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Sebottendorff, expelled from Germany in 1923 as an undesirable alien, returned in 1933. With his book, Bevor Hitler Kam, banned by the Bavarian political police on March I, 1934, and the Thule Group dissolved, Sebottendorff was arrested by the Gestapo, interned in a concentration camp and then expelled to Turkey.
There are several theories concerning Sebottendorff’s death. It had been always believed that on the 8th of May 1945 Sebottendorff, while sitting at a café in Istanbul, learned from the radio that Admiral Dönitz had unconditionally surrendered; he paid the bill and left the café. Later he walked along the bridge of Galata and when he reached half way across the bridge he jumped into the sea with his pockets filled with stones.There is now evidence (which still needs to be checked) that von Sebottendorff remained alive after 1945, and was protected by Turkish intelligence (for whom he then worked) against anyone who might have been interested in him because of the role he had played in the origins of the Nazi Party. According to this version, von Sebottendorff moved back to Egypt, where he died in the 1950s.
There is an urban legend in Turkey which claims Sebottendorff and Dr. Şefik Hüsnü Değmer [*] (1887-1959) the founder of the turkish newspaper Aydinlik, (also the head of the Turkish Communist Party) were actually the same people, but this claim has no backing.
Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff (or von Sebottendorf) was the alias of Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer (b. Hoyerswerda,Dresden November 9, 1875 – d. Istanbul May 8, 1945?), who also occasionally used another alias, Erwin Torre. He was an important figure in the activities of the Thule Society, a post-World War I German occultist organization that influenced many members of the NSDAP. He was a Freemason and a practitioner of meditation, astrology, numerology, and alchemy.
Glauer was born in Hoyerswerda (located northeast of Dresden in Saxony, Germany), the son of a locomotive engineer from Silesia. He appears to have worked as a technician in Egypt between 1897–1900, although according to his own account he spent less than a month there in 1900 after a short career as a merchant sailor. In July of that year he travelled to Turkey, where he settled in 1901 and worked as an engineer on a large estate there in Beykoz (Çubuklu) that belonged to Hüseyin Fahri Paşa a Bektaşi, and a Mason who introduced him to esoteric studies connecting him to the Sufi Tariqa of Medlevi.
In Bursa, a famous Jewish trader, Mr.Tarmudi, was willing to show him his rich and most precious collection of esoteric books and helped him in his initiation at the local Masonic Lodge, working according to Memphis Rite. He became an Ottoman citizen in 1911 and was apparently adopted (under Turkish law) by a noble German resident in Istanbul, Baron Heinrich von Sebottendorff, who nominated him heir of his name and patrimony. Feeling strong due to his new title and with no more financial worries, Rudolf decided to completely devote himself to esoteric research .
The adoption was later repeated in Germany and its legal validity has been questioned, but it was endorsed by the Sebottendorff family (Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 140-41) and on this basis he asserted his claim to the Sebottendorff name and to the title of Freiherr.
After fighting on the Ottoman-Turkish side in the First Balkan War, Sebottendorff returned to Germany with a Turkish passport in 1913. He was exempted from military service during the First World War because of his Ottoman citizenship and because of a wound received during the First Balkan War.
Glauer was initially interested in Theosophy and Freemasonry. In 1901 he was initiated by a family of Greek-Jewish Freemasons into a lodge which is believed to have been affiliated to the French Rite of Memphis. In Turkey, he became interested in numerology, kabbalah and Sufism (including secret mystical exercises still practised by Sufis of the Bektashi order).[1] Speculations say he might have converted to Sufi Islam [2] [3], although the evidence (from his own semi-autobiographical writings) is rather tenuous on this point. In his autobiographical novel Der Talisman des Rosenkreuzers (The Rosicrucian Talisman), Sebottendorff distinguishes between Sufi-influenced Turkish Masonry and conventional Masonry.
Sebottendorff’s version of Freemasonry did not prevent his striking up a friendship with the Germanenorden chancellor, Hermann Pohl, who violently opposed Freemasonry as being international and Jew-ridden, but who used masonic terminology and organizational structure, believing this would insure secrecy. Settling in Munich, he established the Thule Society[4][5], which became increasingly political, and in 1918 established a political party, the German Workers' Party. This party was joined in 1919 by Adolf Hitler, who transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers' Party or Nazi Party. Sebottendorf was also the owner of the Völkischer Beobachter, which Hitler bought in 1921.[5] The paper was to become Hitler’s most important propaganda tool.
By then, however, Sebottendorff had left the Thule Society and Bavaria, having been accused of negligence in allegedly allowing the names of several key Thule Society members to fall into the hands of the government of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, resulting in the execution of seven members after the attack on the Munich government in April 1919, an accusation that he never denied. Sebottendorff fled Germany for Switzerland and then Turkey.
After leaving Germany, Sebottendorff published Die Praxis der alten türkischen Freimauerei: Der Schlüssel zum Verständnis der Alchimie ("The practice of ancient Turkish Freemasonry: The key to the understanding of alchemy"), and then, in 1925, Der Talisman des Rosenkreuzers, a semi-autobiographical novel which is the main source for his earlier life.
He returned to Germany in January 1933, and published Bevor Hitler kam: Urkundlich aus der Frühzeit der Nationalsozialistischen Bewegung (Before Hitler Came: Documents from the Early Days of the National Socialist Movement), dealing with the Thule Society and the DAP. Hitler himself understandably disliked this book, which was banned. Sebottendorff was arrested, but somehow escaped (presumably due to some friendship from his Munich days) and in 1934 returned to Turkey.
Sebottendorff was an agent of the German military intelligence in neutral Istanbul during the period 1942–1945, while apparently also working as a double agent for the British military. His German handler, Herbert Rittlinger, later described him as a "useless" agent (eine Null), but kept him on largely, it seems, because of an affection for "this strange, by then penniless man, whose history he did not know, who pretended enthusiasm for the Nazi cause and admiration for the SS but who in reality seemed little interested in either, much preferring to talk about Tibetans".
[1] "In 1901 von Sebottendorff was initiated into a Masonic lodge which, like many in the Middle East, had connections with the French Grand Orient"). Furthermore: "the masonic lodge, which Glauer had joined at Bursa in 1901, may have been a local cadre of the pre-revolutionary Secret Society of Union and Progress, founded on the model of Freemasonry by Salonican Turks to generate liberal consciousness during the repressive reign of the Sultan." (Goodrick-Clarke, op. cit., 139).
"...he learned Turkish from a Muslim imam and worked for a Sufi initiate at a toewn near Bursa, becoming initiated into Freemasonry there in 1901." Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance. New York : Continuum, 2002, c. 1995. p. 74.
[2] Sebottendorff believed that the esoteric tradition of Sufism was the purest stream of wisdom and that it had nourished European occultism through astrologists, Rosicrucians and authentic freemasons of the Middle Ages. He claimed: "No one can accuse me of profanation, nor of sacrilege in uncovering the course of these mysteries...It is the means that the communities of dervishes traditionally use in order to acquire special strength by means of unusual techniques. They are, for the most part, men who aspire to the highest rite, that from which come those who have been prepared for their missions as spiritual leaders of Islam... This high rite is the practical basis of Freemasonry, and it inspired in times past the work of the alchemists and of the Rosicrucians...But to reply to the accusation of my being guilty of some kind of treachery: I say to you plainly that this book has been written on the instructions of the leaders of the Order."
[3] The Bektashi were also in close contact with the Sabbatean Movement from the start. When the false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi would visit Constantinople, for instance, he became “accustomed to living in a dervish monastery,” Gershom Scholem writes, “[a]nd it can hardly be doubted that there were early secret ties between the order of the Bektashi and the Donmeh.” It is known that among the Bektashi orders the doctrine of takiye (dissimulation) was widely practiced; it permitted the adherents of even radical mystical heresies in Islam to appear to the outside world as a wholly orthodox segment of the Sunni community in order to avoid persecution. It is also known that their enemies always claimed this duplicity of the Bektashi and accused them of it. Often they also added even more far-reaching accusation that the Bektashi, or at least certain of their subgroups, secretly subscribed to a religious nihilism. Now it is just this theory and practice of takiye which, though here for purely internal Jewish reasons, determined the Donmeh’s way of life in which the external appearance stood in radical contradiction to what they taught and stood for. Their common status as a mystical heresy with often extreme aberrations was bound to create sympathy between these two groups. Perhaps it is also no accident that the cemetary of the most extreme group of the Donmeh, with the grave of its leader Baruchya Russo (in Islam: Osman Baba), was located in the immediate vicinity of the Bektashi monastery of Salonika. According to Donmeh tradition, moreover, aside from several groups of Sabbatian families which still later joined them from Poland, a number of Turkish and Greek non-Jewish families also passed over and joined one of their subsects. - The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schocken, 1995), pp. 150-1.
[4] Thule was a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis and Mu, supposedly the center of a lost, high-level civilization. But not all secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out. Those that remained were being guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings (similar to the "Masters" of Theosophy or the White Brotherhood).
[5] Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, the Gurdjeff disciple Karl Haushofer, the ace pilot Lothar Waisz, Prelate Gernot of the secret "Societas Templi Marcioni" (The Inheritors of the Knights Templar) and Maria Orsic, a transcendental medium from Zagreb met in Vienna. They all had extensively studied the "Golden Dawn", its teachings, rituals and especially its knowledge about Asian secret lodges. Sebottendorf and Haushofer were experienced travellers of India and Tibet and much influenced by the teachings and myths of those places. During the First World War Karl Haushofer had made contacts with one of the most influential secret societies of Asia, the Tibetan Yellow Hats" (dGe-lugs-pa). This sect was formed in 1409 by the Buddhist reformer Tsong-kha-pa. Haushofer was initiated and swore to commit suicide should his mission fail. The contacts between Haushofer and the Yellow Hats led in the Twenties to the formation of Tibetan colonies in Germany.
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