Ghostapo

Clearly he's the bad guy.

Major Eaton: I'm beginning to understand Hitler's interest in this.
Brody: Oh, yes. The Bible speaks of the Ark leveling mountains and laying waste to entire regions. An army which carries the Ark before it... is invincible.

— Raiders of the Lost Ark

Pretty much everyone agrees that the Nazis were very, very bad. So, how do you make them even more intimidating? Why, by giving them Black Magic and Eldritch Abomination allies (or have them summon some, with various results), of course!

This is actually more plausible than it sounds. The Swastika is one of the oldest symbols in many religions, including Hinduism, and also became significant in some occult groups. Nazism's roots are arguably traceable to an occult group called the Thule Society. A primary focus of the Thule Society was a claim concerning the origins of the Aryan race, as the descendants of Atlantis (sometimes called Thule), depending on which rumour you listen to. A lot of the senior Nazis, most notoriously SS head Heinrich Himmler, were intensely interested in the occult. Himmler followed a religion called Armanenschaft which was, according to its believers, the original religion of the ancient Aryans, which later evolved into Norse Mythology and Hinduism.

Culturally, the country was also hip-deep in Teutonic tradition. Some senior Nazis apparently wanted to gradually abolish the Jewish-originated Christianity in favour of bringing back Germanic/Norse paganism, while others just wanted the state to absorb all the qualities of a religion instead, while another faction endorsed so-called "Positive Christianity", an attempt to create a national church that removed "Jewish" elements from Christianity, including the entirety of the Old Testament. In the present day, there exist factions in the neo-Nazi movement who also endorse a pagan revival, sometimes mixing Nietzsche in their rhetoric: Christianity was a fraud of "Slave Morality" that had resulted in the degeneration of the "racial traditions" and "master morals" of the Aryan race, and had been foisted upon Europe by the Jews.

Adolf Hitler himself was pretty skeptical of the occult and notions of mystical powers, and restricted secret societies out of fear that they would threaten the power of the Nazi Party, but nevertheless tried to get his hands on The Spear of Destiny mostly for propaganda value. Hitler's own religious beliefs are a matter of intense debate, not least because of contradictions in his own writings, not helped by how both sides of the debate tried to portray Hitler as either an atheist (when in fact, he absolutely hated them and ordered for them to be killed) or a religious fanatic (when he privately disparaged both Christianity and Himmler's paganism). The consensus is that Hitler never really cared about participating in any religious activity, but still believed in and spoke of God/Providence/Fate/Nature in a pantheistic manner.

One other benefit to including magic Nazis in your story is that within your fantastical world, the true horrors of the Third Reich can "keep up" with your everyday fantastical horrors, rather than being overshadowed. The downside is that it can be a bit, well, silly, which can diminish the impact of the factual events; indeed, the Nazis are a common source of Even Evil Has Standards from more fantastic evils.

Alternatively, you can give the Nazis technology ahead of their time, resulting in Stupid Jetpack Hitler. Or leave that to Soviet Superscience, making the Eastern Front the front line of Magic Versus Science.

May also overlap with Nazisploitation, The Klan and Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot. Sub-Trope of Weird Historical War. Super-Trope to Nazi Zombies.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• One of the movies in the Urotsukidoji/Legend of the Overfiend Hentai anime series has our hero squaring off against a mad scientist whose father was deeply involved in trying to bring occult science to the Nazis. In one scene, Hitler himself is seen upbraiding the father for his failure to produce immediate results.
• A zombified Hitler and his army appears in the Dragon Ball Z movie Fusion Reborn. Not mentioned by name, but it couldn't be more obvious who they are.
• In the backstory of Fate/Apocrypha, Nazi Germany intervenes in the third Holy Grail War after Darnic informs them about the existence of the Holy Grail and convinces them to try and acquire it with his help. Wehrmacht commits a full scale invasion of Fuyuki city and defeats The Three Families as well as the Imperial Army that tries to stop them. After the war ends inconclusively, Darnic stabs the Germans in the back and steals the Greater Grail for himself.
• First Squad a joint Russo-Japanese anime-style movie about the Eastern Front, features the knights of the Teutonic Order, as lovingly resurrected by the SS. They're opposed by a Soviet equivalent, military intelligence Division 6.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa had the Thule Society using The Spear of Destiny to open a portal to the Fullmetal universe to retrieve weapons for the Nazis. Notable in how one character ends up helping the Thule Society...
• The Hellsing: Ultimate OVAs and the original Hellsing manga features one of the most terrifying examples of this trope, Millennium: which has vampire Nazis en masse, as well as the more specialized Nazi werewolf, a magical flintlock sharpshooter, a Mad Scientist/Doktor, a scythe-wielding mesmerist, and a quantum catboy fighter. For extra points, they also get advanced technology and weaponry in the form of advanced attack zeppelins armed with V-1 bombs and V-2 rockets, heavy weapons and armor, and microchips which can be used to monitor the location and progress of their troops from afar, and remotely incinerate them with blue fire when they've served their purpose.
• Averted in Hetalia: Axis Powers - it's England who's obsessed with magic and the occult, not Nazi Germany.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency: Nazis resurrect four ancient super-vampires who become the main bad guys for the arc. Played with, however, in that the Nazis pretty much immediately decided the Pillar Men were way too powerful and dangerous to be controlled, and when the Pillar Men inevitably break out, the Nazis have been working for some time on how to kill them permanently, rather than foolishly try to put a leash on such monsters.
• In K, the superpower-granting Slates were discovered in a church in Dresden in that time, unlocked by Nazi scientists, and brought to Tokyo after the war by a Japanese soldier sent there to help using his knowledge of Japanese magic. Notable in that the teenaged head scientist working on it was horrified at the idea of his work being used for war, and seemed to have no idea what was actually going on in the world. And that he gets powers, becomes immortal, and ends up being the main character seventy years later.
• The first season of Knight Hunters has a pack of enemies called the SS whose leaders are obvious Nazi analogues. Their evil plot revolves around the occult powers of black magic and the main character's sister.
• Mentioned in the background of Senki Zesshō Symphogear AXZ. During the war, Nazi Germany began extensively working to acquire the Magitek relics that have been commonplace throughout the setting. They would exchange some of these relics with their Japanese allies, which ended up being the reason why Gungnir and Ichaival (Hibiki and Chris's relics, both of which originate from Norse Mythology) along with the Nehustan Armor ended up in Japan in the present day. After the war's end, the Nazis who fled to South America wound up taking several of their relics with them to avoid them falling into Allied hands, among which includes Tiki, the personal homunculus of the season's Big Bad Adam Weishaupt.

Comic Books

• In a 2000 AD issue imagining what the book would be like if it had a Comics Merger with Battle Action, the latter's more conventional war stories have been given a fantastic overlay. Major Eazy is now about the title character teaming up with a British Museum archeologist to stop occult items falling into the hands of the Nazis, while Hellman of Hammer Force has been renamed Hellman of Hell Force, and is about the Nazis invading Hell.
• American Vampire: During World War II, Nazis have worked alongside with Carpathian vampires to further their goals. This particular bloodline also shares their supremacist views and consider themselves superior to other vampire species, having committed their own genocide against their "inferiors" centuries before the Nazis' ascension. In addition, their Japanese counterparts also made experiments on the Pacific theater with a particularly virulent and dangerous vampire bloodline which they intended to deploy in the war.
• In Athena Voltaire, the supernatural elements and the Nazi-fighting elements of the series aren't always intertwined, they often are; the Nazis are after some sort of occult advantage, and need to be thwarted. The Thule Society is a prominent antagonist, and never seems to learn that Evil Is Not a Toy.
• The second volume of the Baltimore comic (set in an Alternate History version of World War I) has an anonymous evil sorcerer heavily implied (and confirmed by Word of God) to be a young Hitler. Most readers won't realize this at first because he has a different mustache and name. The mustache is a nice bit of historical accuracy; Hitler did have this style of mustache early in World War I. The German army made him trim it down to a toothbrush in order for his gas mask to fit and he liked it so much he wore it that way for the rest of his life.
• Caballistics, Inc. makes mention of Nazi Germany's occult warfare division, Sonderkommando Thule, very frequently. When the titular Caballistics, Inc. was still functioning as a secret department in the British Government at its peak during World War II, as Q Department, Sonderkommando Thule was their biggest enemy. Solomon Ravne is revealed to have been a former member.
• Captain Gravity and the Power of Vrill: The Nazis are looking for Atlantis! It's actually pretty awesome.
• In "Army of the Walking Dead" from Creepy Magazine #35, a Nazi Mad Scientist uses then-current technology to create a bunch of zombies that obey only his verbal commands. This ends up biting him in the butt when he breaks his jaw during a plane crash.
• Danger Girl has The Hammer, a terrorist group led by a Nazi war criminal, who collect magical artifacts in order to revive an ancient Atlantean "Aryan superman". Of course, when said being actually appears, he kills most of them.
• The DCU:
  • The question of "Why didn't Superman kick Hitler's ass?" was retconned by explaining that Hitler had used the Spear of Destiny to brainwash any American hero who entered Germany's borders (in some stories, this extends to the entire Eastern Hemisphere) and send them off to attack the US.
  • In Wonder Woman (1987), the Justice Society of America and Hippolyta are rather unsettled that the magical protections of the Spear of Destiny seem to have been lowered around Nazi-controlled space. They discover that the protections were lowered temporarily in order to facilitate a magical experiment by Paula von Gunther that involved her reading from an Eldrich Tome in order to transform herself into a powerful monster.
  • Whom Gods Destroy is an Elseworlds story featuring Superman and Wonder Woman showing an alternate universe where the Third Reich won the war and is backed by the Greek pantheon, having mythological monsters at their disposal.
• Part of the premise of Death-Defying Doctor Mirage is that the US government had a secret program to recruit former Nazi occultists.
• Even Fables has to get in on the action. One flashback issue told of Bigby Wolf as a commando in WWII, stopping the Nazis for creating an army of Frankenstein's Monster and Werewolf soldiers. Which raises some serious questions about the quality of their Masquerade. Bigby comments once on his general apathy towards being discovered.
  Bigby: Even if they saw a man transforming into a wolf, I'm sure their first thought probably wouldn't be, "What, a collection of former storybook characters from our collective subconscious has set up a nation-in-exile in the heart of New York City to escape from a dimension-spanning evil empire!"
• Hellboy:
  • The titular demon was summoned to Earth by Nazi occultists, and the plans of the Third Reich regularly play upon the plot, in both the comic books and the films. President Truman personally sent the B.P.R.D. to Berlin in 1946 to catalog all the data pertaining to the Nazis' obsession with the occult - on account of American soldiers uncovering scores of… bizarre things since the city fell.
  • Hoo, Hellboy: Jet Packs, LEGO Genetics, Hollywood Cyborgs, living heads in jars, the Spear of Longinus, and quality occult advice from Rasputin the Mad Monk; You name it, the Nazis had it. In the Mignola-verse, World War II was simply the public face of the decades-long "Occult Wars" which began shortly after World War I and lasted until the Allies finally killed Hitler - in 1958. Only Mignola knows how America Saved The Day.
  • However, this is mostly in the movie continuity. In the comics the Nazis still had loads of occult stuff, but Hitler himself is portrayed more realistically, as an ordinary dictator who only funds this insanity because he's desperate to gain an advantage over the Allies and winds up dying the same way he did in Real Life anyway. In the first story arc, Rasputin refers to Hitler as a "small, doomed madman" who the former cooperated with simply to advance his own agenda.
  • In a crossover with The Savage Dragon, it was discovered that the brain used by Brainiape, a gorilla with a powerful psychic brain, was none other than Hitler's. When the brain leaped up and started walking, that's when the heroes called it...
• The Irish indie comic The League Of Volunteers has a group of Nazis summons an ancient Irish demon to serve them in issue 1. It doesn't go as planned.
• The premise of The Life Eaters is that human sacrifice can summon ancient deities. The Nazis create their death camps and sacrifice millions of people to build an army of Nordic Gods. By the end of the series, every region on Earth has embraced the practice to summon their culture's ancient deities.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Hitler was cloned multiple times by a geneticist named Arnim Zola and repeatedly transferred his mind from body to body. In most of these bodies, he calls himself the "Hate-Monger", wields a "hate ray" that can manipulate people's emotions, and wears a costume that looks something like a purple Klansman's robe. Marvel Comics eventually tried to distance themselves from the Hate-Monger by having him transfer his mind into a Cosmic Cube that didn't actually work. This being comics, even Hitler couldn't stay dead forever, though... Marvel has also raised the question of whether this is "really Hitler" or "just a mental copy of Hitler", which somehow never comes up when it's someone else using Zola's process (such as Zola himself).
  • In The Invaders #32-33, a Nazi scientist manages to summon the norse god Donar from another world, much to the Wagner-loving Hitler's joy, and is soon swayed into the Nazi cause under a filmsy Aryan descendance pretext and used to kill Josef Stalin.^note Another Donar appears in the very first Invaders issues, but it's just an alien masquerading as the deity; the real one is summoned with the power of anachronistic television. Since All Myths Are True in the Marvel universe, "Donar" is none other than The Mighty Thor.^note Thor abandons the Nazis once he learns about Hitler's genocidal ambition thanks to an early Dr. Doom cameo, and technically doesn't kill Stalin, just accidentally give superpowers to another superhero disguised as him. Everything Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
  • On one occasion, Baron Von Strucker attempted to attack America with a submarine full of Nazi vampires. Unfortunately for them, the submarine sunk off the Louisiana coast, and they spent 70 years at the bottom of the sea. By the time that Captain America and Jubilee found them, they were nothing but dust and hate.
  • The Captain America: Hail HYDRA! miniseries does this, casting HYDRA as an ancient conspiracy who piggyback on the Nazis' conquests to take advantage of their sweeping across Europe as well as Himmler's (and, to a lesser extent, Hitler's) historical interest in the occult to ransack Europe of occult goodies to create their own god and which uses resurrected dead SS troopers as indestructible immortal mooks.
• Played with in Rex Mundi: the story is set in an Alternate History where the French Revolution failed, leading to a 1930s where the Nazis never came to power. However, thanks to the fact that magic exists in this reality, a secret history involving the Holy Grail and generous helpings of Putting on the Reich, the main villain and his followers essentially become this.
• In The Secret History, the Nazis are secretly controlled by the immortal Fifth Archon, William de Lecce, who oversees most of their occult projects.
• Vampirella has Dr. Midwinter, a high-ranking Nazi officer who was tasked with finding supernatural artifacts during World War 2. He was able to find amulet known as the Scarab of Atum-Ra in Egypt but lost it to the immortal priestess Pantha who tore off his arm and escaped with the amulet. Midwinter's life was extended as a result of him touching the amulet and he spent the next 60 years chasing Pantha across the world to get it back from her. In the final issues of the run in which he appears in he concocted a plan which required him to summon Lady Death.

Fan Fiction

• Halloween Unspectacular:
  • In "The Wax Museum" from the second collection, one of the disturbing exhibits Danny and Tucker find in the titular museum tells the story of how Adolf Hitler tried to create an army of ghosts by harvesting the souls of captured Russian civilians.
  • "Robot Connie vs the Moon Nazis" mostly uses the Stupid Jetpack Hitler variety of fictional Nazis, but just before the end we're told that Himmler is Hitler's Chief Warlock. E350 decides that the idea's a bit too much for him and pulls the plug on the story afterwards.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: It's strongly suggested that the Nazis were Grindelwald's followers in the muggle world, with the Holocaust actually being a blood magic ritual to give him power.
• Sixes and Sevens has HYDRA as this, naturally, though at the start all that Michael and Emily have to go off of are rumours that they've heard about them "conducting Doctor Frankenstein-like experiments in gloomy châteaux across the Loire". They take them more seriously after encountering an agent who can assume a Hulk-like form and another who's an actual werewolf, and a later mission has them deal with a vampire related to the comics villain Baron Blood.
• Vainglorious: On Earth Gimel the Nazis successfully summoned Thor who, drunk on their human sacrifices, bought into their sob story about the rest of the world picking on poor little Germany. They rode his coattails to near victory over the Allies until the Thinker and Warrior obliterated that iteration of Earth due to Thor disrupting the experiment.

Film — Live Action

• In Amsterdam (2022), Libby offhandedly mentions that she is a member of an all-female Vril society comprised of mediums, and that she and her "sisters" use their long hair to contact "the greater race" from another galaxy. This is a reference to a real-world Urban Legend that such a society (comprised of the mediums Maria Orsic, Traute, Sigrun, Gudrun, and Heike) allegedly existed in pre-Nazi Germany, and was the driving force behind the rise of Hitler. This hints to the fact that Libby and her husband are in cahoots with the Committee of Five.
• Bulletproof Monk's main villains are a bunch of Nazis trying to gain immortality through ancient magic.
• This is how the HYDRA rises to power in Captain America: The First Avenger. Originally just a sort of black ops division for the Nazi forces, when they find the Tesseract (a.k.a. Cosmic Cube) in Norway things take a drastic turn as they develop hyper-advanced weapons systems like Frickin' Laser Beams that can instantly vaporize their targets or all the Cool Planes that the Nazis designed but never managed to build.
• In The Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse, there are some French (Neo-)Nazi monks trying to find a medieval artifact to help them build a new, pure France.
• The Norwegian movie Dead Snow contains Zombie Nazis. Dead Snow seems to be a Spiritual Successor to the 1977 film Shock Waves. Other films with Zombie Nazis include Jesse Franco's Oasis of the Zombies (1983), Jean Rollins' Zombie Lake (also 1983, and produced by the same folks who did Oasis), and the obscure Night of the Zombies (1981).
• The 1980 film Death Ship was about a Nazi prison ship that continued to sail the seas for decades after World War II, controlled by the angry spirits of its crew.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: We're shown a framed photograph in Mephistopheles' office where he's seen shaking hands with Adolf Hitler just in case the viewer might still be confused that he's supposed to be evil.
• The Swedish film Frostbite has a Nazi vampire who intends to create a master race of vampires.
• One of the years listed in Shandor's temple in Ghostbusters: Afterlife is 1945 alongside the dates of the Ghostbusters movies and The Tunguska Event, implying Gozer caused World War II.
• For anyone who's seen Grindhouse, five words: Werewolf Women Of The SS.
• And of course, the movie adaptation of Hellboy. See above. There's also Kroenen, previously a Nazi assassin and now the undead servant of Rasputin—it's unclear whether he's still sentient enough to have party loyalties.
  Professor Broom: 1958, the Occult Wars finally come to an end with the death of Adolf Hitler.
  John Myers: 1945, you mean.
  (Broom pauses to stare at him.)
  John Myers: Hitler died in 1945.
  Professor Broom: (chuckles) Did he, now?
• Indiana Jones of course. Not one, but three of the movies and the cinematic adventure game feature Nazis trying to recover an ancient artifact that will grant them untold magical power, including The Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, Archimedes' dial and other stuff. One of the comic books features Indy searching for The Spear of Destiny and having to battle both Nazis and druids to get it. Ultimately, of course, it ends up with the US military, and since the destiny of the world lies with the Spear Hiroshima is nuked almost immediately afterward.
• In King of the Zombies, Dr. Sangre is a Nazi operative who is using a combination of hypnosis and voodoo magic to extract secrets from a captured American admiral.
• Unusual for a Disney Made-for-TV Movie, the 1997 film of The Love Bug made this an impotant part of Herbie's backstory for the reason he's a Sentient Vehicle: turns out that a kindly German scientist had theorized a way to make vehicles alive and he had been forced to try to realize this theory (and then mass-produce said vehicles for the regime). Turned out that the procedure required a serious amount of The Power of Love and thus the scientist was content that it was impossible to replicate... until he was forced to make Herbie's Knight of Cerebus Evil Counterpart Horace, that is.
• Parodied in Night Train to Munich: John Fredericks: Occultist and Ophthalmic Surgeon.
• This may fall partially under tech rather than magic, but Outpost has a mercenary team of ex-Royal Marines trying to hold off the seemingly immortal bodies of resurrected SS. There's a half-century old machine within the bunker they were originally hired to search, and it's revealed to have the power to negate the Nazis' immortality when activated. The mercenaries turn it on only for it to promptly break down, the last of the mercenaries (the captain) to die holding the Nazis off, and the scientist to try and escape through the ventilation shafts only to be met by the Nazis' commanding officer and a cut-to-black death.
• Overlord (2018) features a band of heroes raiding a supposedly mundane Nazi communications facility, only to discover that it's actually a laboratory dedicated to the creation of indestructible soldiers via the "unbelievable power" that they discovered in naturally occurring tar beneath French soil.
• In Reign of the Gargoyles, the Nazis make a pact with stone-winged killers.
• Sky Sharks has zombie Nazis riding flying sharks. Seriously.
• The main antagonists of P-51 Dragon Fighter are a Nazi unit who have awakened ancient dragons.
• Parodied in What We Do in the Shadows, Deacon was apparently a member of a 'secret Nazi vampire army'.
• In Zack Snyder's Justice League, Victor Stone mentions that the Nazis found the Mother Box that would later turn him into Cyborg, but they were stopped by the Allies before they could find out about its Magitek properties.

Literature

• The Andrew Doran series is about how the Nazis have started utilizing the power of Cthulhu Mythos in order to Take Over the World. Andrew Doran, Adventurer Archaeologist, is the only person capable of stopping them. There's multiple groups working for the Nazis harnessing the occult and they're often competing against one another.
• Area 51: The Nazis were aided/manipulated by secret aliens on Earth, pursuing ancient mythical artifacts that turn out to be lost alien technology, and were motivated with a belief in Thule, which is essentially a Germanic Atlantis per their view. Additionally the real Thule Society (an early occult group that some leading Nazis were members of) is described as the force behind the Nazi Party driving this. The occult beliefs that some Nazis like Himmler held are highlighted.
• Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archive portrays the Holocaust as a gigantic necromantic experiment, Operation Jotunheim, to summon an Infovore, a being of near-infinite cold that feeds on energy and information; the titular archives store the particular artifacts that the public should never find out about. It also features an Alternate Universe where the Nazis succeeded in their goal; unfortunately for them, they weren't in control of it and didn't realize what they'd unleashed until it was much, much too late. As a result, that universe is nearing its entropic heat death in the present days, and the laws of physics themselves were being distorted. A particularly nasty bit involves the description of Nazi necromantic practices, or as Stross dubs it, Algemancy - divination through pain. (There's also some crossover with Stupid Jetpack Hitler since "magic" in the Laundryverse is really just applied higher mathematics crossed with computer science with a little quantum physics for seasoning.)
• A subtle example in Normal Mailer's last novel The Castle in the Forest, a fictional account of Hitler's childhood. Nothing overtly supernatural happens, except for the fact that a demon named Dieter is assigned to oversee the development of young Adolf, as a sort of reverse guardian angel. The narrative is actually presented as his personal recollection. Toward the end Dieter is relieved of his responsibilities, and he mentions rumors of them eventually being taken over by Satan himself.
• Constantine’s Crossing by Dejan Stojiljković is a WW2 horror novel about the Spear of Destiny being hidden in Emperor Constanine's hometown in southern Serbia, SS Annenerbe major and Serbian Chetnik major searching for it and about werewolves.
• Inverted in Graham Masterton's horror novel The Devils of D-Day, in which it's the Allies who turn out to have used demonic help in the war.
• Diogenes Club series:
  • Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch, set in 1933, has a nod to this, as one of Charles Beauregard's agents in Europe sends a report about Chancellor Hitler reviving the Thule Society. That's only a colorful background detail, though, as the main plot involves another threat entirely.
  • Seven Stars: In the chapter "The Trouble With Barrymore", set in 1942 Hollywood, the villain is said to be "in close with Hitler's crackpot mages", but he's currently engaged in his own project and no actual Nazis appear. Unless you count the group that show up near the end of the story — but they're just actors on their way to film a scene in Casablanca.
  • The End of the Pier Show holds an accidental example: the Reality Warper spell used by a veterans' club to turn a town back to the way it was during World War Two (out of a rose-colored reminiscing of the wartime era) manufactures Nazi Zombies as a side-effect. Richard Jeperson explains it as "you can't bring back the 'good old days' without bringing back what was bad about them".
• In The Dire Saga, Sparky and Roy reminisce about having to battle the Thule Society during World War II. It's why they're familiar with The Final Janissary and vampirism.
• In Dora Wilk Series, it's said that Hitler was extremely interested in raising an elite commando of werewolves, and had his warlocks invent a collar - called the SS Wehrwolf curse - that would force them to fight for him. He would've succeeded, too, if it wasn't for Stalin of all people hiring a witch to dismantle the Wehrwolf, but the secret of its creation is, unfortunately, not lost to time.
• In The Dragon in the Sword by Michael Moorcock, the protagonists, while looking for the Holy Grail, meet Hitler, Goering and Goebbels conducting a pagan summoning ceremony. They manage, without really trying, to change the course of the war by giving the trio a "sign" that they should invade Russia before inventing the atomic bomb.
• In The Dreamthief's Daughter by Michael Moorcock, the Nazis want the protagonist's family sword because they believe correctly that it is a mystic artifact of cosmic significance. The climax of the book features Hitler and his chief stooges, er, conducting a pagan summoning ceremony, where they get the bejeezus scared out of them by Elric of Melnibone. Elric and the protagonist then lead an army of dragons to save Britain from the Luftwaffe.
• The novel/ comic book series Fiends of the Western Front has Hitler cut a deal with Dracula; the vamps help Germany win the war, and they get all the commies, wounded, and POW's they can eat.
• In the Harry Potter series, a dark wizard named Grindelwald was causing chaos on the continent before being defeated in 1945; in the final book we find out that he practiced Fantastic Racism and had a prison with the Nazi-ish name Nurmengard. Word of God has confirmed that this represents the Wizarding version of World War II, and since we know that the British Prime Minister knows about magic it's not inconceivable that the leader of Germany might too...
• In Illuminatus!!, the Holocaust is part of a ritual whose purpose is to cause Hitler and his immediate circle to ascend to Physical Godhood. Hitler also faked his death at the end of WWII, and lives in Israel. Probably.
  • As part of the same plan, the heroes have to stop a squadron of zombie SS commandos from attacking a Woodstock-like music festival in Germany, which is part of the Illuminati's plan to trigger World War Three.
• Lammas Night, by Katherine Kurtz. The book's primary focus is on Britain's heroic Wiccans (and other occultists) and their Heroic Human Sacrifice that shuts down Operation Sealion, but Hitler is portrayed as a scarily powerful Adept.
• Andrey Lazarchuk and Mikhail Uspensky's cryptohistorical novel Look into the Monsters' Eyes has Nazis and their occult preoccupation as one of its main subplots, with Annenerbe Institute headed, essentially, by Baron Samedi.
• In the backstory of the Merry Gentry series, the Nazis attempted to make alliances with the Sidhe, which worked right up until the Sidhe found out that the Nazis intended to exterminate the less humanoid fae. The Nazis became a gruesome object lesson in why one doesn't cross The Fair Folk.
• An early novel by horror author Robert R. McCammon, The Night Boat, features a U-boat full of very angry, very hungry Nazi zombies created by Hollywood Voodoo.
• In the later part of Sergey Lukyanenko's Night Watch (Series) it is said that most of the early 20th century projects is failed attempts by the Day Watch, the Night Watch or in some cases both of them together to make the world better for them. It might be of note that both sides thought Sovjet communism was a good idea. A major plot point is the part played by a Dark Witch in one of this and her remorse that make her turn.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, all wars are fought parallel to secret wars between rival demigods, and the human wars are often lead by demigods. There are strong hints that Hitler was a demigod son of Hades - children of Hades are supposed to be charismatic and power-hungry, their fatal flaw is holding a grudge, and Hades mentioned that around the time Nico and Bianca were born, some of his other children were leading the losing side of a war (Nico and Bianca were born during World War II but are younger than the protagonist because they spent decades trapped in the Lotus Hotel).
  • The Heroes of Olympus Sequel Series strongly implies Hitler is a son of Hades' Roman counterpart, Pluto who's said to look otherwise identical to Hitler apart from not having a moustache.
• In the President's Vampire series, it's revealed that the Nazis hired Johann Konrad so that he'd create undead soldiers, Unmanschensoldaten, for them, and that he used the Holocaust to get "parts" for his experiments. They also wanted him to create magically-boosted viruses to wipe out the British, but Konrad didn't agree to this, reasoning that viruses can easily turn against their creators.
• Part of the Back Story of the Rivers of London-verse is that this was very prominent in WWII. To the point that almost all of the allied magical forces were wiped out stopping them. Many of the things they did are still regarded as too horrific to mention although we know that they tried unsuccessfully to weaponise vampires and, successfully, to create anti-personnel devices powered by tormented spirits
• In the Kaiju Deconstruction novel that is Shambling Towards Hiroshima, it is mentioned that the Nazis also were trying to breed giant fire-breathing reptiles, but thankfully they were unable to do so.
• The Spear by James Herbert is an espionage Thriller about an ex-Mossad agent (though he's neither Israeli nor Jewish) turned Security Consultant who, while investigating the murder of another Mossad agent, uncovers a Neo-Nazi cult who believed Himmler was the real brains behind the Nazis, and are attempting to bring him back to life using The Lance of Longinus. It plays it pretty straight throughout. That is, until the very end, where it's reveled they weren't crazy after all and he has to fight Himmlers re-animated corpse.
  • It should probably also be noted that he was sued by another writer named Trevor Ravenscroft, claiming he had stolen elements from his earlier novel Spear Of Destiny. Except Ravenscroft's novel was non-fiction.
• The Book The Spear of Destiny and other works mention an occult secret society named "The Green Dragon Society" located in imperial japan and supporting the Nazi Occultists.
• The Alternate History novel SS-GB subverts this when the German officer tells the hero that he had to present atomic bomb research as something occult to get high ranking Nazis to fund it. Only by presenting it as Germany's destiny written in the stars does Himmler agree to it. Note that there is no real occult magic or outlandish technology in this novel; everything is extremely plausible.
• British writer Dennis Wheatley used the Ghostapo trope in at least one of his novels: First, in Strange Conflict, in which the Nazis used the services of a Haitian Witch Doctor to get the routes for Allied convoys from the minds of the people who knew about them. The Duke de Richleau and his companions put a stop to it.
• Barbara Hambly's Sun Cross series has two magicians in a medievalish time setting respond to a call for help from beyond the Void from a world without magic. They travel through the Void to help those mages...and land in the Third Reich. Luckily the hero is pretty smart and quickly realizes they're the bad guys.
• In Robin Jarvis's novel The Woven Path, a young boy from the modern era named Neil enters The Wyrd Museum, a place filled with powerful and dangerous artefacts. He ends up transported back in time to World War II London, but in the process unwittingly opens a casket containing Belial, an ancient demon held in the museum's Separate Collection. It is unleashed to wreak more death and destruction on the already wartorn world. Nazi spy Kathleen Hewitt encounters Belial and eagerly accepts his offer for her to become his new high priestess, certain that an alliance with the evil being would ensure a Nazi victory. But in the end he is defeated and her hopes are dashed.
• David Brin's really rather dark Alternate History short story Thor Meets Captain America, later adapted into comic form as The Life-Eaters, has the Nazis murder almost 17 million people as part of a gigantic Necromantic ritual intended to bring the Norse Gods to life, fighting on the side of Hitler. And it works. The author has said this was an attempt to make Holocaust have some actual sense for the Nazis and to create a scenario for a "Nazis Win" Alternate History anthology (Brin simply didn't believe that outcome was possible without some bizarre twist to overcome the Allies' economic and logistical advantages).
• Manly Wade Wellman's darkly funny short story "The Devil Is Not Mocked", as the title suggests, goes the Evil Is Not a Toy route with this trope. In the very first paragraph, the Wehrmacht Villain Protagonist is contemplating Heinrich Himmler holding "some sort of garbled druidic ritual with his Schutzstaffel on the Brockenburg." However, when something genuinely supernatural happens ( namely, Dracula shows up), the Germans are completely unprepared to deal with it and it doesn't go very well for them.

Live-Action TV

• The Angel episode "Why We Fight" had a flashback to the 1940s, where it is revealed that the Nazis have been experimenting with the creation of a vampire army.
• The Burning Zone: “Midnight of the Carrier”: Neo-Nazis plan to use special lenses that can see energy signatures as a weapon.
• Danger 5 completely embraces the camp potential of this trope, particularly in the episode "Fresh Meat for Hitler's Sex Kitchen", in which Hitler uses blood magic to magically turn his opponents into evil blonds. The plan is foiled when his blood sample is tainted by "impure" Swiss blood. And as everyone knows, Swiss blood is made of money.
• One of the historical vignettes in episode 3 of Good Omens (2019) shows a small group of Nazis trying to gather any occult artifacts that might help win the war, including Agnes Nutter's book of prophecies.
  Aziraphale: I'm afraid that's the Holy Grail of prophetic books.
  Mr. Glozier: The Fuhrer also wants the Holy Grail. And the Spear of Destiny, if you should run across them.
• In the Kamen Rider series, particularly in the Showa era, SHOCKER was founded by Nazis who had survived World War II and, in addition to having kaijin-creating super science, also dabbled in mysticism and other areas of the supernatural. Among its top executives is a Nazi SS officer named Colonel Zol who could transform into a werewolf.
• In The Man from U.N.C.L.E. season 1 episode "The Deadly Games Affair", a former SS scientist is attempting to reanimate Hitler (whose name is not directly mentioned in the episode).
• The Sanctuary (2007) episode aptly titled "Normandy" has Helen, Watson, Griffen and Tesla (from the war office in England) going against Hitler's own abnormal hunting group, seeming helped by Druitt, who were going to use a Fire Elemental to stop the D-Day Invasion. Watson points out the irony of Hitler going after the imperfect creatures to help in his quest for a perfect world.
• Supernatural:
  • In the subtly-titled episode "Everybody Hates Hitler", Sam and Dean help a young Jewish man and his inherited golem fight the undead Nazi necromancers of the Thule Society. During the war, the necromancers used Holocaust victims to test the efficacy and limits of their Resurrective Immortality Inducer.
  • They return a few seasons later, now intent on resurrecting Hitler, using a pocket watch containing his soul and the blood of one of his unknowing descendants. They succeed... and the cartoonishly crazy Hitler gets re-killed by Dean shortly after.
• Tokkyuu Shirei Solbrain has an actual ghost of a female SS officer, known simply as the "Woman of Riga", who also committed large-scale atrocities during the second World War in Nazi-occupied Latvia. Many people have lost their lives over it and they swore a curse upon her as they died. The officer is said to have died with Hitler in an underground bunker when Berlin fell, her spirit resides inside a portrait which was last located in a church in Riga. Her spirit influenced young women to tragically commit suicide with some having grandfathers who were allies with Hitler. The spirit also possesses Ako Gunji and would battle Solbrain. At the end, they would then destroy the spirit and her portrait, putting an end of her reign of terror for good.
• Witchblade: The most recent destined wielder of the Witchblade before Sara Pezzini was an American spy in World War II who became an SS officer's mistress to acquire intelligence, and was given the Witchblade in bracelet form as a gift (the Nazis had presumably pilfered it from the Catholic church, which is known to have acquired it at Joan of Arc's execution). In season two, Adolf Hitler is cited by Kenneth Irons as a past wielder of The Lance of Longinus.

Music

• Current 93's "Hitler as Kalki" includes referrences Miguel Serrano's ideas.
• In Real Life "Ghost Division" was the nickname for the German Wehrmacht's 7th Panzer Division of WWII - thanks to their Lightning Bruiser tactics, even the German High Command had difficulties knowing their exact location. In the Sabaton song Ghost Division the title division consists of both living and undead soldiers, and is fueled by the fear of their enemies
  • However, Sabaton also attributes supernatural qualities to a Soviet bomb squadron, the Night Witches.

New Media

• This archived 4chan thread. It actually features the phrase "Australian witch doctor special forces".
• The Creepypasta Cry of the Revenant is about a squad of American GI's (plus one SS defector) fighting an ancient, undead aryan (the godlike people who settled in what is now germany in nazi mythology) warrior who was mighty pissed off about being ressurrected by nazi wizards.

Radio

• Given the way it blends real world occult history and cosmic horror, this trope's inclusion in the Pleasant Green Universe was inevitable. Nazi occultists play a prominent role in the Backstory, as the current incarnation of the British paranormal defense agency known as "The Department of Works" was created to fight them (though they have antecedents going back at least to the 1600s). Real Life Thule society member and pre-Hitler national socialist Rudolf von Sebbotendorf briefly turns up in the adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a candidate for a previous host of the spirit of the ancient Mesopotamian sorcerer Ipku-Aya.
• The original, short-lived World War II-set version of the Red Panda Adventures involved Nazi zombies, Ninja Nazis, and a Nazi oil slick as the primary villain. Of course, this was nothing compared to what the heroes had.

Tabletop Games

• This is the premise of AEWWII, with the twist that the Allies have their own equivalents - the British have druids and wizards, while the Americans have drafted Native American shamans and even skinwalkers.
• In the sixth edition Champions Universe source book, it were the mystic energies released by a backfiring ritual attempted by Nazi mystics that ushered in the age of modern superhumans on May 1st, 1938. While 'costumed adventurers', including ones with the occasional odd talent or unusual technology, had been a part of the setting for decades previous, it was only afterward that the first people across the world started to spontaneously develop genuine superpowers.
• Contested Ground Studios Cold City is set in Berlin in 1950, after the Second World War went weird. Twisted technology and occult research have made Lovecraftian and other horrors real, so the U-bahn tunnels being full of failed super-soldier experiments, zombies and eldritch abominations can be the least of your worries. Given that the party can consist of any combination of American, British, German, French and Russian personnel, that list of worries includes each other.
• In the setting of Deadlands, the trope is taken to its logical (?) extreme. One of the Hell on Earth rulebooks explains (from the future perspective) that the Nazis used their own brand of Mad Science, creating devices powered, among other things, by souls of war prisoners. Furthermore, Hitler actually intends to raise the Fear Level all over Europe to such levels that he can bring the Reckoners to Earth. And then control them.
• Delta Green features the Karotechia, the bare remnants of Hitler's occult program hiding out in South America. They have a perfect example of the Ubermensch (thanks to his discovery of a cannibal tribe's immortality rituals) and Hitler's third book, Mein Triumph — dictated by the spirit of an "ascended" Hitler himself (who's actually just Nyarlathotep being a dick as usual). Actions against Nazi occultism in World War II played a significant role in the eventual state of Delta Green.
• Eat The Reich: The player characters are a team of vampires dropped into occupied Paris to assassinate Hitler. Their most significant opponents are a series of unique Übermenschen created by magic and Mad Science.
• Defied in World War Cthulhu,While the investigators may encounter the occasional ex-Ahnenerbe SS officer who has uncovered some pre-human tomb, his activities are unsanctioned and as aberrant as those of any other dabbler in the Mythos. There were no magical sacrifices in the concentration camps; the Nazis did not use magic or the Mythos. Keepers are instructed to avoid overusing Nazi exploitation of the Mythos, for it changes the game into an alternate-history weird war, and turns the Mythos into something rational, predictable, diminishing the horror.
• GURPS:
  • In the GURPS Infinite Worlds setting, "SS Raven Division" are amongst the major villains, using psychic/mystic world-jumping to infiltrate other worlds. They hail from Reich-5, one of a handful of alternate timelines where the Nazis won the war.
  • GURPS Weird War II, one of a series of supplements covering World War II as a setting. GURPS Weird War II discusses and goes into detail almost everything discussed under this trope, as well as how to use, mix, and blend them together to make a customized Weird Alternate WW2 for your role playing pleasure. The supplement is not related to the Savage Worlds/D20 setting below - they just borrowed the name, with permission. That's why there's an ad for the setting on the inside cover of the GURPS book - it was one of the requirements for permission.
  • In the magic-riddled 1930s setting of GURPS Thaumatology: Age of Gold, the Nazis are a threat and a source of antagonists and evil plots — and they very much want to use and abuse magic. However, they aren't quite as formidable as they could be, because they tend to reject any and all ideas about magic which happen to have Jewish or "non-Aryan" origins. Still, Nazi archaeologists with supporting squads of stormtroopers are bad enough, and can be very dangerous if they locate the right artefacts.
• In Hollow Earth Expedition the Hollow Earth is equated with Thule, so the Thule society, and therefore Nazis, are thoroughly interested in it, and trying to use the Orichalcum found there as an energy source and/or extremely powerful explosives.
• The Nazi Occult, by Kenneth Hite, is Mockumentary containing every single Nazi Occult connection he could find, for use as a systemless sourcebook for weird WW2 plots.
• The Day After Ragnarok RPG setting, also by Kenneth Hite, diverges from our history in 1945 when the Nazis manage to summon the Midgard Serpent in a desperate attempt to win the war.
• In the Nephilim RPG series, Thule Society still exists and is a prominent faction generally hostile to the eponymous Nephilim. The Society is a mix of real-life Thule Gesselschaft and Ahnenerbe with magicians and alchemists added for a good measure.
• The New World of Darkness game Hunter: The Vigil subverts this with the Loyalists of Thule, made up of the remnants of the aforementioned Thule Society. Not only were they driven out of Germany after the Nazi Party came to power, but they became so horrified by what happened thereafter that they swore to use their occult knowledge to protect mankind from other horrors.
  • Vampire: The Requiem has another subversion with the Dragolescu bloodline, a group of vampires capable of control over ghosts. Their founder was a... bit too enamored with Hitler, but never had any direct interaction with the guy — if anything, he was a raving fanboy. When the Reich collapsed, he lost his mind and tried to find a way to harness the necromantic potential of the Holocaust, and that's when the rest of his order said, "Fuck that guy" and destroyed him. Since then, the Dragolescu name has a rather bad rep — partially because of belief that they're beholden to strange spirits, and partially because of the Nazi thing.
  • Fan-made Genius: The Transgression has an interesting variant; while it follows the same idea than in both versions of the World of Darkness that no supernatural critter was behind the Third Reich itself, the game also introduces the concept of Manes and Bardos, which is that whenever an idea is discredited, the brute creative energy freed by its death results in the birth of an Eldritch Location and creatures who do follow that idea. As such, when the Nazi ideology was discredited, this immediately gave birth to an entire organization of Nazi mad scientists and sorcerers, but this group didn't actually existed until after the Third Reich's fall.
• In Night's Black Agents, Nazis are mentioned repeatedly in the setting-building chapter as a convenient option for where a given form of vampire came from.
• Noticeably averted in the Old World of Darkness; after a few missteps in 1st Edition, White Wolf came to think that making World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust the master work of any one type of supernatural critter would undermine the utter inhumanity of it. So, if supernatural creatures were involved, they were just picking at the sides of the suffering or trying to stop it (Vampires need human "cattle" to survive, so stopping them from being wiped out is in their best interests), and not the grand architects of genocide. This made it pretty much the only event in the WoD's history that wasn't entirely due to some NPC's master plan.
  • If anything, the big problem was supernaturals deciding there might be something to this Hitler thing, only to later have to be purged out of their own ranks by members who knew better. This was a particular problem for the Get of Fenris, the Verbena, and the Progenitors.
• Weird War II is the name of a setting for Savage Worlds, originally created for the D20 rule set, about a world where the mass slaughter and evil of the war had awoken all manner of monsters, old and new. This meant that a player would not only face things like Nazi programs to create zombie or werewolf soldiers, but also haunted tanks and planes, apes with human brain transplants, djinn harassing the troops in Africa, onis fighting on behalf of the Japanese, and more.
• The Scion companion has a setting where you can play as a scion involved in WWII. Hitler is a mortal, not even a scion, who was given Odin's spear by Loki as part of an attempt to use fatebinding to rewrite the Norse legends so that Ragnarok doesn't happen. It should be noted that the Aesir, including Hel and Loki, were horrified when they discovered the Holocaust and its extent. The book states that upon learning what one of her scions was up to, that Hel created a "special" place just for him.
• A throwaway reference in the small-press RPG Shattered Dreams inverts this trope, suggesting that Hitler's global agenda was foisted on him by the game's nightmare-haunting monsters, the Vacyg, who made a run-of-the-mill tinpot dictator into a bastard For the Evulz.
• The Stargate SG-1 Tabletop RPG supplement for the first season established that the Giza Stargate was used during WWII by Hitler, who, intrigued by its "occult possibilities", transported troops through it to literally "conquer Heaven", establishing an off-world Nazi colony that presumably persists to this day.
  • Ret Cons in the movies' material have rendered this impossible, however, as it is established that the gate was captured and transported to the US before the war started.
• The Tannhauser board game has Obscura Korps, basically the SS with psionic / magical / demonic powers. The Reich itself, however, is in fact Imperial Germany, led by the Kaiser, and the war being fought is the Great War.
• The Witchcraft setting uses this trope where the Nazis tried to use Cosmic Horrors to win the War.
• The backstory of Witch Girls Adventures had an openly magical World War II in which Witches and Otherkin sided with the Allies in order to stop a bid to free Sealed Evil in a Can Echidna by evil supernatural forces (including Vlad Dracula) allied with the Axis powers. Then powerful magic was used to erase all memory and record of this.

Video Games

• Master-D in Bionic Commando/Top Secret.
  • The remake, Bionic Commando Rearmed, makes no attempt to hide "The Leader's" identity, but they still don't come right out and say "Nazi" or "Hitler". It makes the whole remade game, which is essentially a retconned prequel for the new, very serious and dark Bionic Commando, very surreal. And then you make his head explode.
• The first Bloodrayne game is loaded with Nazi occultists, dieselpunk mecha, and leather-clad Aryan temptresses armed with sharp objects. Yes, there were jetpack-using Nazis.
• Call of Duty: Zombies started out as this back in World at War, where the undead were the result of genetic experiments from the Germans with Element 115 (with a light smattering of otherworldly possession and corruption on the side) with the trope coming into effect with the revelation of the zombies being controlled by a little German girl within the Aether. This would continue on until the last map of Black Ops II, which instead casts the zombies as the minions of a group of extradimensional Lovecraftian beings known as the Apothicons. Sledgehammer Games' Nazi Zombies took the undead to their roots once more, casting them as experiments of the Nazis and powered by an eldritch energy known as Geistkraft, sourced from the legendary sword of Frederick Barbarossa.
• The Fifth Column, one of the original villain groups in City of Heroes, were Nazis who'd been underground in the US since being sent there to strike from within during World War II. A mid-level story arc had the Fifth Column as modern allies for a Nazi soldier who time-traveled to 21st century Paragon City to learn about Allied plans during World War II and bring the information back to ensure the victory of the Axis. At the higher levels, there were genetically-engineered vampires and werewolves among their ranks, complete with a vampiric archvillain named Nosferatu.
• The LucasArts inspired Adventure Game Flight of the Amazon Queen featured a Mad Scientist planning to transform Amazon women into dinosaurs. All fronted by the Flöda lederhosen company, of course.
• In Hellboy: The Science of Evil, you fight clockwork Nazis, cyborg Nazis, and, in one late-game area, clock-work-cyborg-Nazi-zombies being animated by a Lovecraftian alien worm.
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis features Herr Doktor Hans Ubermann and Klaus Kerner, a Gestapo member of the Thule society himself. Initially, they are trying to find Atlantis for its source of orichalcum, a mystic substance capable of unleashing energy equal to a uranium bomb- with just a single bead of the substance. However, after discovering Atlantean technology the orichalcum can power, they begin growing more interested in the robots and machinery discovered in Atlantis itself- especially the Colossus.
• In Inscryption and the related ARG, it's eventually revealed that the Nazis created some from of Doomsday Device whose activation code was hidden in a pack of Karnoffel cards Hitler carried with him at all times. Something about the Karnoffel Code is decidedly supernatural as, once encoded on a floppy disk, the resulting OLD_DATA caused the game characters to gain sentience and become hostile to one another. One character even claims the OLD_DATA is a digitized form of Satan.
• In The Last Resurrection Hitler is actually the right-hand man to Jesus himself, who in this game is the Big Bad, and teams up with his angels. Could count as a subversion depending on metaphysical semantics.
• Lost Horizon features Nazis hunting for Shambala, a utopian place mentioned in certain Buddhist traditions. They're something of a mixture in terms of mystical versus scientific approaches — the Thule Society appears to lean towards the former, but the main villain is rather disdainful of them, instead stressing her allegedly rationalist approach.
• The New Order: Last Days of Europe:
  • Esoteric Nazism is one of the game's many ideological alignments, associated primarily, though not exclusively, with the SS. While there are no supernatural elements in the game (an alternate history of a Cold War between the US and Nazi Germany), the ideology is pretty mysticist and, well, esoteric, as well as being horrific even by Nazi standards. For some "EsoNaz" leaders, it's mostly about secular Spartanism to build a "stronger" Germany, but Josias zu Waldeck und Pyrmont is obsessed with finding ancient Aryan artifacts while ruling Reichskommissariat Kaukasien as a totalitarian slave state, Sergey Taboritsky turns Russia into a cult devoted to a long-dead heir to the Romanov line should he reunite the shattered nation, Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina is a pawn of the mad mystic José López Rega (which actually happened in real life), and Heinrich Himmler wants to start World War III in order to remake the world in his image.
  • Beyond the Esoteric Nazi sphere, Niccolò Giani is a potential successor to Galeazzo Ciano as Duce of Italy. His ideology is classified as Fascist Mysticism, a sub-branch of vanilla (non-Nazi) fascism, and he is the radical with the Quadrumvirate that unseats Ciano, seeking to build a purified state where fascism took on spiritual importance.
• Operation Darkness has Nazi Zombies, vampire SS officer Alexander Vlado and, on the playable side, a squad of British werewolf commandos.
• The premise of Outlast is a mish-mash of evil corporations and appropriation of Nazi research. A German scientist, Dr. Rudolf G. Wernicke, is explained to have survived WWII and been kept alive through life support and occultistic means.
• In Pathways into Darkness, you encounter the dead members of a Nazi expedition team. One can speak to them with a crystal, and unlike the Wolfenstein example, most of them are helpful, being the only supply of ammunition and information.
• In Persona 2: Innocent Sin this is mixed with Stupid Jetpack Hitler, with the Last Battalion, an alleged remnant of the Nazi regime that was brought to life by the Rumor system, on top of having an army of robots, Hitler is somehow still alive, wielding The Spear of Destiny, the Holy Grail, and is attempting to summon Nyarlathotep. It's actually Nyarlathotep himself, materializing the rumor that Hitler is back and alive.
• Another little known adventure Prisoner of Ice had Nazis attempting to use Lovecraftian horrors as a secret weapon in war.
• Putrefaction has a Nazi cult in the sequel, headed by Adolf Hitler himself (!!!), who turns out to be the source of the zombie outbreak; having escaped into the void during the 1940s, making a pact with a demon lord for immortality, Hitler and his followers uses the void's resources to develop their technology and engineered the putrefaction virus - which took them over a century and a half - before releasing it in 2079 to wipe out humanity.
• Relic Of War has the Axis powers create a line of undead Super Soldiers, the "ZZ" division (The Schutzstaffel-SS-logo was a pair of thunderbolts that looked remarkably like slanted Z's), created by researching the powers of an ancient artifact, the titular Relic. They also create cyborgs through "Unholy" research.
• Thousand-Week Reich, like The New Order: Last Days of Europe, also features Esoteric Nazism, this time as a sub-ideology of National Socialism. Should the SS prevail in the Succession Crisis following Hitler's death, esoteric Nazis will come to power in Nazi Germany with Heinrich Himmler as the most enthusiastic supporter, and should he prevail in the power struggle within the SS afterwards, he will spiral into insanity such that he can turn Nazi Germany into the "Aryan Empire" and start reviving paganism as the state religion.
• Uncharted:
  • In Drake's Fortune, Nathan discovers a German U-Boat and base that discovered El Dorado, only to learn it was cursed. You find a lot of dead Nazis. And the things that killed them.
  • In Among Thieves, Hitler is on the list of powerful men theorized to have gained their power by holding a tiny fraction of the Cintamani Stone, and then subverted. Late in the game, it turns out that the stone doesn't exist, it's a metaphor for the unusual but not supernatural sap from the Tree of Life that gives those who drink it Nigh-Invulnerability and, eventually, madness. Though not stated in-game, one might assume that in this version of events, drinking the sap didn't give Hitler any advantages in World War II because he wasn't a front line soldier, and may have caused his eventual mental collapse. Although it does provide a sound explanation for why he survived his assassination attempt.
• From the Wolfenstein series:
  • In Wolfenstein 3-D: Spear of Destiny, the player must recover the titular Spear from Hitler's grasp, and encounters a supernatural protector called the Angel of Death.
  • Basically the entire premise of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It has you trying to prevent the Nazis of the SS Paranormal Division from resurrecting an ancient Germanic warrior as an invincible superweapon, while fighting off cybernetic Super-Soldiers and zombies animated by dark magic. The supposedly invincible demigod, however, reveals himself surprisingly weak to Venom gun bullets...
  • In Wolfenstein (2009), the Paranormal Division is back, and takes this trope even further with extra-dimensional travel, Nazi mages, energy guns and yes, Nazis with jetpacks.
  • In the iPhone Wolfenstein RPG, the Nazis attempt to stop BJ's assault by summoning the final boss, The Harbinger of Doom. After BJ blows his arm and leg off, the demon vows to get revenge on his descendants. Flash forward a few centuries, and Doomguy is fighting a rebuilt Harbinger, better known as the Cyberdemon!
  • In Wolfenstein: The New Order, this is actually subverted. Germany has plenty of super-tech but no occult elements at all. The standalone DLC, The Old Blood, brings it back, though— it features a dark magic-fuelled Zombie Apocalypse engulfing the town of Wulfburg, a Nazi commander trying to dig up artifacts of supernatural power (said to have belonged to real-life Holy Roman Emperor Otto I), and a giant Eldritch Abomination slumbering beneath the town, which is later awakened by said commander.
• The Zombie Army Trilogy, which originally began as the extra "Nazi Zombie Army Mode" for Sniper Elite V2, plays this to the tee; as the combined Allied and Soviet forces press into Berlin, a defeated Hitler demands the activation of "Plan Z"; using demonic relics to summon hellish forces that reanimate the millions of Nazi dead as voracious zombies. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a case of Gone Horribly Right, as German High Command split up the three pieces of the relic needed to control the zombies before activating the ritual, and so they promptly begin tearing through Allies, Soviets and surviving Germans indiscriminately. You play as one of several survivors, an eclectic mixture of Americans, French, Russians and Germans, striving first to escape the zombie-infested Berlin, then to retrieve the relics and ultimately kill Zombie Hitler and close the Hellmouth allowing him to reanimate the dead.

Visual Novels

• Dies Irae features the Longinus Dreizehn Orden as its primary bad guys, a group of immortal, magically enhanced Nazis lead by the infamous hangman of the Third Reich, Reinhard Heydrich carrying the title of Mephistopheles while Karl Ernst Krafft is a genuine magician having taught them all these secrets, and all seek to have a wish granted by sacrificing the people in Suwahara City. It ends with (depending on route) Reinhard succeeding with the sacrifice and ascending to become a God while Krafft is revealed to in reality be the God of the universe, Mercurius, acting under alias. Amusingly, for the most part they are Nazis In Name Only with most of the members just being a ragtag bunch that, in some cases quite literally, where just taken off the street.
• Parodied in Panzermadels, where all the members of the Occult Club are WWII era German tanks.

Webcomics

• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Hitler inexplicably appears in Dracula's moon base. Though that might just be because Dracula apparently collects historical figures.
• The Good Hitler vs. Space Hitler arc of the webcomic Goats.
• Irregular Webcomic! plays with this trope for all its worth, as indicated by the quote above. In one storyline, Montana Jones and his father try to stop the Nazis from getting their hands on all the world's major occult artifacts. The Nazis, in turn, are being ordered around by Hitler's Brain in a Jar.
  • The really strange thing is that the Montana Jones storyline takes place before World War II.
    • "Nazi science sneers at historical accuracy!"
    • They explained this here. Alternate Universe, big time.
• In The Specialists, this is how the first ubermenschen were made.
• Spinnerette has Kugelblitz, a former member of the "Third Reich's Sorcery Batallion" who planned to infuse a Hitler clone with the soul of the real deal.
• Stalin vs. Hitler does this a great deal both for both Hitler and Stalin. Here's an English translation. The first panel was the original page image. Hitler is depicted as a fairly typical mad sorcerer, while Stalin's own magic is powered by Marxist-Leninist ideology (no, really).
• Strange Aeons is a Diesel Punk themed webcomic where the Nazi villains are planning to use the Necronomicon for some yet-unknown evil purpose.

Web Original

• Bed Time Stories Youtube Channel has the episode centered on the Celle Neues Rathaus, a town hall turned literal Haunted Headquarters where it's heavily implied that members of the SS, under Himmler's orders, conducted occult experiments in the building's basement.
• In Magic, Metahumans, Martians and Mushroom Clouds: An Alternate Cold War, the Nazis are the first ones to seriously invest in paranormal research, due to Himmler's obsession with the subject. Among other things, they create rune-enhanced guns that never miss their target and wards that protect buildings from damage even from direct hits, and during the closing days of the war Himmler seriously considers summoning Eldritch Abominations to drive off the Allies, only to be voted down by the rest of the Nazi high command (on the grounds that they'd be too difficult to control). After the war is over, the Americans and Soviets confiscate most of their research for themselves, a la Operation Paperclip.
• In Marble Witch the Nazis use warwitches and dragons. Then again, so do most of the belligerents.
• The Slender Man Mythos:
  • It's implied in Tribe Twelve that the Collective has Nazi affiliations. "Affiliations" in this case meaning "stalked and abducted a Nazi soldier named Sebastian Kraus". As the internet did not exist during World War II, Sebastian was unable to make blog posts or upload his encounters with Slendy to Youtube like most people these days do in his situation, so he kept a journal instead. Said journal is one of the series' MacGuffins.
  • HABIT from Everyman HYBRID, an Ax-Crazy spirit capable of Demonic Possession, has the infamous Nazi Mad Scientist Josef Mengele among the long list of names on his Historical Rap Sheet. Even worse, he confirms in in a crossover episode with Tribe Twelve that he actually worked with Sebastian Kraus during his time as Mengele.
• The AlternateHistory.com story Vivere Militare Est by rvbomally has, as its Point of Divergence, the Nazis and Imperial Japan unleashing preternatural weaponry in Europe and the Pacific in 1945, fueled by human sacrifices in the form of The Holocaust and Unit 731. This brings them Back from the Brink and allows them to start pushing back; the only thing stopping their renewed conquests is when the Allies deploy preternatural weaponry of their own, culminating in a "despoiler bomb" dropped on Kyoto that renders the city an uninhabitable Eldritch Location. By 2015, the world is locked in a multi-sided Cold War between the Anglo-American alliance (with France as a stubbornly independent supporter), the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, all of whom have lunar colonies and are armed with enough preternatural weaponry to destroy the fabric of reality around Earth, while many parts of the world (Poland, India, New Zealand, a vast swath of Africa) have gone to hell in a handbasket thanks to the occult run amok. It's specifically mentioned that the ultimate fate of Adolf Hitler and his corpse, if he died at all, is unknown and widely disputed, with multiple Nazi splinter cults claiming to have cloned Hitler, uploaded his brain and/or soul into a computer, or contacted his spirit; needless to say, these claims do not amuse the actual NSDAP in Germany, which has mellowed out considerably since 1945 (now, it's a run-of-the-mill bureaucratic dictatorship that treats Hitler the way our world's PRC treats Mao Zedong — "yeah, he was our nation's founder, but don't bring up all the other stuff he did") and sees them all as challenges to their leadership. And of course, there's the 'rogue state' of North Italy, run by surviving fascist diehards that even the Germans are now embarrassed by, serving as a combination of this trope and North Korea.
• In the Whateley Universe, supervillain The Necromancer has actually reminisced about doing occult evil for the Nazis. Although he didn't get that unstoppable zombie army up and running (shambling?) in time.
  • At the end of "The Widening Gyre"[1] when everyone involved in The Troll Bride's attempt to claim Eldritch as a stolen family heirloom (despite warnings from her son Nephandus not to pull something like that on campus) are called into Headmistress Carson's office, Carson (AKA Lady Astarte) mentions that she recognizes Contessa Arvidsen-duChantraine as an old foe, Eisern-Jungefrau, saying that school neutrality would keep her from reporting her to the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation - this time - so long as she left and didn't return.
• The notorious Flash adventure game Which Way Adventure (you know, the one with the manticores) contains a scene where Hitler steals your time-traveling helmet and flamethrower and proceeds to fill the world with zombies. Er.
• In X, there is a cult, heavily implied to be The Klan, who summons Adolf Hitler out of Hell.
• Creepypasta:
  • "Cry of the Revenant" has the narrator's grandpa tell him about the time his squad, plus one terrified SS big-wig, fought off an ancient, undead aryan (one of the god-like people who settled in what is now Germany in nazi mythology) warrior, who was absolutely honked off about being ressurected by nazi wizards.
  • "Valkyrie" is about an Afterlife Express (the emponymous Valkyrie) that ferries the souls of dead Nazi war criminals to Hell.
  • There's one about a haunted copy of The Lion King for the Sega Genesis that was ROM Hacked by the Nazis (apparently inspired by a real bootleg of the game that inexplicably features swastika-emblazoned dirigibles as platforms), presumably involving Time Travel and a very bored technician somehow.

Western Animation

• A rare twist in the Love, Death & Robots short "The Secret War". A Soviet CheKa officer tried to use a Siberian pagan ritual to summon an army of flesh-eating ghouls to aid the Red Army in their war against the White Russians. Naturally the ghouls couldn't be controlled so easily.

Real Life

• In Real Life the Nazi most interested in the occult was Heinrich Himmler, while Hitler personally had very little interest in the subject, mostly seeing the dramatic and political implications of secret societies, and banning all that didn't support his reign. While he admired the Teutonic myths, his intention was not to replace Christianity with a dead religion, but to get the state to absorb all the properties of a religion, much like the Soviet Union had done, at least for starters - one can only speculate what would have followed if he had won, or WWII had ended in a stalemate. Some state papers the Allies discovered after the fall of Berlin discussed either "Aryanizing" Christianity or completely replacing it with a new religion centered around Hitler, whom the Nazi Party would proclaim the Germanic messiah.
  • Himmler also had a spiritual adviser named Karl Wiligut, who was quite an interesting character. While Himmler believed himself to be a reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, Wiligut believed he was a descendant of the Norse god Thor. Wiligut conducted SS rituals in Wewelsburg Castle, studied and taught the secrets of the runes. When word got out of his stays in mental hospitals, his abuse of his wife, and sexual advances he made on his own daughters, he was quietly institutionalized.
  • Himmler believed in the existence of the Holy Grail, which he thought to be a Pagan artifact with connections to Odin. He enlisted the help of Otto Rahn, a known archaeologist and Holy Grail aficionado, to track down the mystical chalice. It was a real case of an odd alliance, as Rahn was gay, possibly part Jewish, and not a supporter of Nazism.
    • If the thought of an archaeologist searching for the Holy Grail sounds familiar, it's because Indiana Jones was based on Otto Rahn.
  • Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess believed it so much that he was inspired by a dream to make an unauthorized peace proposal by parachuting into Britain to offer it. Hitler quickly disavowed Hess, had his propaganda machine paint him as a total flake and had scores of psychics, mediums etc. rounded up as a scapegoat for Hess embarrassing the Third Reich.
• The definition of an "Aryan" is more complicated than you might think. Hitler used the term, Aryan, to refer to both the ancient Indo-Europeans and contemporary white people, excluding Slavs and Jews (both white and non-white). There was also an Aryan hierarchy based on how Nordic an ethnic group was, as well as their support for the Third Reich. On the other hand, Himmler and other Nazi Occultists saw the ancient Aryans as what we now know as the most popular depiction of them, blue-eyed blond Übermensch who were originally from Atlantis and possessed supernatural powers due to their advanced biology. They thought that the Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Modern Germans were the descendants of Atlantis. However, the Jews used Christianity to suppress the descendants of Atlantis in a Dark Age of ignorance, and therefore they need to be eliminated. Much of the rituals of the SS revolved around these ideas of the ancient Aryans, Nordicism, and blood. Hitler agreed with the Occultists on Nordic superiority, but that was about it. Any other Occult symbolism used by Hitler (such as the infamous Swastika) was purely for imagery and propaganda.
  • The real Aryan people, on the other hand, were never Nordic. They're Middle Eastern, specifically the natives of Iran (the nation's name literally means "of the Aryans").
• Occult beliefs varied among the Nazis; for example, Albert Speer showed no interest, while Rudolf Hess was almost as into the Occult as Himmler. Also, the Thule Society was shut down after the leadership became politically unreliable. Hitler shut down a lot of Occult societies, but not because they were Occultic. He just didn't trust secret societies.
• It is worth mentioning that the Thule Society actually did play a major role in Nazism. A member named Karl Harrer formed the German Workers' Party with Anton Drexler, who was largely responsible for establishing links between the Thule Society and other political and worker organizations. Eventually, Hitler would turn this party into the National Socialist German Worker's Party. The Thule Society continued to be its main sponsor for a while. Chances are without them, the Nazis never would have come to power. The Thulists put the Nazis together to recruit street muscle following a failed but bloody Communist uprising in Munich.
  • Hitler and Himmler were never members of the Thule Society, and there's also no evidence that either of them ever even attended a meeting. However, other Nazis who were either members or frequent visitors included: Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.
• There's the interesting case of Erik Jan Hanussen, a hypnotist, mentalist, and fortuneteller who has been attributed with teaching Hitler his charismatic form of public speaking, predicting the Reichstag fire that enabled Hitler to seize absolute power, and later being assassinated by the SA for getting too much influence with the Führer. Bear in mind, like most other Nazi-occultism allegations, there is a good chance that a lot of stories associated with him are more sensationalism than fact.
• Esoteric Hitlerism is basically the idea of the Ghostapo turned into a new religious movement (and likely inspiration for Iron Sky). According to Miguel Serrano, one of the founders of this religion, Hitler was an occult messiah who survived the fall of the Second World War and hid inside of the Hollow Earth, the SS was a recreation of medieval knightly orders searching for alien technologies, runes were ancient magic originating from the North Pole, and at the end of the world, Hitler will return with Nazi UFOs to free humankind from demon influence. Even many surviving SS occultists called Serrano and other Esoteric Hitlerists crazy. It didn't help that Serrano thought Hitler was a Buddhist Bodhisattva, a "living saint" come to redeem humanity from the "spiritual corruption" of the Jews.
  • This idea was begun by Savitri Devi, philosopher and environmentalist, who thought Hitler was literally an incarnation of Vishnu. And who preached this revelation in occupied post-war Germany, getting her imprisoned and expelled from the country over it.
• As noted above, a number of neo-Nazi groups have also embraced this trope due to their anti-Semitic sentiments extending to Christianity. Varg Vikernes, the infamous Black Metal musician who murdered fellow black-metaler Euronymous, is an outspoken pagan and Nazi sympathizer, his involvement in a number of church burnings in Norway in The '90s motivated primarily by nationalist/religious causes that saw Christianity as foreign to Scandinavia. This article by Sarah Lyons for Vice goes into more detail on how neo-Nazis have latched onto paganism, particularly "reconstructionist" pagan faiths that attempt to recreate ancient pre-Christian religions.

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