The
Thule Society (
German Thule-Gesellschaft), originally the
Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum ("Study Group for
Germanic Antiquity"), was a German
occultist and
völkisch group in
Munich, named after a
mythical northern country from Greek legend. The Society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was later transformed by
Adolf Hitler into the
Nazi Party. However, there is no evidence that Hitler had ever attended the Thule Society before the DAP's transformation into the Nazi Party.
[1]The Thule Society was originally a "Germanic study group" headed by Walter Nauhaus,[2] 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.[3] In 1917 Nauhaus moved to Munich; his Thule-Gesellschaft was to be a cover-name for the Munich branch of the Germanenorden,[4] 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.[5] 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.[6]
Sebottendorff later claimed that he originally intended the Thule Society to be a vehicle for promoting his own occultist theories, but that the Germanenorden pressed him to emphasize political, nationalist and anti-Semitic themes.[citation needed] The fact that this claim was made while the Nazis were in power and Sebottendorff had little to gain by denying anti-Semitism lends credibility to this claim.
A primary focus of Thule-Gesellschaft was a claim concerning the origins of the Aryan race. "Thule" ((Greek) T????) was a land located by Greco-Roman geographers in the furthest north.[7] The term "Ultima Thule" ((Latin) most distant Thule) is also mentioned by the Roman poet Virgil in his pastoral poems called the Georgics.[8] 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.[9]
