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The Committee of 300, also known as The Olympians, is a group alleged to have been founded by the British aristocracy in 1727. Proponents of the theory alleging the Committee's existence believe it to be an international council that organizes politics, commerce, banking, media, and the military for centralized global efforts.
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Background
The theory dates to a statement made by Walther Rathenau in a 1909 article "Geschäftlicher Nachwuchs" in Neue Freie Presse:
Dreihundert Männer, von denen jeder jeden kennt, leiten die wirtschaftliche Geschicke des Kontinents und suchen sich Nachfolger aus ihrer Umgebung.
This could be translated as: "Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of the continent and choose their successors from their area."
In context, Rathenau was actually deploring the oligarchic implications of this statement, and did not suggest that the "Three hundred" were Jewish. However, by 1912 Theodor Fritsch had seized upon the sentence as an "open confession of indubitable Jewish hegemony" and as proof that Rathenau was the "secret Kaiser of Germany." The idea became more popular after the World War I, and the spread of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Rathenau addressed the issue in a 1921 letter, stating that the three hundred referred to were leaders in the business world, rather than Jews.
After Rathenau's assassination in June 1922, one of his assassins explicitly cited Rathenau's membership in the "Three hundred Elders of Zion" as justification for the killing. This prompted the Reichstag to pass a Law for the Protection of the Republic making propagation of the myth a prosecutable offense. Nevertheless, it was still used by the Nazis before and after they took power.
Later theory
Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich wrote that the group may also be known as the "Hidden Hand", which is headed by the Rothschild family of international financiers and based loosely around many of the top national banking institutions and royal families of the world.