He was the founder of the Thule Society, a post-World War I German occultist organization where he played a key role, and that influenced many members of the Nazi Party.
His birth name was Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer and he was born in Hoyerswerda in the Prussian Province of Silesia (present-day Saxony), the son of a locomotive engineer.
[citation needed][dubious – discuss] In July of that year he travelled to Turkey, where he settled in 1901 and worked as an engineer on a large estate there.
[citation needed] He became an Ottoman citizen in 1911 and was apparently adopted (under Turkish law) by the expatriate Baron Heinrich von Sebottendorff shortly thereafter.
His wealthy host, Hussein Pasha, was a Sufi and interested in such matters; it was around this time that Glauer saw the Mevlevi Order and visited the Great Pyramid of Giza in July 1900.
[7][8] One of the books that Glauer inherited from Termudi featured a note from Hussein Pasha, which piqued his interest in the Sufi Bektashi Order, in regards to their alchemical and numerological practices.
By about 1912 he became convinced that he had discovered what he called "the key to spiritual realization", described by a later historian as "a set of numerological meditation exercises that bear little resemblance to either Sufism or Masonry" (Sedgwick 2004: 66).
[citation needed] By then, however, Glauer 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.
[citation needed] 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".