Quote from Charles Stross – Laundry Files 01

[scottobear]

“Well, it goes back to around 1919,” I say, dropping tea bags into a chipped pot. “That was when the Thule Gessellschaft was founded in Munich by Baron von Sebottendorff. The Thule Society were basically mystical whack-jobs, but they had a lot of clout; in particular they were heavily into Masonic symbolism and a load of post-Theosophical guff about how the only true humans were the Aryan race, and the rest—the Mindwertigen, ‘inferior beings’—were sapping their strength and purity and precious bodily fluids. All of this wouldn’t have mattered much except a bunch of these goons were mixed up in Bavarian street politics, the Freikorps and so on. They sort of cross-fertilised with a small outfit called the NSDAP, whose leader was a former NCO and agent provocateur sent by the Landswehr to keep an eye on far-right movements. He picked up a lot of ideas from the Thule Society and when he got where he wanted he told the head of his personal bodyguard—a guy called Heinrich Himmler, another occult obsessive—to put Walter Darre, one of Alfred Rosenberg’s protégés, in charge of the Ahnenerbe Society. Ahnenerbe was originally independent, but rapidly turned into a branch of the SS after 1934; a sort of occult R&D department cum training college. Meanwhile the Gestapo orchestrated a pretty severe crackdown on all nonparty occultists in the Third Reich; Adolf wanted a monopoly on esoteric power, and he got it.”

Originally published at The Scotto Grotto. You can comment here or there.