How much was Hitler and the Nazis influenced by the occult? Basically not at all, it was fiction created after the war to sell books. Made up out of whole cloth like the Bermuda Triangle, but widely promoted and believed: [skeptoid.com]
I’m a huge fan of the Skeptoid podcast: have been listening to it (religiously) for many, many years. Brian Dunning is very thorough and reliable in his clinical dissection of popularly held (but fallacious) beliefs, such as this one. It’s a must listen for anyone desiring to sharpen their critical thinking skills.
Or possibly not. Yale University Press published Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich by Eric Kurlander. Here's a review: [religionandpolitics.org]
And it's far from the only scholarly work to find esoteric traditions alive and well in the Nazi party's philosophy and practice.
Occult ideas had a place in Nazi Germany, for certain. For example, Peter Bender, a pilot and protege of Goering's, promulgated a hollow earth theory. Not only is the Earth hollow, he claimed, but we live inside it. This theory was shot down in 1942, when the Germans tried using powerful telescopes to spot the Royal Navy on the other side of the supposedly hollow planet, and only saw more sky. Bender ended his life in a concentration camp.
This isn't to say Nazis were out looking for the Lost Ark, but they were certainly open to ideas that most people would label insane. Like looking for the Holy Grail. sigh [brobible.com]
The main point of Nazi ideology was to build on already existing features of the mainstream culture. That's how you push people into doing extreme things, by making them seem to be just banal extensions of what their existing culture was leading to anyway. The main religious influences were therefore Christianity, plus Norse and West European mythology, which they could interpret metaphorically just as much as was needed and no more to justify their ideas.
To that they, especially Hitler himself who was a master of it, added the old political trick of, if you stand for nothing you can appear to stand for everything, as long as you use the right tone of voice. So that if he was talking to the trade unions, he would talk about defending workers rights against grasping bosses, and if he was talking to capital, he would talk about defending capital against demands for tax funded projects.
It was a trick which in resent years was employed wonderfully, by our prime minister T. Blair. ( Perhaps the most truly evil creep to run a European country since the Nazis. But that is getting of subject.) The point of both tricks, was to make the victims of the brain washing think that it was there own ideas that were being presented to them, and reinforced. The old con-mans trick, of make the mark think that the plan is their idea.
That is exactly why it was important not to go too far out into new ideologies, or fanciful cults.