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Premonitions: A leap in to the future – Herbert Greenhouse [1971]

HITLER AND HIS COURT PROPHETS

It would have been fairly easy to predict the sudden death of anyone who got in the way of Adolf Hitler. To predict the time of death was a bit more difficult. On May 23, 1934, the Spanish psychic Tomas Menes foresaw that Chancellor Dolfuss of Austria would be murdered within three months. Two months and two days later a group of Nazis marched into the government office where Dolfuss was holding a cabinet meeting, and shot him.

Hitler himself was the subject of many death prophecies.

In 1932 a hand-reading expert, Dr. Joseph Renald, studied Hitler's handprints and saw that his life would end violently.

"I see that you will come into power," he told the future dictator. "It will bring woe to Germany and woe to Europe."

Raging, Hitler stormed out of Dr. Renald's office and later did what many kings had done - he put in his own stable of prophets - all astrologers. Since Hitler's rise at that time was meteoric, his prophets were able to please him with glowing short-term forecasts

One of his astrologers - Louis de Wohl - could see Hitler's violent end on the way, and he began to hedge his predictions or couch them in vague language. Foreseeing his own doom if he kept his professional integrity, de Wohl managed to escape from Germany in 1935 and resumed his forecasts in the more permissive atmosphere of London. Here he predicted success for the Allies.

Hitler's other astrologers were not so lucky. Karl Ernst Krafft first came to the dictator's attention in 1939, when he warned that Hitler would be threatened by violence during the November 7-10 period. An attempt was made on Hitler's life at that time in the Munich Burgerbrau beer hall, but Der Fuhrer escaped unhurt. As a court prophet, one of Krafft's jobs was to interpret the quatrains of Nostradamus - written four hundred years earlier - in favour of the Third Reich. These were used as propaganda during the war.

As Krafft's prophecies became less appetizing to Hitler, he fell from grace. In 1941 he was thrown into a concentration camp along with other German astrologers, occultists, and parapsychologists who were arrested after the Rudolf Hess flight. Among the parapsychologists was Gerda Walther, who later wrote about Krafft and the other Nazi astrologers in an article in Tomorrow magazine (winter, 1956) entitled "Hitler's Black Magicians." In the article she mentioned another prophetess in Germany who courageously and openly predicted disaster for Hitler and Naziism. This was Elise Lehrer, a Bavarian.

Even when Hitler was winning his most impressive victories, Elise Lehrer insisted that a bad end awaited him.

She spoke loud and often of Hitler's doom and never hesitated to show her contempt for him. She would often visit the studio of sculptor Ferdinand Liebermann, who made busts of the Nazi leaders. Once Elise stared at a bust of Hitler and said, "you needn't bother with that Gitzkopf (blockhead). You're wasting your time and might as well destroy the statues because they're going to be absolutely worthless."

Elise was such a thorn in Der Fuhrer's side that she was finally carted off to an insane asylum and later died in a concentration camp....

Another German prophet made a remarkably accurate prediction of Hitler's death, saying that the dictator would die under mysterious circumstances before May 7, 1945.

Wilhelm Wulff of Hamburg was able to escape Hitler's wrath because he was Heinrich Himmler's astrologer, and a forecast of death for Der Fuhrer was pleasing to the power-hungry Himmler. As Hitler's last days approached, he was probably unaware of Wulff's prophecy. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.