====== The Thule Society ======

The Thule Society (/ˈtuːlə/; German: Thule-Gesellschaft), originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum ('Study Group for Germanic Antiquity'), was a German occultist and Völkisch 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 (DAP; German Workers' Party), which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi 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.

Author Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke contends that Hans Frank and Rudolf Hess had been Thule members, but other leading Nazis had only been invited to speak at Thule meetings or they were entirely unconnected with it. According to Johannes Hering, "There is no evidence that Hitler ever attended the Thule Society."

===== Origins =====

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 (or "Order of Teutons"), a secret society founded in 1911 and formally named in the following year. In 1917, Nauhas 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, Nauhas 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 Nauhas's Thule Society as a cover-name for his Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater at its formal dedication on 18 August 1918.

===== Beliefs =====

A primary focus of the Thule Society was a claim concerning the origins of the Aryan race. In 1917, people who wanted to join the "Germanic Order", out of which the Thule Society developed in 1918, had to sign a special "blood declaration of faith" concerning their lineage:

"The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races."

"Thule" (Greek: Θούλη) was a land located by Greco-Roman geographers in the farthest north (often displayed as Iceland). The Latin term "Ultima Thule" is also mentioned by Roman poet Virgil in his pastoral poems called the Georgics. Thule originally was probably the name for Scandinavia, although Virgil simply uses it as a proverbial expression for the edge of the known world, and his mention should not be taken as a substantial reference to Scandinavia. The Thule Society identified Ultima Thule as a lost ancient landmass in the extreme north, near Greenland or Iceland, said by Nazi mystics to be the capital of ancient Hyperborea.

===== Activities =====

The Thule Society attracted about 1,500 followers in Bavaria, including 250 followers in Munich.

The followers of the Thule Society were very interested in racial theory and, in particular, in combating Jews and communists. Sebottendorff planned but failed to kidnap Bavarian socialist prime minister Kurt Eisner in December 1918. During the Bavarian revolution of April 1919, Thulists were accused of trying to infiltrate its government and of attempting a coup. On 26 April, the Communist government in Munich raided the society's premises and took seven of its members into custody, executing them on 30 April. Amongst them were Walter Nauhaus and three aristocrats, including Countess Heila von Westarp who functioned as the group's secretary, and Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis who was related to several European royal families. In response, the Thule organised a citizens' uprising as White troops entered the city on 1 May.

===== Münchener Beobachter newspaper =====

In 1918, the Thule Society bought a local weekly newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer), and changed its name to Münchener Beobachter und Sportblatt (Munich Observer and Sports Paper) in an attempt to improve its circulation. The Münchener Beobachter later became the Völkischer Beobachter ("Völkisch Observer"), the main Nazi newspaper. It was edited by Karl Harrer.

===== Deutsche Arbeiterpartei =====

Anton Drexler had developed links between the Thule Society and various extreme right workers' organizations in Munich. He established the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP; German Workers' Party) on 5 January 1919, together with the Thule Society's Karl Harrer. Adolf Hitler joined this party in September the same year. By the end of February 1920, the DAP had been reconstituted as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers' Party), often referred to as the Nazi Party.

Sebottendorff by then had left the Thule Society, and never joined the DAP or the Nazi Party. Dietrich Bronder (Bevor Hitler kam, 1964) alleged that other members of the Thule Society were later prominent in Nazi Germany: the list includes Dietrich Eckart (who coached Hitler on his public speaking skills, along with Erik Jan Hanussen, and had Mein Kampf dedicated to him), as well as Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank, Hermann Göring, Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Alfred Rosenberg. Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has described this membership roll and similar claims as "spurious" and "fanciful", noting that Feder, Eckart, and Rosenberg were never more than guests to whom the Thule Society extended hospitality during the Bavarian revolution of 1918, although he has more recently acknowledged that Hess and Frank were members of the society before they came to prominence in the Nazi Party. It has also been claimed that Adolf Hitler himself was a member. Evidence on the contrary shows that he never attended a meeting, as attested to by Johannes Hering's diary of society meetings. It is quite clear that Hitler himself (unlike Himmler, for example) had little interest in, and made little time for, "esoteric" matters.

Wilhelm Laforce and Max Sesselmann (staff on the Münchener Beobachter) were Thule members who later joined the NSDAP.

===== Dissolution =====

Early in 1920, Karl Harrer was forced out of the DAP as Hitler moved to sever the party's link with the Thule Society, which subsequently fell into decline and was dissolved about five years later, well before Hitler came to power.

Rudolf von Sebottendorff had withdrawn from the Thule Society in 1919, but he returned to Germany in 1933 in the hope of reviving it. In that year, he published a book entitled Bevor Hitler kam (Before Hitler Came), in which he claimed that the Thule Society had paved the way for the Führer: "Thulers were the ones to whom Hitler first came, and Thulers were the first to unite themselves with Hitler." This claim was not favourably received by the Nazi authorities: after 1933, esoteric organisations were suppressed (including völkisch occultists), many closed down by anti-Masonic legislation in 1935. Sebottendorff's book was prohibited and he himself was arrested and imprisoned for a short period in 1934, afterwards departing into exile in Turkey.

Nonetheless, it has been argued that some Thule members and their ideas were incorporated into Nazi Germany. Some of the Thule Society's teachings were expressed in the books of Alfred Rosenberg. Many occult ideas found favour with Heinrich Himmler, who had a great interest in mysticism, unlike Hitler, but the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Himmler emulated the structure of Ignatius Loyola's Jesuit order rather than the Thule Society, according to Hohne.

===== Conspiracy theories =====

The Thule Society has become the center of many conspiracy theories concerning Nazi Germany, due to its occult background (like the Ahnenerbe section of the SS). Such theories include the creation of vril-powered Nazi UFOs.

===== In popular culture =====

  * The Thule Society has been featured in the television series Supernatural: in "Everybody Hates Hitler" (2013, season 8), a group of society members seek out a lost ledger containing information about their experiments with necromancy. In "The Vessel" (2016, season 11), a leading member of the Thule Society vies against Dean to find a piece of the Ark of the Covenant during World War II. In "The One You've Been Waiting For" (season 12) the Thule leadership endeavors to resurrect Adolf Hitler, resulting in the death of both the leadership of the Thule Society and the resurrected Hitler.
  * The Thule Society plays a major role in the Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, a movie set after the ending of the 2003 anime of the same name.
  * In Hellboy, the Thule Society was responsible for conducting a doomsday ritual that brought Hellboy to Earth.
  * The 1998 video game Return to Castle Wolfenstein features the Thule Society.

====== Thule ======

Thule is in classical European literature and maps, a region in the far north. Though often considered to be an island in antiquity, modern interpretations of what was meant by Thule often identify it as Norway. Other interpretations include the Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands, and Scandinavia. In the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Thule was often identified as Iceland or Greenland. Another suggested location is Saaremaa in the Baltic Sea.

The term **ultima Thule** in medieval geographies denotes any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world". Sometimes it is used as a proper noun (Ultima Thule) as the Latin name for Greenland when Thule is used for Iceland.

The Greek explorer Pytheas is the first to have written of Thule, doing so in his now lost work, *On the Ocean*, after his travels between 330 BC and 320 BC. He supposedly was sent out by the Greek city of Massalia to see where their trade-goods were coming from. Descriptions of some of his discoveries have survived in the works of later, often skeptical, authors. Polybius in his *Histories* (c. 140 BC), Book XXXIV, cites Pytheas as one "who has led many people into error by saying that he traversed the whole of Britain on foot, giving the island a circumference of forty thousand stades, and telling us also about Thule, those regions in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jellyfish in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together, so to speak." Other late classical writers and post-classical writers such as Orosius (384-420 AD) and the Irish monk Dicuil (late 8th and early 9th century), describe Thule as being North and West of both Ireland and Britain. Dicuil described Thule as being beyond islands that seem to be the Faroes, strongly suggesting Iceland. In the writings of the historian Procopius, from the first half of the 6th century, Thule is a large island in the north inhabited by twenty-five tribes. It is believed that Procopius is really talking about a part of Scandinavia, since several tribes are easily identified, including the Geats (Gautoi) in present-day Sweden and the Saami (Scrithiphini). He also writes that when the Heruls returned, they passed the Varni and the Danes and then crossed the sea to Thule, where they settled beside the Geats.

During the Middle Ages the name was used first of all to denote Iceland, such as by Dicuil, by the Anglo-Saxon monk Venerable Bede in *De ratione temporum*, by the Landnamabok, by the anonymous *Historia Norwegie* and by the German bishop Adam of Bremen in his *Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church*, where they cite ancient writers' use of Thule but also new knowledge since the end of antiquity. All these authors also understood that other islands were situated to the north of Britain.

Petrarch in the 14th century wrote in his *Epistolae familiares* (or Familiar Letters) that Thule lay in the unknown regions of the far north-west.

A municipality in northern Greenland (Avannaa) was formerly named Thule after the mythical place. The Thule People, a paleo-Eskimo culture and a predecessor of modern Inuit Greenlanders, were named after the Thule region. In 1953, Thule became Thule Air Base, operated by the United States Air Force. The population was forced to resettle to Qaanaaq, 67 miles to the north - 840 NM from the North Pole).

Southern Thule is a collection of the three southernmost islands in the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, one of which is called Thule Island. The island group is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom and uninhabited.

The Scottish Gaelic for Iceland is "Innis Tile", which means literally the "Isle of Thule". Ultima Thule was the title of the 1929 novel by Henry Handel Richardson, set in colonial Australia.

Scientists of the Institut of Geodesy and Geoinformationtechnique of the Technical University of Berlin were testing the antique maps of Ptolemy and recognized a pattern of calculation mistakes which occurred if one tried to convert the old coordinates from Ptolemy into modern cartographical maps. After correcting for the mistakes, the scientists mapped Ptolemy's Thule to the Norwegian island Smola.

Additionally, Thule lends its name to the 69th element in the periodic table, Thulium. Ultima Thule is also the name of a location in the Mammoth Cave system. It was formerly the terminus of the known-explorable southeastern (upstream) end of the passage called "Main Cave," before discoveries made in 1908 by Ed Bishop and Max Kaemper showed an area accessible beyond it, now the location of the Violet City Entrance. The Violet City Lantern tour offered at the cave passes through Ultima Thule near the conclusion of the route.