Playing With / Ghostapo

Basic Trope: Nazi Germany is equipped with and fights with supernatural weaponry, occult rituals, dark magic and necromancy.

• Straight: The Nazis have sought the services of a powerful magician to help them win the war with his control over the supernatural.
• Exaggerated:
  • Nazis have entire batallions of magically enhanced Super Soldiers, squads of fireball-throwing Evil Sorcerors, enchanted artillery rounds, Magitek tanks and The Wild Hunt is formed to a Waffen-SS division under command of Odin himself.
    • Even more so, if combined with Stupid Jetpack Hitler.
  • The entire Second World War — up to and including the Holocaust — is part of a ritual performed by an Ancient Conspiracy of Nazi alchemists to summon an all-powerful Eldritch Abomination.
• Downplayed: The Nazis have a few low level magicians on staff for consultation, but nothing really comes of it.
• Justified:
  • In Real Life, high-ranking Nazis were connected with secret societies with interests in and links to the occult.
  • The setting is an Urban Fantasy where supernatural entities and magic co-exist with Real Life.
  • The Nazis embrace magic as being part of "Aryan heritage".
  • The Nazis are desperate enough to try anything.
• Inverted:
  • Facing defeat from the Nazi war machine, the Allies turn in desperation to magic in order to balance the odds.
  • Combined with Parodied: Nazis are used as auxilary troops by The Fair Folk.
  • As part of their overall ideology with regards to racial supremacy, the Nazis view magical practitioners and supernatural beings as "subhuman" and hunt them in order to exterminate them.
  • Vampires think Nazi blood is delicious.
  • Nazis refuse to believe in the supernatural even when it's staring them in the face.
  • The Unseelie weren't nice to begin with but they become more of a threat when they fall under a charismatic dictator and start becoming like the Nazis, complete with Industrialized Evil and super-weapon projects, and go from viewing humanity as playthings to 'ironmongering filth' that must be destroyed.
  • The Nazis became weapons for other supernatural evil after their deaths - first demons exploited their damned souls as lower profile minions then dark wizards learned to summon them as well.
  • Supernatural partisans have fought and sabotaged the nazis consistently.
  • Stupid Jetpack Hitler — The Nazis use the highest levels of tech possible, straying far, far away from nature, let alone magic at all.
• Subverted:
  • The magician the Nazis have approached turns out to be a fraud, and his 'magic' easily defeated.
  • The 'occult' project turns out to be a non-magical highly advanced technological secret weapon that its creator has dressed up in occult terms in order to get funding from his superstitious superiors.
  • While the occult is very real Nazis instead deal with their own twisted worldview flattering nonsense.
  • The Nazis succeed in summoning The Wild Hunt - which, being the Norse version led by Odin, consists of honorable warrior types and promptly defects to the Allies as soon as they see the Nazis and their brazen hypocrisy and cowardice.
• Double Subverted:
  • ... At least, that's what the magician wants the Allies to think.
  • The "occult" technological superweapon is powered by science that, on closer examination, can't actually work, but does anyway.
  • While blundering around with their self-aggrandizing ideology-before-evidence nonsense approach, the Nazis accidentally discover an occult power, obscure or long-buried, that is more than willing to exploit them for their own ends.
  • After the Nazis are spurned by most of the existing supernatural forces in this way, and are staring down certain defeat, they summon a world-ending Eldritch Abomination purely out of spite.
• Parodied:
  • The Sealed Evil in a Can the Nazis are trying to magically evoke turns out to literally be pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
  • The Nazis worship an occult deity which is really an anthropomorphic cartoon frog.
• Zig Zagged: Those Wacky Nazis release the Sealed Evil in a Can in order to gain an edge against the Allied forces, however it turns out said evil has an army of minions, thus creating an entire new faction for the war. The Allies, upon bribing the entity, convince it to join them. Finally, it is revealed that this was an elaborate scheme created by both the Nazis and the entity to take down The Allies from the inside..... and the entity fights the Nazis.
• Averted: There's no magic; the Nazis fight as they did in Real Life.
• Enforced:
  • "Nazis by themselves aren't scary! Give them an alliance with The Fair Folk/an Evil Sorcerer!"
  • The author is very interested in the Real Life occult links the Nazis had, but doesn't feel that by themselves this would be an interesting story so decides to exaggerate them.
• Lampshaded: "According to these reports, the Nazi high command have been meeting with powerful figures in occult circles with increasing frequency; Intelligence believes that some form of supernatural or paranormal attack is imminent. That's where you and your team comes in, Colonel."
• Invoked: A powerful pro-Nazi necromancer approaches the Nazi High Command offering his services.
• Exploited: Allied forces make intense supplement of silver bullets and Cold Iron bayonets to the front in order to fight off Nazi werewolves and Fae.
• Defied:
  • A group of white magicians opposed to Nazi Germany work in secret to ensure that any black magic or practicing magicians who could help the Nazis are dealt with before the Nazis can approach / use them.
  • Hitler scoffs at the proposal his occultist underlings have prepared for him about using necromancy to win the war and dismisses it outright.
  • The Nazis are utterly unsuitable for any form of supernatural alliance or learning of the abilities themselves. They have managed an impressive feat of utterly disgusting every last supernatural faction out there and the only people of suitable character for any form of magic among their members are already double agents.
• Discussed:
  • "The first time anyone tried summoning the Riders of Unseelie was in Germany 1945, as the Russians approached Berlin. It was also the last time; every single member of the SS unit involved disappeared. Horribly."
  • "You're trying to beay the tanks with runes and spells? I don't understand! That's impossible!" "Zen ve vill hav to make you understand, Herr Standartenfuhrer..."
• Conversed:
  • "Oh look, a story about the Nazis raising dead again." "Well, they did have lots of ties to the occult..."
  • "Hey, get this: I'm playing a WW2 tactics game, and you can have Odin and Thor storming the Normandy beaches!" "...what? How? Why?" "Well, the Nazis summoned them and kinda forgot how much the Norse gods value bravery, so they defected." "That doesn't answer my question!"
• Implied: Nazis have strange superweapons that are ambigously magical.
• Deconstructed:
  • The Nazis might be able to summon powerful supernatural forces, but this does not equal being able to control them; the Nazis soon find themselves on the losing side along with the rest of humanity as their rituals backfire on them.
  • In something similar to what happened in Real Life, the Nazis throw so much time, effort and resources into supernatural projects — many of which go nowhere — that they neglect their conventional forces, meaning the Allies still have an edge that enables them to win the war.
  • In a variation of the above, the Nazi supernatural project can theoretically work, but it's utterly impractical; it's too time-consuming or resource-intensive to easily activate and will ultimately weaken Nazi Germany so much that even if they do cause some damage to the Allies they'll end up losing anyway.
  • The Anenerbe finally succeed and make a bond with The Wild Hunt. They get easily mowed down by machinegunners and squashed by tanks, not even given a chance to use their medieval weaponry.
  • The Nazis' own racial bias and fascist ideologies causes them to underutilize and misuse the supernatural, making it no more effective to the war effort than the real "wonder weapons" they developed.
  • Evil Is Not a Toy, and the Nazis are the first idiots to get annihilated by the Evil going on a rampage.
• Reconstructed:
  • The Nazis specifically seek out a supernatural entity which shares their ideology and / or which they can easily bind and control.
  • Nazi necromancy, while time consuming and resource-intensive, is still powerful and formidable enough to give the Allies a hard time.
  • The Wild Hunt appears to be Immune to Bullets, easily reaches the Allied trenches and give the bayonet-armed grunts a Curb-Stomp Battle with swords and spears.
• Played For Laughs:
  • The Nazis intend to defeat the Allies by impressing them with the kind of conjuring tricks you'd find performed at a child's birthday party. The Allies take it seriously. "My God...there could be Rabbits the size of Elephants in that hat! And if he can remove his own thumb, he could remove ours as well! Game Over Man!"
  • The single zombie the ritual managed to awaken walks up to the Nazi Necromancer, gives him a wedgie, and goes back to being dead.
    • Alternatively, he manages to bring back the Allied soldiers his comrades killed, and gets absolutely creamed by them.
  • The Nazis summon what could have been a Cosmic Entity... under two feet tall.
• Played For Drama: Allied Intelligence learns that a top-secret Nazi project has been established to summon a powerful Eldritch Abomination that they will use to create a Third Reich that will never end, and must assemble a crack team to prevent this before the Nazis succeed and bring about a thousand years of darkness, or even The End of the World as We Know It.
• Played for Horror: Every single atrocity the Nazis have ever committed is meant to empower them mystically. Every single one.
• Intended Audience Reaction: Well, the audience will always feel good about watching Nazis getting curb-stomped For Justice, and Satanist Nazis? Yup, definitely will feel more good about them getting wiped out.
• Plotted A Good Waste: The crazy Odin-worshipping Nazi leader is crazy and nothing more, and if the Germans are a threat it is demonstrated to be because that idiot got Kicked Upstairs and left the more realistically vile and even-minded subordinates to do their job.

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