source of divine light that would bring about salvation for the Aryan race. This strand of thought remains marginal in the grand scheme of things and in terms of post-war white supremacy, it's best thought of as not an occult symbol representing powerful cosmic forces, but swastika substitute.
Sources: The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935 by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich by Eric Kurlander
Follow-up question: Was it carved into the Wewelsburg floor before the 1930s when the Nazis took up residence there?
