Völkisch movement

A number of völkisch movements that had developed during the late 19th century in the German Empire, under the impress of National Romanticism, were reorganized along propagandistic lines after the German defeat in World War I. The untranslatable word völkisch has connotations of "people- powered" and "folkloric". The movement combined sentimental patriotic interest in German folklore, local history and a "back-to-the-land" anti-urbanism that is misinterpreted now as a concern with ecology in its modern sense, with the arcane and conspiratorial aspects of occultism, along with "racial superiority" and anti-Semitism linked to ethnic nationalism. The ideas of völkisch movements also included anti-liberal, anti-immigration, anti-capitalist, and anti-democracy. Their ideologies were influential in the development of Nazism. Indeed, Joseph Goebbels publicly asserted in the 1927 Nuremberg rally that if the völkisch movement had understood power and how to bring thousands out in the streets, it would have gained political power on 9 November 1918, Armistice Day [1].

The secret society called the Teutonic Order or the German Order, representing pathological nationalism in an extreme form, was founded in Berlin in 1912 by Theodor Fritsch, Hermann Pohl , Philipp Stauff as a splinter group formed from the Masonic Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft ("Community for German Beliefs"), founded in 1907 by Professor Ludwig Fahrenkrog of Bremen. A typical Völkisch organization, it required its candidates to prove that they had no non-Aryan bloodlines and required each to promise to maintain purity of his stock in marriage. Local groups of the sect met to celebrate the summer solstice, an important neopagan festivity in Völkisch circles and later in Nazi Germany, and more regularly to read the Eddas as well as some of the German mystics [2].

Another Völkisch society, the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), was founded August 17, 1918, by Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Its original name was Studiengruppe für Germanisches Altertum (Study Group for German Antiquity), but it soon started to disseminate anti-republican and anti-Semitic propaganda. The Thule Society was instrumental in the foundation of the Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (German Workers' Party, or DAP) which later became the NSDAP (Nazi Party). It had members from the top echelons of the party, including Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg, though not Adolf Hitler. Its press organ was the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer ) which later became the Völkischer Beobachter (People's Observer ).

Adolf Hitler wrote in the Mein Kampf (My Struggle) "the basic ideas of the National-Socialist movement are völkisch and the völkisch ideas are National-Socialist."

Another völkisch movement of the same time was the Tatkreis.