Did witchcraft play a part in the downfall of Adolf Hitler? This 1943 newspaper article tells of a death-doll trend taking place before Hitler was killed. In it is one of the death rituals used to bring about Hitler’s end.
Adolf – Down to Witchcraft
By William Seabrook
That old black magic may be driving Adolf Hitler to ruin.
Well-authenticated reports from Europe tell of a secret society which, using the dangerous weapons of devil worship and witchcraft, is waging a systematic voodoo blitz against the Nazi leader.
Allowing for the distortion natural to such reports, it is by no means impossible that a campaign of this type is having an effect.
The writer, in the course of his explorations into witchcraft and black magic, has seen men die or go mad, in the space of a few days, from a simple bit of mumbo-jumbo involving sticking pins into a clay image.
Death chants, blood sacrifices, and rhythmic incantations have turned strong men into hopeless cripples or mumbling idiots in a space of weeks.
People tell me often that such things can’t happen. But I’ve seen them, not only among superstitious jungle folk. I can cite a dozen proven instances in which educated people have sickened or died after being made the target of devil magic.
How does it happen?
The “rational” explanation is auto-suggestion. That is, superstitious people believe they are doomed by such evil charms, and their credulity results in their destruction.
No one, however, can positively say what would be the effects of a mass witchcraft.
No military authority, for instance, has yet offered a rational explanation of why Hitler chose to attack Russia, thus converting a potential friend into a dangerous enemy.
But believers in witchcraft could explain it easily. They would say that mass black magic, invoked against the Führer by thousands of organized occultists throughout Europe, as reported from occupied countries, finally drove him to do the one thing that was certain to bring about his destruction.
Add to this that Hitler is notably superstitious, that he believes in signs and omens, that he consults astrologists and fortune-tellers. Well, it would have been an easy matter for a black magician to have instilled into his mind the belief that an attack on Russia would mean victory, instead of defeat.
Or, being superstitious, the Führer would fall easy prey to auto-suggestion – once he knew that thousands of devotees of black magic were engaged in practicing sinister charms against him.
Let the doubters laugh at such things if they want to. I have lived with voodoo priests, and felt myself the awfulness of their strange powers. Personally, I want no part of the danger that lies in such sinister explorations.
This fantastic movement now sweeping Europe may have begun here in our own USA – a beginning at which I happened to be present.
On the wet, windy night of January 2nd, 1941, a group of young Washingtonians crossed the Potomac, turned into a side road, drove deep into the woods of Maryland, traversed a swamp, and after some time reached a dimly-lighted cabin.
From a hearse-like limousine they dragged a life-sized effigy of Adolf Hitler. In a basket were a number of smaller Hitler images. A sinister black bag contained pins, needles, nails, hammers.
The mysterious guests were met by Charles Tupper, owner of the cabin, a young university man, and by his older brother, Richard, who was to direct the weird ritual which lasted through most of the night.
The group included a number of young people, all serious, mostly engaged in defense work.
I had been invited as a sort of consulting “witch doctor.” But Richard Topper, a profound and hard-boiled if amateur student of the occult had documented himself thoroughly on death-drum-rhythms, incantations – the whole doll-of-death ritual – and there was little I could add.
He and his friends were not doing this as a stunt. They were in deadly earnest.
After the image and dolls were set up in the cabin, Mr. Tupper arrayed himself in the voodoo high priest’s robes and intoned:
“Adolf Hitler! You are the enemy of man and of the world; therefore we curse you by every tear drop and drop of blood you have caused to flow. We curse you with the curses of all the dead who have cursed you.”
I was able to help about the drums, and soon we got the death rhythm going. It is a solemn rhythm. The robed young men and women began to chant heavily, in unison:
“We are driving nails and needles,
Death pins, death nails, death needles,
We are driving nails and needles,
Into Adolf Hitler’s heart.”
In solemn procession they marched as they sang, piercing the dolls and effigy. At the conclusion of this savage ceremony, all presently joined in pronouncing the Great Death Ouanga:
“Stan, send 99 cats to claw his heart out and 99 dogs to eat it when he’s dead. It will be soon! Soon! SOON!”
At each intoning of “soon,” more needles were thrust home. The transfixed dolls were then taken outside and buried face downward in the swamp where they would rot.
Now what on earth, you may well by now be asking, did these modern, intelligent, educated young people expect to accomplish by these incantations against a powerful tyrant from whom they were separated by an ocean?
It can be safely said that they expected nothing, through the help of demons, in which none of them believed.
But modern medical science has long agreed that witchcraft, when it works, is nothing more or less than psychotherapy in reverse. And it is established that sticking pins in dolls or waxen images can be absolutely deadly to a victim who believes in the occult power of such practices, knows they are being used, and fears them.
It was already then rumored that Hitler, a highly superstitious hysteric, was a fervent believer in black magic.
So Mr. Tupper and his group used every means they could to disseminate their “Hex Hitler” movement, to see that news of it reached Europe and Berlin, to gain adherents, to arouse a worldwide death-doll cabal.
Now suddenly has come the astounding news that anti-Nazi Europe is being swept by a wave of death-doll witchcraft and black magic. It is designed to bring about the downfall and death of Hitler.
The facts, here made public for the first time, were gathered by George F. Allison, a London journalist.
The movement seems to radiate from the Belgian town of Hasselt where members of a secret society have vowed thus to bring about the death of Hitler and his henchmen.
This society, we are informed, has distributed thousands of death dolls – exact miniatures of the German leaders – to patriots who have sworn a solemn oath to continue digging pins into the images of these hated Nazi tyrants until they finally succumb.
Swarms of Gestapo agents have been detailed in vain, it is known, to stamp out this dread wave of focussed hatred.
But a movement of that sort cannot be stopped if its adherents believe in it.
Outstanding examples of this tenacity are reported from the region of Abbeville, from Lyons, and from the St. Sulpice district of Paris – strongholds of ancient faith, fanaticism, superstition since the thirteenth century.
So, whether the death dolls multiplied by thousands ever accomplish the personal destruction of Hitler or not, a terrible force has been unleashed which may well play its part in the eventual downfall of Germany.
The extent to which Hitler and certain of his associates are obsessed by beliefs, which might make them susceptible to the death-doll attack – is a matter which psychiatrists and students of mysticism find absorbing.
Shaw Desmond, founder of the Institute of Psychical Research, says Hitler is so steeped in black magic that he never makes a decision without consulting his “demons.”
“When in doubt,” asserts Desmond, “he retires to his dark hole at Berchtesgaden which he believes is impregnated by the black vibrations of his ritual. Invoking his ‘guides’ or ‘demons,’ he goes into a seeming trance, and is then ‘possessed’ by the supposed spirits who advise him. He feels a pricking in the thumbs when they come.”
In a treatise on “the occult causes of the war,” the historian, Lewis Spence, states that Mein Kampf was deeply influenced by Hitler’s intimate contact with Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic mystic who had a sinister faith in black magic.
And the German people themselves, according to reports, have become prey to many superstitions as a result of depression over war reverses.
Thus, such a simple event as the birth of a baby elephant in a German zoo gave rise recently to a wave of peace talk. It happened that a baby elephant was born in the same zoo in 1871, toward the end of the Franco-Prussian war, and another in 1918, just before the World War I armistice. That, with the recent birth, was enough to make many Germans think the present conflict is also drawing to a close.
There are certain “signs” – as black magicians would call them – about the head of Adolf Hitler that bode ill for anyone who comes in close contact with him.
In his public orations, there is a weird chanting effect that almost hypnotizes his hearers. It is an effect well understood by voodooists, who use it themselves. And, after hearing it just once, I was personally convinced that the mystic of Berchtesgaden had made a close and intimate study of diabolism.
Personally, I don’t dally with witchcraft any more. But if I did, I should be very much tempted to do a little doll-pinning of my own.
And, if I wanted to know just when Hitler is going to come to the end of his road, I wouldn’t consult a military expert. I’d talk to a certain old Ubangi witch-doctor. And I rather think I’d get the right answer.
Source: Detroit evening times. (Detroit, Mich), 19 Dec. 1943.
Hitler’s date of death is April 30, 1945.
