The Thule Society, originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum,
was a German occultist and völkisch group in Munich, named after a mythical
northern country from Greek legend. The Society is notable chiefly as the
organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which was later
reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers'
Party. According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the organization's
"membership list... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi sympathizers and
leading figures in Munich", including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans
Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.
However, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke contends that Hans Frank and Rudolf Hess
had been Thule members, but other leading Nazis had only been invited to
speak at Thule meetings or were entirely unconnected with it. The ideology of the
Thule Society and that of Hitler's regime agreed in philosophy but,
according to Johannes Hering, "There is no evidence that Hitler ever attended
the Thule Society." Origins
The Thule Society was originally a "German study group" headed by Walter
Nauhaus, a wounded World War I veteran turned art student from Berlin who had
become a keeper of pedigrees for the Germanenorden, a secret society founded
in 1911 and formally named in the following year. In 1917, Nauhaus moved
to Munich; his Thule Society was to be a cover-name for the Munich branch of the
Germanenorden, but events developed differently as a result of a schism in
the Order. In 1918, Nauhaus was contacted in Munich by Rudolf von
Sebottendorf, an occultist and newly elected head of the Bavarian province of
the schismatic offshoot known as the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy
Grail. The two men became associates in a recruitment campaign, and
Sebottendorff adopted Nauhaus's Thule Society as a cover-name for his Munich
lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater at its formal dedication on 18 August 1918.
Beliefs A primary focus of the Thule Society was
a claim concerning the origins of the Aryan race. In 1917, people who wanted
to join the "Germanic Order", out of which the Thule Society developed in
1918, had to sign a special "blood declaration of faith" concerning their
lineage: "The signer hereby swears to the best of
his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or
in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the
coloured races." "Thule": Θούλη) was a land located by
Greco-Roman geographers in the farthest north. The term "Ultima Thule": most
distant Thule) is also mentioned by Roman poet Virgil in his pastoral poems
called the Georgics. Thule originally was probably the name for Scandinavia,
although Virgil simply uses it as a proverbial expression for the edge of
the known world, and his mention should not be taken as a substantial reference
to Scandinavia. The Thule Society identified Ultima
Thule as a lost ancient landmass in the extreme north, near Greenland or
Iceland, said by Nazi mystics to be the capital of ancient Hyperborea. These
ideas were derived from earlier speculation by Ignatius L. Donnelly that
a lost landmass had once existed in the Atlantic, and that it was the home of
the Aryan race, a theory which he supported by reference to the
distribution of swastika motifs. He identified this with Plato's Atlantis, a
theory further developed by Helena Blavatsky, an occultist during the
second part of the 19th century. Activities
The Thule Society attracted about 250 followers in Munich and about 1,500
elsewhere in Bavaria. Its meetings were often held in the luxury Hotel
Vierjahreszeiten: Four Seasons Hotel) in Munich.
The followers of the Thule Society were very interested in racial theory and, in
particular, in combating Jews and Communists. Sebottendorff planned but
failed to kidnap Bavarian socialist prime minister Kurt Eisner in December
1918. During the Bavarian revolution of April 1919, Thulists were accused of
trying to infiltrate its government and of attempting a coup. On 26 April, the
Communist government in Munich raided the Society's premises and took seven of
its members into custody, executing them on 30 April. Amongst them were Walter
Nauhaus and four well-known aristocrats, including Countess Heila von Westarp who
functioned as the group's secretary, and Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis who was
related to several European royal families. In response, the Thule
organised a citizens' uprising as White troops entered the city on 1 May.
= Münchener Beobachter newspaper= In 1918, the Thule Society bought a
local weekly newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter, and changed its name to
Münchener Beobachter und Sportblatt in an attempt to improve its circulation.
The Münchener Beobachter later became the Völkischer Beobachter: People's
Observer), the main Nazi newspaper. It was edited by Karl Harrer.
= Deutsche Arbeiterpartei= Anton Drexler had developed links
between the Thule Society and various extreme right workers' organizations in
Munich. He established the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German Workers'
Party, on 5 January 1919, together with the Thule Society's Karl Harrer. Adolf
Hitler joined this party in September the same year. By the end of February
1920, the DAP had been reconstituted as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers' Party, often referred to
as the Nazi Party. Sebottendorff by then had left the Thule
Society, and never joined the DAP or the Nazi Party. Dietrich Bronder alleged
that other members of the Thule Society were later prominent in Nazi Germany:
the list includes Dietrich Eckart, as well as Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank,
Hermann Göring, Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Alfred
Rosenberg. Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has described this
membership roll and similar claims as "spurious" and "fanciful", noting that
Feder, Eckart, and Rosenberg were never more than guests to whom the Thule
Society extended hospitality during the Bavarian revolution of 1918, although he
has more recently acknowledged that Hess and Frank were members of the Society
before they came to prominence in the Nazi Party. It has also been claimed
that Adolf Hitler himself was a member. Evidence on the contrary shows that he
never attended a meeting, as attested to by Johannes Hering's diary of Society
meetings. It is quite clear that Hitler himself had little interest in, and made
little time for, "esoteric" matters. Wilhelm Laforce and Max Sesselmann were
Thule members who later joined the NSDAP.
Dissolution Early in 1920, Karl Harrer was forced
out of the DAP as Hitler moved to sever the party's link with the Thule Society,
which subsequently fell into decline and was dissolved about five years later,
well before Hitler came to power. Rudolf von Sebottendorff had withdrawn
from the Thule Society in 1919, but he returned to Germany in 1933 in the hope
of reviving it. In that year, he published a book entitled Bevor Hitler
kam: Before Hitler Came), in which he claimed that the Thule Society had paved
the way for the Führer: "Thulers were the ones to whom Hitler first came, and
Thulers were the first to unite themselves with Hitler." This claim was
not favourably received by the Nazi authorities: after 1933, esoteric
organisations were suppressed, many closed down by anti-Masonic legislation
in 1935. Sebottendorff's book was prohibited and he himself was arrested
and imprisoned for a short period in 1934, afterwards departing into exile in
Turkey. Nonetheless, it has been argued that
some Thule members and their ideas were incorporated into the Third Reich. Some
of the Thule Society's teachings were expressed in the books of Alfred
Rosenberg. Many occult ideas found favour with Heinrich Himmler, who had a
great interest in mysticism, unlike Hitler, but the Schutzstaffel under
Himmler emulated the structure of Ignatius Loyola's Jesuit order rather
than the Thule Society, according to Hohne.
Conspiracy theories The Thule Society has become the center
of many conspiracy theories concerning Nazi Germany, due to its occult
background. Such theories include the creation of vril-powered Nazi UFOs.
Popular culture In popular culture, references to the
Thule Society have included the 2013 season 8 episode "Everybody Hates
Hitler" of The CW series Supernatural, in which a group of Society members seek
out a lost ledger containing information about their experiments with necromancy.
The Thule Society play a major role in the Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror
of Shamballa, a movie set after the ending of the 2003 anime of the same
name. In the film Hellboy, Professor
Bruttenholm refers to Adolf Hitler having joined the Thule Society in 1937,
describing them as "a group of German aristocrats obsessed with the occult."
The Thule Society, along with Rasputin, were responsible for opening the portal
which allowed the titular Hellboy into our world.
The Thule Society is referenced in several of Charles Stross's Laundry
Files novels and short stories. In the Area 51 novels, the Society is
mentioned as being the occult force behind the Nazi Party.
The Thule plays a part in the Wolfenstein video game series.
In the Secret World Chronicles by Mercedes Lackey, the Thule Society is
behind the attacks on Echo facilities on February 15, 2004.
The Thule Society also feature in the video game Clive Barker's Jericho.
The Thule Society plays a role in the Marvel Comics series, "Fear Itself". In
the story, the Thule Society are under the guidance and leadership of the Red
Skull, which he uses to protect the Hammer of Skadi when it is summoned to
the earth. The Thule Society appears in Steve
Gerber's brief run on Marvel's Cloak and Dagger.
The Loyalists of Thule, a group dedicated to the hunting of supernatural
creatures, is based on the remnants of the Thule Society in Hunter: The Vigil
by White Wolf Publishing The Thule Society is present in the
eroge/anime 11eyes as a hermetic society of dark magick practitioners aiding Nazi
Germany against the Vatican. The Thule Society is mentioned in the
paranormal novel "Night Journey" by Goldie Browning.
See also Guido von List
Nazi archaeology Nazism and occultism
Notes References
Angebert, Jean-Michel. 1974. The Occult and the Third Reich: the mystical
origins of Nazism and the search for the Holy Grail.. Macmillan Publishing. ISBN
0-02-502150-8. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. 1985. The
Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1935.
Wellingborough, England: The Aquarian Press. ISBN 0-85030-402-4.
Republished 1992 as The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their
Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany,
1890–1935 and in 2003 as The Occult Roots of
Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. 2002. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and
the Politics of Identity. New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-3124-4.
Höhne, Heinz. 1969. The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS.
Martin Secker & Warburg. ISBN 0-14-139012-3.
Jacob, Frank. 2010. Die Thule-Gesellschaft. Uni-edition. ISBN
3-942171-00-7 Jacob, Frank: Die Thule-Gesellschaft und
die Kokuryûkai: Geheimgesellschaften im global-historischen Vergleich,
Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 2012, ISBN 978-3826049095
Phelps, Reginald H. 1963. "'Before Hitler Came': Thule Society and Germanen
Orden". Journal of Modern History 35(3): 245-261. ISSN 0022-28013501.
Skorzeny, Otto, tr. Johnston, David. 1995. My Commando Operations. ISBN
0-88740-718-8. Further reading
Gilbhard, Hermann. 1994. Die Thule-Gesellschaft. Kiessling Verlag.
ISBN 3-930423-00-6. Hale, Christopher. 2003. Himmler's
Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet. London:
Transworld Publishers. ISBN 0-593-04952-7.
Kershaw, Ian. 2001. Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-013363-1.
Sklar, Dusty. 1977. The Nazis and the Occult. Dorset Press, New York. 188
pages. ISBN 0-88029-412-4. Peter Lavenda.2007. Unholy Alliance.
Continium Books, 401 pages. ISBN 0-8264-1409-5.
External links ttp:www.relinfo.chinfo.html#sebottendorf