The Nazi Séance

Review by Gerhard L. Weinberg

A self-promoting psychic who called himself Erik Jan Hanussen came to convince large numbers of individuals in Germany and other parts of Central Europe during the 1920’s and early 1930’s that he could read minds, foretell the future, and perform all sorts of other marvels. His successful defense of charges in a widely publicized trial in a town in Czechoslovakia helped to ensure a reputation that he enhanced with an autobiography that is largely fictional but revealing nevertheless. Although Jewish, Hanussen became an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis; but his alleged ability to see into the future never alerted him to the fact that they would kill him in April 1933, less than three months after coming to power.

What the author of this well-written book has done is to trace the life and career of this unusual individual. Magida shows how even the distortions in Hanussen’s autobiography offer some revealing glimpses into the reality of this dubious figure. He tracks the early years and marriages of Hanussen and emphasizes the way that crowds in Berlin came to see him perform in public as well as pay him for private readings and audiences. It was in this process that the supposed mind reader came in contact with the Nazis and in particular with a figure who would be highly important in the Nazi movement, Wolf Heinrich Count von Helldorf. The role of the latter as head of the storm troopers in Berlin and, after the accession of Adolf Hitler to the top of the government, chief of the Berlin area police, assured Hanussen an entrance into high- as well as low-level Nazi circles and possibly access to Hitler himself, a complicated topic that Magida handles most carefully. Since there have been some exaggerated accounts of Nazi interest in and relationship to the occult, it is refreshing to have this subject engaged in a thoughtful way.

The reader of this fairly balanced book will obtain a real sense of the way in which many individuals in the upheavals of post-World War I Germany, and especially its capital, Berlin, flocked to the most unlikely sources of information and comfort. It may well have been Hanussen’s comments on the Reichstag fire at the end of February and early March 1933 that contributed to his being first taken to jail and then murdered. One daughter of his survived in Italy, and Magida helps the reader see Hanussen through extensive conversations with her. Having failed to foresee his own killing by those he really believed were his friends, Hanussen would have been equally surprised by the fact that his main contact among them, Count von Helldorf, was executed in August 1944 for his involvement with those who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. Hanussen never warned Count von Helldorf; this most interesting figure was lacking precisely in the field he claimed as his own.