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initiates continued to do battle with their communist adversaries, so another organization was also beginning its political life, the German Workers’ Party, which would eventually become the National Socialist Workers’ Party, or Nazis. Living in Munich during 1919, Adolf Hitler soon aligned himself with this group. ‘I went through the badly lighted guest-room,’ wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, describing their first encounter, ‘where not a single guest was to be seen, and searched for the door which led to the side room; and there I was face to face with the Committee. Under the dim light shed by a grimy gas-lamp I could see four people sitting round a table [ … ].’ 5 Satisfied with their credentials, Hitler joined as the seventh member of the group 7 and began his assault on the beer halls of Munich, stirring up his listeners with a stream of racist invective guaranteed to appeal to his lower-middle-class audience. In Mein Kampf , Hitler stated that he was in his early twenties before he became aware of the ‘Jewish problem’, but in light of the fact that he had been raised by an anti-Semitic father, it seems more likely that he had always harbored this deep animosity. The ‘Jewish problem’ became one of Hitler’s life-long obsessions, one which obviously drew him towards the Thule Society whose racist opinions were as virulent as his own. Hitler also expressed an abiding interest in the origins of the Aryan race, a passion he shared with the head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, Heinrich Himmler who, according to the historian Robin Cross, also enjoyed membership of the Thule Society. Both these men knew the powerful appeal of what the Thule Society represented to the average man in the street, particularly in post-war Munich, but also throughout Germany, for Thule doctrine gave support to the idea that Germany could reassume Teutonic supremacy after its shattering defeat in World War I. Both the Thule Society and Hitler, together with his henchmen, were also giving credence to the idea that Nazism wasn’t just a political doctrine or a semi-religious manifesto, it was the means by which a whole race could be reborn.

    Hitler with his ministers at a meeting in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin in 1933. To Hitler’s left stands Hermann Goering, with Alfred Rosenberg looking over Goering’s left shoulder and Heinrich Himmler in uniform on the far right of the picture.
    Himmler’s romantic dream was to establish a whole country of blue-eyed, blond heroes, the exact image that the Thule Society promoted by emphasizing their ancient Germanic heritage. But whereas Sebottendorff believed that Thule existed in the far regions of the north – Himmler (and to some extent Hitler) now began to be influenced by yet another Thule Society member, Karl Haushofer, who asserted that the true origins of the Aryan race were more likely to lie in, of all places, Tibet.
    In 1933 Hitler assumed the role of Chancellor of Germany, realizing both the Thule Society and Himmler’s dreams. But while the Nazi Party’s sun was in the ascendant, the Thule Society’s light began to fade. Membership dropped off with several ex-Thulites setting up splinter groups to cater for their increasingly bizarre beliefs. Even Sebottendorff didn’t survive, being ousted by his own members and for several years afterwards he disappeared from view as he took to traveling around the world. But if the bricks and mortar that constituted the Thule Society were disintegrating before Sebottendorff’s eyes, Thule Society ideals were by this time flourishing and, more frightening still, being made law.
    Given the task of implementing Hitler’s ideologies – particularly those involving racial superiority – in 1929 Himmler became leader of the SS or Schutzstaffel (protection squads) who were modeled on the Teutonic knights of old, supposedly representing a fighting force that was