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Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich
Abstract
This book is the definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, exploring the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich in the service of power. The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. This eye-opening history reveals how the Third Reich's relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.
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“Biodynamic farming was conducted in several concentration camps, led by Anthroposophists and using prisoners as a severely mistreated, enslaved workforce.”
From Anthroposophy and Racism (2025) · cites this paper as Kurlander 2017: 146-150, 239-240 and 249-250
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Hansson, S. O. (2025) · AURA - Tidsskrift for akademiske studier av nyreligiøsitet · doi:10.31265/aura.791
Metadata
- Authors
- Kurlander, E.
- Corresponding author
- Kurlander, Eric
- ORCID
- Kurlander, Eric
- Venue
- Yale University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Published
- 2017-07-18
- OpenAlex
- W2790717410
- Cited by
- 107
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 38 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 14 · 2018: 2
- FWCI
- 18.12
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Yale University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › European history and politics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies
- Keywords
- supernatural, esoteric science, paganism, astrology, witchcraft, Atlantis, Heinrich Himmler, Nazi propaganda, Nazi science, Nazi Germany
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Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.12987/yale/9780300189452.001.0001
- The paper
- Kurlander, E. (2017). Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Yale University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300189452.001.0001
