We introduced Rudolf von Sebottendorf years ago in a short piece on the occult players of the Second World War. We noted the strange biography, the unexplained money, the Sufi connections. We planted a flag and moved on. Ten years later, the flag is still there. And the questions it marks have only deepened.
There is a test you can apply to anyone who claims to be recovering a lost tradition.
Not a complicated test. Simply this: look at where their actual roots go. Not what they claim. Not what robes they wear or what symbols they invoke. Follow the initiatory lineage — who taught them, who initiated them, who funded them, and in whose name they ultimately acted.
Apply this test to the man who founded Germany’s most influential esoteric society of the twentieth century, the organisation whose membership list reads like the founding roster of the NSDAP, and something strange comes into focus.
The Man Behind the Name
He arrived in Munich in the autumn of 1917 like a figure from a novel. Hat pulled low, dark coat, greeted in silence by young men who had been waiting. His name, as he presented it, was Freiherr Rudolf von Sebottendorf — an aristocratic title, a noble lineage, a Germanic identity complete in every detail.
None of it was original.
He had been born Rudolf Glauer, in Hoyerswerda, the son of a locomotive driver. The aristocratic name came later, through an adoption arranged in Turkey by an occult patron whose own background remains obscure. The title was borrowed. The noble lineage was constructed. The Germanic identity was a costume assembled from foreign cloth.
What was genuine about the man was his initiatory training. And that training pointed in a direction the Germanic robes were designed to conceal.
What Turkey Taught Him
Glauer spent years in Egypt and Turkey before his return to Germany. The documented record of those years is sparse — deliberately so, it seems, since the man operated in shadows his entire life. What is established is this: somewhere in the borderlands of the Turkish-Persian region, he was initiated into the Bektashi Dervishes, a Sufi order whose rites combined Islamic mysticism, Neoplatonic philosophy, and practices that the mainstream Islamic world considered deeply heterodox.
Shortly after, he was initiated into Rosicrucianism — not by a Germanic source, but by a Jewish merchant in Turkey named Termudi.
The scholar Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose work on the occult roots of National Socialism is serious academic history rather than conspiracy literature, verified both the Bektashi and the Young Turk connections. This is not speculation. It is documented.
So the founding lineage of Germany’s great “Germanic revival” was: Sufi mysticism, received in Turkey. Rosicrucian initiation, received from a Jewish merchant in Turkey. A borrowed aristocratic identity. And substantial funds of completely unknown origin, which he carried back to Germany and which nobody — then or since — has satisfactorily explained.
He himself, in an unguarded moment, described his mandate in terms that should have made everyone stop and ask questions. According to the record of his own statements, Muslim Masters had entrusted him with “Illuminating Germany.” His method, in his own words, was to ally Sufism to ancient Norse mythology.
Not recover Norse mythology. Not transmit it. Ally it to something else. Something Eastern. Something that was not it.
The Money Nobody Could Explain
This detail deserves its own moment, because it is not a peripheral curiosity — it is the central question that was never answered.
Sebottendorf returned from the Middle East with considerable funds. He used them to purchase the Münchener Beobachter, which he transformed into the Thule Society’s propaganda organ — the paper that would eventually become the Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the Germanic awakening. He used them to rent apartments under false names, maintain a second house for his inner circle, and build the organisational infrastructure that would give birth to the NSDAP.
Where the money came from: unknown. Who his principals were: never established. He traveled regularly to Switzerland, Turkey, South America, Egypt. What he reported and to whom: not documented.
He used a word himself that nobody seemed to follow up on at the time. In a note to his followers about the purpose of the Thule rites, he wrote of “der Wunsch und die Hoffnung meiner Auftraggeber” — the wish and hope of my principals.
He had principals. He acknowledged this himself. And in all the decades of historical investigation into the Thule Society and its catastrophic consequences for Germany and Europe, the identity of those principals has never been established.
Three Sentences
Three statements survive from inside the Thule inner circle. They are not theories. They are the words of men who were present, recorded and documented.
The first comes from Dietrich Eckhart, the völkisch poet who was Sebottendorf’s closest ideological ally and Hitler’s self-described mentor. On his deathbed, he is reported to have said to his circle:
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Join Now →“Er wird tanzen. Aber die Musik zum Tanz haben wir komponiert.”
He will dance. But we composed the music for the dance.
The second comes from a Grand Master of the Rosicrucian Order, speaking years after the war:
“Wir haben Hitler von Anfang an nur genutzt, um die schmutzige Arbeit zu verrichten. Der eigentliche Führer war Rudolf Hess.”
We used Hitler from the beginning only to do the dirty work. The real leader was Rudolf Hess.
The third is Sebottendorf’s own, from his memoir published in 1933 — a book that the Nazi regime banned almost immediately after publication. The title of that memoir is itself the question: Bevor Hitler kam. Before Hitler came. A claim to priority. A suggestion of authorship.
Why did the regime whose founding mythology Sebottendorf claimed to have created ban his memoir within months of publication? What did it contain that required suppression? The book exists. The question has never been satisfactorily answered.
What He Published After
By 1924, the Thule Society had largely served its founding purpose. The NSDAP had been launched, staffed, and given its newspaper. The organisation receded from public view — no longer needed for that phase of the work. Sebottendorf himself became increasingly marginal to the movement he had helped create. In that same year, freed from the need to maintain the Germanic costume, he published what amounts to his real sourcebook. Not a text on Norse mythology. Not a recovery of Germanic tradition. A manual entitled Die Praxis der alten türkischen Freimaurerei — The Practice of Ancient Turkish Freemasonry.
The man who gave Germany its Germanic revival society. Writing, in the year he stepped back from it, a practical guide to Turkish Sufi-Masonic initiation rites. He did not appear to find this contradictory. Perhaps because, for him, it was not.
When the Work Was Done
The pattern completes itself with a precision that is either coincidence or design. The NSDAP spent the following decade building what Thule had seeded — the party machine, the electoral apparatus, the street organisation. When Hitler was finally appointed Chancellor in January 1933, the work that had begun in the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Munich in 1918 reached its conclusion across fifteen years. Whatever remained of the Thule Society dissolved. It did not fade. It did not transform. It simply stopped — as an organisation that had fulfilled its function.
Sebottendorf left Germany for Turkey. Where he had always returned. Where his principals, whoever they were, presumably awaited his report.
What the Test Reveals
Return to the test we began with. Follow the initiatory lineage. Not the robes — the roots.
The man who founded Germany’s Germanic revival was initiated by Bektashi Sufis and a Jewish Rosicrucian in Turkey. He was funded by unidentified foreign principals. He acknowledged those principals himself. He published his real sourcebook — Turkish Freemasonry — the year his Germanic society dissolved. He died in Turkey on the day of German surrender.
We are not claiming to know what this means with certainty. History is a hall of mirrors and anyone can be a double or triple agent. The charade runs deep and we may ourselves be misled.
What we can say is this: the test produces a finding. The Germanic face of the Thule Society had a non-Germanic initiatory foundation. The tradition it claimed to recover was used as a vehicle — by someone, for something, with funding from somewhere — in ways that the genuine tradition would not recognise as recovery.
Eckhart said it himself. He composed the music. Hitler danced.
The question that remains — and remains open, deliberately — is not who pulled the strings. It is simpler and harder than that.
If you wanted to permanently contaminate a people’s access to their own spiritual tradition — to associate it so thoroughly with catastrophe that even asking about it honestly becomes impossible — how would you do it?
And how would what you would do differ from what was done?
Next: we will ask why every major figure claiming to lead Western spiritual recovery in this period had their actual roots pointing east. Sebottendorf is one case. He is not the only one. The pattern, once seen, does not disappear.
