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From Der Fuehrer by KonradHeiden, connection with Buddhism...connects nazis with far distant lands... german national leagues in Austria wore the swastika as their insigna decades before nazis... official emblem of Finland and Estonia... German Free Corps who fought in 1918 in Baltic against bolsheviks brought it back to germany...A former GFC captain, Erhardt, chased the Reich gov. out of Berlin in 1920...His troops wore the swastika on their tin hats...after they were defeated, many fled to Munich, where Rohm enrolled them in Hitler's SA... They brought the swastika to Hitler...the printer turned spidery lines into bold lines... at its debut, Hitler was "surprised and pleased" at its inflammatory effect...

PBS TV ran a show titled something like "The search for the holy grail. In the show they cover the Nazi expedition to Tibet in the late 1930s.

Back in 1912, several German occultists with radical anti-semitic inclinations decided to form a "magic" lodge, which they named the Order of Teutons. the main founders were Theodor Fritsch, a publisher of an anti-semitic journal; Philipp Stauff, pupil of the racist Guido Von List, and Hermann Pohl, the order's chancellor. (Pohl would drop out three years later to found his own bizarre lodge, the 'Walvater Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail'.)

The Order of Teutons was organized along the lines of the Free Masons or the Rosicrucians, having differing degrees of initiation, only persons who could fully document that they were of pure "aryan" ancestry were allowed to join.

In 1915, Pohl was joined by Rudolf Blauer, who held a Turkish passport and practiced sufi meditation. He also dabbled in astrology and was an admirer of Lanz Von Liebenfels and Guido Von List, both pathologically anti-semitic. Blauer went by the name of Rudolf Freiherr Von Seboottendorf. He was very wealthy, although the origin of his fortune is unknown. He became the Grand Master of the Bavarian Order and he founded the Thule Society, with Pohl's approval, in 1918.

After the Bavarian communist revolution of 1918, the Thule Society became a center of the counterrevolutionary subculture. An espionage network and arms caches were organized. The Thule Club rooms became a nest of resistance to the revolution and the Munich Soviet Republic.

Journalist Karl Harrer was given the job of founding a political "worker circle". He realized that the workers would reject any program that was presented to them by a member of the conservative "privileged" class. Harrer knew that the mechanic Anton Drexler, who was working for the railroads, was a well-known anti-semite, chauvinist and proletarian. With drexler as nominal chairman, Harrer founded the German Workers Party in January 1919

The German Workers Party was only one of many associations founded and controlled by the Thule Society. The Thule was the "mother" to the German Socialist Party, led by Julius Streicher, and the right-wing radical Oberland Free Corps. It published the Munich observer, which later became the National Observer. Hitler became the most prominent personality in the party. He caused Harrer to drop out, and he pushed Drexler, the nominal chairman, to the sidelines. He filled key positions with his own friends from the Thule Society and the Army. During the summer of 1920, upon his suggestion, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Worker Party (NASDAP). The new name was intended to equally attract nationalists and proletarians.

To go along with the new name his mass movement also required a flag with a powerful symbol. Among many designs under consideration, Hitler picked the one suggested by Thule member Dr. Krohn: a red cloth with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika.

Hitler wanted to turn the German Workers Party into a mass-conscious fighting party, but Harrer and Drexler were hesitant, due in part to their woeful financial situation. The Thule Society was not yet supplying very much money and no one seemed to know how to build up a mass party. Hitler arranged two public meetings in obscure beer halls, and he drafted leaflets and posters, but there was no real breakthrough.

All of this changed dramatically at the end of the 1919 when Hitler met Dietrich Eckart. Most biographers have underestimated the influence that Eckart exerted on Hitler. He was the wealthy publisher and editor-in-chief of an anti-semitic journal which he called In Plain German. Eckart was also a committed occultist and a master of magic. As an initiate, Eckart belonged to the inner circle of the Thule Society as well as other esoteric orders.

Briefly, the creed of the Thule Society inner circle is as follows: Thule was a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis, supposedly the center of a lost, high-level civilization. But not all secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out. Those that remained were being guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings (similar to the "Masters" of Theosophy or the White Brotherhood). The truly initiated could establish contact with these beings by means of magic-mystical rituals. The "Masters" or "Ancients" allegedly would be able to endow the initiated with supernatural strength and energy. With the help of these energies the goal of the initiated was to create a race of Supermen of "Aryan" stock who would exterminate all "inferior" races.

There can be no doubt that Eckart - who had been alerted to Hitler by other Thulists - trained Hitler in techniques of self confidence, self projection, persuasive oratory, body language and discursive sophistry. With these tools, in a short period of time he was able to move the obscure workers party from the club and beer hall atmosphere to a mass movement. The emotion charged lay speaker became an expert orator, capable of mesmerizing a vast audience.

One should not underestimate occultism's influence on Hitler. His subsequent rejection of Free Masons and esoteric movements, of Theosophy, of Anthrosophy, does not necessarily mean otherwise. Occult circles have long been known as covers for espionage and influence peddling. Hitler's spy apparatus under Canaris and Heydrich were well aware of these conduits, particularly from the direction of Britain which had within its MI5 intelligence agency a department known as the Occult Bureau. That these potential sources of trouble were purged from Nazi life should not be taken to mean that Hitler and the Nazi secret societies were not influenced by mystical and occult writers such as Madame Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Guido Von List, Lanz Von Liebenfels, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, Karl Haushofer and Theodor Fritsch. Although Hitler later denounced and ridiculed many of them, he did dedicate his book Mein Kampf to his teacher Dietrich Eckart.

A frequent visitor to Landsberg Prison where Hitler was writing Mein Kampf with the help of Rudolf Hess, was General Karl Haushofer, a university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics. Haushofer, Hitler, and Hess had long conversations together. Hess also kept records of these conversations. Hitler's demands for German "Living Space" in the east at the expense of the Slavic nations were based on the geopolitical theories of the learned professor. Haushofer was also inclined toward the esoteric. as military attache in Japan, he had studied Zen-Buddhism. He had also gone through initiations at the hands of Tibetan Lamas. He became Hitler's second "esoteric mentor", replacing Dietrich Eckart.

In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The lodge's objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to awaken the forces of "Vril". Haushofer was a student of the Russian magician and metaphysician Gregor Ivanovich Gurdyev (George Gurdjieff).

Both Gurdjeiff and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan Lodges that possessed the secret of the "Superman". The lodge included Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Himmler, Goring, and Hitler's subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell. It is also known that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler. In 1946 Haushofer murdered his wife ritually and then before a ‘black Buddhist altar’ opened his own belly using a Japanese short sword, Samurai style.

Hitler's unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the "secret" psychological techniques of the esoteric lodges. Haushofer taught him the techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan Lamas- and familiarized him with the Zen teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.

From The Unknown Hitler by Wulf Schwartzwaller, Berkeley Books, 1990

The Men Behind Hitler - excerpts from the book by Bernard Schreiber

It may be that the real key to the Third Reich lies buried in the history of Tibet, for it was here that Karl Haushofer, the initiate who taught the youthful Hitler, first met in literal fact the Superman of Nazi legend.

Origins of the swastika

By 1945 the Thousand Year Reich had become a smoking ruin. Russian soldiers pressed through the rubble, fighting from house to house, from street to street in order to link up with their British and American allies who also pressed in inexorably on the heart of the dying capital. Before they overran the eastern sector of Berlin, these Russian troops came across something very strange: vast numbers of Tibetan corpses. The fact is mentioned by Maurice Bessy and again by Pauwels and Bergier, who set the actual number of bodies at a thousand. They wore German uniform, but without the usual insignia of rank.

The religion of Tibet is Buddhism, but like the Zen of Japan, it is a brand of Buddhism far divorced from the Indian original. Many scholars prefer the term "Lamaism" to distinguish between Tibetan Buddhism and its parent root. The religious life of the country is concentrated in a multitude of monasteries, many of them built in almost inaccessible mountain regions. Side by side with the state religion of Lamaism, and flourishing particularly in the rural districts, is Tibet's aboriginal religion of Bon. The Bon-Pas follow a primitive, animistic creed, full of dark rituals and spells. If the holy Lamas of the Buddhist sects were looked on as personifications of spiritual wisdom, the priests of Bon had a potent reputation with the common people as magicians.

The Nazi leaders were attracted to Tibet by those of its secret doctrines which filtered through to the west. They believed, those members of the Thule group, the Luminous Lodge, and the various other occult organizations which helped shape the Third Reich, in an esoteric history of mankind. And it was in the archives of Tibetan monasteries that this history was preserved in its purest form.

Already, in the latter half of the previous century, intriguing hints about Tibetan secret teachings had been carried to the west by Helena Blavatsky, who claimed initiation at the hands of the Holy Lamas themselves. Blavatsky taught that her "Hidden Masters" and "Secret Chiefs" had their earthly residence in the Himalayan region. As soon as the Nazi movement had sufficient funds, it began to organize a number of expeditions to Tibet and these succeeded one another practically without interruption until 1943. One of the most tangible expressions of Nazi interest in Tibet was the party`s adoption of its deepest and most mystical of symbols-the swastika.

The swastika is one of mankind's oldest symbols, and apart from the cross and the circle, probably the most widely distributed. It is shown on pottery fragments from Greece dating back to the eighth century BC. It was used in ancient Egypt, India and China. The Navaho indians of North America have a traditional swastika pattern. Arab-Islamic sorcerers used it. In more recent times, it was incorporated in the flags of certain baltic states.

The idea for the use of the swastika by the Nazis came from a dentist named Dr. Friedrich Krohn who was a member of the secret Germanen order. Krohn produced the design for the actual form in which the Nazis came to use the symbol, that is reversed, spinning in an anti-clockwise direction. As a solar symbol, the swastika is properly thought of as spinning, and the Buddhists have always believed the symbol attracted luck. The Sanskrit word "svastika" means good fortune and well being. According to Cabbalistic lore and occult theory, chaotic force can be evoked by revers- ing the symbol. And so the symbol appeared as the flag of Nazi Germany and the insignia of the Nazi party, an indication for those who had eyes to see, as to the occult nature of the Third Reich.

The Controversy off the Occult ReichBy John Roemer

In light of this it isn't very surprising that an extensive literature exists seeking an occult rationale for the otherwise baffling catastrophe Hitler represents. As Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier point out in the Morning of the Magicians(1960), the Nazi era simply defies conventional analysis:

A self taught madman, surrounded by a handful of megalomaniacs,rejects Descartes, spurns the whole humanist culture, tramples on reason, invokes Lucifer, conquers Europe, and nearly conquers the world. The historian begins to feel anxious and to wonder whether his art is viable.

Pauwels and Bergier were among the first postwar proponents of a black magical explanation for the Third Reich. About a quarter of their book is devoted to a region they call "The Absolute Elsewhere," a neverland where Nazi pseudosciences and occult methodology held official sway. They quote a Hitlerian pronouncement to demonstrate that the Fuhrer's intellectual development was on a level wholly different from that understood by the Western tradition: "there is a Nordic and National Socialist science which is opposed to Jewish-Liberal science".2 Reality was defined by politics.

Nazi "science" has brought hoots of derision from those who hold to the Cartesian model. In place of psychology there was an occult frappe composed of the mysticism of Gurdijeff, the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the archetypes of Nordic mythology. In place of Newtonian physics stood the cosmic force called vril, the bizarre geology known as the hollow earth theory, and the frigid cosmology of Hans Horbiger's Welteislehre, the doctrine of eternal ice.

Out of this eccentric landscape emerged Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff, the prototype Nazi, before Adolf Hitler made his first public appearance. Sebottendorff (or Sobottendorf) founded the notorious right-wing ThuleSociety and in 1918 purchased the Munchener Beobachter, a weekly Munich newspaper which he transformed into an anti-Semitic scandal sheet and the Thule Society's official publication. Little has actually been written about Sebottendorff, other than that he was a Turkish citizen, claiming to have been adopted, who was probably familiar with Sufi and Islamic literature. Some biographers have stated that his real or European name was Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer, and that he was also involved in the violent Bavarian political scene and in various attempts to market a prototype armored vehicle or tank.

Sebottendorff was an initiate of the Eastern mysteries in Turkey as well as of Freemasonry. "Just before World War I he made several trips to the Near East. During the Balkan War of 1912-1913, he directed the Turkish Red Crescent and was named a Master of the Order of the RoseGarland (Rosenkranz)." In 1910, while living in Istanbul, Sebottendorff controlled his own secret society based on a combination of Islamic Sufi mysticism, masonry, alchemy and anti-Bolshevik ideology. He established a sect of devotees comparable with the Ismailian "fedayeen" (Assassins) guided by their spiritual leader, the Old Man of the Mountain. In other words, the idea was to form a militant Order of initiates, with a military and religious structure.

According to Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, the Thule was a  "Society of Assassins". It held secret courts and condemned people to death. It is likely that many victims murdered by the District Command had been condemned earlier in the secret courts of the Thule. Many prominent Germans supported this violence and were documented members of the Thule. For example, the Police President of Munich, Franz Gurtner, was a reported member of the innermost circle of the Thule. He later became Minister of Justice of the Third Reich.

"Sebottendorff believed that the esoteric tradition of Islam, particularly Sufism, was the purest stream of Ancient Wisdom and that it had nourished European occultism through the Rosicrucians, alchemists and authentic Freemasons of the Middle Ages." Rene Alleau relates that Sebottendorff also wrote that: “...‘secret Muslim Masters’ had entrusted him with the mission of ‘illuminating’ Germany through the revelation of the secrets of advanced magic and initiation into ancient Oriental mysteries.” (Hitler et les Societes Secretes)

Sebottendorff's Thulist aim to revive pagan "Aryan" culture, symbolism, and mythology held that Sufism is "the development of the Primaeval religion of the Aryan race." Both the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons of Europe find the ultimate source of their teachings in the Orient. Thus, the Buddhist concept of the "Aryan Eightfold Path" was the mystical link which brought the population of Japan (and parts of Tibet) into the racist Nazi Axis without having Nordic or Saxon physical characteristics.

Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess were active Thulists, both going on to high positions in the Third Reich. By 1919, an obscure right-wing nationalist (volkisch) group became known in Europe calling itself the German Worker's Party, which had close links with the secretive Thule Society. Sebottendorff's anti-Semitic newspaper changed its name to Volkischer Beobachter. Adolf Hitler soon became a leading member and a Munich intelligence agent of the German Worker's Party. In 1920, Hitler was the undisputed leader of the German Worker's Party, which by then was known as the National Socialist German Worker's Party, the official body of Nazism. The Volkischer Beobachter became its authorized propaganda newspaper. Dietrich Eckart, a Bavarian Catholic poet and morphine addict, also emerged as another Illuminati godfather of National Socialism who exploited the magical swastika symbols and Asiatic expressions of Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of modern Theosophy. 

The Swastika Sun symbol is a powerful magical device still used in Occult Masonic teachings today. It was to replace the Cross in the Nazi's new post Christian Pagan Religion, for their Occult New World Order.

Eckart had great influence over Hitler and introduced him to Munich society. "Mein Kampf" was dedicated to Eckart, who groomed Hitler for his role as dictator. In 1939, Hitler made reference to Turkey's policy of extermination while seeking to legitimize his own blueprint for genocide.

A secret society called the Astrum Argentum (AA), or the Order of the Silver Star (SS), began giving initiations in Germany at about that time. But Reich leader Heinrich Himmler enforced prohibitions on German Freemasons who were sympathetic to Jews, and created a new national police force. Drawing on the ideas of the occult Vril Society (which had been named after a book by Bulward Litton), Himmler's special force, or Death Head Units, practiced elaborate fraternal magic rituals. General Karl Haushofer, the director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics, became Hitler's second "esoteric mentor." He helped Himmler install members of the "Aryan super race" into the new force to systematize the extermination of Jews. It became known as the Schutzstaffe (SS).

Himmler devised new festivals to take the place of such Christian events as Christmas and Easter, he wrote out baptism and marriage ceremonies - though he believed (harem) polygamy would best serve the interests of the SS elite - and he even issued instructions on the correct manner of committing suicide. The center of the SS cult became the castle of Wewelsburg in Westphalia, which Himmler bought as a ruin in 1934 and rebuilt over the next 11 years at a cost of 13 million marks. The central banqueting hall contained a vast round table with 13 throne-like seats to accommodate Himmler and 12 of his closest "apostles" - making, as some occult writers have pointed out, a coven of 13. Beneath this hall was a "Hall of the Dead", where plinths stood around a stone table. As each member of the inner circle of the SS died, his coat of arms would be burned and, together with his ashes, placed in an urn on one of these plinths for veneration.