In fact Hitler never has been evidence to be interested in Astrology, but Himmler and Rudolf Hess where. Hess’s predilection for such pursuits, in fact, became a tool for casting him as mentally ill in May 1941. A public relations disaster for Germany, Joseph Goebbels mounted a public campaign to save face for Germany by painting Hess as a lunatic occultist. And while intestinal spasms had plagued Himmler, like Hess, also he developed an interest in natural healing. And he consulted a naturopathic practitioner named Felix Kersten. Once war broke out in 1940, Kersten despite his Finnish citizenship, soon found himself pressed unwillingly into service as Himmler’s full-time doctor. Himmler’s interests in herbalism, in fact, led him to establish a special garden in the concentration camp of Dachau, and allow experiments with naturopathic medicines on slave laborers.Told in “Les Mains du Miracle” by J. Kessel 1960, Kersten revealed that Himmler also consulted one or two astrologers during the war, although apparently without much faith in their predictive powers.
Himmler’s astrological dabbling were also reported in detail by Wilhelm Wulff 1968.Originally published in Germany, it was released in 1973 as Zodiac and Swastika: Astrologer to Himmler's Court or Zodiac and Swastika: How Astrology Guided Hitler's Germany. Wulff claims, that Walter Schellenberg had assigned him with various astrological tasks. And Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke took it as evidence that Wulff was consulted by Himmler in the last weeks of the war (Goodrick-Clarke The Occult Roots of Nazism, 1985, p.165).
The German occult revival including a new interest in Atrology at the time, owed its inception to the popularity of the Theosophical Society after it was re-imported from Adyar to Europe.
Hence Brandler-Pracht, after having learned astrology while working as an actor in the United States, started the first Astrological Society in Germany. He also became a fervent admirer of Hitler, and on 2 November 1939, wrote to a Dr Fosel (then working for the RSHA, Himmler's secret intelligence service) warning that between 7 and 10 November Hitler's life would be in danger because of 'the possibility of an attempt at assassination by the use of explosive material'.
But it was a Swiss student of Brandler-Pracht named Krafft, who when on 9 November a bomb exploded at the Burgerbrau beer hall in Munich minutes after Hitler had left it, could not resist sending a telegram to Rudolf Hess pointing out that he had somehow predicted this (be it in an unclear fashion).His original letter to Fosel was dug out of the files and shown to Hitler, who passed it to Dr Goebbels. The same day, Krafft was arrested by the Gestapo and taken in for questioning.
After his release he was summoned to the Reich Propaganda ministry, run by Dr Josef Goebbels. Goebbels had recently taken to poring over Nostradamus, trying to squeeze propaganda from the prophecies. As an astrologer Krafft, he felt, was a suitable person to work on manipulating the cryptic quatrains, and translate any of them that could be used as propaganda against the Allies. Thus in January 1940, Krafft began work on a pro-Nazi evaluation of Nostradamus, claiming that the prophecies of Nostradamus boded well for the Third Reich.
It then was felt that dropped copies of this manipulation into unoccupied areas, might well do something to persuade the people that government by the Nazis was in the natural order of things. And indeed, after some weeks' work, Krafft claimed to have discovered verses predicting the invasion of Holland and Belgium, and foreseeing the Third Reich and the Second World War.
Tens of thousands of pamphlets based upon his interpretations of the quatrains were circulated in various languages and he soon came to the attention of the Führer. In the spring of 1940 he gave a private horoscope reading for Hitler to an aide. but he never met his leader. Later he boasted to friends that he mentioned that the time for an attack on the USSR was some way off. Hitler, impatient to launch Operation Barbarossa after he had dealt with the West, in fact delayed his operations in the east until the following June. The stunning success of the early days of Barbarossa convinced him that Krafft had great powers.
British intelligence became so concerned at the thought that their opponent's war was being conducted by a mystic that they, for a time, hired the services of astrologer Louis De Wohl. De Wohl was quietly dropped after several months, having failed to procure any hard evidence about Krafft's work.
But in May of 1941, about three months later, Hess, second in command to Hitler (after Goering) flew to Scotland in an independent attempt to arrange a peace - an attempt rewarded by the Allies with over forty years' imprisonment. Martin Bormann decided that the best way of presenting the story to the German people would be to announce that Hess was actually insane, and shortly afterwards it was announced that he had been crazed by 'hypnotists, astrologers and so on'. In Britain, The Times actually reported that Hess had been Hitler's private astrologer!
Hitler was outraged, and ordered a purge of astrologers, occultists and other sages. Krafft was caught up in this, and was in prison for a year. He was sent to work on horoscopes of Allied generals and admirals. One of his predictions when seeing the charts of both Rommel and Bernard Montgomery, adversaries in the desert war, was: "Well this man Montgomery's chart is certainly stronger than Rommel's."
This gave the Gestapo the excuse to clamp down on astrology in general, and those who had formerly enjoyed the protection of a sympathetic Himmler (who had arranged the release of one of their number, Wilhelm Wulif, from a concentration camp to work for him and his wife) now found themselves arrested and at worst sent to concentration camps. This delighted a number of members of the Nazi High Command, few of whom admired Himmler, and many of whom regarded him as deranged: Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, used to compare Himmler to another officer, saying 'One is worried about the stars on his epaulette, and the other about the stars in his horoscope!' Along with faith healers, clairvoyants, graphologists, Christian Scientists and spiritualists, astrologers were definitely out of favour. Krafft was among those arrested. In prison, he continued to work for a while on astrological propaganda, but at the end of 1944 caught typhus, and in January of the following year died en route for Buchenwald.
It is doubtful whether astrology had any effect on the German conduct of the war, despite Himmler's sympathy to it. Even Goebbels was infected, to some extent, for he sent from the besieged Berlin bunker in the last days of the war for copies of Hitler's birth chart and that of the Reich, pointing out to the Fuhrer that both charts agreed in showing the outbreak of war and the present disastrous reverses, but also promised an overwhelming victory for Germany in April, and peace by August. Hitler preferred not to wait for the planetary change, and killed himself.
