Germanenorden

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.

Disagreement within the Germanenorden over how strictly its racial membership rule should be enforced produced a formal split in 1916, with Hermann Pohl leading a stricter faction that broke away as the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail. That splinter group was itself reorganized in Munich in 1918 by Rudolf von Sebottendorff under a new and now far better known name, the Thule Society, which briefly played an active role in the political chaos of postwar Bavaria, funding a newspaper and hosting political meetings that drew figures including the future Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, the writer Dietrich Eckart, who is credited with mentoring the young Adolf Hitler, and Rudolf Hess, later Hitler's deputy.

Historians of the period, including Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in the standard scholarly study of these movements, are careful to distinguish two different claims that popular accounts often collapse into one: that the Thule Society and its Germanenorden roots supplied some of the personnel, publications and Munich social milieu out of which the early Nazi Party grew, which is well documented, and that Nazi ideology itself is best explained as a direct outgrowth of Armanist runic occultism, which the same historians regard as considerably overstated. The order's racial antisemitism and its post-founding Thule Society connections are the well established parts of its history; the deeper claim that occultism caused Nazism is treated with more caution.