Rick Spence

The Bolshevist version, or let's just call it the Marxist version of Germany was going to be a class society in which we're going to have to have some kind of civil upheaval, which will have Germans fighting Germans.

Whereas the kind of mystical nationalism, the almost kind of religious nationalism that Zabotendor from the Thule Society had hitched its wagon to held that Germans are all part of a single racial family and that's what must be the most important thing. And that these can be different ways of trying to influence people. It comes down to a matter of political influence.

So in a sense, I think that what Sibotendorf and the Thule Society was trying to do, at least within Munich, was to use this idea of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying point for some part of the population to oppose these other forces, to keep people fighting. The war is lost, though, in November. The Kaiser abdicates, and essentially the socialists do take over in Germany.

things come very, very close to following the Russian model. And you even get the Russian version or take on the Bolsheviks, which are the Spartacists, who try and fail to seize power early on. But you do essentially end up with a socialist Germany. And that then leaves, in the aftermath of the war, the Thule Society is sort of the

the odd man out, although they're still very closely connected to the army. Now, here's one of the things that I find interesting. When you get into 1919, who is it that's paying Subotendorf's bills? It's the army. The one thing the German army is absolutely determined to do is to preserve its social position and power. And they're perfectly willing to dump the Kaiser to do that.

That's sort of this deal between which is made in November of 1918, Kaiser's abdication, the proclamation of a German Republic, which, you know, you just had this guy declare it. It wasn't really planned. There's the Ebert-Groner Pact. Groner is the chief of staff, general staff at this point. Friedrich Ebert is the chief socialist politician, basically, and they make an agreement.

And the agreement basically is that the army will support Ebert's government. if Ebert supports the army. And particularly that means the continuation of the officer corps and the general staff in one form or another. So a deal is made. And that, of course, is what will eventually help defeat the Spartacist uprising.

The German intelligence landscape in the First World War is obscure in many ways. There are lots of things that are going on. Germany has a military intelligence service called Abteilung or Section 3B. That's just plain military intelligence.

They're constantly trying to collect military information before the war about the weaponry and plans of the enemies and then about what the operational plans were during the war. It doesn't really go much beyond that, though. The German Foreign Office runs a kind of political intelligence service.

And that's the one which is much more involved in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia, which is one of the things that the Germans sign on to fairly early. little diversion here. In 1915, there is a Russian revolutionary who's lived much of his life in Germany who goes by the code name of Parvus. And he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople, interesting enough, in Turkey.

He's hanging around there the same times as Botendorf is there, which I find curious. So Parvus, or Alexander Hellpand, to give his actual name, He goes, look, there's a lot of revolutionaries in Russia and there's a lot of mistrust with the regime. We think that the war will increase the contradictions in Russian society.

And if you give me a lot of marks, I can finance this revolutionary activity. And through subversion, I can take Russia out of the war. oh, the Germans are facing a two-front war. That sounds great. We'll use money in order to... But notice what they're doing.

The German general staff, a very conservative organization, not a bunch of revolutionaries, are going to finance revolution in an opposing country. They are going to finance revolutionary subversion to take Russia out of the war, which basically... So that gives you another idea as to what the German military is willing to do.

They're not revolutionaries, but they'll pay revolutionaries to subvert another regime. Now you've got the problem is that The revolutionary regime that your money helped bring to power is now threatening to extend into your country. So the whole question for the army and for others in Germany in 1919 is how to keep Germany from going Bolshevik, from in a sense being hoist by your own petard.

So the Thule Society, I don't think is a huge part of this program, but it is a part of it. And it's all an effort to try to keep control. And that's why the army is financing them. That's even where the army at some point then supplies them with its own propagandists. So the Thule Society begins to create, under Subotendor's leadership, what he called the Rings of Thule.

And these are satellite organizations that aren't the society as though, but they're kind of controlled and inspired by it. And one of those is a thing called the German Workers' Party. And the German Workers' Party, again, is local. It's not large. It's not terribly influential. But what does it aspire to be?

It aspires to be a party that will bring German workers away from the seductive influence of the Bolsheviks and into a more patriotic position, a patriotic. And the way that I describe this is that it's not an anti-communist organization. It's a counter-communist organization. So you don't create something which completely opposes it.

You create something which mimics it, which is ultimately what the German Workers' Party will become, is the National Socialist German Workers' Party, known as that term, socialist. And that is... in my view, what Nazism is from the beginning. It is a counter-communist movement.

Well, he's going to come into this because remember I said the army was going to supply its own propagandists to help the German Workers' Party and the Thule Society do their work. And the propagandist they supply them with is a man who the army trains, sends to classes to learn the art of public speaking and propaganda. And that fellow is Corporal Adolf Hitler.

Well, he'd been in the army during the war, the only regular job that he'd ever had. Kind of liked it. So you often get the view is that, well, at the end of the war, he joined millions of other German soldiers who didn't have jobs. No, no, he stays in the army. He stays in the army until 1921. He's on the army payroll at the very time in which he is held to set this up.