An article by D’Arcy Doran from the AP is reporting that back in WWII, the UK hired an astrologer to help them fight the Nazis.
Oddly enough, Louis de Wohl turned out to be a total fraud, and the British government soon found themselves in trouble.
A series of events led his work to be introduced to Sir Charles Hambro, the head of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, who hired de Wohl, and gave him a great apartment in an exclusive area of London. De Wohl eventual won the rank of army Captain. However, he soon became a bit of a problem, making grandiose claims about himself and publically embarrassing high-ranking officers.
His exploits are outlined in the article, but here’s my favorite part:
According to the released MI5 correspondence, senior officers offered a number of proposals on how to “dispose” of de Wohl, including interning him in a camp or moving him to a remote corner of the country. Two other options are blanked out.
I would love to see what was blanked out.
Eventually, the Brits caught on:
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.
[…]
“I have no doubt if I checked up his successes, I would see that he had more than an equal number of failures, but I have not the inclination nor the time to do so,” Hambro wrote.
Well, duh. But happily, nothing like that could ever happen in the US…
March 4th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
we must put it in perspective. the “hiring” was in 1940, the u.k. was fighting alone for its live, against nazi germany with the most colossal war machine of the history, after Dunkirk (Dunquerque) and in the middle of a) “The battle of Britain” betwen the R.A.F. & the Luttwaffe and b) the u-boots sinking vessels in the the atlantic….
it’s easy to laugh now, but i would like to see “us” in that fateful year.
i know that the desperation is a bad counsellor!!! the U.S.A. when entered the war, hired a psychiatrist.
and speaking of astrologers do you remember nancy and ronal regan??? there are historians that said that soviet union did they same thing in that period….
March 4th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Careful, Phil, Reagan (for reasons that are a mystery to me) has been elevated to near sainthood in this country.
March 4th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Didn’t our government hire remote viewers not too long ago? Have you ever listened to Ed Dames? He is enough to make you gag.
……
March 4th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Daffy, you’re right about Reagan. I am sometimes forced to listen to Sean Hannity while driving around Atlanta (the station that carries his show is also the one with the best traffic coverage - if you’ve ever driven in Atlanta you know wy that’s important), and many’s the time I’ve heard Hannity say “What Would Reagan Do?”
Next time you see him at a public appearance, check his wrist for a WWRD bracelet…
March 4th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
I seem to vaguely remember learning somewhere that the Nazis were very big into the occult, and when things started going bad for them in WWII they were convinced that it was because the allies were using occult magic against them and spent a fair amount of resources trying to counter it with their own occult magic and this might have shortened the war.
So fuzzy thinking is good for you in times of war, as long as it’s the other guy who’s doing it.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
British Intelligence during WWII were pretty open to unconventional ideas - it was called, in the language of the time, ‘using your initiative’ - but but they were also hard headed about getting results so I doubt they were seriously contemplating using astrology as a source of intelligence or that they were ever actually duped. More likely it was a part of the disinformation/propaganda effort. Have a look at the video below. It seems De Wohl convinced MI5 that he could give them and insight into Hitler’s thinking - which might have worked if he hadn’t turned out to be a complete flake (as opposed to being merely deluded, that is). Also, the idea of influencing public opinion by seeding horoscopes has a certain genius to it - I can think of a few places where it could have worked.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/03/03/hitler.horoscope.ap/index.html#cnnSTCVideo
March 4th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Kind of what Ae7flux wrote. What I heard is that the idea was that Hitler used astrologers, so if the British had an astrologer, they could have an idea about how Hitler’s astrologer’s advice was guiding Hitler.
ie, Hitler’s astrologer might say “blah is in the house of blah, so it would be a good time for action”.
If the British astrologer produces the *same* nonsense, it would be useful, as if the Brits could read the mind of a key German advisor.
The prediction need not really be accurate. If a bank robber gets the idea that a heist will be successful if it happens the seventh day after a full moon, then if the police also know this, they’ll probably be able to catch the robber. It doesn’t matter that the robber was wrong and there was nothing special about that day.
The British scheme wouldn’t require that astrology actually *work*, it would only require that the process be deterministic, such that two people making the same observation would make the same prediction.
Unfortunately, I don’t think astrology works like that, so the German astrologer and the British astrologer were probably coming up with different things.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Yes Jon H, that was the idea. MI5 didn’t believe in astrology but it was rumoured that Hitler did and may have been using it to help with his decision making. I think Dennis Wheatley used the idea in his book They Used Dark Forces. Wheatley, being on the planning staff at the War Office, would probably have known about de Wohl at the time.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Well, they may not have “really” believed in astrology, but our cousins across the pond did manage to get their knickers in a twist over other forms of not-so-scientific endeavours.
Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium best known as the last person imprisoned under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735– a law that was not repealed until after World War II.
There is a pretty good article on her in Wikipedia.
March 5th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Didn’t Churchill believe in some sort of woo, too?
March 5th, 2008 at 12:59 am
@ decius: You mean, beyond the idea that Englishmen were entitled to all the bits of the globe they’d pinched off other people in the past century?
March 5th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Yeah, Matt.
What you pinpoint belonged to the realm of the absurd, too, but it wasn’t based on supernatural or even metaphysical claims, as far as I know.
They concocted a few ad hoc laws and post hoc rationalizations, and that was it.
I
March 5th, 2008 at 1:49 am
As Jon H saya, it was an attempt to get an insight into the advice Hitler was receiving. However it had 2 major flaws.
The first, as pointed out above, being that de Wohl was a fraud.
The second being that Hitler didn’t actually believe in astrology and considered it to be utter rubbish.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:21 am
What Jon H and others have said.
The really important thing about this is how it affects arguments on the internet. To win your argument and pwn the other guy, if you believe in astrology you should say “Hitler didn’t believe in astrology, so if you don’t, you are like Hitler”. On the other hane if you don’t believe in astrology you say “Even Hitler didn’t believe in asytrology, so you are worse than Hitler if you do”.
As usual, the big blogs and MSM missing the point here.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:24 am
There’s a third flaw: it’s rare for two astrologers to independently agree on the interpretation of anything.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:00 am
So my question is this: Was he judged a fraud by other astrologers, or did the British come to understand that astrology as a whole is fraudulent?
There was a story about “real” witches in Salem Ma. objecting to “fake” witches trying to horn in on their gravy train at Halloween.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:35 am
“The second being that Hitler didn’t actually believe in astrology and considered it to be utter rubbish.”
There is nothing worse that discovering you share an opinion with Hitler.
March 5th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Tollson: The second being that Hitler didn’t actually believe in astrology and considered it to be utter rubbish.
Ethics aside, it’s a little like Hoagland debunking Sibrel’s moon hoax fantasy.
Hitler and his inner circle apparently believed in a whole lot of weird things, including the notion they knew more about technical matters than their technical people.
I’ve seen references (can’t cite them, it’s been far too long, so grain of salt this) that suggested he wanted his jet fighters humping bombs, (which pretty much negated their air superiority). Rather than decide between fast cruisers and heavy cruisers, he decided that his wanting cruisers that were both fast and heavy was some sort of brilliant flash of insight. After all, if it was easy to express, it should be easy to build, right?
There’s a rumor (I won’t dignify this with anything more than that) that Hitler was interested in the idea of raising zombie soldiers. (The video game spiritual remake of Wolfenstein 3D was based on that rumor, as I understand it. Not the other way around.)
March 5th, 2008 at 8:38 am
It is widely believed that Hitler believed in the occult. So much so, that sets the basis for the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Whether or not Hitler really believed in astrology I do not know.
March 5th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Reminds me of Rasputin a little bit. Especially the part about how to properly dispose of him, since Rasputin survived quite a few assassination attempts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasputin
March 5th, 2008 at 10:25 am
The bit about Hitler demanding that the engineers of the Me262 build a bomber (close air support) version is a well know “factoid”. It’s usually told as a “scary camp-fire story” to frighten people: “If it hadn’t been for that one silly decision of Hitler’s to interfere, the 262 would have flown sooner, pwned the allied fighters, and won the war!”
But I’ve also heard that development of the 262 was not going well anyway, and it couldn’t have flown much sooner than it did. And anyway, how much time and effort does it take to add a couple of bomb-racks to the wings, and feed a length of string from the cockpit to the rack release?
In general, though, Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis placed a disproportionate amount of faith in “wonder weapons”. Many of which failed to achieve anything, and those that were of use on the battlefield, were so expensive and unreliable (eg. Tiger tank) that it would have been more effective to use the precious time and materials building tried-and-true weapons.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:53 am
The U.K. did, in fact, use magic very successfully during WWII.
Check out Jasper Maskelyne. While stationed in North Africa, he moved Alexandria further up the coast, preventing its devastation in a bombing attack, and also concealed the Suez Canal, resulting in the loss of a number of the Luftwaffe’s aeroplanes. He also baffled the Germans as to where our troops actually were. Very clever bloke!
He was also an “anti-spiritualist”, and enjoyed exposing the ’supernatural’ feats of mediums.
Is it my imagination or do I sense his spirit here…?
–
March 5th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Re Stuart’s comment on the ME 262 and its conversion to a bomber: turning a plane into a bomber is a lot more complicated than racks and string- it has to be able to handle all that weight hanging from one part of the structure and actually drop things without airflow from something else causing the bomb to clunk into part of your airplane- kind of spoils your day. The reason this was important is that all those planes that were being built as bombers didn’t have fighter equipment to decimate Allied bomber formations (Google ME 262 and R4M rockets to get an idea of just how destructive that plane could have been). We got lucky, very lucky that a) Hitler was a complete twit about air power and b) the Junkers engines in the 262 were just not up to the task, metalurgically. Time between failures was about 4-6 running hours in some cases. Yes, I’m a major airplane geek along with being an astronomy fan.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:03 am
“You mean, beyond the idea that Englishmen were entitled to all the bits of the globe they’d pinched off other people in the past century?”
Yeah, us Brits called it “manifest destiny”
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:25 pm
[…] it seems that the astrologer in question, Louis de Wohl, is rejected even by his own. The excellent Bad Astronomer blog has some nice quotes on the guy. Nonetheless, it’s still being used to make mileage for […]