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Reichshammerbund (Reich Hammer League) was a German anti-Semitic movement founded in 1912 by Theodor Fritsch.
Based on The Hammer, a journal founded by Fritsch in 1902, the Bund argued that Jewish influences had contaminated Germany and attempted to argue that their racism had a basis in biology.Marius Turda, Paul Weindling, "Blood and Homeland": Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940, Central European University Press, 2007, p. 441 The aim of the group was to co-ordinate the activities of the many small anti-Semitic organisations active at the time and to bring as many of these as possible under its banner.Heinrich August Winkler & Alexander Sager, Germany: The Long Road West, Volume 1, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 287 A movement rather than a political party, it sought to be above party politics and to instead encourage a renewal of the German way of life from an anti-capitalist perspective.Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-45, Routledge, 2001, p. 151 The battle sign of the group was the swastika, making the Bund one of the first Völkisch movements to use the symbol.Steven Heller, The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption?, Allworth Communications, Inc., 2000, p. 11 The founding document for The Hammer had been Willibald Hentschel's 1901 book Varuna, which preached racial purity and antisemitism.Richard S. Levy, Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume 1, ABC-CLIO, 2005, p. 297
A sister organisation, the Germanenorden, also appeared in 1912 under Fritsch, although it was a clandestine group for leading members of society who wished to work in secret rather than the Bund which was open.Levy, Antisemitism, p. 269 The Bund itself was close to the occultism of the Guido von List Society as amongst its founder members were List Society activists Philipp Stauff, Eberhard von Brockhusen and Karl August Hellwig.Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, Tauris Parke, 2005, p. 45 It was Hellwig who drafted the group's constitution and who exercised effective control in the early days of the Bund.Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots, p. 126
They welcomed the outbreak of the First World War as an opportunity to banish softness from Germany and return the country to its harsh, militaristic roots.Turda & Weindling, "Blood and Homeland":, p. 443 From 1914 the group took a leading role in gathering anecdotal evidence relating to the involvement of the in the German war effort, much of which later formed the basis of the stab-in-the-back legend.Michael Brenner, Rainer Liedtke, David Rechter, Werner Eugen Mosse, Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, Mohr Siebeck, 1999, pp.177-8
In 1919 the group, at the instigation of Fritsch's friend Alfred Roth, merged into the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund as part of its continuing policy of forming an umbrella anti-Semitic movement.Levy, Antisemitism, p. 266
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