Bernhard Kummer

Bernhard Kummer (21 January 1897, Leipzig – 1 December 1962, Bad Segeberg) was a Germanist who was appointed to a professorship in the Nazi era and whose writings have been influential among postwar neo-Nazis. He was a prominent representative of Nordicism, the view that the so-called Nordic race was inherently culturally advanced, and in books including his best known work, Midgards Untergang, he argues that the conversion of the Germanic peoples from their native Germanic paganism, particularly the Christianisation of Scandinavia, was detrimental to European culture.

Kummer earned his doctorate at the University of Leipzig under the theologian Hans Haas, first publishing Midgards Untergang in 1927 as his doctoral thesis. A committed National Socialist, he joined the Nazi Party in 1928 (member number 87,841), was also a member of the SA, and wrote articles for Nazi publications beginning in 1927. He left the party in 1930 because membership was preventing him from obtaining a public post or scholarship and he was having difficulty providing for his family;Gustav Neckel had applied for a scholarship on his behalf in 1929. He rejoined the party only late in the Third Reich, but for reasons of conflict with other Nazis, not out of lack of commitment to its ideology; he requested readmission beginning in 1933, and was supported by the Association of National Socialist Dozents, which he represented in his division of the University of Jena. After the Nazis came to power, he lectured widely to party organisations and was a dozent at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin. From 1938 he belonged to the SA "Working Group for Weltanschauung and Culture". He never completed his habilitation (the two volumes published as Herd und Altar—Hearth and Altar—had been intended to serve that purpose) but taught at the University of Jena beginning in October 1936, and on 1 May 1942 was appointed Professor of Old Norse language and culture together with Germanic history of religion.

...
Wikipedia