Despite his Semitic origins, Hanussen had extremely close ties to the Nazi party, especially since his fateful augury that Hitler would somehow become Reichschancellor. He had lent hundreds of thousands of marks to high-ranking leaders of the Nazis, like Hermann Goering, and held IOUs from them. He had befriended Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, the sadistic, depraved commander of Berlin's SA, and referred to Hitler as "my pal Adolf." Certainly, Hanussen could have had inside information of a Reichstag plot. Or perhaps he was even more directly involved.

Gordon relates that some conspiracy theorists believe Hanussen may have hypnotized the fall guy van der Lubbe to do his bidding, either with or without the help of Nazi conspirators. As far-fetched as the possibility sounds, one suddenly sees how the presence of Hanussen in this story becomes an uncomfortable dilemma for historians. To dwell too much on Hanussen's involvement smacks of indirectly tainting the primary victims of the Holocaust with assisting in Hitler's takeover of Germany and, subsequently, their own destruction.

Perhaps this was the reason Istvan Szabo's cinematic treatment of the Hanussen tale conveniently omits Hanussen's Jewishness. And it could account for the dearth of information on Hanussen in English-language texts. However, Gordon, who is himself Jewish, asserts his belief that Hanussen somehow participated in a plot to set fire to the Reichstag.

"My personal feeling is that all the evidence points to the fact that at the very least Hanussen was involved or he couldn't have known about it. Unless you believe in clairvoyance, which I don't. The other story is why he was killed. That is, he had to be eliminated because he knew too much," says Gordon.

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.

Hanussen's time was up, and he knew it. In a missive written in invisible ink, he informed a colleague, "I always thought that business about the Jews was just an election trick of theirs. It wasn't." On the morning of March 25, 1933, Hanussen was arrested by the SA and summarily executed. His lifeless body was left in a field on the outskirts of Berlin.

So ended Europe's greatest oracle since Nostradamus. But questions endure. For instance, why would any Jew, even an assimilated Jew, collaborate with a pack of power-mad racists filled with hatred for his people? Moreover, is there some possibility that Hanussen possessed a sixth sense that allowed him to correctly predict Hitler's rise and the Reichstag blaze while blinding him to the inevitable consequences of his own dalliance with the fascists?

"One fellow Jewish clairvoyant Fred Marion asked Hanussen if he was afraid that if the Nazis came to power they would kill him if they found out he was a Jew," says Gordon. "Hanussen told him it was a problem, but that he wanted to convince Hitler that there are good Jews like us who aren't communists or capitalists. A vain thought, but he believed Hitler just needed his friendship to learn that there were good people everywhere."

As for Hanussen's purported extrasensory perception, Gordon ascribes Hanussen's psychic home runs to an amazing perspicacity on the part of "the Prophet of the Third Reich," which evidently failed him when it came to foreseeing his own demise. For Gordon, Hanussen also represents the mania for the occult that swept Germany at this time, as well as the dilemma of assimilated Jews when faced with the virulent anti-Semitism of Nazism.

"It's such a bizarre story that people wonder why they haven't heard of it before. They think it's either a Hitler diaries forgery or some great exaggeration of some tiny little thing of no consequence," says Gordon. "That's why I include so many pictures and inserts from Hanussen publications in the book. In Germany certainly, it's not a lost story, there's all kinds of stuff all the time on it. But in America, the typical person who watches the History Channel is unaware of it. That's why I wrote the book."

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