'The Occult and the Third Reich: The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail': an Amazon review

"Your run-of-the-mill historian doesn't quite make it work for most students when it comes to Adolf Hitler and the whole Nazi movement.

Hitler is either portrayed as an idiot, a fool, or a lunatic. And while there may have been parts of all these in his personality, none of these explain the attraction and drive that Nazism brought to a civilized, cultured country such as Germany, and which persuaded large numbers of Germans to cooperate in unspeakable acts of horror.

These authors ("Jean-Michel Angebert" is a pastiche of the 2 authors' names) instead try to determine what lay under the Nazi movement and specifically beneath Hitler's personality, and they find it in occult and gnostic thought. In the end, the authors fail to clinch their case because -- at least when the book was published in 1975 -- the evidence is not there for tying up the loose ends. But the book makes a good and persuasive case for believing that Hitler and the Nazi movement had an underlying motif that explains their evil in ways not easily understood if we look at Nazism as a conventional political movement."