The Most Evil Secret Societies in History Read Online Free PDF

hostilities, the German nation was one of, if not the, most law-abiding countries in Europe. Its citizens were hard-working, orderly and well mannered. World War I changed all that. Returning from the battlefields, German soldiers had grown accustomed to levels of violence and scenes of carnage never before experienced. On their return home they faced not a heroes’ welcome, but a disillusioned and divided populace depressed and struggling to survive in a climate of severe economic instability. By April 1921 the Allies had demanded reparations to be paid by Germany to the tune of 132 million gold marks (approximately £6,600 million). This caused the value of the German mark, which in 1918 had stood at the rate of four to the dollar, to spiral out of all control to seventy-five to the dollar. By the summer of 1922 this had almost quadrupled to four hundred. These were dark times indeed for a country more used to leading the world rather than following meekly behind.
    The southern city of Munich, perhaps more than any other principal municipality in Germany – the constitution of the Weimar Republic afforded the old German states such as Bavaria, Prussia and Saxony a certain amount of autonomy by giving them their own state governments and representative assemblies – was worst affected by this mood of dissatisfaction and violence. Even during the war, Munich had stood apart from other cities, with Hitler remarking that ‘bad morale and war-weariness were more pronounced in Munich than in the north.’ 1

    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.’ 2
    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