Davem,
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Tolkien had been confronted with the 'fact' of how devastating a mythology could be. In a way he had had the power of myth confirmed to him by the war. I think he had decided he didn't want to take the risk, so he actually stopped writing a 'mythology' - at least in the sense that he had understood the term, & had decided to write something else entirely. What he 'renounced' was writing a mythology for England, with all that implied
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You make a lot of sense, but I am a stubborn soul!
I can agree with you that the Nazi example must have underlined to Tolkien the dangers of using any mythology to define what a country is: that he could not be assured of producing the same effect that the Kalevala did in Finland. I have never seen anything written by the author concerning the large number of fascist sympathizers in pre-war Britain, but he certainly would also have been aware of their presence.
However, I don't think this problem of abuse of mythology and its symbols was totally unknown to him prior to Hitler. The simple fact is that Hitler was not the only one to misuse myths and symbols in the name of nationalism. He was the last in a long line. A look at modern European and U.S. history is replete with such examples, mostly from the right but even from the left. There were certainly examples of this in World War I propaganda. While some instances of modern abuse are perhaps more subtle, Tolkien was certainly not unaware of this potential downside of myth even before encountering Hitler's stark example.
The whole process of "abandoning" or at least downplaying the writing of a mythology was, to me, a more subtle and gradual thing that actually began soon after he started setting the stories down on paper. We can see it in his struggle with the whole issue of narrators, his abandonment of the idea of equating England with Tol Eressea, the way he used actual English place names in the writing but later abandoned them. The list could go on and on.
Did he ever abandon this goal completely, or did it instead succumb under the gradual force of a different ideal: that of general world-building? This would be a more difficult question to answer.
Davem - I think you are right in stressing that the Nazi example could have had a greater effect on Tolkien and his writing than we've admitted before. Now that Garth has documented the impact of World War I (which I still see as more seminal), perhaps it's time for someone to examine this question with more seriousness. I do not know if you could corrolate changes in the actual manuscripts with things in the society or his wider response and feelings about the War. And, as you say, those unpublished materials may throw light on his attitudes and feelings. But I still see these changes precipitated by the War as one factor among many, and perhaps not the dominating one in explaining the obvious shifts in emphasis that occurred in his writing towards the end of his life.
Incidentally, I'd love to know how much unpublished material exists that the family has not released to the public archives. Or are there troves of letters in Marquette or Wheaton that no one has drawn attention to? That wasn't the impression I had.
Also, there's another question related to this that deserves to be raised. If Tolkien seemed to move away from his mythological base in later years, you could make the same argument in regard to faerie itself. And I would be hard pressed to explain that solely on the basis of the WWII and Hitler. I am struck, for example, that by the mid-sixties Tolkien had moved far in the direction of interpreting the LotR from a Christian perspective, things that he said initially crept into his writing without conscious realization (see Kilby's book).