Perhaps no period in history better illustrates the reality of Shakespeare's lyrical expressions of tragedy, spoken by Hamlet's friend Horatio at the very end of that famous play, than do the events of 1919 in Munich and Bavaria. The decision of one ambitious young man to do one violent thing provided the spark which ignited all of the tinder-dry passions then prevalent in Bavaria and in Germany at large. On the 21st of February, an aspiring law student named Anton, Count von Arco-Valley, confronted the revolutionary leader Kurt Eisner on the street in Munich and shot him dead. Munich was then in the grip of a socialist revolutionary government which had largely been organized by Eisner, a Jewish theater critic and journalist from Berlin, who had been in prison for inciting anti-war sentiments and strikes during The Great War.
"The assassination unleashed a storm of violence in the Bavarian capital" writes Richard J. Evans in The Coming Of The Third Reich (The Penguin Press, New York). As Evans notes, "ironically, a draft resignation document was discovered in Eisner's pocket. The assassination had been completely pointless."
Political turmoil engulfed Bavaria over the next weeks and months, and when news of a communist revolution in Hungary reached Munich, "organized Communists under the Russian Bolsheviks Max Levien and Eugen Levine' pushed aside" the Socialists and anarchists and declared a Bolshevik regime. In short order these Leninists recruited a 'Red Army' and began arresting aristocrats and taking wealthy men as hostages. Significantly, as Evans writes, the Red leaders decreed that "all weapons in private possession had to be surrendered on pain of death." This enraged the otherwise frightened and indecisive Social Democrats of Bavaria, then sitting in Bamberg. Claiming to be the legitimate and elected leader of Bavaria, their leader Johann Hoffmann enlisted the help of Franz Ritter von Epp and the paramilitary Free Corps. Soon they had thirty-five thousand men under arms, and support from regular military units including an armored train, and the Free Corps moved to blockade Munich. At that point the city was in a state of near anarchy, looting was widespread, and the Red council resigned in a panic.
However, before all of these communists showed their cowardice and fled, a Red Army detachment massacred a group of their hostages at the Luitpold gymnasium. These hostages were shot on April 30th, in reprisal for the previous execution of Red Army soldiers by the Free Corps at Stamberg. Ten people were killed outright, including a Jewish artist named Ernst Berger, two officers of the Bavarian army and seven members of the anti-semitic Thule Society including their Secretary, Countess Heila von Westarp. In a climate of desperation and radical political violence, this dastardly deed might have been a minor event in the dissolution of Soviet Bavaria. But these murders enraged the Free Corps soldiers and the influential members of the Thule Society used the deaths of their comrades to prove out their own anti-Jewish propaganda.
As S. Friedlaender observed in Nazi Germany And The Jews (1997), "the commander of the Red forces, a former navy man named Rudold Egelhofer, ordered the shooting of the hostages.
These executions, an isolated atrocity, became the quintessential illustration of Jewish Bolshevik terror in Germany; in the words of British historian Reginald Phelps, this murder of hostages goes far to explain ... 'the passionate wave of anti-Semitism that spread because the deed was alleged to represent the vengeance of Jewish Soviet leaders ... on anti-Semitic foes.' Needless to say, the fact that Egelhofer and 'all those directly connected with the shooting' were not Jews, and that one of the victims was Jewish, did not change these perceptions in the least. The impact of the situation in Berlin and Bavaria was amplified by revolutionary agitation in other parts of Germany.
Thus do accidents of history become ampflied by the lens of revolutionary passions.
LEFTIST HISTORIANS CANNOT ACKNOWLEDGE THE THULE SOCIETY
OR THE OCCULT IN THE RISE OF ADOLF HITLER
Eighty-five years have passed since Anton von Arco-Valley fired two fatal slugs into Kurt Eisner: and it is still a matter of controversy as to whether or not he was a member of The Thule Society, or whether he was seeking to prove himself to them as a potential member. Dutch historian J. Pasteur has a different take on this controversy:
The Thule Gesellschaft 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 [in Munich] and stored caches of arms and munitions to help destroy it. Members of the Society decided to kill Kurt Eisner, leader of the Bavarian ... revolution, but they were beaten to the deed by Anton 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 ....
Arco-Valley was a prominent aristocratic family in Bavaria, with a history of Christian charity that often put them at odds with other aristocrats of the 19th Century. Anton's mother was Jewish but he, himself, was decidedly right-wing in his views. There is not one shred of doubt that The Thule membership was essential to the beginnings of and development of National Socialism, as Pasteur notes -- Thule leaders "approached Anton Drexler, founder of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, to work as a liaison to the working classes." The DAP or German Workers' Party was the minor-league political movement which Adolf Hitler entered as a spy for the Army.
"The whole language of politics in Munich after the overthrow of the Communist regime was permeated by nationalist slogans, anti-semitic phrases, reactionary keywords", which Richard Evans says "almost invited the rabid expression of counter-revolutionary sentiment." As Evans and others have noted, France in the 1880s and 1890s was decidedly more hostile to their Jewish minority than was Germany in that same era. And the leading apostle of anti-Jewish sentiment at the beginning of the new century was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who published Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1910.
Under orders from the Army, Adolf Hitler enrolled in classes offered to soldiers in Bavaria in the summer of 1919. One of the lecturers was the aforementioned member of The Thule Society, according to Evans: "the Pan-German economic theorist Gottfried Feder, who put an anti-semitic gloss on economics by accusing the Jews of destroying the livelihood of hard-working Aryans through using capital unproductively."
A quick study, Adolf Hitler was enlisted to give lectures with a similar, anti-Socialist and radical right-wing flavor, in August and September of 1919. It was in this context that Corporal Hitler encountered his first political success, speaking from the floor in a meeting of the German Workers' Party on September 12th, against the separation of Bavaria from greater Germany. He joined Drexler's group while still under Army orders.
"There was nothing unusual about Drexler or his tiny party in the far-right hothouse of Munich after the defeat of the Revolution", writes Evans. "The fledgling party was in fact another creation of the hyperactive Thule Society."
Within a few months Adolf Hitler was convinced that political organizing was where he belonged and he quit the Army: as Evans puts it, he had become "indispensable to the Party." Neither the DAP or German Workers' Party nor Adolf Hitler were the first to claim and use the Swastika as a political symbol. J. Pasteur notes that The Thule Society had previously used a rounded form of the swastika sustained by a sword, in its imagery. Nor was the DAP all that powerful in its beginnings.
"With its headquarters in Hamburg, the German-Racial Defense and Defiance League boasted some 200,000 members all over Germany, drawn from ex-members of the Fatherland Party," records Evans, and "disgruntled ex-soldiers and from ... students, teachers, and white-collar workers.
"This was yet another far-right group that used the swastika as its main political symbol." But Drexler and Hitler had a broader political vision, one that appealed to German workers on both a nationalistic and an anti-capitalist basis.
With Adolf Hitler moving to the lead as their best speaker, Drexler's DAP decided to change its name to National Socialist German Workers' Party or NSDAP. The Social Democrats having been labelled "Sozi" by their opponents, it was easy enough for the new party to acquire the nickname "Nazi" from their detractors. Drawing larger and larger crowds meant getting new members.
"The synthesis of right and left was neatly symbolized in the Party's official flag, personally chosen by Hitler in mid-1920: the field was bright red, the colour of socialism," says Evans, "with the swastika, the emblem of racist nationalism, outlined in black in the middle of a white circle at the center of the flag." Evans adds "the whole ensemble made a combination of white, black and red, the colours of the official flag of the Bismarckian empire." That is, these were the colors of the Second Reich. The architecture of the NSDAP and its vision for a Third Reich, however, would be provided by the elitists of The Thule Society, not Drexler's working class Germans.
ENTER RUDOLF HESS
"Like a number of ... prominent Nazis," writes Evans, Rudolf Hess "came from outside the German Reich: Hess was born in Alexandria in 1894." Having studied with Karl Haushofer at Munich University, Hess was a devoted advocate of Pan-German expansionism and a member of The Thule Society. More useful in the beginning than was even the hero-worshipping Hess, Dietrich Eckart was a playwright and a poet who had started a weekly called In Plain German. Seemingly well-fixed by comparison to the average member of the NSDAP, Eckart had personal relationships with many prominent 'racialists,' including Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Eckart used his connections in the army and with The Thule Society to raise the money needed for Hitler and Drexler to buy their publication, The Racial Observer, which was taken over in December of 1920. By 1923, as editor of this newspaper, Eckart had converted it into a daily publication and provided it with top-flight journalistic guidance. Even though Eckart was always somewhat cool to the rising firebrand from Austria, he was crucial to Adolf Hitler's early successes. He died in 1923.
"Two associates he brought into the Party from the Thule Society served Hitler more reliably," reports Richard J. Evans, "and a good deal longer. The first of these was the Baltic-German architect Alfred Rosenberg." Born in Estonia, he fled that country after the October Revolution in Czarist Russia. Eckart recruited him as a writer and he proved to be one of the luminaries of National Socialist literature in the Third Reich.
"The other man whom Eckart brought into the Nazi Party was Hans Frank." As Evans records in The Coming Of The Third Reich, "in 1919 he [ Frank ] "joined the Thule Society and served in the Free Corps in the storming of Munich." After hearing Hitler speak in January of 1920, Frank was enthralled and subsequently devoted his life to the NSDAP. He earned a doctorate in law by 1924 and for the next seven years was a crucial ally, defending Party members in over two thousand different cases, many of them brought because of criminal assaults or brawling.
Eventually Hans Frank would become Minister of Justice under Adolf Hitler, and it was his fate to stand and watch as Heinrich Himmler's SS conducted its raids and executions on the 30th of June, 1934, 'the Night of the Long Knives.' Frank would prove to be the most resolute apologist for National Socialism in the area of legal affairs and the administration of the law, but even he was opposed to the heavy-handed tactics of Hitler's political police, in the aftermath of June 30th.
As Heinz Hohne wrote in his master work from 1966, The Order of the Death's Head, "his experience at that time sowed within him the seeds of doubt which caused him, when Governor General of Poland in 1942, to lead the most sustained public attack on Heinrich Himmler's police despotism ever made in the greater German Reich."
WITHOUT THE SOCIETY OF THULE THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO THIRD REICH
In summary, it is simply astonishing that the modern teaching of history -- when so many are obsessed with what happened under Adolf Hitler in the Third Reich -- seems to be deliberately structured so as to ignore the crucial role of The Thule Society in the years 1919 through 1924. Enormous works of scholarship, like Hohne's careful elaboration of the transformation of the Schutzstaffel or SS from being a political party's personal protection detail, to being an enormous industrial empire with its own uniformed officers and its own combat divisions, contain not a word of commentary on The Thule Society. And Hohne was extremely careful in his research !
In Chapter 5 of The Order of the Death's Head, Hohne notes that Anton von Arco-Valley was arrested by Himmler's SS in March of 1933, for supposedly plotting a coup against the Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Ironically, Himmler and other members of the Munich Home Guard had planned, in December of 1921, to enter Stadelheim Prison and liberate Anton von Arco-Valley for his heroic action in assassinating Kurt Eisner. When the aristocrat's sentence was commuted from death to life in prison, they abandoned their plans for a jailbreak.
Equally troubling, Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History ( Hill & Wang, 2000 ), with 812 pages of excellent narrative and analysis, and 150 pages of notes and indexing, gives The Thule Society only one reference. That reference being the fact that some of their members were massacred in April of 1919. But those Thule Society members killed that day were not just "some folks."
Besides the Countess von Westarp, Gustav Franz Prince von Thurn und Taxis was also killed by the Soviet Red Army of Munich. The Thule Society was wired into some of the highest levels of the aristocracy of Germany: its members had previously been involved in The German Order ( or Germanic Order, not the same as the Teutonic Order ), and it is from this region of Germany, from Bavaria and from the university town of Ingolstadt that The Order of the Illuminati was organized in 1776. It was from this region of Germany that the mystical Brotherhood of Death was drawn -- and it is in these united States today, that two scions of Chapter Two of the Brotherhood of Death, or Skull & Bones -- George W. Bush and John Forbes Kerry, are contesting the office of President of the United States of America.
There is no known and explicit diagram which shows precisely how The Order of the Illuminati spawned The Brotherhood of Death: nor can anyone say with absolute certainty, that Adam Weishaupt and the Baron Knigge were the grandfathers of the Germanic Order, which spawned the Masonic-like Thule Society. But it is for certain that The Order of the Illuminati was funded by German princes and aristocrats, that the Illuminati went deep under cover following the French Revolution, and that they have always operated since under the cover of OTHER NAMES and other forms of societies. The Thule Society, beginning apparently as a literary and debating group, but gaining 2500 members in its first year, conforms very closely to other groups known to have been spawned by The Order of the Illuminati after they were so thoroughly exposed in 1798. The key facts are clear -- their magazine Racial Observer was absorbed by the NSDAP and their leading members in 1919 were executed by the sworn enemies of German nationalism, the Jewish Bolsheviks and their confederates.
“What is it you would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search." -- Horatio, to Fortinbras, Prince of Norway
NOTE: the Dutch historian J. Pasteur can be found on line, and his page on The Thule Society draws heavily on -- Dr. Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (McGraw-Hill Inc., 1976). His presentation on Thule is quoted in the public interest
