The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (7 page)

One of the symbols adopted by the Thule Society, dating from 1919 and clearly showing a version of the swastika that would be adopted by the Nazis and become one of the most evocative icons of the twentieth century.

Faction-riddled and overrun with disillusioned ex-soldiers and impoverished businessmen, Munich was a hotbed of unrest. In 1918 a Jewish journalist by the name of Karl Eisner led a socialist street revolution and established a Bavarian Republic only to be assassinated barely three months later by Count Anton von Arco-Valley. A Social Democratic government was then established only to collapse after two months when a Soviet Republic took over. Barely a month later this, too, collapsed. Small wonder, then, that against this muddled, divided and divisive background, a group sprang up dedicated to the idea of a strong, single-minded, unassailable Germany. Calling themselves the Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) and meeting in secret, they were to play a significant part in Hitler's rise to power, fomenting support in the beer halls of Munich, the very establishments where Hitler first began practising his charismatic, rabble-rousing speeches. As the author Joanna Kavenna points out in her book,
The Ice Museum
, ‘The Thule Society was an early expression of the Nazi fetish for “Aryan” tribes and northern lands, an early elision of an idea of natural purity with a belief in the racial superiority of a people.'
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The Thule Society's leader and main activist was a man called Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Sebottendorff's father had been a Silesian railway worker whose last name ‘Glauer' young Rudolf seemed to have disowned by explaining how, whilst traveling in Turkey as a young man, he had met and been adopted by a Baron Heinrich von Sebottendorff. In fact, delusions of grandeur were never far from von Sebottendorff's mind, and his adopted persona fitted precisely the type of character his Thule Society aimed to recruit – men of noble lineage, who could trace their families back down through the centuries.

Prior to establishing the Thule Society, having returned from his trip to Turkey, Sebottendorff joined another secret group called the Germanenorden. Formed by a handful of prominent German occultists in 1912 and violently opposed to the Jews, its leader Herman Pohl was obsessed by what he saw as a gradual diffusion of the German race, a slow watering-down of the national blood-lines caused by the introduction of non-Aryan elements. The Germanenorden enjoyed a hierarchical fraternal structure similar to that found in Freemasonry but unlike Freemasonry, the Germanenorden taught its disciples nationalist ideologies based on racial superiority, and most of the group's literature had an anti-communist, anti-Semitic theme. Sebottendorff fitted in perfectly and soon established his own branch of the group which he named the Thule Society.

Needing an emblem for his new group, Sebottendorff adopted the swastika as the true representation of everything he held dear. Originally the swastika had been an ancient Indian symbol of good luck as well as the traditional symbol of the Norse god of thunder, Thor. In the early twentieth century it had then been taken up by a German neo-pagan movement who named it the Hakenkreutz. Perhaps it was from them that Sebottendorff stole the idea – after all both groups promoted strong anti-Christian ideologies – but it wasn't until a Thule Society member by the name of Friedrick Krohn suggested to Hitler that he adopt the swastika as his new political party's emblem, that this now famous insignia grew to be one of the most feared and hated of all twentieth-century symbols.

Thule was a mythical land (sometimes referred to as an island, sometimes believed to incorporate the lost city of Atlantis) in the most northerly regions of the ancient world, a dark, frozen, mysterious region that existed long before man had mapped the globe with any accuracy. The first mention of Thule appeared in the fourth century BC when a Greek explorer called Pytheas boasted of sailing from the warm regions of southern France to Britain and then onwards north for a period of approximately six days until he reached the land of Thule. Once there he reported that Thule's inhabitants showed him where, on the shortest day of the year, the sun set and how, during the winter everywhere suffered long periods of darkness. But despite Pytheas's account, ancient mapmakers were still baffled about the exact location of Thule, or if indeed it really existed at all. Britain, Iceland and different parts of Scandinavia were all possible locations, although Pliny the Elder seemed to prefer a less concrete interpretation of the place when he wrote that Thule was the ‘most remote of all those lands recorded', a country where ‘there are no nights at midsummer when the sun is passing through the sign of the Crab, and on the other hand no days at midwinter, indeed some writers think this is the case for periods of six months at a time without a break.'
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When the Romans first invaded Britain in 55
BC
and traveled to the far north of the country, they sent back word that they had conquered Thule. Many travelers, writers and explorers all wrote reports and sent back messages to the effect that Thule existed, not least a group of early medieval Irish clerics who traveled to Iceland on retreat only to send back word that they had reached Thule. And yet one thing eluded everyone: absolute, unequivocal evidence that such a place existed, for not only could no one agree where precisely Thule lay, they couldn't even settle on how it was spelt. Throughout history Thule's name has changed drifted from one spelling to another as lazily as the changing of the tides: Thule, Thula, Thila, Tila, Thulé being just a small selection. And so it seemed nothing concrete or factual would ever become known about Thule. Instead it grew into an increasingly mysterious, mythical landscape; a place that hovered on the edge of the known world; a symbol of all that was unreachable and remote. Even in Victorian times, when reason might have suggested that Thule was nothing more than an ancient myth, the explorer Richard Burton included it in his notes. Famously, there is also a mention of Thule in Charlotte Brontë's ever-popular novel,
Jane Eyre
. Early in the story the young Jane is seated in her aunt's library trying to escape the reality of her situation by looking at a book on the Arctic when suddenly a reference is made to the rocks of Thule, a reference that sends her off in transports of delight, imagining the icy far north with its ‘vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space, that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the Pole, and concentrate the multiplied rigors of extreme cold.'
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In other words, over the centuries Thule had come to represent many things to many people; a mythical landscape; a gothic
terra incognita
; a symbol of remoteness and terror – anyone could interpret the land of Thule in any way they wished and Rudolf von Sebottendorff was no exception. Claiming that his society (only those Germans of pure racial blood over several generations were allowed membership) had been formed so that academics could pursue their interest in the Nordic Sagas, a diary of the group's meetings from 1919 to 1925 shows a series of lectures on such topics as the original homeland of the Teutons, German poetry, megalithic culture and German myths. But these innocent-seeming agendas hid a much darker secret, one that was far more in keeping with the Germanenorden's aims – the search for and reinstatement of the Germanic race's true roots; a search that would eventually call for the expulsion from or, worse still, the annihilation of any ‘alien' elements within the country. Little wonder that among the society's members were included prominent industrialists and millionaires, not to mention high-ranking state officials such as Munich's chief of police. At Thule Society meetings, the guests and guest speakers were men such as Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg (Hitler's chief propaganda minister) and Dietrich Eckhart.

In fact, it was Alfred Rosenberg who, during the 1920s, ran the Thule Society's newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
. Set in the kind of heavy, gothic-style typeface so beloved of Nazi and neo-Nazi groups, the paper spouted a mixture of anti-Semitic and anti-communist rhetoric. When, for instance, Kurt Eisner was in control of the local Bavarian government, the
Völkischer Beobachter
swore that it was a communist-Jewish attempt to ‘take over Bavaria'. They were obsessed by ‘outsiders' overrunning their country and some journalists even forwarded articles expressing the opinion that Germany had lost the war due to the fact that it was not more firmly rooted to its Teutonic origins. In other words, the Thule Society were mesmerized by the idea of an heroic past, where their forebears lived and died heroic lives. Romantic? Yes. But this is what far right groups of that period tended towards – a sublime vision of mountains and forests that injected into the populace an inner strength; one which could not be defeated.

It was a winning formula. By late 1918 Sebottendorff boasted that the Thule Society had over 200 members. By the autumn of that same year he claimed the number had swelled to over 1,500 in Bavaria alone. Yet it wasn't all plain sailing, for after Kurt Eisner's assassination and the setting up of a Soviet Republic in Bavaria, civil unrest broke out. This was helped along by the Freikorps, private armies of disillusioned veterans organized by the far right, who clashed with the communists and fought them tooth and nail. Naturally, the Thule Society sided with the Freikorps, as a consequence of which their head office was raided and several Thule Society members were taken away and executed. Unperturbed by this bloody turn of events, Sebottendorff hailed his fallen men as martyrs, true Germans who were not afraid to stand up for their beliefs.

As Thule group membership grew and initiates continued to do battle with their communist adversaries, so another organization was also beginning its political life, the German Workers' Party, which would eventually become the National Socialist Workers' Party, or Nazis. Living in Munich during 1919, Adolf Hitler soon aligned himself with this group. ‘I went through the badly lighted guest-room,' wrote Hitler in
Mein Kampf,
describing their first encounter, ‘where not a single guest was to be seen, and searched for the door which led to the side room; and there I was face to face with the Committee. Under the dim light shed by a grimy gas-lamp I could see four people sitting round a table [ … ].'
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Satisfied with their credentials, Hitler joined as the seventh member of the group
⁷
and began his assault on the beer halls of Munich, stirring up his listeners with a stream of racist invective guaranteed to appeal to his lower-middle-class audience. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler stated that he was in his early twenties before he became aware of the ‘Jewish problem', but in light of the fact that he had been raised by an anti-Semitic father, it seems more likely that he had always harbored this deep animosity. The ‘Jewish problem' became one of Hitler's life-long obsessions, one which obviously drew him towards the Thule Society whose racist opinions were as virulent as his own. Hitler also expressed an abiding interest in the origins of the Aryan race, a passion he shared with the head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, Heinrich Himmler who, according to the historian Robin Cross, also enjoyed membership of the Thule Society. Both these men knew the powerful appeal of what the Thule Society represented to the average man in the street, particularly in post-war Munich, but also throughout Germany, for Thule doctrine gave support to the idea that Germany could reassume Teutonic supremacy after its shattering defeat in World War I. Both the Thule Society and Hitler, together with his henchmen, were also giving credence to the idea that Nazism wasn't just a political doctrine or a semi-religious manifesto, it was the means by which a whole race could be reborn.

Hitler with his ministers at a meeting in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin in 1933. To Hitler's left stands Hermann Goering, with Alfred Rosenberg looking over Goering's left shoulder and Heinrich Himmler in uniform on the far right of the picture.