The Ruling Elite: Death, Destruction, and Domination

© Copyright 2014 Deanna Spingola.

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Hitler And The Rebirth Of Germany

The Advent of Adolf Hitler

Hitler’s Assumption of Power

The Worldwide Masonic Brotherhood

The Official History of Adolf Hitler

The Dictator, Adolf Hitler

We Are Going to Lick that Fellow Hitler

Prewar Maneuvers

Birobidjan, a Jewish Sanctuary

The Ha’avara Agreement

FDR, a Red in the White House

The Genesis of Factory Farming

Reporting the News from Europe

World War Ii In Europe

Ukraine: Assault against the Middle Class

Economic Assault against Germany, 1933

Apprehending Dangerous Aliens

Kristallnacht, a False Flag

Dangling the Czechoslovakian Carrot

Winston Churchill, the Warmonger

Immigration, Not Extermination

Stage-Managing Perceptions to Create Victimization

The Deceptions behind the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Establishing Guilt: The Gleiwitz Incident

The Resumption of World Revolution

The Creation of Poland

The Germans Shoot Back

The Peace Mission of Rudolf Hess

The Duke of Kent, Royal Peacemaker

Churchill and Roosevelt, Longtime Cohorts

Lend-Lease: Warfare Welfare

Operation Barbarossa

Stalin’s Forced Labor Camps

Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare: Facts and Consequences

Germany’s Elite Traitors

Marketing Mass Murder

Jewish Claims of Genocide

Manipulating the Numbers for Maximum Exploitation

Bomber Command: Victory through Air Power

Warfare by Firestorm, Germany

Famine and Genocide

POST-WORLD WAR II

Women: Prize Plunder for the Allies

The Holocaust: Central to the New World Order

The Morgenthau Extermination Plan

Publicizing the German Camps

Eisenhower, Baruch’s Man in Europe

General Patton, a Credible Witness

Raphael Lemkin and the Etymology of Genocide

Preparing for Nuremberg

Nuremberg, the Victors’ Vengeance

Obedience, a Psychological Mechanism

Slave Laborers Working for the Allies

The London Cage and the Germans

Torturing the Germans for Revenge

One Man Fighting, Two Men Looting, Three Men Painting Rainbows

The Allies’ Ethnic Cleansing in Europe

End Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

HITLER AND THE REBIRTH OF GERMANY

The Advent of Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

On October 14, 1918, in Flanders, the British military, using mustard gas as the First World War drew to a close, assaulted German soldiers in Regiment Sixteen of the Bavarian Reserve Infantry, including Adolf Hitler. He was a message courier who had spent four years dodging bullets in France and Belgium. In addition to the First Battle of Ypres, he took part in the battles of the Somme, the Arras, and Passchendaele. He was decorated twice for bravery, with the Iron Cross, Second Class, in 1914 and with the Iron Cross, First Class, in 1918, a medal rarely awarded to enlisted men.¹ After the Kaiser’s abdication, Germany was led by a new coalition government that included Friedrich Ebert; Philipp Scheidemann, a Freemason; and other top members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). While recovering in a military hospital in Pomerania from the effects of gassing, Hitler learned of the armistice signed on November 11, 1918.

William L. Shirer reports that with more than two million Germans dead, Hitler, burned and temporarily blinded, said, Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the Fatherland?² In December 1918, Hitler volunteered for guard duty at a POW camp at Traunstein where Germany held more than a thousand civil and regular prisoners. By the end of January 1919, authorities released them and closed the camp. Then Hitler went to Munich.³

In April and May 1919, Hitler was with List Regiment, part of the Bavarian Reserve Infantry, domiciled on Munich’s outskirts in the Maximillian II Barracks. The communists seized power in Bavaria on April 12. A few of the disgruntled men in his regiment joined them, while others, including Hitler, refused to join Germany’s real enemy.⁴ The communists sent men to arrest him, but he managed to avoid them.⁵ In seizing power, the communists did not disturb one Jewish house, perhaps following a pattern, as in Paris in 1871, where they destroyed a huge amount of property, except Rothschild homes, which remained completely intact.⁶ Because many Jews embraced communism, anti-Semitism became more prevalent in Germany.

Hitler was a perceptive student of history but had not yet developed his political ideas. His avid reading probably made him more knowledgeable than many university graduates. While living in Vienna, he observed the communist expansion.⁷ From 1919 to 1921, he borrowed and read books from Krohn’s library at the National Socialist Institute, along with works by German writers and philosophers, many of which he would cite in Mein Kampf.⁸ He attended a political instruction course designed for the troops and was then given the job of inoculating the men against the propaganda disseminated by socialists, pacifists, and other destructive groups. During this period, he recognized that he had some political ability and interest.⁹

Hitler obtained a job in the Press and News Bureau of the Army Political Department, where he met Major-General Franz Ritter von Epp and his adjutant, Captain Ernst Röhm. In April 1919, von Epp created a volunteer military group, the Freikorps, which ultimately quashed the Red Republic in Munich and brought down its revolutionary Councils Republic in April/May 1919. Röhm and many other discouraged soldiers joined the German Workers’ Party that Anton Drexler had established on March 7, 1918, for the working class and nationalists.

When German troops recaptured Munich, Hitler began working for the military Commission of Inquiry, an agency that tried those soldiers who had joined the communists. He testified against these men, and firing squads soon began executing the traitors. His superiors considered him an exemplary soldier who had proven his readiness to support the government against the Marxists. In early June 1919, Captain Karl Mayr, part of an army intelligence division, recruited Hitler as an undercover agent, a job that required him to attend anti-Bolshevik lectures and later, with the knowledge acquired in those lectures, to act as an anti-Bolshevik educational speaker, instructing soldiers in the Munich barracks.¹⁰

In those classes, Professor Karl Alexander von Muller, a lecturer, observed Hitler’s rhetorical skills in his animated discussion with other students and told Captain Mayr that he was a natural-born speaker. In June 1919, the same month that the Versailles Treaty was imposed, Muller presented his historical ideas and claimed that Germans were a master race, as opposed to the Jews. This echoed what Hitler had heard in the Austrian schools that he had attended. Europe, at the time, promoted nationalism over internationalism. Muller’s negative ideas about the Jews offended a fellow student. When it was Hitler’s turn to participate, he passionately defended the professor’s theories, and most of the other students supported him.

Scheidemann proclaimed the Weimar Republic (1919-33) to replace the imperial form of government. German nationalists referred to Ebert, Matthias Erzberger, and Walther Rathenau as the November criminals, and now they were leading the newly formed Weimar Republic. Its first president, Ebert, signed the Weimar constitution into law on August 11, 1919. Captain Mayr instructed Hitler to attend a meeting of Drexler’s German Workers’ Party, which the military feared might be promoting a Marxist revolution. On September 12, he attended his first party meeting in a Munich beer cellar with about twenty-five other people.¹¹ He recognized that this party’s political philosophies—nationalism and anti-Semitism—were compatible with his own but felt that the party was ineffectively organized.

One attendee suggested that Bavaria secede from Germany and become a part of Austria. Hitler denounced the proposal and in doing so favorably impressed Drexler, who gave him a copy of his autobiographical pamphlet and invited him to join the fifty-three-member party, something that Captain Mayr encouraged him to do. Drexler sent Hitler an invitation to attend the party’s next committee meeting. After considering the matter for two days, Hitler accepted Drexler’s invitation to serve on the executive committee. Drexler then appointed Hitler as the party’s propaganda manager. On April 1, 1920, Hitler would leave the army and dedicate his full time and energy to the party.¹²

At a party meeting, Gottfried Feder presented his monetary views. Hitler later wrote, "For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan activities… When I heard Gottfried Feder’s first lecture on The Abolition of the Interest-Servitude, I understood immediately that here was a truth of transcendental importance for the future of the German people. The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence."¹³ He perceived how international financiers had enslaved entire populations by controlling a nation’s currency and credit.¹⁴

Feder, an economist, studied the relationship of finance and politics particularly during World War I. He developed a growing antagonism to what he called Jewish finance capitalism and wealthy bankers. He wrote a manifesto on breaking the shackles of interest. He was an early member of the German Workers’ Party and was its economic theoretician. He believed that the state should generate and regulate the money supply, using a national bank. At that time, privately owned banks printed and controlled money and charged usurious rates for the use of their currency. Feder’s views were similar to the stipulations contained in the US Constitution.

The Beer Hall Putsch

On June 11, 1922, the Jewish-owned Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, which employed Theodor Herzl, published an article by Friedrich Meinecke about the roots of the claims of treason behind the armistice. From 1922 to 1923, as the inflated Reichmark was bottoming out due to monetary manipulation, Hitler and his followers encouraged nationalism, a feeling to which a discouraged yet hopeful populace could readily relate. His group, which battled the communists, often in bloody street fighting, had its own militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA), superseded on April 4, 1925, by the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Heinrich Himmler. Hitler’s group countered the strength of the communists throughout Bavaria. Meanwhile, the Bavarian government did little to prevent the communists’ seizure of power.¹⁵

Hitler easily assumed political leadership of several patriotic associations in Bavaria, composed of many former soldiers and known collectively as the Kampfbund. He and other Kampfbund leaders believed that they had to seize power in Berlin or their followers would turn to the communists for solutions to economic problems. The Bavarian government opposed Berlin’s resolution to abandon its struggle against the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Rhineland and the Ruhr. On September 26, 1923, Bavarian Prime Minister Eugen von Knilling declared a state of emergency and gave Gustav von Kahr, the state commissioner, authority. On September 27, Hitler announced that he would hold fourteen public meetings. Kahr, with the support of Colonel Hans von Seißer, head of the Bavarian State Police, and General Otto von Lossow, banned Hitler’s meetings. Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff wanted von Kahr’s support, but he, Seißer, and Lossow planned to establish a nationalist regime without Hitler.

With the support of his nationalist group, Hitler contemplated a march like Benito Mussolini’s march on Rome from October 22-29, 1922. In this march on Berlin, he was counting on the military or those working in Berlin’s Weimar government to do the dirty work and get rid of the hated republic and create an authoritarian regime. The Bavarians would benefit from a putsch while retaining an autonomous Bavaria. Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow considered their own assault against Berlin and convened on the night of November 8, 1923, in the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich to strategize.¹⁶ Some people claim that Hitler worked with the Bolsheviks and that he selected this date to commemorate their revolution in Russia. Yet it was Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow who chose the date. It was also the date when the November criminals, now part of the Weimar government, had sold out Germany.

Hitler intended to use Munich as a base for a greater offensive against the Weimar government. However, he quickly perceived that Kahr had decided to usurp the movement. Hitler, with about six hundred Sturmabteilung, marched on the beer hall where Kahr was speaking to three thousand people. Hitler’s forces surrounded the hall and directed a machine gun at the doors. Hitler, Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Ulrich Graf, Johann Aigner, Adolf Lenk, Max Amann, Wilhelm Adam, and others entered the building at 8:30 p.m. and marched through the crowd. Hitler fired a pistol shot into the ceiling and announced that his group was going to form a new government in Berlin.

Hitler, Hess, Lenk, and Graf took Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow into another room and pleaded for their support, since their influence could bring in the military and the police. Kahr refused to collaborate. Meanwhile, Göring and others delivered speeches in the main hall in an attempt to keep everyone calm, barring anyone from leaving, though some escaped through the kitchen. Hitler, Hess, and Lenk returned to the auditorium where Hitler delivered a speech while Ernst Pöhner, Friedrich Weber, and Hermann Kriebel guarded Kahr. In his extemporaneous speech, Hitler assured his highly receptive listeners that he did not oppose Kahr and encouraged them to support him, Seißer, and Lossow in a combined battle to save the Fatherland.

He returned to the room where his companions were holding the three men, who had heard what had transpired in the auditorium. Hitler directed Göring and Hess to take Knilling and several other officials of the Bavarian government into custody. Pöhner, Weber, and Kriebel, in Hitler’s absence, tried to persuade Kahr to consider his options, but he remained unaffected. Ludendorff arrived and finally convinced Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow to honor their sense of duty. After Hitler left the hall, Ludendorff, based on their promises, allowed the three men to leave at about 10:30 p.m. Once free, they reneged. When Hitler returned to the hall and realized that the momentum had ceased, he vacillated for several hours about a march on Berlin and failed even to occupy Munich. During that time, Bavarian authorities organized their forces. Units of Kampfbund, a movement with more than fifty thousand members, attempted to seize and to occupy buildings. However, they did not select the right buildings, such as the state offices and the communications centers.

Meanwhile, perplexed military, police, and civilian leaders tried to determine whom to follow. At about 3:00 a.m., officers from the local unit of the Reichswehr observed some of Röhm’s men leaving the hall and called for reinforcements. Hitler ordered the seizure of Munich city council members as hostages. By midmorning on November 9, he recognized that the putsch was not going as planned and that many were ready to abandon it. However, Ludendorff said, We will march! Röhm and Hitler had about two thousand men. The general proposed that they go to Munich and take over. He assumed, because of his position during World War I, that no one would obstruct him or fire on him. He also believed that the police and many in the army would join them. However, about a hundred armed policemen halted their march. Both sides fired shots, and within minutes, sixteen NSDAP members and four police officers were dead. The scuffle also injured Hitler and Göring. Hitler’s bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, attempting to shield Hitler, died in the battle.

The nationalist group scattered, but many were arrested, including Ludendorff and Hitler, two days later. Göring, Hanfstaengl, and Hess escaped to Austria. On Wednesday, about three thousand students from Munich University rioted until they learned of Hitler’s arrest on Friday. They referred to Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow as traitors. In 1937, Shirer claimed that Ludendorff refused to have anything to do with Hitler following the putsch. Yet the Landsberg prison visitors’ book indicates that he visited Hitler numerous times, as reported in Der Spiegel on June 23, 2006.

The authorities of the Bavarian People’s Court charged Hitler with high treason. The head judge, Georg Neithardt, was impressed by Hitler during the five-week trial. Hitler said that Berlin’s government betrayed Germany by signing the Versailles Treaty. Local newspapers daily reported his words, giving wide exposure to his views, which may have influenced the court. On April 1, 1924, he received the lightest allowable sentence of five years. He served eight months and paid a fine of five hundred Reichmarks. In Landsberg prison, Hess transcribed and assisted in the editing of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. Professor Karl Ernst Haushofer, Hess’s mentor in college, visited them about eight times. Hitler assured Hess that it would require seven to twelve years for the NSDAP to create a new government for Germany.

Göring, who suffered severe wounds in his leg and his groin, ultimately became morphine dependent. During his incarceration, Hitler concluded that revolution was ineffective in producing lasting change and that to legitimize his approach and win the hearts and minds of the German people, he had to seek political office instead of using force. In April 1924, authorities released Röhm from jail, where he possibly discovered his homosexual proclivities, which Hitler later acknowledged. Hitler appointed him commander of the Sturmabteilung. Preferring to make his own policies, Röhm abandoned Hitler, began gathering allies, spies, and informants, and founded the Frontbann, a new version of the pre-putsch Combat League.

On May 4, 1924, Germany held elections, and despite its leader being incarcerated, the NSDAP, banned by the government and renamed the National Socialist Freedom Movement (NSFB), won 1,918,329 votes and thirty-two seats in the 493-member Reichstag. Two of those seats were held by Ludendorff and Röhm. Under the leadership of the leftist Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, the party lost eighteen of those seats in the election on December 7, 1924.¹⁷ Hurt by the Strassers’ ideology, the party gained only 907,300 votes.

While at Landsberg, Hitler wrote, We must not forget that the rulers of the present Russia are low, blood-stained criminals, that here we are concerned with the scum of humanity, which, when favored by circumstances in a tragic hour overran a large state, killed and rooted out millions of its leading intelligentsia in a wild thirst for blood, and which now for almost ten years has exercised the most cruel rule of tyranny of all times.¹⁸ Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to Dietrich Eckart, who had participated in the uprising and had died of his wounds on December 26. He had been the editor of the anti-Semitic periodical Auf gut Deutsch, published with the assistance of Rosenberg and Feder. In March 1924, using notes found after his death, friends published the pamphlet Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue between Adolf Hitler and Me, which revealed an extensive Jewish-Bolshevist relationship. Eckart had helped found the NSDAP. He had met Hitler on August 14, 1919, and had introduced him to Rosenberg, who had published a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Münchener Beobachter, a newspaper he edited that formerly belonged to the Thule Society.

On December 20, 1924, Hitler was released and immediately began to strengthen the party, which he reformed in February 27, 1925, after the ban expired in January. He separated the SA from the Frontbann and removed Röhm. They would part ways in the spring of 1925, reuniting in the autumn of 1930, when Hitler wrote to Röhm, inviting him to be the chief of staff of the SA, a job he would assume on January 5, 1931. By April 1931, Röhm would direct Georg Bell to create an SA intelligence service with the intention of menacing politicians within the NSDAP who desired to manipulate his homosexuality for their benefit.

On February 27, 1925, Hitler gave his first speech since his release. In December, officials seized all of the party’s assets, yet it had twenty-seven thousand members. Paul von Hindenburg, running against the KPD’s candidate, Ernst Thälmann, was voted in as Germany’s president on April 26, 1925, and took office on May 12. The Centre Party and the Social Democrats (SD) attempted to keep Hitler quiet for two years. In 1926, the NSDAP published a series of pamphlets to educate Germans on the party’s political and financial policies and to answer questions. On August 31, 1927, Hitler emphatically announced, Questions of Programme do not affect the Council or Administration; the Programme is fixed, and I shall never suffer changes in the principles of the movement, as laid down in its Programme. Germans placed their trust in the NSDAP’s ability to fight international bankers and the Dawes Pact, adopted in August 1924, a plan to impoverish Germany. The NSDAP did not want to barter the liberty of the German nation through the League of Nations or the Locarno Pact or through lack of courage or by compromise.¹⁹

Officials warned Hitler against speaking publicly but rescinded the order in 1927, and he addressed mass audiences and exposed the deceptions behind the Dawes Pact. SD leaders and the Centre Party, enemies of National Socialism, probably benefited financially from their acceptance of the plan. The Marxists also favored the Dawes Pact, which would have insured their domination but would have destroyed Germany. In retaliation for his exposure of them, they vilified Hitler.²⁰ The NSDAP maintained twelve seats in the elections of May 20, 1928, while Hitler concentrated on building the party. Meanwhile, the KPD won fifty-four seats.

In 1929, the NSDAP gained its own press to promote National Socialism, which would penetrate into the national consciousness. By the end of 1929, the party had 178,000 members. Hitler continued the fight against the Young Plan, foisted on Germany by bankers, including Hjalmar Schacht. Hindenburg favored the plan, saying that it would revitalize the economy. Hitler described these views as fatal to Germany. The NSDAP continued to reveal these deceptions to the public while its opponents responded with falsehoods and animosity. By the end of 1930, the NSDAP had 389,000 members. On Election Day, September 14, 1930, the NSDAP gained 6,406,379 votes and won 107 seats in the Reichstag. By the end of 1931, it had 806,000 members; a month later, there were 862,000, and in another month, the total was 920,000. ²¹ The most popular party was the SPD, followed by the NSDAP, and then the KPD.

The Party Manifesto of March 6, 1930, addressed the country’s agricultural situation. Before the war, Germany paid for a considerable portion of foreign foodstuffs through industrial exports, trade, and deposits of capital abroad. After the war, Germany paid for imported food with foreign loans, driving the nation deeper into debt to the international financiers who provided credits. The only way of altering this situation was for Germany to produce essential foodstuffs at home. It was a question of life and death for the nation. An efficient agricultural class was an essential plank in the NSDAP platform, because the party considered the welfare of all our people in the generations to come.²² Further, the NSDAP said that Germans deserved good health and that the nation’s young were the source of its strength.

Hitler felt that current fiscal policies burdened German agriculture and benefited wholesale intermediaries. Farmers also paid excessive fees for electricity and labor, and bank loans left them sinking deeper into poverty to the point where they often had to forfeit their land to the moneylenders. The party wanted to revive agriculture and to improve the conditions of the poor, not with handouts but with opportunities. The NSDAP viewed farmers as the foundation of national identity.²³

Hitler wanted to relieve the poverty of the farmers and insisted that bankers decrease the interest on loans to prewar levels and that the government use tariffs to protect agriculture. He wanted to regulate imports and to provide free training to farmers to increase productivity. He also wanted to avoid using foreign labor, to exempt agricultural prices from corporate exploitation and intermediaries, to reduce farm expenses, and to give assistance to organizations that provided agricultural supplies. Germany’s farmers were poor because the whole nation was poor. He felt that economic aid did not produce a permanent improvement. He said, Political slavery is at the root of our people’s poverty, and political methods alone cannot remove that. The old political parties, which were, and are, responsible for the national enslavement, cannot be the leaders on the road to freedom.²⁴

Hitler opposed the dole system and the policy of providing aid to those who did not work. He believed that as many as three hundred thousand people would readily return to work if the government removed the dole. He thought that current foreign and domestic policies were idiotic and that citizens should sweep away a state that was unable to produce an economic environment that would allow millions of men to work. The NSDAP did not intend to attack religion or the clergy.²⁵

The NSDAP wanted to revive agriculture and to improve the conditions of the poor not with handouts but with opportunities. The party stipulated that German land must serve the German nation as a home and as a means of livelihood; that only Germans should possess land; that land should be regarded as inheritable; that landowners had an obligation to use their property in the national interest, and that German land should not become an object of financial speculation.²⁶

The NSDAP had twenty-five points:

1. The union of all Germans to form a great Germany on the basis of the right to self-determination enjoyed by nations.

2. quality of rights for the German people in dealing with other nations and abolition of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.

3. Land and territory for the nourishment of the people and for settling Germany’s superfluous population.

4. Only Germans could be citizens of the nation. No Jew could qualify.

5. Anyone who was not a citizen could live in Germany, but only as a guest subject to foreign laws.

6. Only citizens had the right to vote or to accept official appointments. The party opposed the parliament’s corrupt custom of filling posts merely with a view to party considerations and without reference to character or capability.

7. The state’s first duty was to promote the industry and livelihood of its citizens; officials had the right to exclude foreign nationals if it was not otherwise possible to nourish the entire population of the state.

8. Officials should prevent all non-German immigration; all non-Germans who had entered Germany after August 2, 1914, should be required to depart.

9. All citizens of the state should be equal as regards rights and duties.

10. The first duty of each citizen was to work; the activities of the individual could not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good. Several demands followed from this.

11. Officials should abolish all unearned incomes.

12. Officials should regard personal enrichment due to war as a crime against the nation, and all war gains should be ruthlessly confiscated.²⁷

13. All businesses formed into companies (trusts) should be nationalized.

14. All profits derived from wholesale trade should be shared.

15. The state should make extensive provision for old age.

16. A healthy middle class should be created and maintained, with communalization of wholesale business premises and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders; the state should show extreme consideration to all small purveyors.

17. Land reform suitable to national requirements, with a law allowing confiscation without compensation of land for communal purposes; abolition of interest on land loans and prevention of all land speculation.

18. Prosecution of those whose activities were injurious to the common interest; criminals against the nation, usurers, and profiteers should be punished with death, whatever their creed or their race.

19. The replacement of Roman law, which served the materialistic world order, with a legal system for all Germany.

20. The possibility of higher education for all citizens; thorough reconstruction of the national education system. Educators should bring the curricula of all educational establishments into line with the requirements of practical life; gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class or occupation, should be nurtured at the state’s expense.

21. The raising of the standard of health by protecting mothers and infants, prohibiting child labor, and increasing bodily efficiency by obligatory gymnastics and sports, especially for the physical development of the young.

22. Abolition of a paid army and formation of a national army.

23. Legal warfare against conscious political lying and its dissemination in the press; the creation of a German national press.

(a) All editors of newspapers and their assistants, employing the German language, should be German citizens.

(b) Non-German newspapers, even those printed in German, should be required to obtain special permission from the state to appear.

(c) Non-Germans should be prohibited by law from participating financially in or influencing German newspapers, and the penalty for contravention of the law should be suppression of any such newspaper and immediate deportation of the non-Germans concerned in it; the state should stamp out all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate national life and suppress institutions that militate against these requirements.

24. Liberty for all religious denominations if they were not a danger to the state and did not militate against the moral feelings of the Germans. The party stands for positive Christianity, but would not bind itself to any particular confession. It would combat the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without the nation and is convinced that Germany could achieve permanent health from within on the principle of the common interest before self.

25. To realize all of the foregoing, the party demands the creation of a strong central state power. a politically centralized parliament with unquestioned authority over the entire Reich and its organization and formation of chambers for classes and occupations to carry out the general laws promulgated by the Reich in the states of the confederation.²⁸

Hitler’s Assumption of Power

In May 1932, the NSDAP printed six hundred thousand copies of its twenty-page emergency economic program before the July Reichstag elections. It had three main points.

1. Unemployment causes poverty; employment creates prosperity. Just as the individual sinks into poverty when he no longer has a job, so also must a whole people sink into poverty when it does not use its productive strength and tolerates a political-economic system that hinders people’s comrades who are willing and able to work to support themselves.

2. Capital does not create jobs, but rather jobs create capital. The ‘brilliant’ capitalist economists maintain that we cannot work because we lack the means. That is nonsense. The less we work, the less must be our means, and the greater the unproductive waste and destruction of our national resources. The more we work, the greater our capital, and therefore the greater the results of our labor.

3. "Unemployment benefits burden the economy, but job creation stimulates the economy. Tolerating unemployment means: With less labor, less is produced, and therefore less can be consumed. The result [is] hunger, poverty, and wage cuts. The fewer who work, the fewer who pay taxes. To get the same tax revenues, therefore, individuals must bear a heavier burden. The result: tax increases. Decreasing purchasing power and increased taxation forces more firms into bankruptcy. The result [is] an increase in unemployment. The unemployed must be supported by the community, which means an increase in public expenditures. The result [is] the collapse of public finance, despite an increase in taxation.

Contributions to the unemployment fund decrease, while poverty forces more to depend on it. The result [is a] collapse of the unemployment compensation system, despite increases in contributions and cutting of benefits. Private industry collapses under the increased burdens. Small firms become bankrupt. Independent people are ruined. Big capitalist firms, trusts, etc., are rescued by the state, since their collapse would throw hundreds of thousands of people into poverty. Billions go for rescuing banks, hundreds of millions for supporting the big industrial and shipping concerns. All of these sacrifices are useless. Unemployment, poverty, and deficits have to get worse, the general situation ever more hopeless, as long as there is not a complete change. Only a systematic program of job creation can bring that change.²⁹ The program had the solutions for Germany’s economic woes.

Heinrich Brüning’s policies caused massive unemployment in both blue- and white-collar industries. Even resorting to Article 48 and implementing emergency legislation did not resolve matters. He failed to acquire parliamentary backing and resigned at the end of May 1932. On July 20, using a presidential decree, Franz von Papen, the new chancellor, ousted Otto Braun’s SPD-led government, and dissolved the Reichstag, bringing the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Chancellor Papen scheduled new elections for July 31. On July 27, Hitler told a crowd in Eberswalde that the NSDAP was never a parliamentary party, unlike other parties. His legal goal, which was constitutional, was to eliminate the thirty-four other parties. The other parties could not claim ignorance; they knew that Hitler intended to create a one-party state. Like the US Constitution, the Weimar Constitution made no provisions for political parties. Article 76 required a two-thirds majority of the Reichstag to eliminate the republic. Hitler refused to participate with other parties in a coalition government. He wanted to end the political status quo and to make the nation independent of foreign money, which would not only destabilize Germany’s economy, but the world’s economic structure.³⁰

General Kurt von Schleicher, friends with President Paul von Hindenburg’s son, Oskar, had suggested Papen for the chancellor’s post. Papen hoped that he could persuade Hitler to accept a subordinate position in the government. On July 31, the NSDAP won 230 seats, with 13,745,000 votes, becoming the most influential party in parliament. Papen had two choices: create a coalition government with the NSDAP or form a minority government and continue to govern under Article 48. Papen considered making a major alteration to the constitution, which would have resulted in the formation of a divisive two-party, left-right regime, with a monarchial figurehead.³¹ Because Hitler was the head of the most popular party, he had a legal right to be appointed the chancellor.

Sixty percent of voters did not want leadership by the KPD, which held eighty-nine seats, as this might lead to a civil war. Poland might then exploit this domestic situation and attempt to grab more territory. In the national elections of November 6, 1932, Papen attempted to gain a majority in the Reichstag or to win enough seats to form a political alliance and maintain his cabinet. Although the NSDAP lost some votes and wound up with 196 seats, it remained the most influential party. Meanwhile, the recession continued. Papen, disappointed by the elections, resigned, and Kurt von Schleicher became the chancellor on December 3. He intended to incrementally discard Brüning’s policies in hopes of gaining SPD and left-wing trade union support. When that failed, he sought a way to fracture the popular NSDAP. He offered the offices of vice chancellor and prime minister of Prussia to Gregor Strasser, hoping to attract the NSDAP’s leftist faction and to marginalize Hitler’s influence. He wanted the NSDAP in the government, but without Hitler. When Hitler rejected this, Strasser resigned from the NSDAP.³²

Hindenburg wanted to end presidential cabinets and the exploitation of Article 48 and emergency decrees. Nineteen governments functioned during the fourteen-year existence of the Weimar Republic. The right and the left disapproved of Schleicher, and Germans consequently embraced the NSDAP. The political and military elite, who pursued a military dictatorship, supported Schleicher, even if this meant staging a putsch. Hindenburg, adamant about observing the constitution, wanted a cabinet supported by a majority in the Reichstag. Meanwhile, the communists increased their influence and power.³³

By now there were six million unemployed people and Germany was in economic chaos, the perfect environment for the communists, whose ideology appealed to the desperate masses. It was also an opportune time for the NSDAP to increase its influence. Papen, banker Kurt von Schroeder, Alfred Hugenberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Oskar von Hindenburg, and Hitler began negotiating in early January 1933 in an effort to create an operational constitution-based government. Hindenburg wanted to appoint Papen as chancellor again, but was willing to have NSDAP representation. He opposed Hitler’s appointment even though he led the strongest party and justifiably demanded the chancellorship. Papen was willing to accept the vice chancellorship, anticipating that he could dictate policy to Hitler. General von Hammerstein-Equord begged Hindenburg not to appoint Papen, due to the possibility of civil unrest. He also opposed Hitler, as this might result in a National Socialist influence in the army.³⁴

Without the NSDAP and the German National People’s Party (DNVP), Hindenburg could not achieve a majority. Thus he felt compelled to appoint Hitler, who had very modest demands, along with his cabinet, which included ministers Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Göring. Papen would accompany Hitler when he visited Hindenburg. Because Schleicher’s desire for a military putsch was widely known, General Werner von Blomberg, who favored National Socialism, was named the new Reichswehr minister. On January 28, Schleicher and others agreed with army chief General Hammerstein to give Hindenburg an ultimatum not to appoint Hitler. If he refused, Hammerstein would proclaim a state of military emergency. On January 29, he telephoned Hitler to tell him that the Reichswehr opposed his appointment.³⁵

However, a coalition of the NSDAP, Hugenberg’s DNVP, and the Centre Party provided a majority in the Reichstag, and a conservative government, Hindenburg’s objective. On January 29, 1933, without consulting members of the Reichstag as that was not a constitutional requirement, he agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler obtained power legally although some people accused Hindenburg of making concessions to him that he had denied Schleicher. But conceding to Schleicher would not have achieved a majority-supported government, something that a Hitler cabinet would do. People underestimated him, assuming that his many duties would overburden him and that he would take direction from Papen.³⁶ On January 30, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor, supported by Hugenberg and Papen.³⁷

The Reichstag Fire Myth

During World War I, Willi Münzenberg, a young left-wing radical, was living in Switzerland where Leon Trotsky discovered him. He soon joined Lenin’s Bolshevik group, whose members were biding their time until they could return to their revolutionary activities in Russia.³⁸ In 1918, Münzenberg was a propagandist and a founding member of the KPD during the Weimar era. In 1924, he was elected to the Reichstag and at the same time worked closely with Lenin’s Comintern and Cheka. He was in the Reichstag until the KPD was banned in 1933. He created numerous Trotskyite front organizations, which aided in the establishment of the Münzenberg Trust, a huge media conglomerate.

On February 22, 1933, Alfred Cohen, the president of B’nai B’rith, and prominent Jewish leaders held a special meeting in New York to plan how to wage economic warfare against Germany. The American Jewish Congress (AJC) advocated public protests in America and elsewhere.³⁹ The National Socialists acknowledged that the communists were trying to achieve in Germany what they had accomplished in Russia. On February 23, Göring ordered a police raid on their offices to collect evidence of this but authorities found nothing. On February 27, a fire erupted in the Reichstag’s debating chamber and soon the whole building was aflame.⁴⁰

Marinus van der Lubbe set the fire, which became the impetus for emergency legislation. Officials had not planned the resulting suspension of civil rights, but improvised as the Reichstag burned. The NSDAP and KPD blamed each other, but Fritz Tobias through exhaustive research verified that van der Lubbe was the culprit. No one has refuted his findings. The new government, with Hitler as chancellor, expected the SPD or the KPD to initiate military action. President Hindenburg, not Hitler, issued the Reichstag directive in response to the fire. This emergency legislation was intended to prevent the excesses of 1932.⁴¹

The Reichstag passed the enabling bill by a two-thirds majority. The article expressly gave the Reichstag the power to cancel the emergency decree by a simple majority vote. The SPD did not have enough seats to prevent ratification of the legislation, which gave extra powers to the government. The SPD opposed the act while the government was in the process of outlawing the KPD, an action it would formalize on July 14, 1933. The enabling laws allowed the government the right to temporarily legislate. Such laws were part of Germany’s constitutional history and were used during World War I and during the first coalition government in the Weimar period. Officials passed enabling laws on October 13 and December 8, 1923, in an attempt to halt inflation. From 1930 to 1932, the government operated on 239 emergency or enabling laws. Hitler, as a condition of his chancellorship, wanted to use enabling or emergency decrees. He did not trick anyone, since Article 76 of the Weimar Constitution allowed for changes if two-thirds of the Reichstag approved. More than two-thirds of the Reichstag did.⁴²

The elections took place as scheduled on March 5, 1933. While the NSDAP failed to obtain the majority it had hoped for, it won 288 seats while the SPD won only 120.⁴³ Germans overwhelmingly revealed their acceptance of the economic policies of the NSDAP, which emerged as the largest party. In response, on March 12, AJC leaders again met in New York for three hours to plan a national program of protests, parades, and demonstrations.⁴⁴ On March 21, Munich Police Chief Heinrich Himmler announced the opening of the Dachau camp for the incarceration of communists, many of whom were Jews, to stop them from executing their conspiracy within Germany, especially with so much encouragement from abroad.⁴⁵

While the NSDAP was struggling against the Bolsheviks, Münzenberg and his staff manufactured evidence claiming that the NSDAP had set the Reichstag fire. In 1933 and in 1934, the Münzenberg Trust would publish two books, The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror and The Second Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire. Historians accepted these books until 1960 when Fritz Tobias uncovered abundant false information in the two works. He revealed that the so-called secret tunnels that NSDAP members supposedly used to leave the Reichstag were actually for water piping.

In 1919, Albert Norden, a rabbi’s son, had joined the Free Socialist Youth, later called the Young Communist League of Germany, a faction of the KPD. Starting in 1923, he edited several communist publications and was the editor of Rote Fahne (Red Flag) (1931-33). In 1933, he left Germany for France where he wrote for Popular Front publications and contributed several chapters to The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, written by the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism and published in August 1933 by Victor Gollancz. It was the primary source of the myth that Hitler seized power by orchestrating the Reichstag fire.

Münzenberg’s books contained purported documentation, persuasive-looking photos, and lists of victims, which served as the model for the falsified IMT documents. Unbiased researchers have since evaluated the books and have discovered that they are fabrications using forged photos and documents. Yet court historians continue to exploit the material in them despite the verifiable findings. In the 1970s, to reaffirm the dubious allegations, a West German communist firm republished the brown books with all of the previous documents, including several papers that look like an NSDAP circular letter of June 7, 1933, complete with a semblance of the NSDAP letterhead.⁴⁶

In June 1934, Münzenberg visited America where he met with SPD lawyer Kurt Rosenfeld. He also spoke at a rally at Madison Square Garden and at the Bronx Coliseum along with Sinclair Lewis and Malcolm Cowley. Otto Katz, Münzenberg’s assistant, visited America to gain support for pro-Soviet and anti-NSDAP causes as part of the 1935 Comintern Seventh World Congress’s proclamation. In July 1936, Katz journeyed to Hollywood where he formed the Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy with Dorothy Parker and other Hollywood personalities who also joined similar groups. Paul Muni, Melvin Douglas, and James Cagney sponsored the Hollywood league. Münzenberg was in Paris conducting anti-NSDAP broadcasts in June 1940 but fled to escape the advancing German forces.

NSDAP Funding

The iron, coal, and steel industries readily accepted Hitler’s policies while Germany’s export-oriented businesses, particularly the chemical and electrical industries, did not. Historian Henry Ashby Jr. had access to West and East German archives and to the records of industrial conglomerates and found that industries from late 1930 onward made donations to Hitler while also donating to the Centre Party and other right-wing parties. Hugenberg and his party would have served the interests of big business much better than Hitler, whose greatest financial support came from NSDAP members. Though often unemployed, they still made personal sacrifices for the party. Krupp, part of Germany’s heavy industry, did not support Hitler until he became chancellor.⁴⁷

According to Joseph Goebbels’s diary, the NSDAP coffers were almost empty by late 1932. Yet, according to Marxist propagandists, the party had plenty of money. By 1923, industrialist Fritz Thyssen, impressed by Hitler, began making large donations to the NSDAP. By 1928, Thyssen’s United Steelworks controlled 75 percent of Germany’s iron ore reserves and employed two hundred thousand people. In November 1932, Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler. Thyssen joined the NSDAP in 1933.

Hitler also had financial support from Emil Georg von Stauss, who sat on the board of at least thirty companies and was on the committee of the supervisory board of the Deutsche Bank from 1915 to 1932. On November 1, 1906, he helped found the European Petroleum Union to oppose the dominant Rockefeller interests. Members hoped that the new union would compel Standard Oil to reduce its price or come to some agreement with the new company.⁴⁸ Stauss, like most businessmen, attempted to build political ties to whatever government was in power and was especially close to Göring. He had initially introduced Schacht to Hitler and to Göring.⁴⁹ For an elaboration on Hitler’s funding, read Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power 1919-1933 by James and Suzanne Pool. A myth perpetuated by Sidney Warburg holds that Jewish bankers funded Hitler. Warburg claimed that Hitler received $10 million from Kuhn, Loeb and Company in 1929 and another $15 million in 1931 and $7 million in 1933.⁵⁰

On August 7, 1933, the New York Times published the text of a radio address by Samuel Untermeyer in which he said that Jewish bankers in New York had lent money to Germany. He claimed that Hitler’s regime was using part of this money in a reckless, wicked campaign of propaganda to make the world anti-Semitic. He claimed that the Germans had invaded Great Britain, the United States and other countries where they have established newspapers, subsidized agents and otherwise are spending untold millions in spreading their infamous creed. Untermeyer said that the German government should use the money to pay its honest debts. Instead, he said, the government was using the funds in an infamous campaign with ever increasing intensity to the everlasting disgrace of the Jewish bankers who are helping to finance it.⁵¹

Speaking of an infamous creed, Cyrus I. Scofield had access to big money from among others Untermeyer and Lyman Stewart, an American executive and the cofounder of Union Oil. Stewart, a Christian philanthropist and cofounder of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, funded The Fundamentals, a twelve-volume publication that provided the foundation for the fundamentalist Christian movement. Scofield, a member of in the non-Christian Lotus Club of New York, announced his intention to create a new Christian Bible concordance. Untermeyer, a dedicated Zionist, supported his efforts and introduced Scofield to other Zionists and socialists, such as Samuel Gompers, Fiorello La Guardia, Abraham Straus, Bernard Baruch, and Jacob H. Schiff who helped fund Scofield’s research trips to Britain where he met purported Bible scholars. They also assisted in the publication and distribution of his concordance.⁵²

Untermeyer and other Jews believed that, if they promoted an imminent rapture or second coming with Christian churches that Christians would relinquish their moral influence on the culture, education, and politics. Their absence would allow an influx of charismatic Jewish writers, political leaders, and crypto Jews to replace them with the goal of presenting the Zionist idea that those who called themselves Jews would have to return to Palestine before the rapture or the second coming could occur. The Scofield Bible changed Christian theology and paved the way for a plethora of Christian Zionist churches that would hail the founding of the Israeli state, facilitated by tales of discrimination, persecution, and a deadly Holocaust.⁵³

In an example of psychological projection, Untermeyer further claimed that the Hitler regime, through a one-day boycott, intended to exterminate the Jews by warning Germans to avoid shopping in Jewish shops or otherwise dealing with them. He also claimed that officials were imprisoning Jewish shopkeepers and parading them through the streets by the hundreds under guard of Nazi troops for the sole crime of being Jews. He said that they were ejecting them from the learned professions in which many of them had attained eminence and that the Germans were excluding Jewish children from schools and kicking Jewish men out of labor unions. He said that the Nazis had deprived the Jews of earning a living and were locking them in vile concentration camps, starving and torturing them, murdering and beating them without cause. He claimed that the Germans were using every conceivable form of torture, inhuman beyond conception, until suicide has become [the Jews’] only means of escape and all solely because they are or their remote ancestors were Jews, and all with the avowed object of exterminating them.⁵⁴

In 1933, Emery Reves founded the Cooperation Publishing Service, which published anti-Nazi propaganda. British officials sent Reves, Churchill’s literary agent, to New York to strengthen their propaganda operation in North and South America. In 1941, Reves, an advocate of world federalism, wrote I Paid Hitler, attributing the information to Fritz Thyssen. Reves saw Thyssen as one of the men most responsible for the rise of Hitler and for the seeking of power by the National Socialists in Germany. In 1940, Thyssen and his family traveled to France where Vichy authorities arrested them, then deported them to Germany where they were incarcerated for the rest of the war. After the war, Thyssen disputed the authenticity of the book. It is similar in nature to Andreas Niebuhr’s Those Who Bought Hitler. Reves wrote The Anatomy of Peace in 1945 to popularize world federalism and international law. The book was endorsed by Albert Einstein and numerous other prominent figures.

President Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934. By unanimous decision, Hitler merged the offices of chancellor and president, a move legalized by a plebiscite. Hitler renewed the enabling act in 1937, 1939, and 1942. Then, as he had promised for years, he eliminated the other political parties. Members of the SDP and the Centre Party and their deputies in the Reichstag were well aware that Hitler would use the enabling act, due to expire when another government replaced the current one, to make changes. One of the first changes was the dismissal of Hugenberg, who at the World Economic Conference made demands, assumed to be from Hitler, that may have alienated his potential ally, Britain. Hitler was given the power to govern by 82 percent of Reichstag members. Alan Bullock and others would have us believe that he used trickery and deception to end the Weimar Republic, get the enabling bill passed, then institute a reign of terror. Further, there was never any recrimination against those, such as the ninety-four Social Democrats, who voted against the enabling act. Hitler wanted the enabling law to suspend the multi-party state. On May 17, 1933, even the SPD unanimously endorsed Hitler’s foreign policy resolution and, along with the NSDAP, gave him a standing ovation.⁵⁵

Marquis W. Childs, a journalist and author of Sweden: The Middle Way (1936), reports that, while he was in Europe, he discovered that a man named Davis, with a grudge against Standard Oil, for allegedly ruining him, conspired to form a giant combine to ship oil to Germany. Apparently, Standard and Shell tankers had refused to transport oil to Germany. According to Childs, Sir Henri Deterding, of Royal Dutch Shell, was working with Hitler and backed him with a huge sum of money when the NSDAP was about to fail. Deterding supposedly supported Hitler because he hoped that Hitler would attack Russia, allowing Royal Dutch Shell to seize the Baku oil fields.⁵⁶

The Worldwide Masonic Brotherhood

Albert Mackey’s Lexicon of Freemasonry states that the religion of Freemasons is not Christianity. Author Jüri Lina and other researchers verify that the Freemasons participate in occult demonism-Satanism.⁵⁷ Rabbi Stephen S. Wise affirmed, Freemasonry is a Jewish establishment, whose history, grades, official appointments, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from beginning to end.⁵⁸ Albert Pike admitted that the Jewish philosophy found in the Kabbalah is the foundation of Freemasonry.⁵⁹

In 1903, Hjalmar Schacht joined the Dresdner Bank where he was a deputy director from 1908 to 1915. For years, his father lived in the United States where he worked for the Morgan-controlled Equitable Trust Company on Wall Street and then in its Berlin office. Because of this, the younger Schacht spoke fluent English. In 1905, during a business trip to the United States with the bank’s board members, he met J. Pierpont Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1908, Schacht became a Freemason when Montagu Norman, his protégé, invited him to join the order. Schacht’s father was also a Freemason.

In October 1914, General Karl von Lumm, a former member of the board of directors of the Reichsbank and then generalkommissar for the bank in Belgium, had assigned Schacht to the staff of the banking commissioner for occupied Belgium to supervise the financing of Germany’s purchases in Belgium. Von Lumm dismissed him in July 1915 when he discovered that Schacht, in payment for that merchandise, had channeled 500 million francs through the Dresdner Bank at a significant discount. In November 1918, along with Walther Rathenau, Schacht would help found the German Democratic Party.⁶⁰

Dieter Schwarz wrote that Freemasonry is an ideological form of hostility to National Socialism and that it corrupts the principles of all forms of government based on racial and Folkish considerations, enables the Jews to achieve social and political equality, and paves the way for Jewish radicalism through its support for the principles of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, the solidarity of Folks, the League of Nations and pacifism, and the rejection of all racial differences. With the help of its international connections and entanglements, Freemasonry interferes in the foreign policy relationships of all Folks, and pursues, through governmental leaders, secret foreign and world policies which escape the control of those in government.⁶¹

During World War I, German Freemasons created field lodges where members could meet for lodge work. Some of the top German brothers met with Freemasons in a Belgian lodge. Reportedly, Captain Adolf Hetzel met with Belgian brothers in Liège where they expressed their mutual brotherhood despite the war. Captain Hetzel apparently had greater loyalty to Freemasonry than to Germany inasmuch as he fraternized in a foreign lodge as a German officer with Germany’s enemies. The Grand Lodge did not disapprove of this obvious conflict of national interest. On March 15, 1915, German Freemasons founded a field lodge in France to fraternize with their French brothers, making their Masonic commonality more important than the people who were dying and killing in the war.⁶²

During World War I, Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff founded the Munich branch of the Thule Society, a völkisch, nonoccult Germanic study group, named for a mythical northern country from Greek legend. The baron and Walter Neuhaus, the society’s founder, recruited 250 Munich residents—doctors, lawyers, judges, police officials, industrialists, professors, and other respectable aristocrats—and about 1,500 people from throughout Bavaria. Many of the founders were former members of the Progressive People’s Party. According to Sebottendorff, members were more concerned about racism and preventing Jewish and communist influence than they were interested in pursuing Germanic studies. In October 1918, the Thule Society bought a local newspaper and soon changed its name to the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer).⁶³

In December 1918, Sebottendorff planned to kidnap Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian prime minister and a Jew, but the plan fell through. Eisner had organized the socialist revolution that toppled the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria in November 1918. During the Bavarian revolution of April 1919, officials accused Thule Society members of attempting to infiltrate the state government. On April 26, Munich’s communist government entered the Thule facility and took seven members into custody, including Neuhaus, executing them on April 30.

The Thule Society sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), founded January 5, 1919, by Karl Harrer, a Thulist, and Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder, and Dietrich Eckart, one of numerous parties in postwar Germany. Drexler had strong connections to right-wing workers’ organizations in Munich. By then, Sebottendorff had left the society and did not join the DAP or the NSDAP. There is no evidence that Hitler ever joined or even attended a Thule Society meeting, though many of its members were enthusiastic about him. Harrer, the editor of Völkischer Beobachter, left the