HANUSSEN’S ERROR... AND MURDER
Hanussen must have seen himself as virtually untouchable and leading a charmed existence. By 1933, Hitler was chancellor of Germany and Hanussen probably saw himself rising in stature and power along with his Nazi friends.
This confidence led to his own undoing, however. Using inside information from his Nazi friends, Hanussen made a “prediction” he shouldn’t have.
It happened during one of his many social gatherings at his villa in Charlottenburg. Always the showman, he feigned a trance-like state and began to speak: “I see a building, a great building, in our city ... it is burning ... flames are roaring high ... smoke is billowing ... ah, but out of the blaze there arises a bird ... a magnificent Phoenix ... bringing new light ... new hope ... from the ashes!”
Yes, the prediction certainly came true. On February 27, 1933, Germany’s parliament building – the Reichstag – was set afire. The Nazis blamed it on terrorist Communists, and the public was so outraged that it allowed Hitler to pass emergency laws that gave him virtually unlimited power. Of course, it is well known today that it was the Nazis themselves who burned the Reichstag in order to get Hitler in complete control.
Hanussen almost certainly knew this, which is how he was able to make his indiscreet “prediction”. Hanussen knew too much, and he had to pay the price.
As he was leaving a restaurant on the night of March 24, he was stopped in the doorway by two unidentified men and led out into the street. Hanussen was never seen alive again. His body was discovered thirteen days later in a wooded area outside Berlin. He had been shot in the head.
So ends the tale of the rise and fall of Erik Jan Hanussen, a showman who might have had genuine psychic powers, used his considerable abilities to gain wealth and power, might have had history-altering influence on Germany and Hitler, but whose compulsion to make startling “predictions” eventually brought about his death. His hubris, like that of Hitler and the Nazis, perhaps deserved only that inevitable outcome.
