It's been well-documented, especially on History Impossible, that many of the Nazis in the upper echelons of power had a certain fascination with the occult, the otherworldly, and the non-Western. One thing, though, that has perhaps stirred the imaginations of our fair share of trashy pulp novels more than any other eccentricity possessed by the elite of the Third Reich was simple: magic.
This wasn't embodied by anyone better than the famous clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen, who became known not just for his iconic performances of supposed mind-reading and fortune telling, but for his close associations with the budding National Socialist Party and its leaders in late Weimar Germany. But what these friends of his didn't realize was that their favorite clairvoyant harbored a secret, one that would ultimately test both their tolerance for him and for the kinds of esotericism he practiced (while of course never fully letting go their love of the occult).
In this episode, we'll explore the history of mentalism and its popularity throughout the late 19th and early 20th century and Erik Jan Hanussen's storied early life and explosion of success, as well as looking at what would become his most famous prediction in the early days of Nazi Germany.
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