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Page 18
On the way, a dozen yards or so from the "Green Branch" he was stopped by a man who asked for a light - then demanded to know whether he was Hanussen, the clairvoyant. "Yes, I am. But I haven't time for autographs now… " A car drew up slowly to the curb. Two other men emerged from the shadows. They told him they had to talk to him - it was important - and invited him to get into the car. And Hanussen obeyed - without any protest. He assumed that it was Helldorf who had sent for him. He warned them, though, that he hadn't much time - in half an hour he was due to go on at the Scala. The three men laughed. Then the car drove off. On the way Hanussen must have realized that he was being taken for a ride - in the tradition of the Chicago gangsters. He pleaded, he offered bribes. It was all in vain. The car left the city behind, travelling at speed along the highway to Breslau. About twenty miles out of Berlin, it stopped. The three SA-men dragged Hanussen from the car, drove him with blows and kicks across a ploughed field, through a small copse, another field and into a larger wood. There they fired five bullets into his quivering body - and then seven more to make sure that they had finished him off. They dug a shallow grave and left him to rot; the clairvoyant who foresaw his own end and yet refused to try and escape his doom. * * * In 1955 a German film company made a picture about Hanussen's life. O.W. Fischer, the brilliant actor played the part and also directed the film. It was a highly romanticized and eulogistic affair which turned the "Devil's Prophet" into an anti-Nazi martyr, the film was too kind to a man who was a strange mixture of charlatan and genuinely gifted clairvoyant, an unscrupulous hedonist yet a generous benefactor of many poor and unhappy people. No scientific examination of his work has ever been made nor is there likely to be one - so many of the people involved are dead or disappeared in the war and its aftermath; few written records exist and those are highly contradictory. The production of the film established one unknown fact - that Hanussen had been married as a young man in Vienna but separated from his wife long before he began his brief triumphant career in Berlin. His widow and his daughter Erika both lived in Meran where Mrs. Hanussen (she has changed her name) is a partner in running the Hotel Excelsior while Erika, a pretty, dark-haired woman works both as an actress and a writer. She claims no clairvoyant powers. * * * © Copyright Paul Tabori 1968. Tabori, Paul. Companions of the Unseen. London:H.A. Humphrey Ltd., 1968 |