German Esoteric Societies
Vril Society
The Coming Race is an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, reprinted as Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. Among its readers have been those who have believed that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called "Vril" is accurate, to the extent that some theosophists, notably Helena Blavatsky, William Scott-Elliot, and Rudolf Steiner, accepted the book as being (at least in part) based on occult truth. A popular book, The Morning of the Magicians (1960) suggested that a secret Vril Society existed in pre-Nazi Berlin.[1]
Thule Society
The Thule Society, originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum ("Study Group for Germanic Antiquity"), was a German occultist group in Munich, named after a mythical northern country from Greek legend. The Society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP; German Workers' Party), which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party). According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the organization's "membership list... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich", including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer. However, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke contends that Hans Frank and Rudolf Hess had been Thule members, but other leading Nazis had only been invited to speak at Thule meetings or were entirely unconnected with it.[2]
Black Sun Society
The term Black Sun (German Schwarze Sonne), also referred to as the Sonnenrad (German for "Sun Wheel"), is a symbol of esoteric and occult significance. Its design is based on a sun wheel mosaic incorporated into a floor of Wewelsburg Castle during the Nazi era. Today, it may also be used in occult currents of Germanic neopaganism, and in Irminenschaft or Armanenschaft—inspired esotericism—but not necessarily in a racial or neo-Nazi context. Despite its contemporary use, the Black Sun had not been identified with the ornament in Wewelsburg before 1991, although it had been discussed as an esoteric concept in neo-Nazi circles since the 1950s.
The shape of the symbol as it is used within Germanic mysticist esotericism and Neo-Nazism today is based primarily on the design of a floor mosaic at the castle of Wewelsburg (built 1603), a Renaissance castle located in the northwest of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. During the Third Reich the castle became the representative and ideological center of the order of the SS. Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, wanted to establish the "Center of the New World".[7] A focus of the actual SS-activities at the castle were archaeological excavations in the surrounding region and studies on Germanic early history.[3]