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| Thule Society | |
| Aliases: | Thule-Gesellschaft |
| Continuity: | All continuities |
| Type: | Secret society |
| Status: | Defunct |
| Leaders: | Adolf Hitler |
| Members: | Adolf Hitler; Grigori Rasputin; Johann Shmidt |
| Allies: | Ilsa Haupstein; Karl Ruprect Kroenen; Klaus Werner von Krupt; Leopold Kurtz; Sinthea Shmidt |
| Enemies: | Anung Un Rama; Athena Voltaire; Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense; Ghost Rider; |
The Thule Society was a German occultist group founded in Munich shortly after World War I, named after a mythical northern country in Greek legend. The society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers' Party. According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the organization's "membership list ... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich", including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.
Description[]
The Thule Society was originally a "German study group" headed by Walter Nauhaus, a wounded World War I veteran turned art student from Berlin who had become a keeper of pedigrees for the Germanenorden, a secret society founded in 1911 and formally named in the following year. In 1917, Nauhaus moved to Munich; his Thule Society was to be a cover-name for the Munich branch of the Germanenorden, 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. 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 August 18th, 1918.