Hitler and his God

The Thule Society

The Germanenorden-Walvater was not in good shape when Sebottendorff took charge of the Bavarian province in 1916. This was in the middle of “the Great War” which the Germans at the outset had expected to last only a few weeks or months, but which had turned into unending hell at the front and dire hardship in the homeland. Many of the members of the Germanenorden were bearing arms, and everyone’s ideals were put severely to the test. Goodrick-Clarke says that the Germanenorden was then “moribund”; one finds this confirmed in Sebottendorff, for he writes that the members who had stayed behind in the homeland must make an effort “to bring the order to life again”. 55 Sebottendorff, though, proved to be a vigorous and inspirational organizer, and soon the order numbered 1500 members in Bavaria, of whom 250 were residents of Munich.

Grand Master Sebottendorff chose a new seat for the Munich chapter: the prestigious Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten (Four Seasons). (This hotel is still one of the topmost in the city.) The new rooms of the order were inaugurated on Christmas Day 1917. On this occasion Sebottendorff launched two periodicals, one typically titled Runes, for the friends and sympathizers of the order, the other called General News of the Order, for initiated members. Sebottendorff, who had come into money by marrying the daughter of a wealthy businessman, also bought a barely surviving newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter. This newspaper would later be retitled the Völkische Beobachter and be the flagship of the Nazis. As the emblem of the Thule Society was chosen a swastika backed by a sword and crowned with oak leafs.

The directives and goals of the Germanenorden were the following: 1. One had to be a German “who could prove the purity of his blood up to the third degree; by this would be prevented that descendants from Jews would infiltrate the order”; 2. “Special value would be attached to the propaganda of racial science”, understood in the Darwinian sense; 3. “The principles of the pan-Germans were to be extended to the whole Germanic race; a unification of all peoples of Germanic blood should be prepared”; 4. “The battle against everything un-German, a fight against internationalism, against the Jewishness in the Germans, should be stimulated with all possible energy.” Members of the order also had to sign an attestation concerning their blood: “The signatory assures, to the best of his knowledge and conscience, that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in his veins and in those of his wife, and that there are no members of the coloured races among his forebears.” 56

On the occasion of the inauguration Sebottendorff revealed the new name of the Munich chapter of the order: Thule-Gesellschaft, Thule Society. From then onwards the secret Germanenorden would act in the open under this assumed name. “Since the ritual Germanenorden activities were supplemented by overt right-wing meetings the term Thule Society was adopted as a cover-name for the order to spare it the unwelcome attentions of socialist and pro-Republican elements”, explains Good-Clarke. 57 This cover name sounded “sufficiently mysterious”, found Sebottendorff, and at the same time “told those-who-knew what it was about”. 58 The lineage of the Thule Society leaves not a shadow of doubt: Fritsch’s Reichshammerbund had created a secret twin-organization, the Germanenorden, of which the Munich chapter of the Bavarian province was named “Thule Society”. In Bavaria the Germanenorden and the Thule Society were one and the same.

“Thule”, mentioned by some ancient historians, was a legendary country beyond the British Isles, somewhere in the misty regions of eternal ice and snow near or at the North Pole. The romantic völkisch imagination turned that country into “the myth of the North” 59. It was “the homeland of the soul of the Nordic race … the remembrance of paradise …” (Sünner 60); it was “the mysterious country of origin of the Aryans, a superhuman race with god-like capacities and knowledge no longer accessible to modern man”. 61 In short, all dreams and frustrations were projected back onto that legendary country in a mythic past, with the deep longing that they might be realized again in the future of the Germanic people. “Thule was concurrently the expression of a spiritual aspiration with which many Germans reacted to the modern tendencies, experienced as puzzling and frightening, to economic liberalism, materialistic utilitarianism and scientific positivism … Thule represented a symbolism of life-denial, eternity and solace, a symbolism of death and conquest of death at the origin of the race.” 62

Thule was inevitably mixed up with the memory of Atlantis, time and again resurgent if not from the waves of the ocean then from the eddies of humanity’s memory. “All Germans stand in the depth of their unconscious with one leg on Atlantis”, according to Chris Amery. And Franz Wegener writes: “The Nordic-racist myth of Atlantis was understood to be the common starting point of German culture.” 63 The importance of these matters for our tale will be apparent in the following lines by Sebottendorff: “One has tried to convince us, and the world still believes it today, that the place of origin of the [Aryan] people is the Asiatic highlands or Mesopotamia. The light is supposed to have come out of the East. But more recent research has shown that this supposition is wrong: Northern Europe, North Germany is the rootplace of the bearers of culture. It is there that, from the dark prehistoric times till the present, streams of fertilizing German blood have poured forth, that waves upon waves have gone out to bring culture to the whole world.” 64 This was much more than a personal opinion. This kind of thought was given currency in the nineteenth century by a succession of esteemed publicists, scientists as well as litterateurs, and became gospel truth to all völkisch-oriented, racist Germans in the first decennia of the twentieth century. Hitler, for one, held exactly the same opinion, as did Alfred Rosenberg, the ideological supervisor of the Third Reich, and consequently the official ideology of the Nazis.

Thule had also become familiar in the imagination of the völkisch Germans by another way: the publisher Eugen Diederichs had chosen the word “Thule” as the title of a series of twenty-four volumes of translations of the Nordic myths and sagas, the Sammlung Thule, published from 1911 onwards. Few means are so powerful for the spreading of an idea as the publication of a carefully selected book or collection of books at an affordable price. The Eddas and other Nordic myths, legends, songs and epics could for the first time be read and studied by a large public. Diederich’s initiative strongly influenced “the turn northwards” of the German mind, away from the Orient but still more away from southern Europe, more specifically from Rome, symbol of the ancient Roman empire and its culture, and of the Catholic Church. “Thule is not the past: Thule is the eternal German soul”, proclaimed a prospectus of Diederich’s collection. 65

“In the Thule Society it was like in a dovecote”, reminisces Sebottendorff, “there was in Munich no association representing some national interest or other which did not find shelter in Thule.” 66 As Munich, with its beer halls and its beer culture, was (and is) the kind of city where social interrelation is a way of life and “everybody knows anybody else” – an important factor in the emergence of the Nazi movement – the influence of the Thule Society in the Bavarian capital must have been considerable.

Besides meetings of the nationalistic and anti-Semitic associations, Thule organized a great variety of activities of its own, for it was after all registered as “Study group of Germanic antiquity”. There were lectures on runes, on German history and prehistory, on the Eddas and the Song of the Nibelungs, on other völkisch subjects accepted and promoted by the Germanenorden. Astrology, numerology, and the use of the pendulum and the dowsing-rod were studied. There were artistic evenings with vocal and instrumental recitals. The highlights of the Germanic calendar, especially the summer and winter solstices, were celebrated – all this taking place in clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke en cheered up with sausages and beer.

But there was another side to the Thule: the occult activities, covered up by the outward bustle. Thule was after all a secret society whose members were sworn to silence. 67 In the first place there were the sessions of the pseudo-masonic Germanenorden-Walvater: the return of a “wayward Aryan into Halgadom”, the routine meetings of instruction and proposal of activities extra muros, or the promotion of a member to a higher grade within the order. And there were the meetings of Thule members interested in occultism of various sorts. We know about Sebottendorff’s Middle Eastern background and he will have sought or been requested to share his knowledge. The readings of Walter Nauhaus, a close collaborator of his, “ranged from Guido von List’s ‘researches’ to astrology, chiromancy, and the writings of Peryt Shou. In a letter to List he admitted to an interest in the Cabbala, and in Hindu and Egyptian beliefs. Like Sebottendorff, Nauhaus was fascinated by the mystical ideologies of ancient theocracies and secret cults.” 68

We find another echo of the goings on in Thule in the memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, the SS chief of foreign intelligence: “Hitler’s racial mania was one of his characteristic features. I discussed this several times with Dr. Gutbarlett [correctly: Gutberlet], a Munich physician who belonged to the intimate circle around Hitler. Gutbarlett believed in the ‘sidereal pendulum’, an astrological contraption, and claimed that this had given him the power to sense at once the presence of any Jew or persons of partial Jewish ancestry, and to pick them out in any group of people. Hitler … had many discussions with him on racial questions.” 69 Wilhelm Gutberlet, a medical doctor, is mentioned in Sebottendorff’s list at the end of Before Hitler Came as a member of Thule’s Kampfbund, one of its two Free Corps to which belonged also a certain Rudolf Hess.

Taking all this into consideration, there can hardly be any doubt that another focus of interest in Thule was spiritism. Philipp Stauff, one of the founders of the Germanenorden, “was involved in a series of spiritualist séances which claimed to have communicated with long-dead priest-kings of the old religion.” 70 In Germany the evocation of otherworldly spirits was then at an all-time high because so many sought consolation in a contact with their son, father or brother killed on the battlefield. Spiritism was, moreover, more than what it is now commonly supposed to be, namely a pursuit of hair-raising sensationalism: it was the search for “a new form of transcendental experience” based on a holistic interpretation of reality. 71

In Before Hitler Came, Sebottendorff reproduces some of his writings in the Thule publications. Some brief quotations will have to do: “The German needs a Führer who imposes himself on him … We don’t acknowledge any international brotherhood, but only the interests of our race; we don’t acknowledge the brotherhood of men, but only the brotherhood of the blood … Struggle is the father of everything … We don’t want to be the anvil anymore, we want to be the hammer [an allusion to Fritsch’s Hammerbund] … Democracy is Jewish, any kind of democratic revolution is Jewish … There are higher and lower races. If one attributes the same value to racial bastards, the Chandalas, as one does to the Aryans, the noble people, one commits a crime against humanity. Humanity needs leaders and leading races for its upward evolution …” 72 Sebottendorff’s own proud comment: “This was a language one had not yet heard in Munich until then.” The position taken by Thule represented “a fundamental change in the attitude of the Germans towards the Jews … Now research and proven facts leave no more doubt that the Jewish problem is a racial problem which has nothing to do with religion. The question is the following: shall we, German companions-in-race [Volksgenossen] let ourselves in the future be dominated politically, economically and culturally by a decreasing minority of a people of a foreign race, that feels itself as such and keeps itself carefully apart and of pure blood through law and religion, which to the Jews are one and the same?” 73

In the first days of November 1918 sailors of the German fleet at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, following the example of the Russian Kronstadt Revolt, rose against their officers and thereby started the German revolution. They spread through the country, inciting the population to join them in their protest against the war, the war mongers and the catastrophic consequences for Germany. They raised the red flag and preached the international revolution of the proletariat. On 7 November, Kurt Eisner, before a huge crowd on the Theresienwiese (a large open space) in Munich, declared Bavaria a social-democratic republic. The Wittelsbach king abdicated and went into exile. On 11 November Germany put down its weapons. Its “grasp for the world power” had failed, its “war of illusions” had been lost. The shock to the psyche of the Germans and their feelings of superiority was numbing. This was a chance for the Thule Society to prove that it could do more than promulgate grandiloquent proclamations.

Sebottendorff reacted immediately to the revolutionary situation in a speech to the members of Thule: “My Brothers and Sisters: Yesterday we experienced the collapse of all we were used to, of all we loved and valued. In the stead of our princes, related to us by blood, reigns our deadly enemy Juda. We do not yet know what will develop out of this chaos. We can guess it … All of us who are involved in this struggle are in danger, for the enemy hates us with the boundless hate of the Jewish race. Now it is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth … It will be my aim as long as I am holding this iron hammer [as Grand Master] to involve the Thule in this struggle … From today we will act …” 74

And act they did. Hermann Gilbhard writes: “The Thule represented, at the time of the [German] revolution, the umbrella organization of nearly all nationalistic and anti-Semitic forces in Munich.” 75 Detlev Rose agrees: “The Thule Society became a centralising organization for pan-German, patriotic and similar associations and tried to harbour all groupings which became threatened by the political upheaval … The significance of the Society in this phase of turmoil cannot be overestimated … Many invisible threads met in the Vier Jahreszeiten.” 76

The Thule Society ran an active propaganda campaign against the Reds and printed tens of thousands of leaflets, one of the principal means of political action at a time that the “media” were not what they have become today. Weapons, massively available after the return of the armies from the front, were bought and stacked in hidden places. The Thule Society formed its Kampfbund Thule in the very first days of the Republic, and the Society would equip a second fighting unit, the Freikorps Oberland. Both Free Corps units were commanded by demobilized officers with years of front experience; they would distinguish themselves in the liberation of Munich from the communist Republic of Councils as well as in the battles against the Russian Bolsheviks in the Baltic region. When Kurt Eisner was murdered on 21 February 1919, he was on his way to step down as president. His murderer, a young student Anton von Arco auf Valley, was allegedly connected with Thule.

Thule’s antirevolutionary endeavours became still more intensive after the communist Republic of Council’s had succeeded Eisner’s socialists and increased the general confusion. The Bolsheviks were a direct challenge to every single article of the Thulean creed, and they did not hesitate to requisition, ransack, imprison and kill. In a tragicomedy of errors seven Thule members were arrested and executed, some say in a gruesome manner. One of them was Walter Nauhaus, who had proposed the swastika as Thule’s emblem; others were Baron Karl von Teuchert, Countess Heila von Westarp and Prince Gustav Maria von Thurn und Taxis. The eighth person to be executed together with those anti-Semites was a Jew, professor Ernst Berger, arrested by mistake; he had insisted on being led to his execution thinking that they were taken to be interrogated and that he would be able to prove his identity. The news of those executions quickly reached the units of the Reichswehr (the national army) and the Free Corps who had encircled Munich and who, when executing their attack, took bloody revenge on the communists.

As Grand Master of the Thule Society Sebottendorff did not survive very long the six months of the revolutionary events in Munich (from November 1918 till May 1919). As he himself puts it: the socialist newspaper the Münchener Post had printed a pamphlet accusing him of living under a false name; of having deserted the Thule cowardly at the time of the murders; of having acquired the Turkish nationality to be exempt of military service and thus escape being sent to the front; of having embezzled certain sums of money; etc. 77 Sebottendorff claims that he refused to defend himself to prevent that the Order’s secrets would be exposed, and that he preferred to take his leave: “He had to go so that the delicate plant would not be smothered” – the delicate plant, that is, of the political movement he had initiated. But this brings us to our following chapter.