I approached the study of Germanic mythology with considerable anxiety, since I was aware of the massive taboo against this topic. This taboo was created by the fact that the Nazis appeared to have been deeply involved in an attempted revival of ancient Germanic religion and practices.
Like most people I had an almost visceral revulsion against any belief system even remotely associated with the Nazis' genocidal ideology. Yet my study of Germanic myth did not find any resemblance to the paranoid racism that was central to the Nazi worldview.
Basically, it appears that the Nazis appropriated certain themes that they claimed to have found in Germanic myth, and combined them with illusory assumptions about Aryan racial supremacy, for their own ideological, propagandistic purposes. One could say the Nazis laid a curse on Germanic mythology.
Nevertheless, I found that I needed to delve into the psychological origins of the Nazi ideology, in order to separate the distortion from the reality, and try to undo the curse that they laid on ancient Germanic religion and mythology. . . .
-- Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance
