Astrologer’s Nazi insights proved too starry-eyed

DESPERATE for a glimpse into Adolf Hitler’s unpredictable mind, British spies hired anastrologer during World War II to write horoscopes for him and other Nazi leaders, documents declassified yesterday show.

However, they soon regretted it.

The file released to Britain’s National Archives catalogues the frustrations of MI5 handlers as they tried to prevent theastrologer Louis de Wohl from publicly embarrassing high-ranking intelligence and militaryofficers.

“I have never liked Louis de Wohl — he strikes me as a charlatan and an imposter,” reads the first line in the astrologer’s file. The letter is typical and appeared to be signed by Dick White, who went on to become the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency — MI5 — in the 1950s.

That view didn’t keep de Wohl from winning a temporary rank as a British army captain. He was sent by then prime minister Winston Churchill to the US to persuade Americans that the Nazis would lose within months if theyentered the war.

De Wohl was born in Berlin in 1903 and fled to Britain in 1935 to avoid Nazi persecution for being part Jewish. His wife, Alexandra, fled to Chile where she claimed to be a Romanian princess and was known as “La Baronessa”.

In London, de Wohl claimed variously to be a Hungarian nobleman, the nephew of an Austrian conductor, the grandson of a British banking magnate and a relative of the lord mayor of London. His break came during a dinner at the Spanish Embassy when a Spanish duchess asked de Wohl to reveal Hitler’s horoscope to Britain’s foreign secretary Lord Halifax.

Sir Charles Hambro, the head of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, soon hired de Wohl as part of his network of agents across Europe.

The government rented the astrologer a hotel apartment on London’s exclusive Park Lane. There he wrote horoscopes for Allied and Nazi leaders on paper with the letterhead “Psychological Research Bureau”.

But his predictions were often vague. His December 1942 prediction read: “The German astrologers must pray that enemyaction does not force the Fueher into making important decisions within the first eight days of the month [of July], as this would lead to greatdisaster”.

His task in the US was to counter a convention of pro-German astrologers that had predicted Hitler would win the war.

Billing himself as “The Modern Nostradamus,” de Wohl proclaimed the stars showed the opposite — that Hitler would lose.

Ultimately it was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the US into the war — not de Wohl’s assurances that President Franklin Roosevelt had a stunning horoscope.