was incarcerated in a concentration camp for three and a half months in 1945. Later developments in Nazi esotericism The Thule Society was dissolved still in the 1920s, well before Hitler's rise to power, and the anti-Masonic legislation of 1935 closed down esoteric organisations including völkisch occultist ones. Karl Maria Wiligut, the chief occultist influence on the Nazi establishment, retired in 1939. Alfred Rosenberg, whose 1930 Myth of the Twentieth Century had been important in the foundation of Nazi racist ideology, and Heinrich Himmler, who added a number of occultist "design elements" to the Schutzstaffel, did remain high ranking party members throughout the war. Himmler's mystic tendencies can be seen in the Ahnenerbe organization and the Wewelsburg castle. According to their private writings, the leaders of the Nazi Party in Germany did not wish to encourage forms of paganism which did not serve to further their goals of promoting pan-Germanic ethnic consciousness. Already in 1927, Hitler had fired the Gauleiter of Thüringen, Artur Dinter, from his post because he wanted too much to make a religion of Aryan racial purity. In 1928, Dinter was expelled from the party when he publicly attacked Hitler about this decision. Rudolf von Sebottendorff had been involved in the Thule Society. In January 1933 he published Bevor Hitler kam: Urkundlich aus der Frühzeit der Nationalsozialistischen Bewegung (Before Hitler Came: Documents from the Early Days of the National Socialist Movement). Nazi authorities disliked the book, which was banned in the following year. Sebottendorff was arrested but managed to flee to Turkey. Esotericists in Nazi Germany Karl Spiesberger Ludwig Straniak Wilhelm Wulff A. Frank Glahn Karl Maria Wiligut Carl Reichenbach Hellmut Wolff Karl Ernst Krafft After 1945 Other than popular Western astrology, there is also a school of thought regarding Germanic Runic Astrology and its usage in divination within the northern tradition of Odinism. The work of Friedrich Bernhard Marby was continued by Rudolf Arnold Spieth, who also published one of his works posthumously. A revival of Neopaganism in Germany and Austria began in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, mainstream esotericism in German-speaking Europe has been dominated by generic New Age syncretism as it developed in the United States. During the COVID pandemic, anthroposophy followers have met for "walks" with anti-vaxxers and the extreme right right to protest government regulations. Anthroposophy has "a proximity to the mindset of conspiracy theorists", according to Helmut Zander. Notes Literature Anna