The Unknown Hitler: Nazi roots in the Occult.
On April 6, 1919, in Bavaria, left wing socialists and anarchists proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The brains of the revolution were a group of writers who had little idea of administration. Life in munich grew chaotic. The counter-revolutionary forces, the whites, composed of various groups of decommissioned soldiers known as "Frei Corps", equipped and financed by the mysterious Thule Society, defeated the Bavarian Soviet within a matter of weeks.
Many other decommissioned soldiers waited out the turbulence in barracks, pfc Adolph Hitler among them. After the Bavarian Republic had been defeated by the Whites, in May, Hitler's superiors put him to work in the post revolution investigating commission. His indictments injected ruthless efficiency into the kangaroo courts as he fingered hundreds of noncommissioned officers and enlisted men who had sympathized with the communist and anarchists. He was subsequently sent to attend special anticommunist training courses and seminars at the University which were financed by the Reichswehr administration and by private donors from the Thule Society. This led to an assignment in the intelligence division of the postwar German army, to infiltrate groups that could organize the working classes while the communists were weak. On a September evening, 1919, Hitler turned up in the Sternecker Beer Hall where members and friends of the budding German Workers Party had gathered.
He quietly listened to the presentation by engineer Gottfried Feder, a Thule Society member, who talked about jewish control over lending capital. When one of the other group members called for Bavaria to break away from the rest of Germany, Hitler sprang into action. The astonished audience stood by while his highly aggressive remarks and compelling oratory swept through the room. After Hitler had finished his harangue, party chairman and founder, Anton Drexler, immediately asked him to a meeting of the party's steering committee held a few days later. He was asked to join the committee as its seventh member, responsible for advertising and propaganda.
Back in 1912, several German occultists with radical anti-semitic inclinations decided to form a "magic" lodge, which they named the Order of Teutons. the main founders were Theodor Fritsch, a publisher of an anti-semitic journal; Philipp Stauff, pupil of the racist Guido Von List, and Hermann Pohl, the order's chancellor. (Pohl would drop out three years later to found his own bizarre lodge, the 'Walvater Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail'.)
The Order of Teutons was organized along the lines of the Free Masons or the Rosicrucians, having differing degrees of initiation, only persons who could fully document that they were of pure "aryan" ancestry were allowed to join.
In 1915, Pohl was joined by Rudolf Blauer, who held a Turkish passport and practiced sufi meditation. He also dabbled in astrology and was an admirer of Lanz Von Liebenfels and Guido Von List, both pathologically anti-semitic. Blauer went by the name of Rudolf Freiherr Von Seboottendorf. He was very wealthy, although the origin of his fortune is unknown. He became the Grand Master of the Bavarian Order and he founded the Thule Society, with Pohl's approval, in 1918.
After the Bavarian communist revolution of 1918, the Thule Society became a center of thea counterrevolutionary subculture. An espionage network and arms caches were organized. The Thule Club rooms became a nest of resistance to the revolution and the Munich Soviet Republic.
Journalist Karl Harrer was given the job of founding a political "worker circle". He realized that the workers would reject any program that was presented to them by a member of the conservative "privileged" class. Harrer knew that the mechanic Anton Drexler, who was working for the railroads, was a well-known anti-semite, chauvinist and proletarian. With drexler as nominal chairman, Harrer founded the German Workers Party in January 1919
The German Workers Party was only one of many associations founded and controlled by the Thule Society. The Thule was the "mother" to the German Socialist Party, led by Julius Streicher, and the right-wing radical Oberland Free Corps. It published the Munich observer, which later became the National Observer. Hitler became the most prominent personality in the party. He caused Harrer to drop out, and he pushed Drexler, the nominal chairman, to the sidelines. He filled key positions with his own friends from the Thule Society and the Army. During the summer of 1920, upon his suggestion, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Worker Party (NASDAP). The new name was intended to equally attract nationalists and proletarians.
To go along with the new name his mass movement also required a flag with a powerful symbol. Among many designs under consideration, Hitler picked the one suggested by Thule member Dr. Krohn: a red cloth with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika.
Hitler wanted to turn the German Workers Party into a mass-conscious fighting party, but Harrer and Drexler were hesitant, due in part to their woeful financial situation. The Thule Society was not yet supplying very much money and no one seemed to know how to build up a mass party. Hitler arranged two public meetings in obscure beer halls, and he drafted leaflets and posters, but there was no real breakthrough.
All of this changed dramatically at the end of the 1919 when Hitler met Dietrich Eckart. Most biographers have underestimated the influence that Eckart exerted on Hitler. He was the wealthy publisher and editor-in-chief of an anti-semitic journal which he called In Plain German. Eckart was also a committed occultist and a master of magic. As an initiate, Eckart belonged to the inner circle of the Thule Society as well as other esoteric orders.
Briefly, the creed of the Thule Society inner circle is as follows: Thule was a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis, supposedly the center of a lost, high-level civilization. But not all secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out. Those that remained were being guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings (similar to the "Masters" of Theosophy or the White Brotherhood). The truly initiated could establish contact with these beings by means of magic-mystical rituals. The "Masters" or "Ancients" allegedly would be able to endow the initiated with supernatural strength and energy. With the help of these energies the goal of the initiated was to create a race of Supermen of "Aryan" stock who would exterminate all "inferior" races.
There can be no doubt that Eckart - who had been alerted to Hitler by other Thulists - trained Hitler in techniques of self confidence, self projection, persuasive oratory, body language and discursive sophistry. With these tools, in a short period of time he was able to move the obscure workers party from the club and beer hall atmosphere to a mass movement. The emotion charged lay speaker became an expert orator, capable of mesmerizing a vast audience.Read more
