I also remember a lot of digging on both the Thule Society and "The NSDAP/AO was the foreign organization branch of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). AO is the abbreviation of the German compound word Auslands-Organisation (English: Foreign Organization). Although it would be correctly written in one word, the Nazis chose an obsolete spelling with a hyphen.

The party members who lived outside the German Reich were pooled in this special NSDAP department. On May 1, 1931 the new organizational unit was founded on the initiative of Reich Organization Leader (German: Reichsorganisationsleiter) Gregor Strasser and its management was assigned to Hans Nieland. But Nieland resigned from office on May 8, 1933, because he had become head of the Hamburg police authority, and later, a member of the Hamburg provincial government, whereupon Ernst Wilhelm Bohle was appointed director of the "AO", which served as the 43rd and only non-territorial Gau of the NSDAP. Only actual citizens of the German Reich – (German: Reichsdeutsche) – with a German passport could become members of the AO. Persons of German descent, ethnic Germans (German: Volksdeutsche), who possessed the nationality of the country in which they lived, were refused entry to the National Socialist Party."

[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]