Rudolf von Sebottendorf (9.11.1875 Hoyerswerda – 8/9.5.1945 Istanbul)

Rudolf Glauer was born the son of a locomotive engineer in Hoyerswerda and, by his own account, came into contact with anti-semitic ideology at home. He was orphaned at the age of 18, and is reported to have stayed abroad after abandoning his studies at the Berlin Polytechnic Institute, where he engaged in occultism. He arrived in Munich in 1902. Six years later, he was convicted of document forgery in Berlin and disappeared to Turkey until 1913, where he was allegedly adopted by the German officer Baron Heinrich von Sebottendorff in 1910 and took Turkish nationality. However, the adoption was not acknowledged by the German agencies. Starting in 1915, his marriage to Bertha Anna Iffland, a wealthy merchant's daughter from Berlin, ensured him a financially independent life.

Starting in spring 1918, Sebottendorff campaigned in Munich and established the anti-semitic Thule Society. In July 1918, he acquired the Münchener Beobachterand developed it into the society's radical anti-semitic propaganda paper. He took part in the Munich Soviet Republic with the 'Thule Militants', which he founded. As a player in Munich's ethnic-chauvinist anti-semitic network, Rudolf von Sebottendorff promoted the founding of the German Workers' Party (DAP) in 1919. That same year, he left Munich after disagreements within the Thule Society. Until the Nazis seized power in 1933, he stayed in various locations abroad and published his embellished autobiography The Talisman of the Rosicrucian (1925) under the pseudonym Erwin Torre, along with astrological and esoteric texts.

In early April 1933, Sebottendorff returned to Munich and endeavored to revive the Thule Society, which had become insignificant. From then on, he stylized himself and the Thule Society as "midwives of the Nazi Party" (Gilbhard, p. 65). However, the Nazis did not grant him this status and arrested him in November 1933 as a political fraud. His volume Bevor Hitler kam (Before Hitler came)(1933) was briefly banned. On February 10, 1934, the Munich Special Court sentenced him to three months in prison for the dissemination of atrocity tales. The enforcement of the imprisonment was suspended by decree of the Bavarian Minister of Justice after Sebottendorff agreed in writing to leave Germany immediately.

Two weeks after the verdict was announced, Rudolf von Sebottendorff settled in Austria and was living in Liechtenstein in July 1934. After further stays abroad, Sebottendorff died in Istanbul in 1945. The circumstances of his death are unclear.