Adventurer, occultist, astrologer and founder of the Thule Society. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of the folk-Germanic, partly anti-Semitic secret societies of the 1910s and 1920s.
From 1898 as a ship heater at sea, he soon tried himself as a gold prospector in Australia. 1900-1902 he probably lived in Turkey, and 1903-1908 in Germany (Saxony), where he married for the first time in 1905. Between 1908 and 1913 he lived in Turkey and was supposedly adopted by Baron Heinrich von Sebottendorf. Under the guidance of a Jewish merchant named Termudi, he is said to have become the master of the Rosicrucians. In addition, he dealt with Sufism and the theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as well as the ariosophical spin-off of the theosophy of Lanz von Liebenfels. He became a Turkish citizen in 1911, took part in the Balkan War in 1912 and returned to Germany in 1913, initially Saxony, where he remarried in 1915: a very wealthy widow became his wife.
In 1912 he also joined the Teutonic Order, where he was commissioned to build up a Bavarian branch of the Order. He then founded it with the radical anti-Semitic Thule Society in Munich in 1918, of which some members later played an important role in the NSDAP and its environment, for example Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Rudolf Heß and Alfred Rosenberg. In July 1918 Sebottendorf bought the newspaper “Münchner Beobachter” and became editor-in-chief. He used the tabloid to reach a youthful target group. As early as August 1919 the newspaper was renamed “Völkischer Beobachter”. On the initiative of Sebottendorf, Thule member Karl Harrer, a sports journalist, and railwayman Anton Drexler founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP) on 5 January 1919, which later became the NSDAP. The Thule Society wanted to control the party and influence politics through it. When Hitler attended the DAP meeting on 12 September 1919 on behalf of the Reichswehr as V-man and was immediately accepted by the party leadership as a member because of his contribution to the discussion, he later learned about the Thule Society working in the background. He didn’t seem to approve.
When the Munich Soviet Republic was proclaimed in November 1918, the Thule Society had about 250 members. Sebottendorf founded a “Kampfbund” from this circle, which procured weapons, and from which the Freikorps “Oberland” emerged, which was involved in the suppression of the communist Munich Soviet republic and the uprising at rest in 1920, among other things.
In 1933 Sebottendorf published the book “Bevor Hitler came”, which was however forbidden. In 1934 he left Germany again to return to Turkey, having lived in Switzerland since 1923 and Turkey from 1926 to 1928. From 1942 to 1945 he worked in Istanbul for the German defence and possibly also for the British secret service. Immediately after the German surrender, the body of the almost eighty-year-old Sebottendorf was found in the Bosporus. The cause of death was unclear, but suicide is officially assumed.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
Link to Wikipedia biography