I was watching the music video for Kreator - Totalitarian Terror and after a quick google search I found out that the nazis were fascinated by the Nords.
How accurate is this? Why were they so fascinated with vikings/nords? I have heard before that a lot of nazis today are still fascinated with Nordic culture and such, how does this tie into history?
Thank you so much for any answers you guys have! I hope I didn't break any rules as I know posts/comments here tend to get deleted a lot
Part of what you've undoubtedly found on Google is the post-war cult of "Hitler's Cult". A whole market sprang up around the idea of Nazi links to Occultism and a Nordic past. Many of these works don't stand up to scrutiny. I wouldn't recommend Wikipedia as a primary source but the page "Occultism in Nazi Germany" gives a good list of films and other documentaries produced in this genre. Eventually that view became mainstream, it even made it to the well-known Spielberg archaeo-blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark. Goodrich-Clarke's "The Occultic Roots of Nazism" (1985) pulls many of these strands of thought together in a work on Nazi occultism and 'Ariosophism' that makes for an interesting read but which offers little in the way of compelling sources.
In any part of the post-war period one can find reasons why the idea of an occultist link fascinated the public, particularly those who continued to admire (even revere) the ideologies and actions of the Nazis. It can be part of paganism versus Christianity, right versus left, them versus us, free thought versus the state. Blee's Ethnographies of the Far Right offers some interesting insights into belief systems of far-right groups, as does Virchow's "Performance, emotion, and ideology: On the creation of “collectives of emotion” and worldview in the contemporary German far right".
In truth the fascination with "Nords" is often misunderstood as equating to a fascination with Vikings or Wotanic culture. In fact Hitler's fascination was with the proto-Germanic race that occupied what we now know as Northern Germany and Denmark. This was the race he termed "Aryan" and this was to be the new, racially-pure German. When we consider Hitler's ideology as expressed in Mein Kampf and in his public speeches we see that his vision was for a Germany that was cleansed of impure races, impure cultures, impure arts, and thereby impure feeling. It's not difficult to see in hindsight that Hitler was a truly hateful person and probably quite insane, particularly in his darkest moments, but we have no reference in his writings or speeches of an interest in true occultism.
Black and Kurlander in Revisiting the "Nazi Occult": Histories, Realities, Legacies undertake an interesting examination of the things that Hitler believed which might retrospectively have been seen as occultic, it's certainly a book that you should add to your reading list on the topic.
In short: Hitler's Nordic fascination was really a fascination with a pure, early Germanic race. His interest in a true occult was a post-war invention.
I think you might be talking about Nordic mythology and occultism inside the NSDAP. If I'm right, here's your answer :
First thing, let's clarify the idea of nazis being fascinated by Nords or Vikings. Many people think that Hitler himself was into it, and it's not exactly true. Yes, Adolf Hitler did participate in occult organization when he lived in Vienna. However, he will write in Mein Kampf that people in these organization disgust him. When he will rise to power, he will ban some occult organization. So Hitler wasn't into Nordic and Viking fantasma, he did but he completly changed his mind.
But, Hitler does not represent nazism all by himslef, the NSDAP, the nazi party, had many different position on specific topics such as Nordic and Viking legacy and fantasma. Few high ranked member of the NSDAP were fascinated by the Nords, such as Rudolf Hess or Heinrich Himmler. But they were just a few, and many other member of the party looked down on them because of their fascination. If Hess, Himmler or even Rosenberg were into Nordic things, it didn't clearly influence the creation of the nazi ideology.
We often hear about ancient nordic runes, occult scientific research about nordic legacy. Is that true ? Well partially yes. Himmler hosted in the castle of Wewelsburg the main research center for the Ahnenerbe (the society for research and learning about ancestral legacy, created in 1935 and integrated to the SS in 1940). The main objective of this organization was to find scientific and archeological "proof" for the Aryan theory (Aryan were supposed to be the superior race). And that's why some nazis were fascinated by the Nords, because they wanted to have "scientific proof" that their racial theory was right.
To conclude, those who were fascinated by the Nords or the Vikings were only a extreme minority inside the NSDAP. The whole nazi ideology has no clear roots into Nordic mythology. The only tie that you can make is the Aryan race that they claimed to be superior was inspired by scandinavian and german physical traits. And even that is not a strong argument, it is just a political use of a representation as Mussolini did with the Roman Empire for exemple.