By James Donahue

It is no secret that Adolph Hitler was caught up in an occult belief system that influenced his politics and war strategies. It also had a lot to do with his decision to exterminate thousands of Jewish and Romanian people whom he considered inferior races.

Hitler got involved in esoteric matters while serving as espionage agent for the military. He became a prominent member of the German Workers Party, a wing of the Thule Society. The Thule Society, founded in 1918, became a center of the counterrevolutionary subculture after the Bavarian communist revolution.

It was during this time that Hitler met Dietrich Eckart, a wealthy publisher, occultist and magickian who belonged to an inner circle of the Thule Society plus other esoteric orders. It is said that Eckart trained Hitler in techniques of self confidence, self projection, persuasive oratory, body language and discursive sophistry. Hitler then used these skills to turn the obscure workers party into a mass-conscious fighting party. By 1920 he renamed the organization, thus it became the National Socialist German Workers, or Nazi Party.

The strange twist to this story is that the Thule Society had its origins in an anti-Catholic movement in Austria in 1898 led by author Guido von List and occult theologian Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels who founded an Aryan cult group then known as the List Society.

Lanz studied findings in anthropology and physics and  in 1905 published a work called Theo-Zoology or The Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods. In the work he argued that there once existed a super-human race of creatures gifted with psychic powers of telepathy and telekinesis. But he said these god-like people, or Aryans, mated with animals to produce lesser beings for use as concubines. Modern man, he wrote, is a remnant of that original race whose psychic abilities atrophied from breeding with biological inferiors.

Lanz believed that Judaism and Christianity had originally been Aryan religions, and that Aryans were God’s chosen people because they were the least contaminated of the humans. Somehow that idea became twisted completely around by the time Hitler linked up with the Thule Society.

How did this happen. It appears that Dr. Wilhelm Dahm, a prominent Viennese psychologist and author at the turn of the century, promoted the idea that “The Thule Gesellschaft name originated from mythical Thule, a Nordic equivalent of the vanished culture of Atlantis. A race of giant supermen lived in Thule, linked into the Cosmos through magical powers. They had psychic and technological energies far exceeding the technical achievements of the Twentieth Century. This knowledge was to be put to use to save the Fatherland and create a new race of Nordic Aryan Atlanteans. A new Messiah would then come forward to lead the people to this goal.”

All of this appears to have been based on a story handed down by the Greek explorer Pytheas who claimed in what is now a lost work that while traveling through Europe and sailing north through the British Isles “to see where Greek trade-goods were coming from” he discovered the island of Thule.

If such an island existed, it was never to be seen again. Some theorize that Pytheas actually glimpsed Greenland or possibly the coast of Norway. All that is known is that Thule was located north of the British Isles.

It was a strange story but Hitler and the other Nazi leaders apparently bought into it. So did Hitler, who was raised a Catholic, disregard the Old Testament story of the genetic links to Noah following the flood. If the flood story is correct, and the genealogy published in Genesis has any historical value, then the Aryans were descendents of the Persians, Afghans, Slavs, Celts, Indians and Kurds. They all form an ethnic continuum within a language family that anthropologists and linguists call Indo-Hittite, Indo-European, or Aryan.

Actually the story has roots in Persia, which is today’s Iran. The name is derived from the root word Arye, or Aryan. As it was believed by the Thule Society, the Indo-European branch of peple, or the original Aryans, were mentioned by the ancient Indian prophet Zarathushtra thousands of years before Christ.

The ancient Zoroastrian writings speak of an earlier homeland from where the lost Airyane Vaejahi, or seedland of the Aryans came. From this homeland the Aryans moved to upper India, Iran, Russia and throughout Europe. That original “seedland” was located in northern Arctic regions, and thus the story zeros in on Thule.

The Nazi Party, in its zeal to cleanse and purify  the white European stock and strive to find its way back to the Aryan roots from which they believed they came, launched a mass killing, or ethnic cleansing of all the “inferior” races of people. This included the mentally impaired Germans. If Hitler had won the war, the killing would probably have continued on a global scale.