“At bottom, every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a better Fatherland and a better patrimony. This double nature of the Germans, this faculty they have of splitting their personality which enables them to live in the real world and at the same time to project themselves into an imaginary world, is especially noticeable in Hitler and provides the key to his magic socialism.”
– Hermann Rauschning, 1940
It was Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night), April 30, the night that witches and dark powers roam the world. On that night, the boundaries between Earth and the Outside weaken and splinter under the assault from demonic forces. That year, 1919, Germany also weakened and splintered: the communists and their enemies the Freikorps (Free Corps) battled in the streets, while the people starved in the husk of their defeated empire. In Munich, the communists had seized power on April 12 after a failed right-wing putsch against a week-old hapless anarchist government. They began cracking down on the wealthy and aristocratic supporters of the old order, and especially on the Thule Gesellschaft. A rejected Thule member had killed Bavaria’s socialist president Kurt Eisner earlier that year, and the Thule’s newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer), had supported the putsch.
The “sunwheel” swastika was the symbol of both the Thule Gesellschaft and the DAP. It later appeared in various insignia and medals such as SA belt-buckles, collar tabs of Danish and Norwegian SS units, and the Frauenwerk women’s group. (NsMn)
On April 26, the Bavarian “Red Army” raided Thule Gesellschaft offices and seized the society’s secretary Countess Heila von Westarp and the Thule membership roster. Working quickly, the communists rounded up six more Thulists, including the society’s co-founder Walter Nauhaus and Prince Gustav von Thurn-und-Taxis, related to every royal family in Europe. Four days later, the communist guards stood the seven Thule members against the wall of the Luitpold Gymnasium and shot them. The royal blood (four of the hostages were titled aristocrats) spilled on Walpurgisnacht blasphemously reversed the ancient sacrifice of the sacred king: ritually, the king dies in the fall and is born in the spring to heal the land. The Reds had killed Germany’s sacred king in the spring, awakening the Outer Beings with seven human sacrifices.
Es Werde Licht! (Let There Be Light!) This early (1923) Austrian Nazi Party publication presents a Masonic–Jewish conspiracy, revealing their secret rituals and role in the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Note the Thulist sunwheel in the center of the shield. (Mel Gordon Archive)
The human reaction was also intense: the Münchener Beobachter report of the atrocity triggered rebellions all across the city, the insurgents using weapons stockpiled by the Thule for months beforehand. That day, the Freikorps stormed Munich, massacring the communist resistance after three days of fighting. Spearheading the assault were the swastika-bedecked Ehrhardt Brigade of the Freikorps – and the Kampfbund Thule (Battle League Thule) militia under the command of the Thule’s head Rudolf von Sebottendorff, who had been conveniently out of the city during the communist raid.
Born Adam Glauer, Rudolf von Sebottendorff took his noble name when he was adopted by the elderly Baron von Sebottendorff in Turkey, where he split his time between his career in engineering and his avocation for Freemasonry, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Sufi mysticism. Returning to Germany in 1913, he avoided the war thanks to his Turkish citizenship; instead, he fell into Pohl’s dissident Germanenorden Walvater. Put in charge of Germanenorden recruitment in Munich in 1918, he and the sculptor Walter Nauhaus established the Thule Gesellschaft as a cover organization. They took the name “Thule” from the mystical northern continent considered by Lanz the original home of the Aryan race. (Lanz called it Arktogäa; the name “Thule” comes from the voyage of the classical Greek navigator Pytheas of Massilia, who encountered an unknown land in the far north around 325 BC.) To drive the point home, they adopted a dagger superimposed on a curvilinear swastika as the society’s emblem.
On May 27, 1942, SS Sturmbannführer Jochen Seifen-Triebacher died in an attic in Prague while confiscating the library of an elderly Czech member of an obscure astrological order, the Hvězdnatý Moudrostřád. His two SS escorts suffered incurable neurological disorders including hysterical blindness; their broken, disjointed testimony is illustrated here. The fate of the book Seifen-Triebacher was reading at the time of his bizarre death is unknown. Once the sightless, raving SS men managed to summon assistance, the library had been unguarded for several hours; most security personnel in the city were distracted by the (ultimately successful) assassination attempt on Heydrich that day. The bulk of the books were shipped to the RSHA Amt VII B archives; the tome in question may have vanished into Kaltenbrunner’s Projekt Leo collection in the fall of 1944. Alternately, SS E-IV may have obtained it: the Laternenträger Projekt made a number of breakthroughs about that time after the addition of one Hermann Mülder to the staff, a specialist in medieval epigraphy who translated the Central Asian necromantic text the Ghorl Nigral for the Ahnenerbe in 1935.
Seifen-Triebacher wears normal SS rank tabs and an Allgemeine-SS uniform with only his cuff band, Ar-rune, and Irminsul badge (indicating advanced magical training at the Externsteine) to indicate his role as an Ahnenerbe UdG specialist. The hard-headed and skeptical Heydrich deprecated the “magical element” around Himmler and was an active supporter of Aktion Hess. He did, however, allow Seifen-Triebacher to participate in intelligence operations, and used him to hunt down Czech and Jewish secret societies conspiring against the Reich Protectorate.
Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923) as a young man. His 1912 translation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt changed the hero from an aimless near-vagabond to a fighting superman and became the second most successful play ever staged in Germany. He published Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a key text in Nazi racial ideology. (Library of Congress)
In the apocalyptic years of 1918 and 1919, solid citizens sought völkisch certainties and occult escape: membership increased from a handful of cranks to more than 1,500 seekers. One member was a young law student, Hans Frank, who would later become the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland. Also a Thule member was the Egyptian-born Rudolf Hess, an eager student of astrology and mystical geography. The völkisch and mystical poet and playwright Dietrich Eckart likewise became a fixture at Thule events, as did the future chief ideologist of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg. The Thule took offices in Munich’s Four Seasons Hotel and began laying the groundwork for the overthrow of Bavaria’s various left-wing regimes.
In January 1919, Thule members Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer set up yet another front group, this time to build a working-class political bridge to anti-communists and anti-Semites who would be out of place at the swanky Four Seasons. The Thulists called their new group the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party; DAP). Its 55th member was a military informer named Adolf Hitler. When Eckart met Hitler that December, he exclaimed in ecstasy, “There is the coming man of Germany of whom the world will someday speak!”
Eckart and Hitler became inseparable. The poet trained Hitler in stage presentation, diction, and oratory. Some hinted that Eckart also provided instruction in the darker arts of mesmerism and channeling, the mediumistic discipline of inviting spirits to possess the body. He introduced Hitler to rich patrons of anti-Semitic politics, and to the realities of Party infighting. Hitler began to mold the DAP in his own image: he forced out Harrer in January 1920, and renamed the Party the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party; NSDAP) the next month. The divorce was hardly acrimonious, however; Eckart helped arrange the purchase of the Party’s newspaper – renamed the Völkischer Beobachter (völkisch Observer) – from the Thule in December 1920.
And the Thule Gesellschaft did not abandon direct action. It became the de facto coordinator of the old Germanenorden network and the Ehrhardt Brigade’s secret death squad, “Organisation Consul” (OC). In August 1921, OC assassins killed former finance minister and signer of the Treaty of Versailles Matthias Erzberger in a Black Forest spa. The next year, the OC gunned down the Jewish foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, Walter Rathenau, on the summer solstice while the völkisch Germanenorden lit bonfires to Wotan across Germany. Rathenau’s death may have attracted the attention of Wotan, but it also turned the public against the violent far right. Misjudging the historical moment, Hitler led his NSDAP in an attempted coup against the Bavarian state government without Thule support on November 8, 1923. Swept up in the arrests of Hitler’s backers, Eckart went to jail but kept his faith: “It will and must be. I believe in Hitler. A star hangs over him.” Hitler’s premature putsch was not the end of Hitler, but the Thule Gesellschaft did not long survive it, fading from sight in 1925.
The Thulists and the Erhardt Brigade were not the only mystical völkisch militias in the Weimar era. This banner, badge, and book are from the Wehrwolf Bund Deutscher Männer (Werewolf League of German Men) founded in Halle in response to the Allied occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923. By the end of the year, it had over 1,000 members; by 1930, there were 50,000 ‘werewolves’, mostly in Thuringia, Saxony, and Hesse, including a large youth division. (INTERFOTO / Alamy)
By the time Hitler came into the orbit of Thule, Sebottendorff had left it. The society expelled its founder in June 1919, blaming him for the loss of their membership rolls to the Reds. He published an astrological newspaper for several years, then became the Mexican consul at Istanbul in 1924. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Sebottendorff returned to Munich with a new book, Bevor Hitler Kam (Before Hitler Came), revealing part of the occult background to the ascendant Party. The Nazis aborted his attempt to restart the Thule Gesellschaft by arresting him and banning his book. In 1934, released from prison, Sebottendorff returned to Istanbul, where he collected a mysterious stipend from German intelligence for the next decade. He disappeared on May 8, 1945, reportedly committing suicide by drowning himself in the Bosporus.
Erik Jan Hanussen (1889–1933) performs a séance in his Palace of the Occult for an audience of Nazi Party officials, German film stars, and Berlin journalists. (Mel Gordon Archive)