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CHAPTER 1

Of Blood, Sex, and the Rune Magicians

Prologue: Christmas Day, 1907. A Castle in Upper Austria, on the Danube. Against a backdrop of snow-covered hills and ice-blue sky, church bells and Christmas carols, a flag is raised over Burg Werfenstein and, for the first time, the world sees a swastika banner fluttering in the breeze over Europe. Men dressed in white robes emblazoned with red crosses — Rune Magicians — raise their arms and voices in pagan chant to Baldur, the Sun God, Lord of the Winter Solstice.

The Order of the New Templars is proclaimed, while, only a few miles away, young Adolf Hitler has just buried his mother.

Most of us live in a world that is neatly organized around several basic principles. Like medieval serfs who lived secure in the knowledge that there was a God in heaven and a Satan in hell, that humanity was the battleground between these two forces, and that God was winning, we twentieth-century serfs bask in the comfort of a world that (we are told) is the product of purely scientific principles. Genesis has given way to The Origin of Species and the Big Bang. We have landed on the moon, rather than drawing it down with incantations and rites of witchcraft. We heal with lasers and sterilized instruments to a backbeat of the blips and beeps of electronic monitoring equipment; the fractured rhythms of the witch doctor's drums are but a faint echo of old fears and tainted memories.

Thus, we assume, all sane men and women are guided by scientific principles in their daily lives; and this is especially true, we sometimes like to think, of our politicians. What more prosaic a lot of people can there be but the House of Representatives or the House of Commons? A debate on the Senate floor — although televised in all its stultifying detail on something called C-SPAN — is rarely gripping; not quite the stuff of Becket or Richard III. There is little in the way of poetry or vision in American politics anymore, and that is largely because the Romantic ideals of our ancestors have been discredited with the passage of time. We are nations of laws, and these laws are constantly changing to reflect new "realities" created — not by philosophers or metaphysicians or theologians — but by scientists and technicians. The very fact that Americans can tune in their television sets and watch live coverage of a debate in the House over funding allocations for a program they've never heard of is somewhat comforting. It means, in fact, that the wheels of government grind on, in the open, with boring, peristaltic regularity, aided and abetted by scientific invention and technological achievement. A bureaucracy on Geritol.

While, outside on the streets, civilization is breaking down so fast Western society is on the verge of a catastrophe of major proportions.

A Communist might say the reasons for the decline of the Western way of life are purely economic and that the warring factions are economic classes struggling for dominance over the means of production.

But there are few Communists abroad in the land anymore; fewer still who could carry that argument with any conviction, no matter how reasonable it might seem today. After all, an L.A. street gang performing a drive-by shooting on rival gang members to enforce their control of the drug trade on some bleak city block seems hardly what Mao had in mind when he wrote "All power comes from the barrel of a gun," or what Marx and Engels meant by "Workingmen of all countries, unite!"

The polarity within which so much of the twentieth century was written — Communism and Fascism — has crumbled. The Soviet Union — Hitler's greatest enemy after the Jews — has fallen. The map of Europe has been redrawn, with a reunified Germany as its centerpiece. Its capital is Berlin, once again.

Who had reason to celebrate the most when the Berlin Wall came down?

And who is celebrating now that the races have become, if anything, even more divided; when we read once again about a "Jewish-Masonic conspiracy" as the rationale for "ethnic cleansing"; when the potential for racial violence all over the world has escalated to heights unheard of thirty, forty years ago?

While science is humming along nicely inside our homes, just what the hell is happening outside, and why?

If we are honest with ourselves we know we can't answer all these questions with a few canned explanations about the decline of the nuclear family or the failure of the social welfare system. There is clearly something more going on here. Our politicians are not men of science; they never were. They live as dangerously close to the Beast Within as the rest of us; perhaps even more so. In the end, the difference between a seasoned politician and a gang-banger with a machine gun is very slight, a difference of style rather than substance. If that seems to be overstating the case, just ask anyone who lived in Berlin in 1919. Or in Munich in 1923. Or Vienna in 1938. Poland in 1941.

Santiago in 1973.

Or Sarajevo in 1994.

Ask anyone on the receiving end of Nazi occultism.

The epigraph from Thomas Mann at the beginning of this book is taken from Doctor Faustus. The author thought that both quotation and source were apt selections to christen this discussion. Doctor Faustus, after all, is a novel that takes place in Germany during the rise and fall of Hitler. Its title comes from a long German tradition of Doctors Faustus: magicians and occultists who have sold their souls to Satan in the next life for personal power and glory in this one. Thomas Mann himself lived to see his books burned in great bonfires throughout Germany in that impotent gesture by the Nazi government during the war of ideas that has characterized our century.

Even more apt, however, is Satan's own explanation for the "secret delight of hell": as Mann understands it, hell's delight is that it cannot be discussed or described, that "it is not to be informed on."

It is the author's intention, therefore, to steal some of hell's secret delight and security; to shine a light, however feebly or inexpertly, on that corner of history's basement few professional historians have dared to visit, and to show the reader why. We will trace the history of a cult so lethal no sensationalistic tales of satanic serial killers hacking women to death in suburban cellars can come close to matching the horror, or the evil; a cult that still exists to this day, its activities aided, abetted, and protected by a variety of the world's governments.

And to do that, we must begin with a scene of utter chaos; with the breakdown of civilization; with rooftop snipers and roving gangs with guns; with terror and madness; with mystical diagrams and pagan rituals in ruined castles; with a vision of hell itself.

We must begin with Munich in 1918.

Descent into Hell

The city is in turmoil. The Kaiser's republic has collapsed with the defeat of Germany in the First World War, and the whole country is up for grabs. It appears as if Germany is about to fall apart into the warring city-states from which it had been assembled nearly fifty years ago. The victorious Allies are demanding enormous concessions from Germany. The Russian Revolution has been in full swing for a year, and German soldiers returning from the front are being cajoled into helping midwife the same type of Communist regime amid the ashes of the Second Reich.

Kurt Eisner — an intellectual and a Jew, a defender of the League of Nations — takes the initiative and proclaims a Socialist Republic in Munich on the seventh of November, 1918. It looks as if there is going to be a Communist regime in Germany — or, at least, a Socialist one in Bavaria — after all. Hysteria grows among the nationalists, and with it despair that their nation is on the verge of realizing the dreams of Marx and Engels as codified in their famous Manifesto. Germans are bewildered, shocked ... stunned into a kind of nervous stupefaction. They have lost the war, their country may be broken up once again into many separate bickering pieces, and there will soon be Communists calling the shots in Berlin and in the capital city of Bavaria: Munich.

Within forty-eight hours there is a meeting of the Thule Gesellschaft. The Thule, a mystical society based in part on the theosophical writings of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels — which is to say, an amalgam of Eastern religion, theosophy, anti-Semitism, Grail romance, runic mystification, and Nordic paganism — meets every Saturday in spacious rooms at the elegant Four Seasons Hotel in Munich. There are roughly 250 members of the Thule in Munich ... and over fifteen hundred in Bavaria. On that day, November 9, a bizarre individual, an occultist, an initiate of the Eastern mysteries in Turkey as well as of Freemasonry, and the leader and founder of the Thule — the self-styled Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff — makes an impassioned plea to the assembled cultists for armed resistance to the Reds. This plea eventually degenerates into a monologue on runes, German racial theory, Nordic mythology, and other arcane lore. No matter. Most of his listeners know what to expect. They are, in fact, members of the supersecret, superracist, and superoccult "German Order Walvater of the Holy Grail," or Germanenorden, which is using the name Thule Gesellschaft — or Thule Society, a "literary-cultural society" — as a cover to confuse Munich's fledgling Red Army, which is on the lookout for right-wing extremists. Sebottendorff himself is Master of the anti-Semitic Germanenorden's Bavarian division under its leader and founder, Hermann Pohl.

The Thule cultists — whose symbol is a long dagger superimposed on a swastika — need no encouragement. They begin stockpiling weapons in secret supply dumps in and around Munich, anticipating a counterstrike against the new Socialist Republic. They make alliances with other nationalist groups, such as the Pan-Germans under editor Julius Lehmann, the German School Bund, the Hammerbund ... and an organized resistance movement is born. All the mystical and clandestine labors of the past twenty years involving a series of secret and occult organizations with elaborate initiation ceremonies and complex magical rituals, from the List Society's inner HAO (Higher Armanen Order) to the Order of the New Templars, will soon culminate in a pitched battle in the streets of Munich between the neo-pagan Thule Society and the "godless Communists."

FEBRUARY 21, 1919. The idealistic but hapless Kurt Eisner — who preceded political speeches with symphonic concerts — is assassinated by a young count and would-be Thulist. The police descend upon Thule headquarters, looking for inflammatory leaflets and other evidence of Thule Society involvement in the plot. Was the notoriously anti-Semitic Thule Society somehow responsible for Eisner's assassination? Sebottendorff stonewalls, and threatens to instigate a pogrom if the police don't leave the Thule Society alone. The police comply.

APRIL 7, 1919. A rebel Bavarian Soviet Republic is proclaimed in Munich as the legitimate minister-president of Bavaria flees north with his council to the town of Bamberg to prevent the Communists from taking over the government. The Thule organizes among the anti-Communist factions in Munich and Sebottendorff (together with his friend, the racist priest Bernhard Stempfle) begins conspiring with the "exiled" Bavarian government in Bamberg for a counterrevolt.

APRIL 13, 1919. The Palm Sunday Putsch. An abortive attempt by the Thule Gesellschaft — with other anti-Communist groups — to take power in Munich. There is bloodshed. The Putsch fails. Munich explodes into anarchy. The Communists seize control of the city and begin taking hostages. The Red Army is on the march ... and hunting for the Thule Gesellschaft.

APRIL 26, 1919. Sebottendorff is away at Bamberg, busy organizing a Freikorps (Free Corps) assault on Communist headquarters, when a Red Army unit raids Thule Society offices and arrests its secretary, the Gräfin Hella von Westarp, and seizes the Thule membership lists. Six more Thulists are arrested at their homes, including the Prince von Thurn und Taxis, a well-connected aristocrat with blood relations among the crowned heads of Europe.

APRIL 30, 1919. Walpurgisnacht. The High Holy Day of European Paganism and Witchcraft. The Red Army executes the captured Thulists and other hostages, shooting them against a wall in the courtyard of Luitpold High School.

It is probably the worst mistake they could have made.

The next day, an obituary appears in Sebottendorff's Münchener Beobachter — a newspaper which a year later becomes the official Nazi propaganda sheet, the Völkischer Beobachter — giving the names of the seven murdered cultists and laying the blame on the doorstep of the Red Army. The citizens of Munich are finally outraged, shaken out of their lethargy. Thulists continue their well-organized campaign of agit-prop against the Communist regime. The people take to the streets.

The Free Corps — twenty thousand strong — marches on Munich under the command of General von Oven. For the first time in history, storm troopers — members of the Ehrhardt Free Corps Brigade — march beneath a swastika flag with swastikas painted on their helmets, singing a swastika hymn. As they enter the city, they find that the Thule has managed to organize a full-scale citizen rebellion against the Soviet government. They join forces.

When the dust settles on May 3, the Communists have been defeated in Munich, politically and militarily. Hundreds of people, including many innocent civilians, have been senselessly slaughtered in their streets and homes by the crusading "Whites" with the swastika banners. But there will be no Socialist or Communist government in Germany until after World War II, over twenty-five years later, and even then it will rule over only half of the country and will take its orders from Germany's most despised enemy, the Soviet Union.

But now, so soon after the victorious march of the Freikorps through the streets of Munich, the threat of a Soviet regime in the rest of Germany is still very real. Units of the navy are in mutiny, raising the red flag over Germany's battleships. France will march into the Ruhr valley, Germany's industrial heartland. But the spectacular success of the Freikorps has aroused the admiration of anti-Bolshevik forces all across Europe. In Riga, the newly formed Latvian Republic begs for Freikorps assistance to defend their country against the Bolsheviks and even the British support this decision. Hence, Freikorps units move to the defense of Latvia until the British themselves have to intervene to free Latvia from the death grip of these rabid proto-Nazi brigands.

Even Germany's own right wing is divided into two camps: those in favor of restoring the monarchy and separating Bavaria from the rest of Germany, and those in favor of a unified Greater German Reich, without a monarch but with a leader, a leader with vision. A German messiah. A Führer. Where is that Führer to be found?

Unwittingly, the Thule Gesellschaft provides the answer. Meeting in the expensive Four Seasons Hotel, the leading industrialists and aristocracy of the city, along with a generous helping of local police and military officials, are designing a two-pronged strategy of political activism. The Thule Society will do the organizing, will make the right connections among the society figures, the wealthy capitalists, the intelligentsia. They will stockpile the weapons. They will organize units of the Free Corps, particularly the Ehrhardt Brigade (which will become an official unit of Germany's navy as the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade and, eventually, subsumed into Himmler's SS) and the Freikorps Oberland.

But another arm of the Thule has already begun recruiting — not among Munich's "beautiful people," the rich and the powerful — but among the working people, the lower- and middle-class citizens who have been hit hardest by the civil wars, the enormous rates of inflation, the chaos and confusion. There will be no overt involvement of the Thule Society in this group, which is to be called instead the German Workers Party and which will be led by a serious, humorless, railroad employee and locksmith named Anton Drexler. They will meet in a beer hall. Perhaps between the two groups — the Thule with its academics, nobles, and factory owners meeting at the Four Seasons, and the German Workers' Party with its rough-and-tumble factory workers meeting in beer halls — they will be able to form a united front against Communism, international Freemasonry, and world Jewry.

Within a year, this project of the Thule Gesellschaft will become the NSDAP: the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The Nazi Party. It will sport a swastika flag and a swastika armband, and its leader will be a war veteran, a corporal who had been sent by the German Army to spy on the organization: Adolf Hitler.

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Excerpted from "Unholy Alliance"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Peter Levenda.
Excerpted by permission of NICOLAS-HAYS, INC..
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