Hanussen, Erik Jan

(d. 1933)



Astrologer and reputed clairvoyant associated with Nazism. He claimed to be a Danish aristocrat but was actually Austrian, his real name being Hermann Steinschneider. To a large extent, he was simply an entertainer. From 1929 onward, he was in Berlin giving lucrative exhibitions of mind reading and hypnosis. He also practiced as a “psychic” consultant. His success with clients was due in part to his use of bugging, then unfamiliar, to pick up facts about them that they supposed he must have learned paranormally.
The widespread belief in his exceptional gifts may have had a basis beyond fraud/ The novelist Arthur Koestler, who was working as a journalist in the German capital, describes him in his autobiography as “a stocky, dark-haired man with quick movements, full of dynamic energy and not without charm.” In 1931, Koestler and a woman colleague subjected Hanussen to a test. They took an employee of their paper, Herr Apfel, to visit him, and handed him Apfel’s bunch of keys to see if he could infer anything from it (this technique is known as psychometry). Hanussen held it and made a number of statements about the owner’s recent life. Apfel denied them, and Koestler dismissed the experiment as a failure. It turned out, however, that Hanussen was correct on every count but about another person in the room, the woman who accompanied Koestler; he had achieved an impressive success by some other means than psychometry.
He had Jewish antecedents but managed to conceal them. As the Nazi movement grew stronger, he became friendly with some of its leaders, including the Berlin head of the storm troopers, the party’s private army. He was invited to coach Hitler in public speaking. Wishing to have a platform of his own, he tried to gain control of a newspaper and did launch an astrological weekly, which had a ready-made readership in a nation that took astrology more seriously than most.
During 1932, Hanussen was predicting Hitler’s triumph, and on January 1, 1933, he cast the Führer’s horoscope and foretold that he would attain power on January 30. When this prediction was fulfilled, there were rumors of inside information, and the rumors went further. Hanussen, it was believed, had foretold that Hitler would be spectacularly successful for some years but that the tide would turn and his regime would come to a cataclysmic end in the spring of 1945—as, of course, it did. An astrological forecast on these lines is known to have existed and to have been preserved in government files, whether or not it was Hanussen’s or derived from his.
Such reports were ominous for him, and the secret police discovered his Jewish background. He survived only a little longer. He sometimes worked with a medium, Maria Paudler, and at one séance she went into a trance before witnesses and spoke of a great and imminent fire, recognizable as the burning of the Reichstag. The Nazi leadership had already planned to burn the building and put the blame on the Communists, as a pretext to outlaw them. Hanussen’s reputation could still be of use, and on February 26, the papers carried an officially inspired account of the séance, alleging that he himself had gone into a trance and seen (conveniently) “a blood-curdling crime committed

by the Communists,” “blazing flames,” and “a terrible firebrand lighting up the world.”
The Reichstag fire duly broke out. It is impossible to be certain what Hanussen really knew in advance or what he or his medium really said. If he had been in on the plot, he would surely have kept quiet. More likely he had suspicions and hinted at them or allowed Maria Paudler to do so. One way or another, he had gone too far. A few weeks later, he was seized by a Nazi gang outside a theater where he performed and shot in woods on the outskirts of Berlin.
A German film made in 1988 (Hanussen) accepted that he had a real psychic gift, connecting it with a war wound in the head. It attributed his murder to his speaking too openly of Nazi responsibility for the fire.