# The Thule Society was the secret occult brotherhood that masterminded the rise of Nazism from behind the scenes

**No verdict.** The Thule Society was real and is well documented: a völkisch, occult-tinged secret order established in Munich in 1918 as the cover name for a lodge of the antisemitic Germanenorden, steeped in Aryan-race mysticism and violent hostility to Jews and communists. Its genuine links to the early Nazi movement are also documented: it sponsored Karl Harrer, who helped found the German Workers' Party (DAP) that Hitler later took over, and it owned the newspaper that became the Völkischer Beobachter. The claim we rate is larger: that the society was the hidden mastermind that created and secretly steered Nazism, an occult inner brotherhood pulling the strings. That claim is unproven. Historians such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke find the society's real influence modest and often overstated; Hitler was never a member, most of the famous names on its rolls were guests rather than initiates, the mature Nazi state was hostile to occult orders, and the most lurid version (a psychic Vril brotherhood) was invented in 1960. Real and connected is not the same as secret puppet-master.

Category: Secret Societies & Power · Era: 1910s · First circulated: The society itself dates to 1918; the claim that it was the decisive hidden force behind Hitler was seeded by Rudolf von Sebottendorff's own 1933 boast Before Hitler Came, then vastly amplified by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's 1960 bestseller The Morning of the Magicians, which launched a whole genre of Nazi-occult writing · Believed by: Readers of popular Nazi-occult and esoteric-history literature, a genre that has flourished since the 1960s; the outsized version circulates far more widely in paperbacks, documentaries, and online lore than in the work of academic historians, who treat the society as real but limited
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## Summary
The Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) was a real organization. Founded in Munich in 1918 by the occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorff as the public cover name for the Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater, it was a völkisch, antisemitic, occult-flavored secret order that preached the myth of a pure ancient Aryan race and agitated against the Bavarian revolutionary left. Its documented connections to the birth of Nazism are genuine: a Thule member, Karl Harrer, helped found the German Workers' Party in January 1919, the party Hitler joined that autumn and remade into the Nazi Party; and the society owned the Münchener Beobachter newspaper that became the Völkischer Beobachter. From those real threads grew a far larger story: that the Thule Society was the secret occult brain behind Hitler, an inner brotherhood that conjured the Third Reich through mysticism and hidden power. This case file keeps two things apart: a real, noxious, and consequential group; and the claim it rates, a hidden mastermind, which remains unproven and, in its most colorful forms, fabricated.

## The claim
That the Thule Society was not merely one of many nationalist groups in postwar Munich but the secret occult society that created, guided, and controlled the Nazi movement from behind the scenes, that its leading occultists initiated Hitler and the Nazi elite into a hidden doctrine, and that the true engine of Nazism was therefore an esoteric brotherhood rather than the documented political and social forces of Weimar Germany.

## Origin and timeline
- 1912: The Germanenorden, a völkisch and antisemitic secret society organized on quasi-Masonic lines, is established in Germany. It preaches the supremacy of a supposed ancient Aryan or Germanic race and screens recruits for racial purity. The Thule Society will emerge from its ranks.
- 1918-08-18: In Munich, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, an occultist and head of the Bavarian branch of a schismatic offshoot of the Germanenorden, formally dedicates his lodge under the public cover name Thule Society, folding in a study group associated with Walter Nauhaus. The name Thule invokes a mythical far-northern Aryan homeland.
- 1918: The society buys a struggling local weekly, the Münchener Beobachter. Under Thule control it becomes a vehicle for nationalist and antisemitic agitation; years later, having passed to the Nazis, it is renamed the Völkischer Beobachter and becomes the party's main newspaper.
- 1918-12: Fiercely opposed to the socialist People's State of Bavaria, Sebottendorff plots to kidnap its prime minister, the independent socialist Kurt Eisner. The plan fails. The episode marks the society as an active player in Munich's violent counter-revolutionary politics, not merely a debating circle.
- 1919-01-05: Karl Harrer, tasked by the Thule Society with reaching Munich workers, joins the locksmith Anton Drexler in founding the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), the German Workers' Party. This is the society's most consequential documented link to what becomes Nazism.
- 1919-04-30: During the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, Red forces who had raided the society's rooms execute seven Thule-linked hostages, among them the secretary Countess Heila von Westarp and Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis. The killings, the Münchner Geiselmorde, are seized on as anti-communist and antisemitic propaganda.
- 1919-09-12: Adolf Hitler, then an army informant, attends his first DAP meeting and soon joins the party. He is drawn into the group Harrer helped create, but there is no record that he ever attended a Thule Society meeting or became a member.
- 1920: The DAP is renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). As Hitler takes command he pushes Harrer out and severs the party's tie to the Thule Society. The society declines and is effectively dissolved within a few years, well before Hitler ever holds national power.
- 1933: Sebottendorff returns to Germany and publishes Bevor Hitler kam (Before Hitler Came), claiming the Thule Society had paved the way for the Führer. The Nazi regime bans the book and briefly imprisons him; he flees into exile. His self-aggrandizing boast becomes a founding source for the mastermind legend.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The Thule Society was the secret occult brain that created and controlled the Nazi Party.
  Evidence: The real connections are documented but limited, and they run the opposite way from control. A Thule member, Karl Harrer, helped found the DAP, and the society owned the newspaper that became the Völkischer Beobachter; these are genuine and important. But by 1920 Hitler had deliberately cut the party's link to the society and forced Harrer out, and the Thule Society itself faded and dissolved within a few years, long before the Nazis took power in 1933. A group that was sidelined by 1920 and gone by the mid-1920s is poorly cast as the hidden hand steering the regime of the 1930s and 1940s. Historians treat its influence as real but modest, a tributary of the early movement, not its source or its master.
- Claim: Hitler himself was a Thule Society member, initiated into its occult doctrine.
  Evidence: There is no evidence for this. Hitler joined the DAP, a party a Thule member had helped start, but the record shows no sign that he ever attended a Thule Society meeting or belonged to it; the diary of the Thule member Johannes Hering, among other sources, is cited to that effect. Hitler's own worldview was racial-nationalist rather than esoteric, and he showed open contempt for occult and secret-society milieus. Placing him inside the lodge is an assumption the sources do not support.
- Claim: The society's membership rolls were a who's who of the Nazi leadership, proving it was the movement's true core.
  Evidence: This overstates a real but narrower fact. Hitler's biographer Ian Kershaw noted that the membership list reads like a who's who of early Nazi sympathizers in Munich, and figures such as Rudolf Hess and Hans Frank do appear to have been genuine members before their rise. But the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the leading scholar of the subject, describes many of the sweeping membership claims as spurious and fanciful, and finds that men later cited as proof, including Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, and Dietrich Eckart, were guests or invited speakers rather than initiates. A handful of real members and a roster of visitors is not the same as an occult high command.
- Claim: The Thule Society wielded hidden psychic power, its inner circle drawing on the Vril force to guide the Reich.
  Evidence: This is fabrication, not history. The idea of a secret Vril Society as an inner sanctum behind the Thule Society was invented in 1960 by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in The Morning of the Magicians, drawing on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 science-fiction novel The Coming Race and its imaginary Vril energy. Historians have found no historical foundation whatever for an organized Vril Society in pre-war Germany; the authors offered no evidence and the claim is classed as fiction. The most dramatic version of the mastermind story rests on a novel and a bestseller, not on any record.
- Claim: Because the society was steeped in occultism, Nazism was fundamentally an occult project in disguise.
  Evidence: The Thule Society's mysticism was real, but the documented substance of its ideology was völkisch racial nationalism and virulent antisemitism, a political and racial program, not a hidden spiritual one. And the mature Nazi state was actively hostile to occult and secret orders: it suppressed Freemasonry, astrologers, and esoteric groups, and it banned Sebottendorff's own book. Treating the early presence of occult trappings as the secret essence of the whole regime confuses one strand in the movement's noxious origins with a master key to all of it.

## Why people believe it
- There is a real kernel. The society genuinely existed, genuinely helped seed the party Hitler joined, and genuinely owned the paper that became the Nazi organ. When the core facts check out, the exaggeration built on top of them inherits an air of credibility that a pure invention never could.
- An occult origin makes an incomprehensible horror feel explicable. Attributing the Third Reich to a hidden brotherhood and a dark doctrine supplies a cause proportionate to the catastrophe, which can be more psychologically bearable than the harder truth that ordinary politics, resentment, and racism produced it.
- Sebottendorff himself supplied the claim. His 1933 book Before Hitler Came boasted that the Thule Society had prepared the way for the Führer, giving the legend a seemingly authoritative insider source, even though the regime rejected the boast and banned the book.
- A 1960 bestseller gave it glamour. Pauwels and Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians blended real groups with invented ones like the Vril Society into a single thrilling narrative, and it seeded decades of paperbacks, documentaries, and websites that repeat the fusion as fact.
- It fits the oldest template there is. A secret society directing world events from the shadows is one of conspiracy culture's most durable shapes, and the Thule Society, with its lodge, its rituals, and its real proximity to power, slots into that ready-made story almost too neatly.

## Open questions
- Historians still debate the precise weight of the society's early influence: whether its sponsorship of the DAP and its newspaper were decisive contributions to the movement's launch or comparatively minor threads among many nationalist groups active in postwar Munich.
- The exact membership remains contested at the edges. Beyond the few names accepted as genuine members, scholars disagree over who was an initiate, who was merely a guest, and how much later rolls were inflated for propaganda or self-promotion.
- How much the society's specific occult and Ariosophical ideas actually shaped Nazi racial doctrine, as opposed to sharing a common völkisch source with it, is a real and unsettled question about intellectual lineage rather than secret control.

## Sources
- Thule Society, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society
- Thule Society, Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/thule-society
- Rudolf von Sebottendorf, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_von_Sebottendorf
- German Workers' Party, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Workers%27_Party
- Karl Harrer, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Harrer
- Vril Society, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril_Society
- Germanenorden, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanenorden
- Nazi Leadership and the Thule Society, Frank Jacob, Osaka University Knowledge Archive (OUKA) (2018): https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/66489/ph_08_051.pdf

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