The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5

[salvorhardin]

How Britain employed a covert cross-dressing astrologer to help lure America into WWII, and defeat Germany.

In the summer of 1941, delegates at the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers’ convention in Cleveland, Ohio, listened to a keynote address from an astrologer named Louis de Wohl. The bespectacled German-Hungarian—late thirties, rather corpulent, flamboyant in dress and confident in manner—told his rapt audience that Hitler was operating under advice from “the best astrologers in Germany,” who had plotted out the course for Germany to attack the U.S. The invasion, it seemed, would occur sometime after the following spring, once Saturn and Uranus, the two “malefic” planets, had entered Gemini, America’s ruling sign: “America,” he warned, “has always been subject to grave events when Uranus transits Gemini.” De Wohl’s professional assessment, nonetheless, was that the stars portended eventual disaster for Hitler. “We can’t predict a date for his defeat,” he said, “but if the United States enters the war before next spring, he is doomed.”

What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the British government, which was attempting to drag the Roosevelt administration into WWII by any means necessary. De Wohl, who was employed by SOE (Special Operations Executive, the wartime sabotage unit), had been dispatched with instructions to present himself as a renowned astrologer with no connections to Britain, and to undermine America’s belief in the invincibility of Hitler. As the spy novelist William Boyd put it in a 2008 radio interview: “At the time, there was a perception of American people, in the minds of the British Security Services, that they were more gullible than us Brits.”

De Wohl’s visit to Cleveland was part of a nationwide tour of talks and media conferences. He was interviewed by the New York Sun, which ran a story with the headline “Seer Sees Plot to Kill Hitler,” detailing de Wohl’s predictions that Hitler would be “done away within a year.” In an interview with the New York Sunday News, headlined “Hitler’s Stargazer Sees Heavenly Stop Light,” de Wohl revealed that he’d obtained a letter written by Hitler’s top astrologer, Karl Ernst Krafft, who confessed that in his opinion, Hitler wouldn’t win the war and, indeed, would “suddenly disappear.” The Los Angeles Times published a front-page report on de Wohl’s forecasts, the most important being that unless America joined in the effort to defeat the Nazis, Germany would invade the country via Brazil.

De Wohl didn’t shy away from making more immediate predictions, either. He announced that an important ally of Hitler, one who wasn’t a German or a Nazi, would go insane within ten days. Lo and behold, the press soon reported that Admiral Georges Robert, the Vichy High Commissioner of the French West Indies, had lost his mind and could be heard shouting and screaming all night. Supernatural corroboration of de Wohl’s prognostications came from far and wide: a Cairo newspaper published some prophesies from an Egyptian astrologer that eerily tallied with de Wohl’s description of Hitler’s downfall, as did the publicized visions of a Nigerian priest and the soothsaying of a Sierra Leonean stargazer.

Full article (~2,100 words): http://www.theawl.com/2012/04/the-inconvenient-astrologer-of-mi5

[longship]

1. When you are Britain in 1940-1 you do amazing things

The real story of Britain's war with Germany first broke into the public eye with William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid (1976) which first told the story of how far the UK went to survive a time when they fought Germany alone.

This adds another chapter to this story.

Thanks for the post.

R&K

[hlthe2b]

2. Yes... I have been reading on this period. Things were so desperate for G. Britain when they were

fighting alone. Who can blame them for this kind of nonsense....

[longship]

3. I am a WWII groupie

I have tons of audio of the period. Hundreds of hours. CBS newscasts (This is London! from Murrow), Churchill speeches, and a lot of other media from the period. I have read Churchill's memoirs, all six compendious columns. Never once does he -- to use a poker metaphor -- does he reveal his hand.

The British only were able to withstand Germany during 1940-1 by doing everything they could to infiltrate German plans at the highest level, and to use blatant subterfuge to fool Hitler at every step of the game. It was an exercise in mind fuck, and apparently nobody knew it better than Churchill (of whom I am a big fan).

If the Brits had known, in the spring of 1945, what Churchill had actually done to keep the UK free, he might not have lost the election to Atlee. The ongoing Potsdam conference might have turned out differently. Unfortunately, Churchill wasn't very effective because of what he knew was that he would probably be preempted by the national election. Or, maybe the war had taken its toll on him. The deal here is that we will never know, except the cold war that ensued was not a very good thing.

I would like to see the world today without that.