Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Clairvoyant, the Reichstag Fire and What the Record Shows

The short answer

Erik Jan Hanussen (June 2, 1889 – probably March 25, 1933) was an Austrian mind reader and hypnotist who became the most famous "clairvoyant" in Berlin in the early 1930s. He published an occult tabloid that ran pro-Nazi horoscopes, lent money to leaders of the Berlin SA, and opened a lavish séance salon, the "Palace of the Occult," in February 1933. In March 1933 the SA arrested and murdered him.

Documented: his stage career, his acquittal in a fraud trial, his newspaper and his ties to the SA. Not documented: any psychic ability. And the prophecy he is best known for — the Reichstag fire — survives in versions that don't even agree on the date.

A Viennese performer becomes a Danish nobleman

Hermann Steinschneider was born on June 2, 1889, in Ottakring, then a suburb of Vienna, the son of an actor and merchant. That comes from the Austrian Biographical Dictionary (ÖBL), the most careful short biography of him. His family was Jewish, with roots in Moravia; his parents toured Austria and Italy with theater troupes and took him along. He left school young and worked as a reporter, actor, circus performer and magician.

By 1918 he was appearing in Vienna as a "telepath," and around the end of World War I he took the name Erik Jan Hanussen, along with the story that he was a Danish aristocrat. That invention set the pattern. Most of what he later said about his origins comes from his own pen, and the ÖBL calls his 1930 autobiography, Meine Lebenslinie, "completely unreliable."

His mind-reading and hypnosis act made him known in Central Europe and in America. In April 1932 his show at the Scala in Berlin set an attendance record, according to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, which holds copies of his newspaper. He also sold private consultations, booklets and a hormone cream. Berlin had room for him: the Leo Baeck Institute estimates the city's occult trade at some 20,000 fortune-tellers, astrologers and hypnotists, and at least seven astrological weeklies.

The 1920 manual that gives the game away

The most revealing document about Hanussen is one he wrote himself. In 1920 he published Das Gedankenlesen / Telepathie ("Thought Reading / Telepathy"), a course in lessons, later translated for magicians as Mind Reading and Telepathy. Lesson 2 is "Muscle Reading." Then come "Question Logic," the pin experiment and "action experiments" solved "through hand contact" — how to hold a spectator's wrist and follow the tiny movements they make without knowing it.

That is the ideomotor effect, the same reflex that moves a pendulum. Hanussen places himself in an American-born tradition: he names the American "John R. Brown" and Irving Bishop, the nineteenth-century U.S. "mind readers," followed by the Englishman Stuart Cumberland, as the pioneers of muscle reading.

The ending is the interesting part. Hanussen writes, in effect, that he has stripped away everything mystical and supernatural and shown mind reading for what it always was: a knowledge of the audience's psychology plus close study of ideomotor action. In the same breath he claims that real "telepathic sensitivity" grows out of the practice by itself. He gives you the full natural explanation of his act — and keeps one door open for the miracle. His career was built in that gap.

Acquitted in Leitmeritz

In the late 1920s Hanussen was tried for fraud in Leitmeritz (today Litoměřice) in Czechoslovakia. Prosecutors said he had taken money from credulous clients for readings he couldn't deliver. The case dragged on for about two years and was covered as far away as the United States. Hanussen treated the courtroom as a stage and demonstrated his "powers" there.

In May 1930 the court acquitted him. The reasoning, as later biographers report it, was that a client who isn't gullible has to expect a clairvoyant to be wrong sometimes. An acquittal is not a certificate of authenticity; it only means fraud couldn't be proven. Hanussen sold it as vindication anyway and published a book about the trial the same year.

Selling horoscopes to the Brownshirts

From 1931 Hanussen ran his own publishing house. His tabloid, the Berliner Wochenschau — also sold as Bunte Wochenschau: Die Hellseher-Zeitung, "the clairvoyant's paper" — grew from 8,000 copies to 38,000 and then 140,000, the Leo Baeck Institute reports. It started as a mix of occult news, entertainment and racy headlines. After Hanussen met Hitler in the summer of 1932, it switched to Gothic type and "astro-political" forecasts; the issue of October 8, 1932, used horoscopes to promote the Nazi party, the SA and Hitler himself.

He also bought his way into the Berlin SA under Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff. In May 1932 he paid debts for Helldorff and another SA officer, Wilhelm Ohst, and bought 400 pairs of boots for the Storm Troopers. His Jewish background was an open secret, reported by left- and right-wing papers alike. Joseph Goebbels called him a "Czech Jew" in 1931, then had to retract it. To the party, Hanussen was useful and a liability at the same time.

The Palace of the Occult and the Reichstag fire

In early 1933, at the peak of his fame, Hanussen opened his "Palace of the Occult" on Lietzenburger Strasse in Berlin. Guests sat at a round table with their palms on glass lit from below; the lights went down and the host made his predictions. It was part séance, part cabaret — a formula that goes back to the spiritualist parlors of nineteenth-century America.

On the night of February 27, 1933, the Reichstag burned. What happened at the Palace just before is told in several incompatible ways:

One prophecy, four versions

Source	What it says happened
Austrian Biographical Dictionary (2010)	At a séance, a "hypnotic medium" saw a large burning house; his paper had hinted at a coming "desperate act" by the Communists
Leo Baeck Institute	A séance on February 26, 1933, at which he "reportedly foresaw" the fire
German-language accounts after Kugel (1998)	The opening party on February 26, where actress Maria Paudler recited lines later read as a prophecy
Other retellings	A trance séance on the night of the fire itself

No verbatim record from the time has surfaced. The Leo Baeck Institute's digitized copies of his paper are four issues from 1932 (April to October); nothing from February 1933 is among them. Our assessment: if there was a hint, the simplest explanation is proximity, not prophecy. Hanussen moved among Berlin's SA leaders, and "a Communist plot" was exactly the story the Nazi leadership told after the fire. That he had real inside knowledge is often claimed and not proven either. The claim that he hypnotized the arsonist, Marinus van der Lubbe, has no evidence at all.

Arrest and murder

On March 23, 1933, an SA squad took him from his home on Lietzenburger Strasse. According to his biographer Wilfried Kugel, he was shot the following night, most likely in the SA's makeshift prison on Papestrasse in Tempelhof, now a memorial to those held there in 1933. The ÖBL gives March 25 as the probable date of death. His body was found weeks later in woods south of Berlin; he is buried in the Südwestkirchhof cemetery in Stahnsdorf.

Why he was killed has never been settled. The ÖBL says he was arrested and "liquidated" on the orders of the highest Nazi circles. Three motives come up again and again, none proven: he knew too much; he held IOUs from senior SA men, Helldorff among them; and his Jewish origins had become intolerable for the party once it held power. Reviewing a 2011 book about him, Eddy Portnoy wrote in the Forward that the reasons "still remain a mystery."

The OSS claim, checked

The idea that Hanussen coached Hitler's speaking comes mostly from Walter C. Langer's 1943 psychological profile of Hitler for the OSS, published in 1972 as The Mind of Adolf Hitler. Langer wrote that Hitler took lessons from Hanussen in the early 1920s and learned "the importance of staging meetings to obtain the greatest dramatic effect."

Arthur J. Magida, an American journalist who wrote a whole book on Hanussen, The Nazi Séance (2011), disagrees. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency the two had only a "brushing acquaintance" and that there's no evidence of public-speaking lessons. The Leo Baeck Institute also lists the Hitler consultations as rumor. What is documented is what Hanussen did in print: he ran flattering horoscopes for the Nazi party. That is enough to call him a propagandist and a profiteer — of a regime that then murdered him.

From Brandauer to The Illusionist

Few occultists have had so many screen lives. O. W. Fischer played him in 1955; István Szabó's Hanussen (1988) starred Klaus Maria Brandauer; Werner Herzog's Invincible (2001) cast Tim Roth as Hanussen; and Edward Norton's stage magician in The Illusionist (2006) is loosely modeled on him. The appeal is the arc: a Jewish Viennese performer poses as a Danish count, tells the Nazis their future and is killed by them.

For the history of the occult he matters for another reason. He shows how closely stagecraft, occultism and political propaganda were tied together in Weimar Berlin. And his own manual shows that the most famous "clairvoyant" of his day knew exactly how to produce the effect of telepathy without needing any. Anyone sitting down at a psychic fair today can ask the same question his audiences should have asked.

Frequently asked questions

Who was Erik Jan Hanussen?

An Austrian mind reader and hypnotist (1889–1933), born Hermann Steinschneider in Vienna, who became Berlin's most famous "clairvoyant" in the early 1930s.

Did Hanussen predict the Reichstag fire?

That has been said since 1933, but the accounts contradict each other on the date and the setting, and no verbatim record from the time exists. What is documented is that the prediction was attributed to him.

Why was he called Hitler's Jewish clairvoyant?

Because he was Jewish by birth, posed as a Danish aristocrat and publicly promoted Hitler with horoscopes. The phrase is the title of Mel Gordon's 2001 biography.

Did Hanussen teach Hitler public speaking?

There is no evidence. The claim comes from a 1943 OSS report; Hanussen biographer Arthur J. Magida found only a passing acquaintance between the two.

How did Hanussen die?

He was arrested by the SA on March 23, 1933, and shot shortly afterward, probably on March 25. His body was found weeks later in woods south of Berlin. The motive is still disputed.

Is The Illusionist based on Hanussen?

Loosely. The 2006 film's magician Eisenheim borrows from his story, while István Szabó's Hanussen (1988) and Werner Herzog's Invincible (2001) portray him more directly.

Sources: Peter Mulacz, "Steinschneider, Hermann; Ps. Erik Jan Hanussen," Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, vol. 13 (2010), p. 198 · Leo Baeck Institute, "Erik Jan Hanussen's Berliner Wochenschau" (collection note; digitized issues nos. 12, 18, 25 and 32 of 1932 on the Internet Archive) · Erik Jan Hanussen, Mind Reading and Telepathy (1920; English translation by Bill Palmer) · Wilfried Kugel, Hanussen: Die wahre Geschichte des Hermann Steinschneider (Düsseldorf, 1998) · Mel Gordon, Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant (Feral House, 2001) · Arthur J. Magida, The Nazi Séance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and interview, "Hypnotic Effect," JTA, Dec. 20, 2011 · Eddy Portnoy, review in the Forward, 2011 · Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler (1972; OSS report of 1943) · Gedenkort SA-Gefängnis Papestraße, Berlin · Wikipedia "Erik Jan Hanussen" (English and German; used only as an index of sources).

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