Donate to Metapedia: The Internet is the foremost field in the metapolitical battle of our time. Help us hold down the front. Thule Society From Metapedia Jump to: navigation, search Society emblem with sun wheel and dagger The Thule Society (German: Thule-Gesellschaft), originally the Study Group for Germanic Antiquity, was a völkisch and occult-influenced organization created after World War I in Munich. The Thule Society was disbanded around 1925 because of declining membership and the overall hostility of the Weimar Republic. According to Greek and Roman tradition Thule was an island the furthermost north. The Society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the organization's membership list reads like a Who's Who of early party members including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer.[1] However, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, an expert on the Thule Society, finds that while Hans Frank and Rudolf Hess had been Thule members, other early party members had only been guests of the Thule Society or entirely unconnected with it.[2][3] There is no evidence that Hitler ever attended meetings of the Thule Society.[4] Contents 1 History 1.1 Origins 1.2 Beliefs 1.3 Activities 1.3.1 Münchener Beobachter (newspaper) 1.3.2 Deutsche Arbeiterpartei 1.4 Dissolution 2 Alternative history 3 See also 4 Further reading 5 External links 6 References History Origins The Thule Society was originally a "German study group" headed by Walter Nauhaus,[5] a wounded World War I veteran turned art student from Berlin who had become a keeper of pedigrees for the Germanenorden (or "Order of Teutons"), a secret society founded in 1911 and formally named in the following year.[6] In 1917 Nauhaus moved to Munich; his Thule-Gesellschaft was to be a cover-name for the Munich branch of the Germanenorden,[7] but events developed differently as a result of a schism in the Order. In 1918, Nauhaus was contacted in Munich by Rudolf von Sebottendorf (or von Sebottendorff), an occultist and newly elected head of the Bavarian province of the schismatic offshoot, known as the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail.[8] The two men became associates in a recruitment campaign, and Sebottendorff adopted Nauhaus's Thule Society as a cover-name for his Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater at its formal dedication on 18 August 1918.[9] Beliefs A primary focus of Thule-Gesellschaft was a claim concerning the origins of the Aryan race. In 1917 people who wanted to join the "Germanic Order", out of which the Thule Society developed in 1918, had to sign a special "blood declaration of faith" concerning the lineage: "The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races."[10] "Thule" ((Greek): Θούλη) was a land located by Greco-Roman geographers in the furthest north (often displayed as Iceland).[11] The term "Ultima Thule" ((Latin): most distant Thule) is also mentioned by the Roman poet Virgil in his pastoral poems called the Georgics.[12] Although originally Thule was probably the name for Scandinavia, Virgil simply uses it as a proverbial expression for the edge of the known world, and his mention should not be taken as a substantial reference to Scandinavia.[13] They identified Ultima Thule, said by National Socialist mystics to be the capital of ancient Hyperborea, as a lost ancient landmass in the extreme north: near Greenland or Iceland. These ideas derived from earlier speculation by Ignatius L. Donnelly that a lost landmass had once existed in the Atlantic, and that it was the home of the Aryan race, a theory he supported by reference to the distribution of swastika motifs. He identified this with Plato's Atlantis, a theory further developed by Helena Blavatsky, an occultist during the second part of the 19th century. Activities The Thule Society attracted about 250 followers in Munich and about 1,500 in greater Bavaria.[14] Its meetings were often held in the luxury Hotel Vierjahreszeiten (Four Seasons Hotel) in Munich.[9] The followers of the Thule Society were, by Sebottendorff's own admission, little interested in occultist theories, instead they were interested in politics and combating Jews and Communists. Sebottendorff planned and failed to kidnap the socialist Jewish Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner in December 1918.[5][15] During the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919, Thulists were accused of trying to infiltrate its government and of attempting a coup. On 26 April the government in Munich raided the Society's premises and took seven of its members into custody, executing them on 30 April. Amongst them were Walter Nau...