The closest equivalent English word for the term völkisch is 'national,' but in German the word means more than just national. It includes the eagerness to cultivate the features typical of the nation and at the same time eliminate the material and spiritual influences of other peoples or cultures. Similar 'nationalistic-patriotic' organisations had come into being during the imperial Wilhelmine era following the beginning of the Kulturkampf.

Following the Vatican's 1870 decrees advocating 'Ultramontanism' (belief in the ultimate authority of the Papacy above that of loyalty to the State) and the creation of an anti-Prussian Catholic Centre Party, anti-Catholic 'Falk Laws' were passed by Reichskanzler Otto von Bismarck in May 1873 to subject the Church to State regimentation, thus reinforcing the State's - and not the Church's - prior claim on citizens' obedience. The Laws seriously limited Catholics' rights in Wilhelmine Germany. However, negotiations with Pope Leo XIII led to a relaxation of the Laws and to a restoration of Catholics' rights in 1887. Quasi-romantic societies such as the All-Deutsch Verein (Pan-German League) and the Ostmarkverein (Eastern Provinces Association) stressed völkisch ideas during this time. By the end of the First World War there were around seventy-five völkisch organisations working within the Weimar Republic on behalf of a feverish nationalist extremism. The movement advocated race mysticism, pseudo-biology/science, romantic yearning for a mythical Volksgemeinschaft of past Germanic rural life, and anti-Semitism. Its literature emphasized the idea of recasting history as a primeval battle between the pastoral blond Nordic hero and the urban parasitic Jew. The later Nazi concept of Blut und Boden found its origins in the völkisch view of a pastoral Germanic past, urging 'good German Aryan students' to do rural labour service a patriotic duty.

The völkisch movement provided the historical roots and constituted the organisational as well as the ideological starting point of National-Socialism. In München Hitler was deeply impressed by, particularly, the Thule Geßellschaft, the local group of the German Völkisch Protection and Defence League, which included among its members Gottfried Feder and Alfred Rosenberg, and only slightly less so the Tatkreis. Point 19 of Hitler's Twenty-five Points of the NSDAP's political programme demanded the abolition of Roman Law - seen as 'a foreign importation beneficial only to the rich man and his paid lackey, the lawyer' - and its replacement by Germanic law. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote: "the basic ideas of the National-Socialist movement are völkisch and the völkisch ideas are National-Socialist." At the same time, as a political propagandist, he made certain to dissociate National-Socialism from the typical völkisch clubs, which he regarded as sectarian groups run by bourgeois philistines. The older völkisch movement, he said, did not understand that an idea had no value as long as it was not turned into action. He himself would take a sterile and powerless idea and transform it by the use of political power. In essence this was the theme of Hitler's career.

The Führer himself, however, wanted no independent-minded individuals among the rightist élite any more than among his leftist enemies. Many of the völkisch groups had either merged with others before Hitler's ascension to power in 1933, or were absorbed into the NSDAP by 1936 during the Gleichschaltung ('Co-ordination'), most members having already joined the Nazi Party.

Curiously, many of the American ultra-right groups of the late-20th Century similarly advocate völkisch ideas: anti-democracy, anti-liberalism, anti-capitalism, anti-immigration, and above all Aryan or Nordic 'racial superiority' over all other races, as well as anti-Semitism at the heart of the notion of an 'historical struggle between the pastoral blond Nordic hero and the urban parasitic Jew' ....