The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (8 page)

Himmler's romantic dream was to establish a whole country of blue-eyed, blond heroes, the exact image that the Thule Society promoted by emphasizing their ancient Germanic heritage. But whereas Sebottendorff believed that Thule existed in the far regions of the north – Himmler (and to some extent Hitler) now began to be influenced by yet another Thule Society member, Karl Haushofer, who asserted that the true origins of the Aryan race were more likely to lie in, of all places, Tibet.

In 1933 Hitler assumed the role of Chancellor of Germany, realizing both the Thule Society and Himmler's dreams. But while the Nazi Party's sun was in the ascendant, the Thule Society's light began to fade. Membership dropped off with several ex-Thulites setting up splinter groups to cater for their increasingly bizarre beliefs. Even Sebottendorff didn't survive, being ousted by his own members and for several years afterwards he disappeared from view as he took to traveling around the world. But if the bricks and mortar that constituted the Thule Society were disintegrating before Sebottendorff's eyes, Thule Society ideals were by this time flourishing and, more frightening still, being made law.

Given the task of implementing Hitler's ideologies – particularly those involving racial superiority – in 1929 Himmler became leader of the SS or Schutzstaffel (protection squads) who were modeled on the Teutonic knights of old, supposedly representing a fighting force that was superior in strength to any other in the world. By 1939 the SS numbered approximately 500,000 and were the principal enforcers of the Nazis racial doctrine. It was the SS who ran the majority of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps as well as forming the Einsatzgruppen (special forces) who were given the task of cleansing eastern Europe of Jews. In January 1937, Himmler made a speech during which he stated that the sole mission of the German people was ‘the struggle for the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world, who are in league against Germany, which is the nucleus of the Nordic race; against Germany, nucleus of the German nation, against Germany the custodian of human culture; they mean the existence or non-existence of the white man, and we guide his destiny.'
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These could have been the words of any member of the Thule Society so in tune were they with the group's beliefs, but unlike the Thules, Himmler actually had the power to put his dreams into action. From the outset of his career in office, Himmler pursued his idea of racial selection and introduced special marriage laws which encouraged the coupling of people of ‘high value'. In turn this led to the establishment of a human stud farm known as the Lebensborn.

Initially the Lebensborn, which was set up by Himmler in December 1935, worked with one aim in mind, that of permitting racially pure young girls the possibility of giving birth to a child which would afterwards be adopted by an SS family. But with the passing of time Himmler's plans grew ever more sinister and on 28 October 1939 he made a speech which included the now famous edict that, ‘it will be the sublime task of German women and girls of good blood acting not frivolously but from a profound moral seriousness to become mothers to children of soldiers setting off to battle.'
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He subsequently turned the Lebensborn into a place where German women with perfect Nordic traits could ‘meet' SS soldiers with the sole intention of producing children who would then be classed racially superior because of their parentage. Himmler also sanctioned the kidnapping of children who matched the Nazis' idea of racially pure stock – blond hair and blue eyes – from the Reich's eastern occupied territories. Thousands of children were transported to the Lebensborn and told that their parents had abandoned them. Afterwards they would be ‘re-educated' (Germanized) with a few lucky ones being adopted into SS families. The rest, those who refused to co-operate with their kidnappers, were later transported to concentration camps and killed.

But the most extreme example of Himmler's wickedness occurred in 1942 when an SS unit was sent to the Czech village of Lidice after the assassination of the local SS governor Reinhard Tristan Heydrich in Prague. In reprisal for the killing of Heydrich, the SS executed the entire male population of the village. They then selected ninety-one children whom they considered met the Nazis' racial standards and these children were taken away to be resettled at the Lebensborn while those left behind were sent to extermination camps.

To this day no one has been able to calculate just how many children were kidnapped from the eastern occupied territories although, in 1946, the estimate ran at approximately 250,000. After the war a mere 25,000 were tracked down and returned to their proper families but many SS parents refused to let their ‘adopted' children go, with some of the children even refusing to be repatriated because they had been so indoctrinated that they believed themselves to be 100 percent Germanic.

As horrific as the Lebensborn project was, it was only one of many criminal schemes perpetrated during the war in the name of racial purity. What the Thule Society had begun blossomed during the Nazi era in ways unimaginable to most of humanity. On 15 September 1935 Hitler implemented the Nuremberg laws which effectively stripped the Jews of their basic human rights by separating them from the rest of the population. The Jews, though extremely disturbed by the situation, had little choice but to comply. In common with most of the rest of the world, they hadn't recognized the full implications of what Hitler had said, for hidden in the same speech the Fuhrer explained that if the plans for these arrangements broke down then it would be necessary to pass further laws, ‘handing over the problem to the National Socialist Party for final solution'.
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Hitler's Aryanization programme continued apace until, on September 1, 1939, the Final Solution started in earnest. Initially the killings were confined to the mentally or physically disabled in what Hitler termed his euthanasia programme, but soon these murders merged with the extermination of the Jews. Killings were carried out by two methods: in gas chambers within the concentration camps and by mobile killing units. The six biggest death camps were Auschwitz, where over one million people died, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor. But the horrors of the gas chambers were not the only atrocities lying in wait for the inmates of these camps. Racially motivated experiments were carried out on a daily basis, for the Party required concrete evidence that proved they were racially superior to all other men. In
Mein Kampf
Hitler states that ‘anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of the diseases.'

The Nazis chose to believe that ‘the causes of the diseases' centered around the Jews, the gypsies, the mentally infirm and any other group they chose to victimize. Thousands of men, women and children were photographed and examined by Nazi doctors, who declared that, among the many other outrageous ‘results' derived from their experiments, gypsies produced a different blood to the rest of us and were more inclined to criminal behavior.

Alfred Rosenberg had become Nazi Minister for the Baltic States by 1940, when this photograph was taken during a Hitler Youth gathering in Kiev.

At Auschwitz a laboratory was set up (known as Block 10) the main aim of which was to discover a means of mass sterilization, while the infamous Joseph Mengele, who was as obsessed as Himmler with the Nazi ideology of racial purity, began to conduct experiments on identical twins. Each twin would be examined, body part by body part with measurements and notes being taken on the length of the nose, the shape of the mouth, skin coloring, eye coloring and any number of other details. The children would be made to stand for hours whilst these examinations took place, while some unfortunate victims had dye dropped into their eyes which often caused partial loss of sight. These latter experiments were Mengele's attempts to change the color of Jewish children's eyes from brown to blue. Two victims, Hedvah and Leah Stern, later recalled that, ‘Mengele was trying to change the color of our eyes. One day, we were given eye-drops. Afterwards, we could not see for several days. We thought the Nazis had made us blind. We were very frightened of the experiments. They took a lot of blood from us. We fainted several times, and the SS guards were very amused. We were not very developed. The Nazis made us remove our clothes, and then they took photographs of us. The SS guards would point to us and laugh. We stood naked in front of these Nazi thugs, shaking from cold and fear, and they laughed.'
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All these experiments were conducted with Himmler's full approval but they were only one of several research areas in which the Nazis became involved.

Certain sections of the Thule Society, including to some extent Sebottendorff himself, harbored a curious mixture of beliefs that included not only Teutonic myth, but also Eastern mysticism and that all-encompassing, late-nineteenth-century obsession, anthropology. Following on from where the Thule Society left off, Heinrich Himmler continued to study all the above disciplines with the sole intention of supporting his (and the Thule Society's) theories on the origins of the Aryan race. In 1935 Himmler created yet another branch of the SS, this time called the Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft – the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society.

Much as members of the Thule Society had previously believed, there were those among the Nazi Party who were convinced that the true origins of the Thule lay in the lost but not-so-mythical city of Atlantis located somewhere between Greenland and Iceland. In direct contradiction to this, Karl Haushofer, who was the founder of yet another far-right secret society called the Vril, believed that the origins of the Aryan super-race lay in central Asia or, to be more precise, in Tibet. The Swedish explorer (and practising Nazi), Sven Hedin supported Hausofer in this theory and in 1938 Himmler's Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society mounted an expedition to Tibet led by a German naturalist and big-game hunter, Ernst Schäfer, who was once described by a British diplomat as being, ‘volatile, scholarly, vain to the point of childishness, disregardful of social convention or the feelings of others, and first and foremost always a Nazi.'
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The second principal figure on the expedition was Bruno Beger, an anthropologist and member of the SS who believed that the Aryans might well have originated in central Asia because the physical characteristics of Tibetans in particular, with their high cheekbones and, ‘imperious, self-confident behavior'
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mirrored the prototypical Aryan. Beger and his men took over 60,000 photographs, collected numerous moulds of the Tibetans' faces and shot over 120,000 feet of film after which he concluded that, in anthropological terms, the Tibetans were almost certainly a human type of stepping-stone between the Mongol and European races.

On their return to Germany Himmler declared both men heroes, but although Schäfer remained close to his patron, he never fully understood or agreed with the oncoming Holocaust. In contrast, Bruno Beger continued his studies into the Aryan race by selecting over 100 people from Auschwitz, the majority of whom showed signs of having Asiatic genes, who were studied, photographed, then executed.

Despite the ‘success' of Schäfer and Beger's research, however, most people believe that no more Nazi-funded expeditions took place. One exception was the writer Trevor Ravenscroft whose book,
Spear of Destiny,
argues that between 1926 and 1943 other trips were undertaken, all with the aim of studying the origins of the Aryan race. Whatever the truth, Himmler's desire to pin-point where his ancestors originated, led him during World War II to commission a series of archaeological digs in western and southern Russia, afterwards shipping back his ‘finds' to the SS headquarters at Wewelsburg. Many people, including Hitler, considered this a step too far, but Himmler remained undeterred and throughout the war continued his researches into what Sebottendorff would no doubt have termed legitimate Germanic studies.

As for Sebottendorff, by the beginning of the 1930s, just as Hitler was starting to realize his dreams of power, the Thule Society's influence was dwindling. After being ousted as leader of the society, Sebottendorff grew increasingly bitter towards Germany's new political movement. Not content simply to fade into the background, he published a book claiming that the origin of the Nazi Party was none other than the Thule Society and that they owed him everything, a theory to which, unsurprisingly, the Nazis took great exception. Sebottendorff's book was confiscated, and every copy the Nazis could find destroyed, while he himself was placed under arrest by the SS who then ‘persuaded' him that his best option was to leave Germany for good.

Sebottendorff fled from Germany, a broken, friendless man, taking himself off on a world tour that eventually led him to Istanbul. Shortly after the end of the war, on 9 May 1945, having seen Germany defeated, Sebottendorff died. The circumstances surrouding his demise are somewhat unclear as he drowned whilst swimming in the Bosphorus, but most historians agree that it was probably suicide. Having seen everything he held dear destroyed, there was nothing much left to live for.