Wulff! Wulff!

By Otto Friedrich

ZODIAC AND SWASTIKA: HOW ASTROLOGY GUIDED HITLER'S GERMANY by WILHELM WULFF 192 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $5.95.

The title is somewhat misleading. This is not a serious study of how the Nazi leaders were influenced by their credulous trust in occultism, but the autobiography of a septuagenarian astrologer who occasionally was summoned to deliver prophecies. He is a man of such solemnity about his craft that he is capable of writing a sequence of sentences like this: "Not long afterward the Nazis were to take over completely. These circumstances had a profound effect on my astrological practice."

Indeed this book is studded with apparently unwitting absurdities. For example: "This left me with a number of Jewish clients, who were being subjected to even worse persecution than we astrologers." Or, even worse, " 'You must meet Himmler,' Kersten told me. 'You'll like him. He is a nice man.' " So Wulff, who had been arrested in a roundup of astrologers after Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess's 1941 flight to England (Hess was believed to have consulted astrologers about the most favorable date for his departure), got invited to lunch at the castle of Heinrich Himmler, commander of the concentration camps and the SS. Wulff was impressed by "the cordiality of his welcome" but dismayed by Himmler's "lack of breeding." The Reichsfuehrer SS sat "sucking his soup like a peasant."

Now it was May of 1944, beginning of the last ruinous year of the war. Himmler, who had read various horoscopes that Wulff had prepared for his aides, asked: "What do you think we should do?" Wulff insists that he replied by urging Himmler to stage a putsch, overthrow Hitler and then negotiate a peace: "Your constellations are favorable and Hitler's are bad." Himmler, lacking Wulffs confidence in the stars, equivocated.

From then on, Himmler apparently inundated Wulff with demands. When would Hitler die? Wulff claims he predicted the Fuehrer's demise for the end of April 1945 (the actual date was April 30). Would the Yalta Conference succeed? Should he flee to the Alps? Wulff rarely tells us his answers, much less any of his reasons for them. He whines consistently about being overworked and the increasing frustrations of dealing with Himmler's entourage. He says that he continued vainly urging Himmler to overthrow Hitler, and there are moments when he actually seems to think that the replacement of one monster by another would have "brought peace and security to the world."

Several weeks before V-E day, Wilhelm Wulff was summoned for a last conference with Himmler, who looked swollen, reeked of liquor, and periodically broke down and started sobbing. "What's going to happen?" Himmler cried. "Why don't you tell me? Tell me, tell me what I am supposed to do!" Wulff answered that for his part he intended to go home and wait for the arrival of the allied armies. If he saw in any of his horoscopes that Himmler was soon to commit suicide, he does not tell us. He does end on a note of good cheer: "National Socialism was smashed and disappeared from the scene. Astrology . . . remained." qedOtto Friedrich

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