One of the things that I like emphasize on this site is that human psychology isn't as straightforward as we might assume. In the area of religion this is important because religion intersects a great deal with public policy and culture, and, I think my fellow atheists often have a fallacious model of how religious people think. The complexity and separability of mental processes and chains of inference are important to keep in mind when we posit a model of how humans "tick," and we shouldn't dismiss rationalization or irrationality as aberrations. Here is an interesting passage from The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (page 42):
The examiners were well aware that the Reichsführer-SS was not exactly green-card material [certificate of Aryan racial purity], with his small, pigeon-chested body, round face, sallow skin, dark hair, and receding chin. Indeed, one racial advisor noted with detachment after the war that Himmler was "an unassimilated half-breed and unfit for the SS." But very few people dared to say such things to their leader's face. At a social event one evening, however, the wife of a high-ranking SS officer, Dr. Werner Best, broached the problem with Himmler. She observed that the Nazi party would instantly lose its entire leadership-"The Führer, you Herr Himmler, Dr. Goebbels ... " -if the principles of racial selection were strictly applied. Himmler was not the least disturbed by this remark, however. He brushed off the criticism, remarking that while he did not appear Nordic, he certainly possed a Nordic brain.
Leo Felton, a white supremacist leader whose father was African American justified his ideological stance in the same manner, drawing upon Francis Parker Yockey's conception of spiritual racialism.