Whisperers by J H Brennan

Author:J H Brennan [Brennan, J H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000; HIS037000; OCC000000; OCC022000; OCC032000; OCC003000; OCC016000; OCC018000; OCC007000; OCC023000
ISBN: 9781468308693
Publisher: ABRAMS Books
Published: 2013-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

18. THE SPIRITS AND THE FÜHRER

THE FIRST WORLD WAR, WHICH BEGAN IN 1914, ENDED FOUR YEARS later with the signing of an armistice in a disused railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. Months later, in 1919, the position was formalized in the Treaty of Versailles which demanded from Germany its old colonial possessions, massive financial reparations, and an admission of guilt for the whole sorry affair. That same year, a thirty-year-old war veteran named Adolf Hitler joined the tiny, obscure German Workers Party. Two years later, he became its leader. By then, the party had been reorganized, expanded, and renamed. It was now the National Socialist German Workers Party or, more concisely, the Nazis. In 1923, the party welcomed a new recruit named Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler’s appearance on Germany’s political stage—he was already head of an embryo SS when elected to the Reichstag in 1930—shows that spirit influence was still evident in European politics during the Nazi period and throughout the Second World War. There is evidence it may not have been confined to Himmler.

By the early 1930s, clubs devoted to all manner of esoteric matters had sprung up across the whole of Germany—there were fifty-two of them in Berlin alone.1 They attracted a wide range of influential people from various walks of life, including the military, medicine, business, finance, and the arts. Among their activities were séances that attempted to contact spirit beings. An indication of their potential influence may be drawn from the fact that the host of one such series of séances was a wealthy aristocrat who sat on the board of I. G. Farben, the massive chemical conglomerate.

There is no doubt at all about the popularity of spirit communication and other occult practices in Germany before the First World War. In the devastation of the immediate postwar period and throughout the long, inflation-ridden economic crisis that followed, interest in such matters actually increased as people sought to escape from their everyday problems and find a deeper meaning to their lives. The country swarmed with psychics and mediums—one estimate puts their number at more than twenty thousand—keen to meet the demand. An example of the breed was Hermann Steinschneider, who achieved fame in Berlin as a stage mentalist under the name of Erik Jan Hanussen.

In the early stages of his career, Hanussen made no assertions beyond an ability to fool audiences using clever stagecraft, but by the late 1920s all that had changed. Hanussen now claimed a genuine psychism that led to communication with spirit forces and a consequent ability to prophesy. On one occasion, shortly after he moved to Berlin from his native Vienna, he fell into a trance in a museum and established contact with the spirit of a drowned woman whose glove was one of the objects on display. On another occasion, he was visited by the shade of his mistress, Betty Schostak, who had just died in a hospital. Whether Hanussen’s mediumship was genuine or simply a ruse to enhance his stage reputation has proven a matter of considerable controversy.

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