"Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich" by Eric Kurlander, Yale University Press, 2018.
Eric Kurlander (born January 1973) is an American historian who currently serves as the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Stetson University. He received his B.A. in history from Bowdoin College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in modern European history from Harvard University. Kurlander is a specialist in modern German history and particularly of Nazi Germany, about which he has written three books. The most recent, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, was nominated for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year in 2019.
Description of the book (Yale University Press):
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. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander 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.
Video Title: Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich with Dr. Eric Kurlander. Source: William Ramsey Investigates, v4. Date Published: December 4, 2025.
