Germanic neopaganism. Nazi period and World War II:
Several early members of the Nazi Party belonged to the Thule Society, a study group for German antiquity. It is postulated (by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in The Morning of the Magicians in 1960 and by Gerald Suster in Hitler and the Age of Horus in 1981) that occult elements played an important role in the formative phase of Nazism and the SS in particular (...) Point 24 of the National Socialist Program stated that the party endorsed "positive Christianity", which did not depend upon faith in Christ as the son of God or the Apostles' Creed and rejected the Semitic origins of Christ and Bible.[111] (...) The eclectic German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung), founded by the Sanskrit scholar Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, enjoyed a degree of popularity during the Nazi period.[112] (...) Celebrating the traditional festivals like Jul and Sommersonnenwende were encouraged and recast into veneration of the Nazi state and Führer.[114] (...) The appropriation of "Germanic antiquity" by the Nazis was at first regarded with skepticism and sarcasm by British Scandophiles. W. H. Auden in his Letters from Iceland (1936) makes fun of the idea of Iceland as an "Aryan vestige",[115] but with the outbreak of World War II, Nordic romanticism in Britain became too much associated with the enemy's ideology to remain palatable, to the point that J. R. R. Tolkien, an ardent Septentrionalist, in 1941 found himself moved to state that he had a "burning private grudge ... against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler" for "ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."[116] (...)