Excursus: The Munich Model - The Emergence of the NSDAP (1918-1920)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The emergence of the NSDAP in Munich exemplifies how fascist movements do not arise spontaneously from “popular rage,” but from the coordinated convergence of völkisch secret societies, the military, and big capital. This excursus documents the concrete mechanisms based on the source material.[1]
The Völkisch Infrastructure - From the Germanenorden to the Thule Society
The organizational roots reach back to 1912. In this year the Germanenorden (Germanic Order) was founded—a racist secret lodge modeled on Freemasonry, but with the reverse sign: strictly antisemitic, völkisch, anti-democratic. The Order worked conspiratorially, recruited specifically from the middle class and academics, used the swastika as a symbol.
At Christmas 1917, the Germanenorden gave Rudolf von Sebottendorff (actually Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer, a con man with a self-assumed title of nobility) the task of building up a Bavarian provincial branch of the Order. In January 1918, Sebottendorff founded the Thule Society—officially a “study group for Germanic antiquity,” in reality a front organization of the Germanenorden.[2]
Thule was no harmless association of antiquarian interests. It was a political combat organization:
In 1918 it acquired the “Munich Observer” (Münchener Beobachter) as a propaganda platform, renamed in 1919 the “Völkischer Beobachter”—the later central organ of the NSDAP. It resided at the Hotel “Vier Jahreszeiten” in Munich. Within it gathered the later NSDAP leaders: Gottfried Feder, Rudolf Heß, Dietrich Eckart, Karl Harrer, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank. On November 10, 1918, it resolved to found an armed “Kampfbund” (combat league) with a weapons cache at the hotel.
The Founding of the DAP - Coordinated Action
At the end of December 1918, Sebottendorff returned from a meeting of the Germanenorden in Berlin with the mandate to found a “German-socialist” party that would appeal to “capital-poor strata” and combat “false Jewish socialism.” The strategy: an organization that sounded “socialist” but acted antisemitic and nationalist.
Thule had prepared this: in October 1918 it commissioned its member Karl Harrer to form a “political workers’ circle.” Harrer recruited Anton Drexler—a railway locksmith who had joined the far-right Fatherland Party in 1917 and had published in 1918 an appeal against striking munitions workers. Drexler was formally introduced by Harrer into the Thule Society and trained in antisemitic argumentation.
On January 5, 1919, the German Workers’ Party (DAP) was founded—with about 25 members, mainly Drexler’s railway colleagues. The DAP arose in the immediate environment of the Thule structures.
The Reichswehr as Catalyst
Until May 1919, the DAP remained a stagnating sectarian group. The “dynamic element” came from the Reichswehr—more precisely, from Reichswehr Group Command IV, which took power in Bavaria after the bloody suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic (May 1, 1919). This command set up its headquarters at the Hotel “Vier Jahreszeiten”—the seat of Thule.
Two officers were central:
Captain Ernst Röhm, confidant of the Berlin putschist circle around Ludendorff, took over the department for armament and contact with “patriotic associations.” He controlled the weapons of the citizens’ militias (Einwohnerwehren) and coordinated paramilitary units.
Captain Karl Mayr led the department for intelligence, press, and propaganda. Mayr was a member of Feder’s “Combat League for Breaking Interest Slavery” and had antisemites appear as speakers at Reichswehr training courses.
Among Mayr’s propagandists was a corporal named Adolf Hitler, who had initially become noticeable as an informer—he had denounced regimental comrades who had worn red armbands during the Soviet Republic to the Reichswehr. Mayr sent Hitler to a “rapid speaker course” for anti-Bolshevik propagandists. There Hitler stood out—as a “rhetorical natural talent.”[3]
Hitler’s visit to the DAP meeting in September 1919 occurred, according to Mayr’s later statements, as an official directive. Hitler joined the party and was—since he came as Mayr’s agent with propagandistic backing—immediately appointed propaganda officer. The DAP had its demagogue—mediated through the Reichswehr.
Financing by Big Capital
The DAP/NSDAP was dependent on big capital from the beginning. After 1918 a conflict prevailed within the German capitalist class: the “new industries” (chemicals, electrical) initially supported the Republic, the “old powers” (heavy industry, large landholders) wanted to “putsch it away as quickly as possible.”
In Berlin, a putschist circle gathered from January 1919 around Colonel Max Bauer (Ludendorff’s confidant): General von Lüttwitz, Captain von Pabst (organizer of the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht), Wolfgang Kapp, Count von Reventlow. It was financed by the “National Club 1919 e.V. Berlin,” in which the financial elite of Pan-Germanism was assembled: Hugo Stinnes (coal/steel), Emil Kirdorf (mining), later Friedrich Flick (steel).
The Bavarian industrialists—thrown into panic by Eisner and the Soviet Republic—sought connection to this circle. Thule was their local instrument, the DAP their attempt at an antisemitic “workers’ party.”
The Systematic Point
The Munich matrix shows the interplay: propaganda and media (Völkischer Beobachter), paramilitary violence (Thule combat league, Freikorps), elite sponsorship (National Club 1919), and state resources (Reichswehr infrastructure) created the conditions for the rise of the NSDAP.
The lesson: fascism was not the spontaneous revolt of “the little man.” It was an organized movement that emerged from the convergence of capital (which feared the labor movement), military (which despised the Republic), and völkisch secret societies (which supplied antisemitism as a mobilizing ideology).
This alliance was not harmonious—there were conflicts, rivalries, differing interests. But it converged on one goal: destruction of democracy, smashing of the left, restoration of authoritarian order. Without this material and organizational enablement by elites, the fascist movement could never have come to power.
The ideological logic analyzed in Chapter 28.4 (counter-Enlightenment, antisemitism, Führer principle) received its practical striking power through these organizational mechanisms—and at the same time its compulsion to escalate, since the heterogeneous alliance could be held together only through permanent enemy-marking and radicalization.
The following account is based on Reinhard Opitz: Faschismus und Neofaschismus, Vol. 1, Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1988, pp. 45-61, who compiled over 90 footnotes with primary sources for the Thule-Germanenorden connection alone. ↩︎
On the Thule Society see Reginald H. Phelps: “Before Hitler Came: Thule Society and Germanen Orden,” in: Journal of Modern History 35:3 (1963), pp. 245-261; more critically Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of Nazism, New York: New York University Press, 1992, pp. 148-177. ↩︎
On Hitler’s entry into politics see Ernst Deuerlein: “Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr,” in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7:2 (1959), pp. 177-227; summarizing Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936, Stuttgart: DVA, 1998, pp. 141-158. ↩︎