Thule Society

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The Thule Society was a political secret society that was founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf in August 1918 in Munich towards the end of the First World War and, in its strongest phase, had around 1,500 members in the winter of 1918/19.

It was named after the legendary island of Thule , which is said to have been located far to the north. The Thule Society was ethnic - anti - Semitic . She fought the November Revolution of 1918, the Free People's State of Bavaria proclaimed by Kurt Eisner ( USPD ) and the subsequent Munich Soviet Republic , which she saw as the outcome of a “ Jewish world conspiracy ”. After 1919, it quickly lost its importance and disbanded in 1925. More recently it has become the starting point for a wide variety of conspiracy theories and fictions .

history

founding

The society went back to the anti-Semitic Germanic Order founded in 1912 , which split in 1916. At the beginning of 1918 the adventurer and occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorf , who had returned to Germany in 1913 after a long stay in the Ottoman Empire and got married richly, collected the remaining Bavarian followers of the order in Munich. He used a seemingly occult framework and the old Germanic allusion in the name to conceal the actual goals. That the Teutonic Order was in the background should not become clear. On 17./18. August 1918 the new secret society with the name "Thule Society, Order for German Art" was officially founded. On August 3, 1919, he was admitted under the name "Thule Society for the Study of German history and promotion of German Art Association, based in Munich" register of associations registered.

From 1919 to 1924, the meeting place was the Munich luxury hotel "Vier Jahreszeiten" . In the winter of 1918/19 the Thule Society had around 1,500 members, 250 of them in Munich. Most of them were academics, aristocrats and business people. A swastika with a halo behind a bare sword was chosen as the emblem of the society, the mottos were “Keep your blood pure” and “Remember that you are a German”, the members' greeting to each other was “Heil und Sieg”.

activities

The society developed a massive, above all anti-Semitic propaganda activity by describing "the" Jews as the "mortal enemy of the German people" and presenting the sometimes confused and restless conditions of the time of the Council as alleged evidence of a "Jewish world conspiracy" that had to be fought . The aim of the Thule Society was the establishment of a dictatorship and the expulsion of all Jews from Germany .

The organ of publication was the Munich observer , which was taken over in 1920 by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and renamed the Völkischer Beobachter .

In addition, Sebottendorf tried to enforce ariosophical teachings in society. He incorporated them into his speeches, and study groups were set up on related topics such as Nordic culture and heraldry .

After Kurt Eisner's proclamation of the Free People's State of Bavaria on November 8, 1918, whom the opponents of the revolution defamed as a traitor, destroyer of Bavarian traditions and, last but not least, as Jews who allegedly immigrated from Galicia , the Kampfbund Thule was founded as the military arm of the Thule Society . In December 1918 he took part in the preparations for a coup , in an attempt to kidnap Prime Minister Eisner, and in various acts of violence. The Thule Society was indirectly involved in Eisner's assassination on February 21, 1919: the murderer Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley had previously been a member of the society for a time. He was expelled because of his Jewish mother and wanted to prove his national convictions by murdering Eisner.

In January 1919, the Thule activist Karl Harrer , a sports journalist for the Munich observer , was involved in the founding of the German Workers' Party, of which he became chairman. It was renamed the NSDAP in 1920. However, Harrer had already come into conflict with Adolf Hitler and left the DAP. A number of people who later gained importance in the NSDAP were registered as "guests" of the Thule Society, including Alfred Rosenberg , Rudolf Hess and Hans Frank . Hitler himself was never a member of the Thule Society.

The Thule Society also took action against the Munich Soviet Republic proclaimed in April 1919 . Thule activists infiltrated the Munich Red Army and the Communist Party and gathered information. As alleged railway officials, they were able to use this means of transport because the Thule chairman Friedrich Knauf, as railway inspector, provided them with appropriate IDs. The information obtained were the after Bamberg ausgewichene SPD forwarded -led government.

During the council rule in Munich, Sebottendorff offered shelter in the rooms he rented in the Hotel “Vier Jahreszeiten” to nationalist organizations that had lost their previous premises. These included the National Liberal Party , the Pan-German Association , the German Armed Forces Association and the German National Sales Aid Association .

On April 26, 1919, the "Vier Jahreszeiten" hotel as the headquarters of the Thule Society was stormed by the Soviet Republican military police and about 20 people were arrested. On April 30, seven Thule members under the control of the military police, including Prince Gustav Franz Maria von Thurn und Taxis and three other nobles, were shot dead in the Luitpold high school . This so-called "hostage murder" attracted international attention and triggered an uprising among the previously calm population in Munich, which was organized by the Thule Society and, in addition to the invasion of counterrevolutionary free corps, contributed to the suppression of the Soviet republic.

On the importance of the Thule Society, historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes :

"Due to their propaganda and their counterrevolutionary activities, but also because of the martyrdom of the hostages, the 'Thule Society' and the 'Teutonic Order' played an important role in creating a heated and emotionally charged atmosphere in which extreme movements such as National Socialism could flourish."

resolution

After the violent end of the Munich Soviet Republic, the Thule Society disintegrated and lost its importance in the völkisch movement. Sebottendorff, who organized the society's counter-revolutionary activities, was blamed for letting the membership lists get into the hands of the military police and withdrew from society.

In the first few years the society had around 200 members. Eventually, with fewer than 20 members left to gather for memorial sessions, it was disbanded around 1925 due to a lack of support. In 1932 it was deleted from the register of associations.

There were several unsuccessful attempts to found a new company, the last one in 1933 by Sebottendorf, who also tried to advertise himself as a forerunner of National Socialism with his book Before Hitler came (1933). However, this met with resistance from the National Socialist regime, and in early 1934 he was briefly imprisoned and then deported from Germany.

Impact history

Swastika and "Sieg Heil"

The use of the swastika as a symbol of the NSDAP goes back to a proposal by Friedrich Krohn , who, in addition to the NSDAP, also belonged to the Teutonic Order and the Thule Society. Contrary to Krohn's suggestion, however, Hitler succeeded in using the symbol in the opposite direction of rotation. Both variants were common in folk circles at the time.

One hypothesis says that the Thule Society's greeting "Heil und Sieg" later became the "Sieg Heil" of the Hitler salute .

Myths and Speculations

In the post-war period, the Thule Society became the subject of many myths and speculations , some of which were adventurous, some of which can be traced back to Sebottendorf's memoirs, in which he greatly exaggerated the Thule Society's contribution to the emergence of the NSDAP. In their book Le matin des magiciens (1960, German: Aufbruch ins Third Millennium , 1962), Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier claimed that two alleged members of the Thule Society, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Haushofer , gained influence over Hitler in the early 1920s by conveying to him knowledge about occult forces, which they had gained access to through the Thule Society, among other things. This society was the " magical center of the Nazi movement" and secretly the real guiding force of the Third Reich . Even Alfred Rosenberg , a leading ideologue of the Nazi party, was called in this context. In fact, Eckart was an important mentor to Hitler in his early days as a party leader by introducing him to the “better society”, and the geographer Haushofer is also attributed an influence on Hitler in the serious literature, but only in the geopolitical field (“ Lebensraum im Osten "). However, there is no evidence whatsoever that Haushofer had anything to do with the Thule Society, and Eckart and Rosenberg were not members either, but were merely registered as their guests at certain events. There are also no indications for the alleged continued existence of the company in the Third Reich or for alleged occult activities. The relevant representations by Pauwels and Bergier are therefore all considered purely fictional.

One of the numerous other elaborations of this fiction is a book published by Dietrich Bronder in 1964, which has the same title as Sebottendorf's 1933 book Before Hitler Came . In it Bronder claims that the Thule Society maintained contact with secret monastic orders in Tibet , and in 1939 the SS undertook an expedition to Tibet to establish radio communication with the lamas there (cf. German Tibet Expedition Ernst Schäfer ). Bronder supplemented his pseudo-historical report with a falsified list of members of the Thule Society, on which u. a. Hitler and Benito Mussolini were listed.

The various descriptions of alleged occult activities of the Thule Society reached up to the claim that satanic practices were cultivated there. Trevor Ravenscroft wrote in The Spear of Destiny (1972, German: Der Speer des Schicksals , 1974) that Jews and Communists were sacrificed in such rituals , and Eckart and Haushofer initiated Hitler into these practices and thus turned him into a tool of evil made.

In reality, the Thule Society was a purely secular, political fighting organization, occult or esoteric rituals were not practiced. In this respect, it is considered a “fallacy” in historical studies to assume that “ National Socialism developed mainly in the atmosphere of occultism”.

"Thule" in right-wing extremism

Some younger right-wing extremist groups referred to the Thule Society and adopted the "Thule" name, so the Thule network in the 1990s. The right-wing extremist Thule seminar , which was founded in 1980, also refers to the Thule Society .

Popular culture

literature
  • The novel The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer describes the Thule Society as occult leadership that is committed to exploring the mysteries and origins of the universe and a last-powerful Germanic race under the guise of Nazism.
  • In Marion Zimmer Bradley's Witchlight cycle , the Thule Society survived the Third Reich and, under the guidance of its magically gifted leader, Toller Hassloch, exerted an unseen influence on historical events.
Movie and TV
Games
  • In the video game Clive Barker's Jericho , the Thule Society tries in the course of the plot to destroy the world using occult methods.
  • In the video game BloodRayne , a boss is a Thule high priest.
  • In the video game Lost Horizon , the Thule Society is involved in the 1936 hunt for an artifact in Tibet .
  • In the video games of the Wolfenstein series, the Thule Society also opens a gate to a parallel world or uses the mysterious powers of this world to build weapons.
  • In the role-playing game Hollow Earth Expedition , the Thule Society is a driving force behind the Third Reich's scientific exploration of the hollow world .
  • In the point-and-click adventure Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon , members of the Thule Society work towards becoming vampires in order to gain a war advantage.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Jan Philipp Pomplun: Thule Society. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Volume 5: Organizations. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2012 ISBN 978-3-11-027878-1 , p. 597 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  2. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 128.
  3. ^ A b Ernst Piper : Alfred Rosenberg . Hitler's chief ideologist. Munich 2005, p. 44 f. and 46 f., ISBN 3-89667-148-0 .
  4. ^ A b c d e Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The occult roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 132.
  5. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Thamer : Seduction and violence. Germany 1933-1945 . Siedler, Berlin 1994, p. 59 (here the quote); Joachim Fest : Hitler, a biography , second book: Der Weg in die Politik , licensed edition by Spiegel-Verlag, Hamburg 2007, p. 196.
  6. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Hermann Gilbhard: Thule-Gesellschaft , accessed on July 2, 2011.
  7. ^ Wolfgang Benz : Eisner, Kurt . In: Derselbe (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Vol. 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 202 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  8. ^ A b Jan Philipp Pomplun: Thule Society. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Volume 5: Organizations. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2012 ISBN 978-3-11-027878-1 , p. 598 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  9. ↑ Hermann Gilbhard: The Thule Society. From the occult mummery to the swastika. Kiessling Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-930423-00-6 .
  10. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 131.
  11. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 133.
  12. ↑ Marco Frenschkowski : The secret societies. A cultural and historical analysis . Marix, Wiesbaden 2007. p. 168.
  13. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 131 f.
  14. ↑ a b Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The occult roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 134.
  15. ↑ a b Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The occult roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 189.
  16. ↑ ISBN 3980755215 .
  17. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 133 f.
  18. ↑ Hermann Gilbhard: The Thule Society. Kiessling, Munich 1994, p. 54.
  19. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 188 f.
  20. ↑ ISBN 3858000027
  21. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 189 f.
  22. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 191.
  23. ↑ HT Hakl : National Socialism and Occultism . In: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism . New edition, Marix, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 201.
  24. ^ Jan Philipp Pomplun: Thule Society. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Volume 5: Organizations. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2012 ISBN 978-3-11-027878-1 , p. 599 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  25. ↑ Martina Kirfel, Walter Oswalt, The Return of the Leaders , Europaverlag 1991, p. 193.
  26. ↑ Supernatural , Season 8, Episode 13 (original title: Everybody Hates Hitler ).
  27. ↑ Dracula series