“I see victory for you. It cannot be stopped.”
In 1932, these words were spoken to Adolf Hitler one year before he became Reischschancellor of Germany. The man who spoke them was a famous clairvoyant, popular for his astrology charts, seances, and hypnotism. He was also a Jew.
Erik Jan Hanussen met with Hitler dozens of times over the following year. After predicting that he would rebound from recent disappointing Reichstag elections, Hitler kept Hanussen nearby. Hanussen taught the Führer many of his crowd control techniques and gesticulations, some of which would became infamous in the coming years.
In either a freakish display of prescience or a leaking of insider information, Hanussen predicted the burning of the Reichstag the day before, claiming to see a “great house” in flames.
For all his soothsaying, Hanussen didn’t divine his own impending end. The seer was assassinated in March of 1933, likely by SS soldiers. Prevailing theories suggest that he knew too much about the inner workings of the Nazi party or that the Nazis found out he was Jewish.
“I always thought that business about the Jews was just an election trick,” he wrote to a friend shortly before his death. “It wasn’t.”
