By mid-March, most of Hanussen’s Nazi friends, including Helldorf, found themselves ousted or re-assigned. On 24 March, a brace of SA dragged the psychic to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. They cut him loose, but the next evening three men snatched him off the street, and he was never seen alive again. The easiest guess is that the Nazis killed Hanussen because they discovered he was a Jew, but it really makes no sense. Evidence of his Hebraic origins had been available for months, and his Party comrades had not rejected him. There was no compelling reason for them to do so now. Another theory, that Helldorf and others murdered him to escape their debts, ignores the fact that they would be killing the golden goose. There is no indication Hanussen made any attempt to collect his debts or that he was unwilling to loan more. This version of Erik Jan Hanussen seems to be more in line with both Erich Ludenorff and Paul von Hidenburg as a replacement as Wilhelm's advisors as in reality Hanussen wasn't an adviser but a performer and wasn't active until after the Great War had ended, only then was he a prominent figure in Germany who rubbed shoulders with the military. Legends abound about meetings between Hanussen and Adolf Hitler, including a meeting between the two just before the German election, November 1932, during which Hanussen taught Hitler secret crowd control techniques with the utilization of gesture. Ultimately he was executed by the Gestapo and his body was dumped in a field north of Berlin.

In postwar Vienna, he earned notoriety as a stage mentalist and hypnotist. He even tried his hand at movie star in the low-budget Hypnose (“Hypnosis”) in which he portrayed a clairvoyant gumshoe battling the evil schemes of a Svengali swami. He earned more attention, and money, playing psychic detective in real life. His most famous case involved mysterious thefts from the printing bureau of the Austrian State Bank. Newly-printed bills were vanishing and authorities were at a loss to explain how. Hanussen solved the case by the simple deduction that the caper had to be an inside job. He correctly fingered the culprits which led to the recovery of most of the purloined notes. 17 A more historically realistic version of Hanussen was depicted in the Werner Herzog film Invincible (2001) where Hanussen (as played by Tim Roth) is seen as nasty and bullying. Herzog’s film concerns the also true character of a Jewish-Polish strongman that is hired as part of Hanussen’s act but caused a sensation when he refused to deny his ethnicity. With this section, I’d love to go through every decade of history, showing the history of espionage, the events, and how was Kingsman evolving. The idea of doing a Kingsman set during the Cold War even gets me excited. Interestingly, another occultist making his home in Berlin during 1930-32 was the notorious Aleister Crowley. Crowley had a long connection to British intelligence, and part of his purpose in Germany was watching and reporting on certain individuals. 29 Given Hanussen’s prominence and his proclaimed expertise in hypnotism and tantric sex, there is no way the Great Beast would have ignored him. Oddly, there is no discernible mention in Crowley’s period diaries of Hanussen or anything relating to him . 30

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El mentalista de Hitler (2016), a "historical noir" novel written in Spanish by the Uruguayan author Gervasio Posadas, closely based on Erik Jan Hanussen's true biography. [22]

Hanussen (an allusion to the real-life figure Erik Jan Hanussen, played by Tim Roth), an epic con-man and supposed mystic, runs a cabaret variety show. Hanussen gives Breitbart a blonde wig and a Nordic helmet and calls him " Siegfried" so as to identify him with the Aryan notion of physical superiority. This appeals to the largely Nazi clientele, and he is a big hit.Peter Zeitlinger short films: Katharina Blum (1978), Experiment Rayner’s Garden (1978), Geburtstag (1979) Hanussen, Erik Jan. 1989. La notte dei maghi: autobiografia di un veggente. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee. Stories abound of meetings between Hanussen and Hitler, including an encounter shortly before the election of November 1932, during which Hanussen taught Hitler his crowd control techniques of using gestures and dramatic pauses. [6] Hanussen was also quite close to other important Nazi officials, to whom he had often lent money, including Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff, Karl Ernst and Friedrich Wilhelm Ohst. Hess’s friend, Karl Haushofer, had told him that he’d had a dream in which he’d seen Hess walking through English castles, bringing peace between Britain and Germany. Hess spoke to his astrologer, who told him that six planets would be in Taurus and that the Moon would be full on May 10, which would be an auspicious day to make a journey of peace. [9] And so he flew to Scotland, convinced it was his destiny.

There were other reasons why the Nazis wanted Hanussen dead. Goebbels and Goering both saw him as an interloper and a potential rival for the Führer's attentions, and there was the little matter of all those IOUs Hanussen had collected. Hanussen also, supposedly, had film footage of SA members involved in homosexual orgies. But perhaps more than anything, it was his Jewishness that made him a liability. The communist press had long published reports that Hanussen was Jewish, but it wasn't until the Reichstag fire bequeathed totalitarian powers to the Nazis and allowed them to eliminate the communists as a threat that they had the time to focus on Hanussen's bloodline.

The Crowley-Hanussen connection may be at the root of René Guénon’s later assertion that the Beast infiltrated Hitler’s circle and made himself a “secret counsellor” of the Nazi leader. 35 There is no indication that Crowley got anywhere near the future Fuhrer, but Hanussen certainly did. A fundamental problem in dealing with Hanussen pre-1920s is that most of what is known about him comes from a single source, his 1930 autobiography, Meine Lebenslinie (“My Lifeline”). To call it self-aggrandising is an understatement, though it seems accurate enough as regards time and place. The author dances around the matter of ethnic origins, stating that he was born in Vienna (true), not in Denmark, Sicily or Tarnopol, the latter a largely Jewish town in the far reaches of the old Empire. 12 If he is to be believed, his psychic powers first manifested in the womb, when he willed his unwed parents to marry. 13 Kromě periodik vydal Hanussen i několik publikací o svém životě a o tématech, jimiž se ve svém životě zabýval.

Gauding, Daniela. 2006. Siegmund Sische Breitbart: Eisenkönig, stärkster Mann der Welt: Breitbart versus Hanussen. Teetz: Hentrich & Hentrich. Hanussen decided to change his name during World War I, when he began entertaining small theaters in Vienna and wanted to avoid being labeled a deserter. Throughout the war, he had impressed his fellow soldiers by steaming open letters, reading confidential information, then re-sealing the envelopes and announcing his mental powers had brought news from home.The Nazis’ head of foreign intelligence, Walter Schellenberg, has gone on the record saying that Hitler “availed himself of Gutberlet’s mystic power.” And he didn’t just do it once—apparently, Hitler had Gutberlet spinning his pendulum to find Jews all the way up until his death. Invincible (German: Unbesiegbar) is a 2001 drama film written and directed by Werner Herzog. The film stars Tim Roth, Jouko Ahola, Anna Gourari, and Max Raabe. The film tells the story of a Jewish strongman in Germany. While basing his story on the real-life figure Zishe Breitbart (a.k.a. Siegmund Breitbart), Herzog uses the bare facts of Breitbart's life to weave fact and fiction (e.g., the story is set in 1932 Berlin, a full seven years after Breitbart's death in 1925) to create an allegory of human strength, knowing oneself with honesty and pride in one's heritage.