Bernhard Kummer (21 January 1897 in Leipzig – 1 December 1962 in 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.

[4] 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;[5] he requested readmission beginning in 1933,[6] and was supported by the Association of National Socialist Dozents, which he represented in his division of the University of Jena.

[7] He never completed his habilitation (the two volumes published as Herd und Altar—Hearth and Altar—had been intended to serve that purpose)[4] 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.

[10] In Midgards Untergang (1927) his main focus is on what can be learned of ancient Germanic culture from the sources; in Mission als Sittenwechsel (1933) he examines the effect of the "collective mental injury" of conversion and loss of culture; and in Der Machtkampf zwischen Volk, König und Kirche im alten Norden (Volume 2 of Herd und Altar, 1939), he ascribes to the conversion all the ills of his own time as he saw them: "usury, homelessness, mass culture, [loss of dignity], treason against blood and army, cowardice, the disregard of ancestral heritage, [failure to resist] the enticements of the day, corruption, disrespect of national interests, a [morality] of adultery, poverty among children, degeneration of motherly love, and intellectual disbelief.

[30] Höfler was able to point out the potential destructiveness of such sectarianism in the Third Reich,[30] and his viewpoint easily supported the notion of National Socialism as the culmination of Germanic history, whereas Kummer had to resort to a reawakening of suppressed cultural forces.

[21] Heinrich Himmler intervened in the quarrel and Kummer was forced to withdraw his attacks on Höfler and resign from the journal Nordische Stimmen, which he had founded;[31] only then did his academic career advance.