Strange Tale of Hitler's Jewish Psychic

Astrologer's Murder at Birth of Third Reich Remains Mystery


Center Stage: Psychic Erik Jan Hanussen leads a seance in prewar Germany. The Jewish-born mentalist improbably became an advisor to Adolf Hitler.

By Eddy Portnoy
Published November 08, 2011, issue of November 11, 2011.


The Nazi Séance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler’s Circle
By Arthur Magida
Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, $26



Where else but in the annals of Jewish history does a boy born to a pair of impoverished runaways become a world-famous mind reader, psychic, astrologer, crime fighter, newspaper publisher, novelist and, if that’s not enough, adviser to Adolf Hitler. The bizarre and tragic story of Erik Jan Hanussen, the famed mentalist born as Hermann Steinschneider in Vienna, is truly stranger than fiction.

A number of books and films have told the story of Hanussen, a popular figure in Europe for decades. With Arthur Magida’s “The Nazi Séance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler’s Circle,” this remarkable tale is offered up to the Anglosphere.

Cautioning the reader to look upon it with a jaundiced eye, but nonetheless relying heavily on Hanussen’s own unreliable autobiography, Magida starts with the inauspicious beginnings of the famed clairvoyant and takes us to his inauspicious end, at the hands of the Nazis, in 1933.

Born in 1889 to Viennese vagrants Julie Kohn and Siegfried Steinschneider, Herman Steinschneider had a remarkable childhood, during which he discovered his preternatural abilities and claimed to have psychically manipulated his parents. While all children manipulate their parents to some degree, young Hermann exhibited powers far beyond those of a normal child.

http://www.forward.com/articles/145806/#ixzz1dDK11GWB

"After publicly supporting Hitler and making close connections with high-ranking Nazis whose gambling habits he bankrolled, Hanussen was found dead in the spring of 1933, with a pile of Nazi IOUs. While Magida also attempts to implicate Hanussen with foreknowledge of the Reichstag fire, the reasons for his murder still remain a mystery."


Interesting stuff. Thanks for the post!