Von List's Runes and a Constitutional Bar Against Jews

The Germanenorden drew its ritual and symbolic vocabulary heavily from the Armanist system developed by the Austrian writer Guido von List, who claimed to have recovered a lost ancient Germanic priesthood, the Armanen, along with a runic alphabet, the Armanen runes, he presented as their sacred script and which he read as encoding a body of racial and mystical wisdom rather than functioning primarily as a writing system in the way historical runic alphabets did. Pohl and Fritsch organized this material into a lodge structure modeled visibly on Freemasonry, complete with graded initiation, but built the order's constitution around a racial admission requirement absent from mainstream Masonic lodges of the period: candidates had to demonstrate what the order considered pure Germanic ancestry, and Jews were barred from membership as a matter of written rule.

Theodor Fritsch, the order's co-founder, was already a prominent antisemitic publisher and propagandist before 1912, and the Germanenorden functioned from its founding as much as a vehicle for organized antisemitic activity dressed in occult and fraternal ritual as it did as a vehicle for runic mysticism on its own terms, the two elements never separable within the order's actual practice.