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The Thule Geßellschaft in München was founded during the First World War by an emissary from Berlin, Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff, who enlisted 250 members in München and another 1,500 elsewhere in Bavaria. Among the members were journalists, poets, professors, and Army officers. The membership list included political theorist Gottfried Feder; Dietrich Eckart, an elder journalist and poet (a central figure in Hitler's entourage during 1919-1923, and who introduced the phrase Deutschland erwache!); Rudolf Hess, a member of the NSDAP from 1920 on; and Alfred Rosenberg, the woolly-minded Nazi 'philosopher.' The objectives of the society were mainly völkisch, embracing especially the concepts of racial superiority and anti-Semitism. The group supported the Pan-German dream of a new, powerful German Reich. Like other such societies in Bavaria and Germany as a whole, the Thule Geßellschaft used mystical symbols such as the fylfot (swastika, hooked cross) and elborate semi-occultist rituals. Its motto was: "Gedenke, dass Du ein Deutscher bist. Halte dein Blut rein!" ("Remember that you are a German. Keep your blood pure!")
Thule agents infiltrated the armed formations of the Communist régime and stored caches of arms and munitions to help destroy it. Members of the Society decided to kill Kurt Eisner, leader of the Bavarian Communist revolution of early-1919, but they were beaten to the deed by Anton Graf Arco-Valley, a young officer of Jewish descent who had been rejected for membership by the Thulists. Arco-Valley was determined to shame his insulters by an act of courage, and killed Eisner in February 1919.
As they saw themselves (and were) as somewhat élitist - certainly too academic and 'intellectual' - members of the Thule Geßellschaft approached Anton Drexler, founder of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, to work as a liaison to the working classes. Drexler's influence and authority within his own party waned as he was sidelined by Adolf Hitler. Like many members of the Tatkreis, many Thulists joined the DAP and, eventually, the NSDAP.
That the Thule Geßellschaft was of influence on Hitler and other leading Nazis is not in question by serious historians and biographers. However, others of a more spiritual or esoteric inclination wish to over-emphasize the occultist influence and rôle during the earliest days of the NSDAP of both the Thule Society and the somewhat more sinister Vril Society, or 'Luminous Lodge.' The latter was supposedly founded by Professor of Geography at the University of München Karl Haushofer, the leading scholar and exponent of 'geo-politics,' but actually a man deeply-troubled by how gingerly the Nazis 'hijacked' his theories and used them to their own nefarious effects as a rationalization for territorial expansion at the expense of the Slavic peoples in eastern Europe. The Vril Society (from vril, the ancient language of the lost Atlantæans, spoken in a series of sounds and 'clicks') was set up to uncover and oppose a great secret Conspiracy, co-operated with the Nazis, and supposedly used 'channelled' energy and secret knowledge gained from extra-terrestrials to build a flying-saucer. Just before the final collapse of the Third Reich, this technology was secretly transported out of Germany to the Antarctic where a secret base was constructed, and where US Admiral Richard E. Byrd's expedition supposedly encountered and was defeated by the mysterious Foo Fighters of UFO-lore. Furthermore, according to a different account of the Thule Society, the Earth is in fact hollow, inhabited by a race of ancient and highly-intelligent 'super-beings' called the Vhujunka. These Inner Earthers are the original 'Nordic Supermen' from whom are descended the Aryans - hence the Nazis' belief in their 'racial superiority' ....
Main source: Dr. Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (McGraw-Hill Inc., 1976)
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