CHAPTER 12: Prophets of the Third Reich

Awareness of one's national heritage and blood ties with the Aryan race are indivisibly bound up with astrological science.
-- German astrological magazine

Astrology is one aspect of the occult tradition with which the Nazis have been openly identified. It is an important part of that tradition. According to astrological theory, the harmony of nature expressed in the planetary movements is the same as that expressed in individual personalities and societies. Therefore, the past, present and future can be interpreted by certain cyclic and numerical calculations of heavenly bodies. H, the occultist argues, the human temperature is lower in the morning, why may we not observe distinct differences between different periods, people, and races, since they, too, follow certain periodicities?

Occultists are particularly fond of the law of correspondences, exemplified by the saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: "As above, so below." They see a reciprocal relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the stars providing a language by which life can be read, a symbolic master-plan of the hierarchical cosmos; and one of the purposes of the occult, as they perceive it, is to give men the wisdom to free themselves from bondage to the fortune in their stars. Through special knowledge, they believe they can develop the psychic powers to influence events. To understand astrology is to be able to use a kind of mental alchemy by which the negative aspects of life can be transmuted into good -- if one is properly initiated, of course.

From the late nineteenth century on, the Germans were eager to use astrology in their daily lives. They had been particularly impressed with Franz Anton Mesmer's attempts to place astrology on a scientific footing. An Austrian who had studied medicine in Vienna, he applied his theory of animal magnetism to heavenly bodies in his first book, De Influxu Planetarum in Corpus Humanum ("Of the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body"). The universe he described was held together by an "aetheric continuum," of which the stars and planets were a constituent part, and from which flowed "animal magnetism." Illness was simply failure to draw effectively on one's aetheric continuum reserves, and Mesmer's apparatus was designed to help people tap this source -- this intangible universal force which pervaded space and exercised a hidden influence on human affairs.

Mesmer learned of the researches of Empress Maria Theresa's court astrologer, who enjoyed amazing luck in treating the ill on the basis of Paracelsus' theory of correspondences, or sympathies. What the court astrologer did was to apply magnets to the affected part of the patient's body. Mesmer broadened this theory.

Animal magnetism was more widely practiced by doctors in Germany than anywhere else in Europe, as the eminent turn-of-the-century British clergyman, Frank Podmore, observed in his book, From Mesmer to Christian Science. There was no centralized medical academy to impose its rules on the "profession." Mesmerism was studied in German universities. Court physicians and medical professors wrote learned treatises on it. Experiments were repeated endlessly. Podmore reported: "The magnetic fluid could be seen radiating as a stream of light from the eyes and the fingers of the operator and the poles of a magnet, from the heart of a living frog or the spinal marrow of a newly killed ox."

German magnetists threw themselves enthusiastically into clairvoyance and somnambulism. Since the animal fluid could magnetize over space, many instances of extrasensory communications were noted. According to Podmore:

Clairvoyance at a distance was apparently much commoner in Germany and northern Europe generally at this time than in France. The cases quoted are rarely, however, recorded with sufficient detail to serve any purpose other than that of attesting the prevalence of the belief, and some of the instances are strongly suggestive of collusion.

The special contribution of the German nation, however, to the early history of Animal Magnetism consists of the revelations concerning the spiritual world dictated by several somnambules in the state of ecstasy.

Such interests flourish in cataclysmic times and are exploited by adventurers like Madame Blavatsky. Inspired by her challenge to Darwinism, other occult leaders copied her peculiar package, so satisfying to educated people who were not prepared to gainsay the findings of science, yet were not prepared to give up the mysteries of religion, either. Scientific theory was not so well understood by the layman that it could hold its own against Madame Blavatsky's fanciful ramblings. In her variation of the Eastern doctrine of human cycles, she read the Atlantean zodiacal record and predicted the end of certain races whose "time was up."

Men like Lanz von Liebenfels, Guido von List, and the master astrologer, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, elaborated on this, and German astrology became intimately bound up with racism. Its ideologists borrowed heavily from Madame Blavatsky to show that the ancient Germans had been keepers of a secret science which had been wiped out by Judeo-Christianity. Lanz and Sebottendorff read in the movement of the planets the coming of a divine Fuhrer who would establish a racist regime. List, in his book, Die Religion der Ario-Germanen in ihrer Esoterik und Exoterik ("The Religion of the Aryan Germans in Its Esoteric and Exoteric Aspects"), revealed the "secret" that the moon was the forefather of the human race, and the swastika "one of the holiest secret signs." List believed that the mystery of the heavens would be revealed by departed spirits, in an extrasensory way.

The effect of World War I was to intensify German interest in animal magnetism, Theosophy, and astrology. Inflation drove some to suicide and others to the "sure" knowledge contained in horoscopes. The German astrologer Wilhelm Wulff reports in his book, Zodiac and Swastika:

... by the November Revolution of 1918, inflation was making headway, well-established businesses were crashing, and suicides were a daily event. In this period of tremendous economic and political uncertainty, hypnosis, mesmerism, clairvoyance, and every form of occultism flourished. Such interests are promoted by catastrophic situations. In post-war Germany, hypnotists, clairvoyants and mind readers were suddenly able to fill huge concert halls. There was scarcely a single large music hall or cabaret that did not stage a telepathic act. Enormous placards and newspaper advertisements pompously proclaimed: "The Most Important Parapsychologist," "The Woman with a Thousand Eyes" (Madame Karoli at the Busch Circus), "The Great Enigma, an Outstanding Achievement in the Sphere of Occult Science, the Lady Who Tells You All," etc. Swindle or not, both public and press found it all fascinating. I was very soon revolted by this fairground occultism ....

Konrad Heiden adds this personal observation of the same period:

The churches raged.... But if one had accused these astrologers, quacks, necromancers, and fake radiologists of witchcraft and sorcery, most of them would have replied indignantly that they occupied themselves with science -- naturally, a science that the "experts" did not understand, for it was the science of the future, perhaps a science predicated on experiments that were still imperfect....

... there was much talk of intuition, of presentiment, of what they called "vision" and the like. But nearly always it was considered an "advance" by abnormally endowed natures into certain fields of the spirit that in the near future would be investigated by conventional methods. The stock explanation in that world of deception and self-deception was that everything was done "along strictly scientific lines," which shows to what extent the cult of science had taken the place of religion....

One magus, Erik Jan Hanussen, who received notoriety as the "Prophet of the Third Reich" and the "Magician of Berlin," was credited with having taught Hitler all that he knew about mass psychology, which was considerable. Walter Langer, a psychiatrist, wrote in his secret report to the Allies:

According to Strasser, during the early 1920's Hitler took regular lessons in speaking and in mass psychology from a man named Hanussen, who was also a practicing astrologer and fortuneteller. He was an extremely clever individual who taught Hitler a great deal concerning the importance of staging meetings to obtain the greatest dramatic effect.... It is possible that Hanussen had some contact with a group of astrologers, referred to by von Wiegand, who were very active in Munich at this time. Through Hanussen Hitler, too, may have come in contact with this group, for von Wiegand writes: "When I first knew Adolf Hitler in Munich, in '21 and '22, he was in touch with a circle that believed firmly in the portents of the stars. There was much whispering of the coming of 'another Charlemagne and a new Reich.'"

Born Herschel Steinschneider in Vienna in 1889, Hanussen pretended to descend from a long line of Danish noblemen, although his father actually was a small-time itinerant Jewish vaudevillian. The son followed in the dancing footsteps of the father and joined a traveling show at twelve, as trapeze artist, lion tamer, stable boy, and folk singer. And these roles did not begin to exhaust his versatility. In Istanbul, without resources, he created an ersatz Franz Lehar operetta. On his way back to Vienna, to freeload aboard ship, he impersonated a singer and agreed to work his way home, but a scratchy throat prevented singing. Once home, he blackmailed people to keep their names out of a paper he edited, and made money from others by giving them free publicity.

Before World War I, he discovered the world of magic illusion, and in the army he set himself up as a clairvoyant, with considerable help from someone in the army post office. Whether or not he believed he really possessed extrasensory perception, he became a masterful hypnotist. He also learned how to dowse for water, and wrote a book for other magicians who wanted to put on mind-reading acts: The Road to Telepathy: Explanation and Practice. After the war, he wrote another, Thought Reading: A Primer for Telepathy, in which he gave invaluable advice to the neophyte magician: "The illusion of the supernatural must surround him in the eyes of his audience, which will be a thousand times more manageable when it has become a group of believers. With success, self-confidence rises, and with self-confidence the power of persuasion itself."

By this time he had changed his name to Erik Jan Hanussen and had created his own reputation for clairvoyance and other supernatural powers, despite his confession: "If I were to strip away all that is mystical or supernatural, if I were to show thought reading for what it is, we would arrive at virtuosity in the knowledge of audience psychology, linked to the meticulous study of procedures concerning ideomotor motions [based on ideas rather than on reflexes]." Here, finally, was a man who employed the scientific method. Others less candid had paved the way for him. There is a natural affinity between magic tricks and fakirism which believers had no will to discover. Many "masters of wisdom" were also accomplished magicians. Madame Blavatsky had been, and when she was discovered at her tricks, her disciples protested that this was what the public had driven her to. As magicians, from Houdini in the twenties to Milbourne Christopher and Randi in our own time, have demonstrated, most, if not all, feats of clairvoyance can be duplicated by the magician, and a look at a catalog of magicians' equipment bears them out. The magicians, of course, resent the mediums, because they feel the mediums are using the same tricks they do (and, in fact, they have caught many of the most famous mediums in the act, so to speak). The stage magicians are using their skills and techniques to provide honest entertainment, and feel that the mediums, psychics, and faith healers are using those skills to gull, cheat, and sell false dreams and false hopes.

In 1931, Hanussen met Hitler, joined the Nazi party, raised the swastika flag on his car, and befriended leading Nazi officials. Hitler knew the value of using men with Hanussen's gifts to publicize his image as a man of historic destiny. Hanussen put himself at the service of the Nazi cause in astrological forecasts published by his swastika-trimmed paper. He also sought to put the Party in his debt by lending large sums to the SA leader of Berlin, Count Wolf Heinrich Helldorf, an opportunist as impressive as Hanussen himself. Prominent Nazis attended fashionable seances which Hanussen staged at his Palace of Occultism and were pleased to listen to his cheerful prognostications for the Party. One that was not so cheerful will cause him to be remembered whenever the controversial Reichstag fire comes up.

In February 1933, soon after Hitler was named chancellor, Hanussen opened the Palace of Occultism to actors, actresses, and important members of the Party. At a midnight seance, in an atmosphere of garish splendor embellished with gilded zodiac symbols and bugged with secret microphones to pry out intimate details from an unsuspecting audience (a common showman's trick which the Nazis were to use again in the fashionable brothel they instituted for important officials, German and foreign), Hanussen went into his trance:

I see a vast and distinguished room.... Portraits of prominent men of history hang on the walls. They are men who have led Germany through much agony. Are they not the chancellors of the Reich? Yes, this is the Conference Room of the Chancellery. Noise penetrates through the windows. The Storm Troopers move down the Wilhelmstrasse. There has been a magnificent victory. The people want Hitler. Victory, Victory! Hitler is victorious. Resistance is useless. But the noise comes closer. Is there a struggle? Shooting? No ... no ... it is not that.... I see flames, enormous flames.... It is a terrible conflagration that has broken out. Criminals have set the fire.

They want to hurl Germany into last-minute chaos, to nullify the victory. They are setting fire to a large public building. One must crush this vermin. They want to resist Hitler's victory. Only the mailed fist of an awakened Germany can hold back chaos and the threat of civil war....

The following evening, the Reichstag was in flames. The question as to who started the fire has not been resolved to this day. The suspicion that the Nazis themselves were implicated is strengthened by the fact that Berlin police president Helldorf went directly to bed after hearing of the fire. It was still raging when the police arrested a Dutch Communist who was found on the premises. The Nazis linked him with a Communist plot which they failed to make stick, but the Dutchman was executed. Some people claim that Hanussen had hypnotized him into starting the fire. Hanussen had pledged himself, after all,

to be the first, if necessary, to devote everything I own and am, when the time comes, to make a sacrifice at the altar of Germany. I have encountered the readiness for sacrifice among all those who stood behind the banner of the National Concept; I know that Adolf Hitler sacrificed his all for this national idea; I saw Storm Trooper veterans in torn shoes and in thin jackets standing in the icy winds for hours to perform their duty; I have observed selflessness, integrity, and true patriotism among the millions who back Hitler. . . . and so I had no choice but to demonstrate my respect and gratitude, unhesitatingly, in spite of everything, to serve the truth.

Whether or not Hanussen had advance notice of the fire, he probably assumed his prediction of it would assure his stature as a prophet. It did not. Six weeks later, he was snatched from the entrance to his theater by Helldorf's orders, and murdered in the woods near Berlin. Helldorf, perpetually bankrupt, had borrowed money from Hanussen, but whether this was the motivation for the murder, or whether it related to Hanussen' s knowledge about the fire, is still a mystery. The fire augured well for the Nazis, on the other hand. It enabled them to do away altogether with the need for free elections, under the guise of preventing an imminent Communist takeover.

Once firmly entrenched, the Nazis continued to call upon the services of soothsayers, even though official policy was to harass and banish them. The astrologer Gerda Walther, in an article in Tomorrow entitled "Hitler's Black Magicians," observed a "complete lack of unity" regarding occultism. "Not only is there an absence of 'coordination,' but often there are different and even opposing points of view."

As soon as Hitler came into the public eye, he was the target for astrological prognostications. But after 1933, an astrologer tempted fate if he cast the Fuhrer's horoscope, and none were so bold as to dare. Fearing unfavorable predictions, Hitler decreed that police regulations equate astrology with fortunetelling, and Paragraph 2 read:

For purposes of these police regulations fortune-telling is understood as a prediction of future events, the divination of the present or the past, and all other forms of revelation not based on natural processes of perception. It specifically includes the reading of cards, the casting of horoscopes, the explanation of the stars, and the interpretation of omens and dreams.

As Himmler later confessed to Wilhelm Wulff, the reason for the strictures against astrologers was that if they were not Nazis, they might see their calling as universally applicable to all humans, whether they were Negroes, Indians, Chinese, or Aryans, "in crass opposition" to the Nazi concept of the racial soul. "No one doctrine," argued Himmler, "can cover all cases." But he left no doubt in Wulff's mind that he was committed to a belief in astrology and related occult studies:

He told me about a few of his own experiences and observations at certain phases of the moon. His ancestors, he said, had been familiar with peasant lore, calculating the right time to plant crops .... He began projects at certain, but not generally known, phases of the moon....

He was fond of citing the important place of astrologers and fortunetellers in the court of Frederick the Great.

A friend of Wulff's, Ellie Howe, who was employed by the British Secret Service in World War II, discovered, by reading astrological studies in Gestapo files after the war, that Himmler was in good company. Wulff repeats his assertion that "German astrology was supreme in the 1930's" and it engaged the attention of other important Nazis, like Walter Schellenberg and Rudolf Hess. It was largely thanks to Hess that the so-called "witchcraft act" of 1934 against astrologers and occultists was circumvented. When a former planetarium director on Alfred Rosenberg's staff in the Department for the Promotion of German Writing made an official declaration that astrology should be banned, Hess disagreed, on the grounds that there might be something to it. It was this bias, some believe, which caused Hess to make the mysterious flight to Scotland. Howe reports in his book, Astrology: A Recent History Including the Untold Story of Its Role in World War II, that a confidant revealed to him:

Hess's astrological foible strengthened his own conviction that everything possible must be done and hazarded in order to end hostilities without delay, because at the end of April and beginning of May 1941 Hitler's astrological aspects were unusually malefic. Hess interpreted these aspects to mean that he, personally, must take the dangers that threatened the Fuhrer upon his shoulders in order to save Hitler and restore peace in Germany. Time and again Hess's astrological "advisor" had told him that Anglo-German relations were threatened by a deep-seated crisis of confidence.... Indeed, at this time there were very dangerous [planetary] oppositions in Hitler's horoscope.

Hitler, although he publicly ridiculed the occult tastes of his disciples, was equally superstitious; and his chief architect and later minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, related that he himself witnessed a number of instances of this, such as the occasion when

Hitler had solemnly laid the cornerstone for the House of German Art in Munich. He delivered the ceremonial hammer blows with a fine silver hammer Troost had designed especially for this day. But the hammer broke. [Troost died three months later and] Hitler remarked to us: "When the hammer shattered I knew at once it was an evil omen. Something is going to happen, I thought. Now we know why the hammer broke. The architect was destined to die."

Hermann Rauschning, a leader of the Danzig Senate who fled Germany in 1940, also attests to Hitler's occult leanings. In The Voice of Destruction, he writes:

One day when Hitler seemed in an approachable mood, a far-sighted woman in his circle said to him warningly:

"My Fuhrer, don't touch black magic. As yet both white and black are open to you. But once you have embarked upon black magic it will dominate your destiny. It will hold you captive. Don't choose the quick and easy successes. There lies before you the power over a realm of pure spirits. Do not allow yourself to be led away from your true path by earthbound spirits, which will rob you of creative power."

Hitler was fond at times of this sort of mystical talk. Only in such guise could any serious warning be offered to him. This woman friend expressed in her way what everyone who came in touch with Hitler was bound to feel: Hitler was abandoning himself to forces which were carrying him away -- forces of dark and destructive violence. He imagined that he still had freedom of choice, but he had long been in bondage to a magic which might well have been described, not only in metaphor but in literal fact, as that of evil spirits. And instead of a man emerging step by step from the obscurity of his youth, and freeing himself from its dross in his upward course, we witnessed the development of a man possessed, the helpless prey of the powers of darkness.

Black magic, white magic -- Hitler is the typical person with no firm foundation, with all the shortcomings of the superficial, of the man without reverence, quick to judge and quick to condemn. He is one of those with no spiritual tradition, who, being caught by the first substitute for it that they meet, hold tenaciously to that, lest they fall back into Nothingness. He belongs also to the type of German who is starving for the unattainable. For all those who have been unsuccessful in the battle of life National Socialism is the great worker of magic. And Hitler himself is the first of these; thus he has become the master-enchanter and the high priest of the religious mysteries of Nazidom.

Hitler's henchmen make more and more play with this quality of his of supreme magician ....

After Hitler's rise, someone in Himmler's department was given an astrological forecast by a Swiss friend, Karl Ernst Krafft, an astrologer with a predilection for the same sort of theories about the "spirit of language" and "word magic" which distinguished Guido von List. Krafft was well versed in Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and English. He had used his astrological talents to forecast trends on the commodities market. Around 1938, he was living in the Black Forest with two women who were interested in Rudolf Steiner. Hitler appealed to Krafft as "the conqueror of the mechanistic way of life."

Krafft predicted to his friend that Hitler's life would hang in the balance between November 7 and 10, 1939. During that time, Hitler attended an anniversary celebration of the 1923 Putsch in the Munich Hofbrauhaus. He left just before a bomb went off and tore apart the beer cellar. Krafft zealously wired Hess, thrusting his prediction under his nose, and adding that the stars still indicated that Hitler would not be safe for a few more days. Krafft was promptly arrested.

Himmler, meanwhile, was working on tracking down the failed assassin by interviewing a Viennese trance medium who had been ordered to his office.

Goebbels, as propaganda minister, had more practical concerns. He just happened, at that particular time, to have developed an interest in Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French prophet, not for his verse quatrains, but for his propaganda possibilities. He must have been delighted to find in Krafft a man who was not only familiar with Nostradamus' obscure verses but who actually believed that Germany's triumph over the Allies -- and over future enemies, as well -- could be deciphered from them.

Krafft came to work for the propaganda ministry and began using his special knowledge of Nostradamus as a means of psychological warfare. Nostradamus had been deliberately obscure, to keep his secrets from being understood by any but the initiated. The infinite permutations of possible interpretations had made his quatrains popular propaganda devices for centuries. Thus Krafft had an embarrassment of riches from which to choose so as to interpret Germany's victory. Quatrain III-76 presumably predicted the birth of National Socialism:

In Germany will be born diverse sects,
approaching very near happy paganism.
The heart captive and receipts small;
they will return to paying the true tithe.

Krafft was in deadly earnest when he interpreted a passage like the following to mean great discomfort for Great Britain:

In the islands shall be so horrid tumults,
That nothing shall be heard but a warlike surprise,
So great shall be the insult of the robbers,
That everyone shall shelter himself under the great look.

Goebbels' diary entry for November 22, 1939, reads: "This is a thing we can exploit for a long time. I forbid all printing of these forecasts by Monsieur Nostradamus. They must be disseminated only by handbills, hand-written, or at most typed, secretly, and in the manner of snowball letters. The thing must have an air of being forbidden.... Naturally, all this silly rubbish must also go out to France...."

Pamphlets of Krafft's interpretations were sent in advance of the military through occupied France and were highly successful in getting their message across. Krafft's exegeses were translated into many different languages, and the output was enormous. They were even "surreptitiously stuck into people's pockets as they left the movies -- as far away as in Iran!" according to Gerda Walther.

Romania's minister to London, an anti-Nazi awed by Krafft's seemingly prophetic gifts, wrote him to renew an old acquaintance and to ask for his astrological predictions about the war. Krafft showed the letter to his Nazi superiors, and they drafted an answer predicting Germany's victory. When the Romanian minister received it, he assumed that Krafft must be advising Hitler, and got the idea of convincing the British to hire the best astrologer they could find and have him try to second-guess Krafft. If the British could get their astrologer to find out how Krafft was arriving at the sources for his advice, they could, first of all, know what Hitler was thinking, and secondly, influence his thought by preparing forecasts similar to Krafft's but pro-Allies, and slipping them into Hitler's hands. For the purpose, Ludwig von Wohl was hired.

A Roman-Catholic Hungarian author of religious books who left Berlin for London in 1935, he had a reputation among believers in astrology for his accurate horoscopes of Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Chamberlain, and other prominent people. One of Hitler, in particular, cast in 1931, brought him to the attention of the international set. Just before the beginning of World War II, at a Spanish embassy dinner party, he entertained the British secretary of foreign affairs, Lord Halifax, with astrological predictions, and was assured that he would have a job if war broke out when he said it would and if Hitler's invasion of Poland was as rapid as he predicted.

The war was three days early. Ludwig von Wohl became a British citizen, changed his name to Louis de Wohl, and joined the British army. In August 1940 an employee of the War Office came to him and asked: "How would you like to work on a highly secret assignment?"

He liked it very much. Made a captain, paid in cash, and set up in a suite at Grosvenor House, he worked on his unique task. British Intelligence believed that Hitler was being advised not only by Krafft but by four other astrologers, and that he never made a military move without their advice. Churchill was agreeable to the idea of trying to intercept what Hitler was being told every day. "Why not try it?" he said. "It could be fun." In allowing the bizarre appointment, Churchill was assumed to be indulging one of his mischievous caprices. "After all," he is reported to have said, "why should Hitler have a monopoly on astrologers?" One commentator remarked that he may also have "relished the idea of subjecting some stuffy high-powered official to an astrologer's scrutiny."

Since De Wohl knew all five astrologers who were supposedly advising Hitler, had worked for some time with Krafft, and was familiar with his formula, he could guess what he presumed they were telling Hitler. In his first memo to the British War Office in the beginning of September 1940 he advised that the Germans would not invade England, because he was sure that Hitler's astrologers were counseling him against it.

One of De Wohl's tasks was to put out a bogus copy of an astrological magazine called Der Zenit, which looked exactly like the genuine article. It was intercepted by the Nazis; and Wulff relates that he told Himmler's assistant, Walter Schellenberg, "that from an astrological point of view it was a first-class production and indicated that it was the work of experts. Some very skillful bits of propaganda had been casually inserted in an otherwise apparently innocuous text. We deduced that this fake had been manufactured in England."

Wulff was consulted several times by Himmler during 1944 and 1945, particularly as defeat seemed imminent. Wilhelm Hoetl, who joined the German Secret Service in 1938, says of Himmler: "His predilection for the occult sciences also went far beyond the confines of a harmless hobby; it can with truth be said that all his major decisions hung upon the advice given to him by his clairvoyant.... " According to Hoetl, Schellenberg, anxious to end the war, had Wulff draw up a horoscope "which would give Himmler the necessary courage and convince him that he was destined by Fate to become the Fuhrer and the saviour of the German people.... "

Not only Himmler, but the German people pinned their hopes on astrology. Speer relates that they had

long since stopped believing the newspapers. There was one exception: During the closing months of the war growing bands of desperate people began pinning their hopes on the astrological sheets. Since these were dependent on the Propaganda Ministry, for a variety of reasons they were, as I learned from [Hans] Fritzsche at Nuremberg, used as a tool for influencing public opinion. Fake horoscopes spoke of valleys of darkness which had to be passed through, foretold imminent surprises, intimated happy outcomes. Only in the astrological sheets did the regime still have a future.

In 1945, the day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Goebbels, who may have been a victim of his own propaganda, ordered champagne and phoned Hitler: "My Fuhrer, I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning-point for us. This is Friday 13 April. It is the turning-point."

Later, in Hitler's bunker, Goebbels sent for the horoscopes which had been cast for the Fuhrer and for Germany on his accession to the chancellery. They had been given to Himmler for safekeeping. Both predicted the entire outcome of the war: the beginning, in 1939; victory until 1941; then defeat until the second half of April 1945, when there would be a reversal of fortune. Peace would not come until August.

Goebbels, who may have been humoring Hitler, drew historical analogies between the death of Roosevelt and the death of the tsarina during the Seven Years' War with Russia, when Frederick the Great appeared to be defeated until the death turned things around.

But in the end, all the prophets failed them, and the Nazis learned that they could not be saved by the stars.

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