CHAPTER 5: Riffraff into Supermen

As soon as the bonds of civic order lie shattered on the ground and law is trodden underfoot, the Sacred Vehme enters on its rights; it must not fear to smite the mass-criminals with their own weapons.
-- Theodor Fritsch

After the war, the democratic regime symbolized, to the volkisch mind, Jewish control. The protest against economic, political, and social difficulties became an "anti-Jewish revolution." Shell-shocked Germans came home after the ordeal of the fighting and the defeat to find chaos and hunger in the streets. They remembered the anti-Semitic propaganda they had heard and read before the war. It was reinforced by new propaganda: The Jew was the anarchist, the Communist, the one who had caused the defeat and would bring down the world. In such an atmosphere of terror, the Thule Society prospered.

It was clear to Sebottendorff that the small room on the Zweigstrasse where the group had been meeting would no longer serve if it was to expand. Now meetings were held every Saturday -- the day of Saturn -- in the elegant Munich hotel Vier Jahreszeiten ("Four Seasons"), whose proprietor was a member of Thule. Sebottendorff rented the rooms of a naval officers' club and adorned them with the Society's arms -- a curved swastika pointing right, plus sword and wreath. The rooms could accommodate three hundred people.

"Here," said Sebottendorff, "objectives could be attained." The consecration of the new meeting place was attended by the chairman and committee of the Germanen Orden's Berlin chapter. They officially made Sebottendorff a representative of theirs and a Master, and accepted the name Thule as a cover for the Orden. A week later, when thirty people were consecrated to the first grade, it was decided that every third Saturday of the month was to be dedicated as a consecration lodge, and on all other Saturdays, talks were to be held. The group was kept busy with meetings, initiations, and excursions at least once a week, as well as talks on such subjects as divining rods, mysticism, and bardic ritual. Every member wore a bronze pin which was designed as a shield upon which were two spears crossing a swastika.

Sebottendorff bought the newspaper Der Munchener Beobachter because he felt that proselytizing against the enemy could not be done as effectively through the spoken word as through the press. Though Der Munchener Beobachter was a sports paper, Sebottendorff was attracted to it for several reasons. The readership was young; it was impossible to start a new paper because of the paper shortage and because the government did not allow new papers to appear; and, most important, "The Jew had no interest in sports, if it did not have any monetary advantage, so the Jew would not buy and read the paper. Therefore, a sports paper could make propaganda without being detected."

Sebottendorff was wrong, of course, but showed no awareness of this, as he went on, blithely contradicting himself: "How right these calculations were is shown by the Jewish ire against the editor. They called the paper itself 'unimportant.'"

The paper had been established in 1887. The former publisher, now deceased, had been a client of the attorney Gaubatz, the Thule member; and Sebottendorff bought the publishing rights from his widow for five thousand marks. The paper had no subscribers and was distributed on the street. Sebottendorff himself was the editor. The first edition was five thousand copies.

Early issues were given over to the exhortation to "keep your blood pure" and to propaganda about the Jew as "parasitic capitalist" and participant in the black market. According to Sebottendorff: "This was something Munich never heard of.... In addition to the big questions, we did not forget the details. We were very critical about everything."

By November 1, 1918, the Thule organization had 1,500 members in all Bavaria, 250 of them in Munich. The paid membership journeyed to Berlin to be indoctrinated in further propaganda.

The meeting on Saturday, November 9, 1918, was a crucial one. The war was ending, the monarchy collapsing. The Jew, Kurt Eisner, had taken control of the Bavarian government two days earlier. A series of revolts had just broken out which promised chaos for the whole country. Munich, in fact, was engulfed in revolution. The old order had proven itself bankrupt, not only in Germany and Austria, but in Russia. The bolshevism which had triumphed there was the big bugbear feared by the middle and upper classes in Germany and Austria. The toppled empire in Germany created a vacuum in which revolutionaries of the right and left fought for domination. Conspirators were everywhere. German radicals looked to Russia for guidance and financial support. Munich was one of the key cities for revolutionary activity, and the little anti-Semitic lodges now consolidated into something like a mass movement.

At the November 9 meeting, Sebottendorff told the members:

Yesterday we lived through the whole breakdown of what was good and holy to us. Instead of our blood-related Kaiser, there now reigns Juda. We have to fight the Jew.... He who cannot follow me, despite his oath of loyalty to me -- he should get out. I won't be angry about it. He who wants to stay with me, he should know that there is no going back, but only forward. He who wants to stay should remember his oath even until his death. I myself assure you and swear to you by the holy sign, listen to the victorious sun. I also will be loyal to you. Trust in me as you have trusted in me before. . . .

He then lapsed into mythological metaphysics, reminding them that their god was Walvater, the self-born power and spirit, whose rune was the Aarune (Aryan; fire; sun; eagle; sun-wheel; swastika) and whose Trinity was Wodan [Wotan], Wili, and We. Lest the members find this a bit obscure, he admonished: "Never would a low-class brain comprehend the unity of a Trinity. Wili is, like We, the polarization [of] Walvater, and Wodan the godly immanent law."

The Trinity originated, he said, from the first creation. It then created the world, and the first human pair. Wodan created the self or spirit of the life power. Wili gave the thought and the will, and We the feeling and emotions.

What did this odd mixture of ancient Eastern philosophy and Norse mythology have to do with the revolution raging outside the Vier Jahreszeiten? It provided a rationale for the dangerous mission the members were being called on to accomplish:

My friends, as of today, the red eagle is our symbol. It should point to the fact that we may have to go through death to live.

The Jews know very well that they have to fear the Aar, as it even says in the holy scriptures, fifth book of Moses, 28:49, "and the Lord will awaken unto you a people from far away, from the end of the earth, which flies like an eagle, a people whose language you do not understand."

With this pep talk, Sebottendorff cursed any member who procrastinated or compromised, who did not join in the eight o'clock consecration the following day, the birthday of Luther and Schiller. The Master adjourned the meeting with a schmaltzy poem by Philipp Stauff.

No one, of course, dared to miss the meeting on November 10 -- no one except Sebottendorff himself, who was laid low with a fever.

The Armistice became official the next day, and the Thule Society quietly prepared for counterrevolution. Its members could not accept the surrender of the German Army nor the proclamations of the republican government.

Conditions after the war were intolerable. Food was almost impossible to get, and jobs even scarcer. It was not uncommon to see wounded war veterans begging in the streets. With production crippled and inflation rampant, the country became a vast starvation camp. In five years' time, from 1918 to 1923, the mark had sunk to one-fifth its value, which reduced the middle class to poverty. In the harsh winter, people searched everywhere for coal and kindling. One observer remarked: "If a store offered dog biscuits a long line formed outside to procure them. People ate whatever they could find. Horsemeat became a delicacy, potato a luxury."

But for the Thule Society there was a surprising upswing. Because of governmental suspicion about the possible conspiratorial nature of organizations, many Bunds were thrown out of their meeting rooms. Landlords wanted no trouble. The innocent-appearing Thule was left alone, and with its runic obsessions was able to play host to these other Bunds, who shared a similar ideology. Sebottendorff observed:

That was good, since for the first time single groups could be in proximity to each other, because it happened very often that two or three took place at one time.

In the Thule Society everything went like a pigeon coo. Here was the National Liberal Party under Hans Dahn. Here also were the All-Germans under editor [Julius] Lehmann, the German School Bund under Rohmeder, the Riding Fellows, the Hammerbund.... In short, there was not a society in Munich that somehow represented any nationalistic aim which could not be tented in the Thule Society.

All these groups were made up, for the most part, of men who had fought in the war and returned to their country stunned to find that the prewar world had been blasted away. In these secret meetings, what they fantasized was a world better able to fulfill their longings.

It was to Thule that the civil engineer Gottfried Feder first came. He was well known in Munich for an eccentric proposal for ridding the country of all its troubles. As a crankish amateur economist, he babbled about the machinations of "Jewish high finance" which undercut "German" production. His slogan became "break the shackles of finance capital," and the way to do it was by abolishing "interest slavery." He urged Thule to try to win over the workers, who were being wooed by the left.

Anton Daumenlang, whose hobby was genealogy, worked on ancestral research. Walter Nauhaus, a sculptor, was in charge of Nordic culture. The editor Julius Lehmann argued for a coup d'etat and brought weapons to store in Thule rooms. One night at dinner, Sebottendorff was seized with a premonition that the premises were going to be searched. He ran quickly and hid the arms. No sooner had he done this when an investigator came.

In conjunction with plotting counterrevolution, Thule was busy fighting other occult groups, like Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophs. Steiner had been head of Madame Blavatsky's German branch of the Theosophical Society and had broken with it over a doctrinal dispute and started his own group. Steiner, observed Sebottendorff, "wanted to become finance minister, and propagate his system of Trinity," which, presumably, was different from Thule's. Through his system, he sought to "reform Communism" rather than destroy it. The influence of this "degenerate man, this swindler and liar," was all-encompassing. He had many disciples in Munich, but was set back, said Sebottendorff, "due to the fact that there were so many suicides and sexually abused women" among them. Before the war, he had worked with "a clairvoyant, Lisbeth Seidler, in Berlin." The pair "had connections with General [Helmuth von] Moltke and they were the ones who stopped the new recruits from going into the Marne battle when they were needed. That's how the battle was lost." Sebottendorff did not miss an opportunity to attack them in his newspaper.

The Thule itself was not without its influence. Countess Heila von Westarp was the Society's attractive young secretary. Another aristocratic member was Prince Gustav von Thurn und Taxis, a name prominent throughout Europe. Robert Payne comments, in The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, that Sebottendorff "had ingratiated himself into Munich society, large sums of money were at his disposal, and many of the most influential people in Munich were his disciples." This powerful occult circle included adepts, judges, lawyers, professors, leading industrialists, surgeons, scientists, and even former members of the royal entourage of the Wittelsbach kings. The Bavarian minister of justice, Franz Gurtner; the police president of Munich, Ernst Pohner; and the assistant police chief, Wilhelm Frick, were active.

It was not surprising, then, that Thule's hidden activities were held responsible for much of the cold-blooded terrorism in that turbulent time. In the beginning of December, Thule members planned to capture Kurt Eisner, the Jewish minister-president of Bavaria, who had led the revolt against the monarchy on November 7. To Thulists, Eisner, an ethereal looking intellectual, champion of the League of Nations, and conciliator of the Communists, represented everything odious.

Eisner's hundred-day reign was tinged with Bohemianism. Symphony concerts preceded political speeches. Poetry was recited from a roving truck which toured the streets, as if, someone observed, "a picnic and not a revolution were going on." In executive sessions, Eisner expounded on the inner nature of politics, which he thought was as much "of an art as painting pictures or composing string quartets."

Shortly after Eisner's assassination on February 21, police came to investigate Thule and search for anti-Semitic flyers. Sebottendorff threatened that if his members were not granted immunity from arrest, they would "take a Jew, drag him through the streets, and say that he stole a consecrated wafer. Then you will have a pogrom on your hands that will take you out of office at the same time... When the police assured him he was crazy, he answered: "Perhaps, but my craziness has a mouth." He meant, presumably, that he was a man of influence, one who could not be silenced, which must have been the case, since no one from Thule was arrested.

The main thrust of Thule was to consolidate the anti-Semitic organizations into militant action. Toward this end, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP -- National Socialist German Workers' Party) was established on January 18, 1919, in the rooms of the hotel, and Karl Harrer, a sportswriter for the Munchener Beobachter, was made the first chairman. A small proportion of Thule members were also members of the early NSDAP.

Karl Harrer apparently still hankered after the original secret discussion meetings, where one could cultivate feelings of exclusiveness. His days as chairman were numbered, and so were Thule's as an officially recognized society. The last consecration took place on March 21, 1919. The government now insisted that groups had to be incorporated, and the only leaders they would recognize had to be elected. "One had to abandon the Fuhrer principle," Sebottendorff wistfully noted.

Thule members did continue to meet informally. After the Eisner assassination, the new minister-president of Bavaria fled northward to the city of Bamberg with his cabinet, to avoid an imminent takeover by the Communists. He issued a proclamation that "the regime of the Bavarian Free State has not resigned. It has transferred its seat from Munich. The regime is and will remain the single possessor of power in Bavaria." The Thule Society helped to set up a military group of anti-Communists, infiltrated Communist organizations, and was in touch with the legal Bavarian government in Bamberg. On April 13, Thule members participated in a debacle known as the Palm Sunday Putsch, which was intended to restore the Bamberg government to power in Munich and prevent the Communist takeover. The leader of the Putsch, Alfred von Seyffertitz, described a comic scene after the current head of Thule, Friedrich Knauf, had presented him with the gallant offer of six hundred men. When the actual event took place, only ten or twelve Thule men came, one of them a captain "in gala uniform! Patent leather riding boots, riding whip, monocle!" reported Von Seyffertitz. The Putsch which was to have driven out the Communists had the opposite effect. It opened the way for a true dictatorship of the proletariat.

Virtual anarchy reigned in Munich. The Communists seized control on April 14 and began taking hostages in reprisal for the murder of other Communists. Twelve days later, they invaded the Thule rooms, arresting the Countess von Westarp, Prince von Thurn und Taxis, a sculptor, a painter, a baron, a railroad official, and an industrial artist. Sebottendorff laid on Knauf the charge of failing to hide the membership lists.

Sebottendorff himself had journeyed to Bamberg in the hope of enlisting the help of the Free Corps, a paramilitary band of volunteers under the leadership of former army officers, supported by rich industrialists, pledged to defend the Bamberg government-in-exile. Together with rightist politicians and army officers, the Free Corps was getting ready to overthrow the Communists. Counterrevolutionaries in Munich helped by smuggling men, arms and money to the Free Corps. The men in the Free Corps, unfit for civilian life, had a personal stake in the fight. For them, the war had never ended. They were still intoxicated with it. Some had come straight out of school into the trenches, where they had learned how to be hard and how to make sacrifices. Postwar Germany was despicable to these men, and they were with the Thulists in wanting to restore the past. They were joined by students who felt superfluous in a society that was falling apart. They had nothing better to do than to kill and plunder.

Four days after seizing the seven Thule members, the Communist leader in Munich, Rudolf Egelhofer, ordered them shot. He claimed that they were counterrevolutionaries and, after all, accountable to civil law.

Thule members had, in fact, been smuggling men and information out of the city. They had become especially gifted at forging documents, assembling caches of weapons, and recruiting men for the Free Corps, whose volunteers were laying plans to defeat the left.

While twenty thousand Free Corps men marched on the city, the hostages were taken to Luitpold High School, which the Communists were using as a barracks as well as a jail. They were lined up against the courtyard wall and executed.

After the hostage murders, the Communists posted a notice that a "band of criminals ... of the so-called upper classes" had been captured, "arch-reactionaries" who forged official documents to get confiscated goods, agents for the counterrevolution.

The executions caused an unprecedented wave of outrage among the citizenry. The anti-Semitic groups lost no opportunity to make effective propaganda, spreading rumors of fearful atrocities. The civil strife, which had begun right after the war, came to a horrifying climax over these murders.

Three Jews in the Communist government -- Eugen Levine-Nissen, Tobias Axelrod, and Max Levien -- were alleged responsible for the deaths, as an act of vengeance against their anti-Semitic enemies, a charge which was never proved. The Free Corps, inflamed by the hostage murders, stormed through Munich, setting fire to a beer hall and fighting with mortars and hand grenades. One Free Corps unit marched through the streets singing its marching song:

"Swastika on helmet,
Colors black-white-red...."

Soon, they would call themselves Storm Troopers.

During the civil war which followed, the Communists were defeated and the racist-nationalists received a great boost. It was, in every way, a rehearsal and a preparation for the brutalities to come later.

As to the Thule Society, it seems to have come to an end along with the seven hostages. Two days after their interment, there was a memorial service at the Thule rooms. The pulpit was draped with a captured Communist flag, but instead of the hammer and sickle, there was a swastika. The murder of the members had opened new possibilities.

Sebottendorff disappeared from Munich. He eventually returned to Istanbul, and then made his way to Mexico. He reappeared in Munich in 1933, hoping to revive Thule, but by that time the NSDAP he had helped to launch was doing very well without him. Some of the other Thule members were now in a position to implement what they had learned at those meetings on Saturdays at the Vier Jahreszeiten.

Eventually, the NSDAP assumed the power to come near to destroying Europe. That power, Rene Alleau observed, derived from one source:

... a fanatical autohypnosis which convinced disciples, succumbing to the totalitarian discipline in the promise of reaching a transcendent reality, that they were the new men the age was waiting for, that they were endowed with a secret energy which would enable them to take over Germany and the world. If they were properly prepared, mysteries would be revealed to them which would give them Satanic powers.

Incredible as it may seem, the members and guests of the Thule Society thought of themselves as potential masters of the earth, protected against all dangers. Their reign would last for a thousand years, until the next Deluge. Some of them became key figures in the Nazi party: Max Ammann, business manager of the party's newspaper and publishing house; Dietrich Eckart, who introduced Hitler to Munich society; Hans Frank, governor general of Poland; Anton Drexler, first chairman of the German Workers' party; Gottfried Feder, economic adviser; Karl Harrer, first chairman of the NSDAP; Rudolf Hess, Hitler's secretary and first adjutant; Adolf Hitler; Dr. Heinz Kurz, SS leader; Friedrich Krohn, dentist who designed Nazi swastika insignia; Ernst Rohm, leader of Storm Troopers; Alfred Rosenberg, commissioner for Eastern Affairs; Julius Streicher, Gauleiter (party district-leader) of Franconia.

The philosophy behind this cult, never mentioned at the Nuremberg Trials, sheds new light on the atrocities which were about to come, on the tacit sanction of them by the German people, and on the Messiah who led them.

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