Chapter 11

Nostradamus Is Adolf Hitler

A couple of years ago, an elderly gentleman came up to me during a cocktail party in Boston. I had just given a talk on the nineteenth-century Nostradamus, but this retired doctor wanted to discuss World War II. More precisely, he wanted to share memories of his first encounter with Nostradamus, which had taken place in a Brooklyn movie theater in 1944. A teenager at the time, he had never heard of the quatrains until he saw a film about the astrologer and his predictions. It was an MGM short titled Nostradamus IV,the kind of fare that used to accompany feature presentations. It impressed the young man so much that sixty-five years later he could still recall its images of modern weapons and impending calamities for the Axis. Within days, he had gone to the Borough Park public library and borrowed its copy of the Prophecies. He had to find out for himself what Nostradamus had to say.

Other people have asked me about the wartime Nostradamus over the years. Did he not make an important prediction about Adolf Hitler? World War II has joined the Fire of London and the French Revolution as touchstone moments that settle in the collective imagination and endow the phenomenon with another layer of mystery or credibility. During one of the deadliest conflicts the world has ever known, during a time of displacement and hunger and persecution, the quatrains resonated with greater reach and intensity than at perhaps any other historical juncture. This does not mean that other modern wars had not been good to Nostradamus. The U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War played their parts, as we have seen, and so did World War I. The quatrains circulated in the trenches and on the home front, within the press and among literati. Germans, Britons, and others uncovered references to the invasion of Belgium, the invention of submarines, and the kaiser’s defeat. The artist Amedeo Modigliani was convinced in 1915 that Nostradamus had foreseen the advent of a cruel ruler and a mass exile to distant islands.¹

Still, World War II stands out. In one respect, this is a story about ordinary citizens who, from the late 1930s on, turned en masse to the quatrains in order to peer into their personal and collective future, make sense of seemingly unprecedented events, stare into the abyss, and connect with a world historical event that was equally catastrophic and momentous. One American wartime edition proclaimed that Nostradamus “makes for fascinating reading when related to the catastrophes announced daily while the world is in crisis.”²

But there is another story to be told. This one revolves around new uses of Nostradamus and especially propaganda, which is partly what MGM provided on the home front. World War II propaganda conjures up images of Leni Riefenstahl documentaries, Rosie the Riveter flexing her biceps, and Robert Taylor fighting the Japanese in the jungles of Bataan. Add Nostradamus to the mix. In earlier centuries, the phenomenon’s political life had rested upon individual efforts. After Catherine de Médicis, no regime or ruler made a concerted use of the quatrains or directed them toward the masses. But during this conflict, rival propaganda outfits turned to Nostradamus to impress public opinion at home and abroad. In a context of total war, the Axis and the Allies tried anything to gain an advantage. Strangely or not, four-hundred-year-old predictions made for an alluring instrument of mass persuasion.

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It began once again in France. The Depression had come late to the country, but it lasted longer than elsewhere. As industrial and agricultural production collapsed during the 1930s, public deficits and unemployment ballooned. Frustrated by the apparent paralysis of the state and traditional parties, growing numbers of people gravitated toward communism and the xenophobic right. An antifascist, leftist coalition won the 1936 elections and passed several progressive laws, but this Popular Front could not stem a conservative tide two years later. France seemed punch-drunk, oscillating between left and right, with no clear sense of direction. By 1938, furthermore, war against Germany seemed imminent—a frightening proposition for a country that had lost one citizen out of eighteen and seen a thousand towns vanish between 1914 and 1918. The Munich Agreement, which placated Germany by allowing it to occupy the Sudeten territory in Czechoslovakia, was greeted with relief, but it hardly provided long-term security or a grip on current and future events.

The future had already beckoned following World War I. People used rational methods of analysis and deduction (anticipating our own economic and political models) to forecast the nature of the next war, the growth of urban centers, and technological advances. This form of planning would help manage and regulate a world that, as one journalist put it in 1932, seemed to advance at three hundred miles an hour. Divination, that older window into the future, continued to flourish as well. Almanacs had declined, but thousands of fortune-tellers plied their trade in Paris. Newspapers, mail-order services, and publishers peddled a secular, accessible, and supposedly scientific astrology that revolved around zodiac signs. A deluge of predictions flooded the country. Not all astrologers embraced Nostradamus, but the quatrains seemed to provide answers or at least a way of posing questions. In the early 1930s, a Parisian could begin his day with an astrological consultation at the Nostradamus Institute, located on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. After lunch, he could attend a public talk on these predictions. And before returning home, he could purchase a new interpretation of the Prophecies or L’astrosophie, a magazine that paid close attention to the tantalizing quatrains.³

The output kept mushrooming as one ominous event followed another: Italian incursions in eastern Africa, the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War. An astrologer from Marseille rendered the mood in 1937: “All we hear about are revolutionary uprisings, political wars, economic wars, civil wars. Everyone is worried and seeks to know the future.” As in earlier centuries, uncertainty drew attention to Nostradamus. Mainstream and fly-by-night publishers alike released more than twenty Nostradamus books between 1937 and 1939 alone. The Collapse of Europe According to Nostradamus’s Prophecies was typical. Complete editions of the Prophecies sold for thirty francs while condensed ones could be had for two francs. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the novelist and notorious anti-Semite, commented that turmoil always brought forth Jewish prophets and oracles such as Nostradamus and Karl Marx. Detestable as they were, they could feel presentiments of what he called “great Jewish upheavals.”⁴

Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 triggered the long-awaited war. The French high command sent conscripts to the Maginot Line, the massive fortification line that stretched between Luxembourg and Switzerland, but instructed them to wait. They bided their time, wrongly convinced that the French army needed two more years to catch up with Germany’s. As they waited for an attack that did not come, soldiers and civilians grew increasingly fretful and wary of their tentative leaders. The New York Times reported that men and women of all social stations, including officers at the front, were combing the Prophecies for insight into current and future events. In the town of Versailles, a taxation official welcomed a new underling by pulling out his copy and reciting a quatrain that announced terrible dangers in various regions. On the quays of the Seine, strollers asked booksellers for books on magic or spiritualism and above all the Prophecies. One Parisian bookstore sold three thousand copies in a single month that fall. The American journalist A. J. Liebling bought a book of interpretations soon after landing in France. It predicted the destruction of Paris by birds from the east and the advent of a French king (often depicted as a white knight) who would defeat the Germans in the Loire Valley a year later and then rule from Avignon. If all of this came true, Liebling reflected, Nostradamus would become as revered as experts on European affairs.⁵

Commentators drew attention to quatrain 2.24, which had barely registered beforehand but would circulate widely during the war:

Ister (spelled Hister in the Old French) most probably referred to the Danube River. Nineteenth-century commentators had presented it as an anagram of Thiers, the name of an important minister. Now they equated it with Hitler, about to cross the Rhine and launch new conquests. Some added that his early victories would soon give way to defeat. In the town of Le Mans, a bank director and his friends could not stomach another protracted war. They accordingly parsed the quatrains and prophecies attributed to the Irish Saint Malachy to uncover cheerier prospects. Meanwhile, a Figaro journalist recounted the visit he had paid to fashion designer Paul Poiret in Saint-Tropez. Within minutes, Poiret had whipped out chosen quatrains and told his guest to expect a German invasion during the coming year followed by the devastation of Paris and the reunification of France in 1944. Poiret and the Figaro captured the modern machine in full drive. Providers made Nostradamus available by pointing to quatrains that had come true and then peering at the future. Growing numbers of people, facing uncontrollable forces, dipped into this universe and spread what they found by word of mouth. Changing norms made it acceptable to engage in such behavior without losing face. The media, finally, fed and amplified a process that was repeating itself on a broad scale.⁶

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When fighting broke out on the Western Front in the spring of 1940, it was swift and brutal. The German army powered through Holland and Belgium and overwhelmed French and British forces. Within weeks, they had inflicted three hundred thousand French casualties and taken two million prisoners. Not even Hitler’s generals had expected a victory of such magnitude. Roosevelt reckoned that France had lost its place in the world for decades to come. Terrified of German exactions, civilians packed up their belongings and headed south—by car, train, buggy, bicycle, or foot. The Dutch came first, followed by Belgians, residents of northern France, and finally Parisians. Some French towns lost more than 90 percent of their residents. Altogether, eight million people clogged the roads, civilians alongside soldiers, mayors, prefects, policemen, and firemen, all of them in full retreat during the greatest exodus in French history. The government took off as well, first to Bordeaux and then to the spa town of Vichy. On July 10, the French parliament called for a new constitution and granted full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain, an old ultratraditionalist war hero whose authoritarian regime would restore the country’s ancient values while accepting German conditions, including a partial occupation of France.⁷

In a matter of weeks, France had lost a war, two-thirds of its territory, its republic, and its independence. This massive crisis raised unsettling questions about the country’s military, its political leadership, and French society itself. What had happened to the army and its war plans? Where did political legitimacy reside? Did latent ills and social disfunction cause this debacle? The shock and the divisions that ensued were so deep that eminent scholars have spoken of a national trauma—a collective denial of painful memories or a compulsive, haunting reliving of the event. Trauma is a catchall term, too broad to do justice to the unique experiences of individual men and women. Still, studies have shown that civilians who saw their country fall apart, lived through German airborne attacks on the roads of France, or survived bombardments suffered severe psychological effects. It may not have been traumatic for all, but the wounds and the anguish ran deep. By the summer of 1940, citizens of France (and countless foreigners as well) had to accept almost overnight the bankruptcy of what they had taken for granted. “France no longer exists; in a few weeks, a thousand years of culture have vanished,” the young writer Julien Green noted in his journal. “We believed that the foundations were strong; they were collapsing.” The same was true of people’s cognitive foundations. Many in France struggled to ascertain what they could know about their world and its future and their place within it. The prevailing emotion, according to Green, was stupefaction.⁸

Interest in Nostradamus’s predictions intensified that year. Never had the quatrains been read with greater eagerness, declared one journalist. After watching people consult these prophecies, Green noted that “a kind of popular naïveté was emerging and grasping at hope wherever it could find it.” In truth, people from all walks of life were once again intrigued. An officer who had fought the Germans that June later recalled the comfort that members of his unit drew from Nostradamus while trying to process what he called “our disaster.” In the midst of the exodus, the high school teacher Germaine Dauchat spent a night in a village surrounded by women who listened raptly to a clairvoyant who, quoting Nostradamus, spoke of a German retreat. Elsewhere, a Communist schoolteacher drew from geopolitics and Nostradamus to predict the outcome of the Battle of Britain. And somewhere on the Atlantic, aboard the ship that ferried them from France to Casablanca, a group of naval officers discussed the meaning of selected quatrains. News of this French obsession even reached Warsaw, where a school principal concluded that the country’s tragic defeat had spawned “a spirit of mysticism in her oppressed people.”⁹

French intellectuals could not agree on what this meant. The surrealist André Breton told an interviewer in 1941 that the Nostradamus vogue represented one of the most troubling psychological facets of the war. The Communist poet Louis Aragon likewise declared that stunned folk were making Nostradamus “their shadowy, stupefying refuge.” Léon Werth, a critic who lived through the exodus, was more indulgent. The people whom he saw invoking protective divinities and apocalyptic beasts on the roads of France were less crazed than one might think. “Nothing, since we have left Paris, can be explained by the laws of reason,” he wrote in an account of those events. Indeed, some people found confirmation of their fears while others rebuilt an interpretative framework. A journalist linked quatrain 2.68, with its great northern forces and London trembling, to the German offensive and the Battle of Britain. Elsewhere, rumors asserted that Nostradamus had warned the French republic that its errant ways would lead to cataclysm in 1940. For the most part, people sought news of a favorable resolution to these chaotic, paralyzing times.¹⁰

The prevailing interpretation held that Hitler would be stopped in Poitiers and that a great white prince would save France. But who might it be? On the Casablanca-bound ship, the officers settled first on Pétain, great in repute rather than height, and then considered the little-known general who was telling the French on the BBC that the war was not over. Charles de Gaulle was six foot five. The officers could not settle the matter, but on the mainland two young social workers accepted that de Gaulle was the savior whom Nostradamus had announced. “We put all of our trust in this de Gaulle,” they wrote in the chronicle they kept that summer. “Nostradamus is quite something!” It is difficult to gauge how widespread such feelings were, but we should consider the possibility that sixteenth-century quatrains helped shore up the standing of France’s future war hero. After all, one of the speakers at a Washington, D.C., benefit for the Free French claimed in 1941 that Nostradamus had predicted de Gaulle’s triumph. There was nothing shadowy or stupefying about this.¹¹

The more the French lost confidence in their military forces, Julien Green concluded, the more they trusted the Prophecies. Beyond the army’s failures, history appeared capricious and every social institution was disintegrating. No traditional figures of authority—political leaders, clergymen, policemen, teachers, unbiased journalists—seemed to remain. Nostradamus was not the only source of protection and certainty during this time of confusion. People turned to the Bible, astrological forecasts, and the prophecies of Sainte Odile (which were said to predict Germany’s downfall in 1941). They also listened to reports that a saint had appeared before a nun to predict Hitler’s defeat. All of them were carried by the rumors that flourished during the war. But Nostradamus did stand out. The phenomenon carried the aura of past conflicts, from the Franco-Prussian War to the Great War. It exuded a mix of mysterious power and tangible evidence lodged in actual quatrains. It continued, finally, to marry prophetic and astrological traditions, secular and religious strands in an ecumenical synthesis that spoke to people from different sexes, classes, political leanings, generations, and faiths.

This remained the case throughout the war, during these years of deprivation and terror in France. Four citizens out of five were undernourished; deportations of Jews, Communists, and other such public enemies became commonplace; bombardments killed tens of thousands. The authorities intervened in all realms of everyday life, and yet they could not provide security or a clear sense of where the world was headed. Ordinary folk gravitated effortlessly toward Nostradamus when, as in previous crises, political leaders and social institutions seemed deaf, remote, or powerless. Once Germany began suffering military setbacks, they anticipated the end of the war. A Marseille daily reported that people were parsing the quatrains for signs of “the end of their misery, which is also ours.” Among them was the Jewish novelist Irène Némirovsky. While hiding in a French village until her deportation in 1942, she trusted Nostradamus’s prediction about a favorable outcome two years hence. Her daughter was so mortified decades later that she dismissed this fancy as a brief childish moment.¹²

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However we consider this collective fascination, it was not limited to France. In London, a Belgian refugee—a secretary to exiled political leaders—wrote in her diary that Nostradamus had predicted an assault against an Italian dignitary before the end of 1940: “We firmly hope that it will be Mussolini.” In the Soviet Union, admirers of Marshal Timoshenko, the defender of Stalingrad, claimed in 1943 that Nostradamus had forecast further triumphs for the “bald eagle of the Ukraine.” Further research is needed to fill in this international tableau, but European propaganda shops took notice. Nostradamus’s omnipresence suggested that his predictions could gain a grip on psyches—and this had been the order of the day throughout the 1930s. This was a decade of Nazi rallies, Stalinist posters, and antifascist movies by the likes of Jean Renoir. On the eve of the war, every major country except the United States had set up a propaganda agency to mobilize its citizenry around shared goals and soften its enemies. The need for propaganda was one of the lessons learned during World War I but the focus was shifting from political allies, enemies, and neutral powers toward civilian populations and public opinion.¹³

The French entered this Nostradamian field first. With war looming in 1939, ministerial officials asked a Parisian astrologer named Maurice Privat for favorable interpretations of Nostradamus. This onetime journalist had made a name for himself between the wars as an astrologer. He wrote several mass-market books, sold mail-order horoscopes, and in 1933 launched a magazine on “conjectural studies” titled Nostradamus. Two months after France’s declaration of war, he published a book titled 1940, Year of French Grandeur. Drawing from the quatrains, Privat predicted misfortunes for Franco, Stalin, and the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. As for France, the title said it all. Its strong government would stand up to Hitler, weaken the Axis, and avert war. “The West will not kneel down,” Privat promised. “France and Great Britain have no reason to worry.”¹⁴

Once it became clear that events would follow a different course, Privat became quiet and Nostradamus faded from French propaganda. The collaborationist regime of Vichy sought to unite the population around Catholic patriotism, military honor, rural purity, and familial harmony. If any historical figure could embody such values, it was the saintly peasant girl Joan of Arc, who had sacrificed herself while serving her king (and her fatherland, it was now claimed) against England. Nothing of the sort could be said about the unattached and unreliable Nostradamus. The French authorities were also concerned about interpretations that might offend their new German partners. In the fall of 1940, they went after two other books that drew from the quatrains: Emile Ruir’s The Great Carnage and Max de Fontbrune’s Prophecies of Master Michel Nostradamus. The first announced a Nazi assault on Christianity and a French resurgence thanks to British aid in 1944. The second predicted tribulations for France under the rule of an old man and depicted Germany as a brutal enemy. Quatrain 2.9, which we encountered in a different context during the Renaissance, was now linked to the doomed chancellor:

Meanwhile, the German embassy’s lists of forbidden publications included a selection of quatrains predicting France’s victory over barbarians. Michel de Nostredame joined Freud and Einstein among the ranks of “undesirables.”¹⁵

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Or did he? In Berlin, Nazi officials looked at Nostradamus with greater benevolence. The young Hitler himself had bought books on spiritualism and the occult while living in Munich in the 1920s. Among them was an interpretation of the Prophecies by Carl Loog, a postal official who claimed to have discovered the book’s numerological key in 1921. According to Loog, Nostradamus had predicted that a “prophet with a raging head” would liberate the German people and then transform the world. France would decline, he said, and war would begin in 1939, a year of crisis for Poland and England. By 1940, this book was in its fifth edition.¹⁶

Hitler’s moldering copy—one of eighty books found in his bunker after his death—contains no marginal notes, and some of its pages remain uncut. We cannot be certain that he consulted these predictions before or during the war. Indeed, there is no conclusive evidence that astrology shaped his decisions or those of other Nazi leaders. Hitler reportedly met the mentalist Erik Jan Hanussen—known as “Europe’s Greatest Oracle Since Nostradamus”—on several occasions in the early 1930s. He expressed interest in his clairvoyance and listened to Hanussen explain that the stars and planets were aligned in favor of the man who embodied German destiny. Whether Hitler believed such predictions or merely sought out a seer whose tabloid reached millions of Germans is unclear. In his entourage, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess gazed at the stars and reportedly recited passages by Nostradamus. SS commander Heinrich Himmler was engrossed by Nordic myths and may have inquired about Hitler’s astrological prospects late in the war.

Still, distrust prevailed. Himmler outlawed public uses of astrology, which hinged on a universal soul untouched by racial differences. In 1941, the Gestapo blamed Hess’s ill-fated flight to Scotland (an apparent attempt to broker a peace) on pernicious astrologers and then purged their ranks. The horoscope’s focus on individual self-development did not sit well with Nazi ideology. Likewise, its neopagan, anti-Christian beliefs could antagonize the Church. More to the point, predictions defied central control. After 1934, horoscopes about Nazi dignitaries and speculation about the Third Reich suddenly came to a halt, probably due to an official order. Occult activities were outlawed a few years later, and Germany’s rich astrological life went underground. “In the National Socialist state, astrology must remain a privilegium singulorum,” Himmler declared. “It is not for the masses.”¹⁷

More precisely, it was not for the German masses. Enemy populations were another story. The goal of psychological warfare was not only to tame ordinary Germans but also to create a more favorable terrain for military operations. Although Goebbels dismissed astrology as a medieval throwback, he paid attention to Nostradamus’s predictions that fall. One version of the story holds that his wife woke him one night after reading a startling book on Nostradamus (Loog’s perhaps). Goebbels’s first instinct had been to avert unfavorable predictions by banning fortune-tellers and almanacs. But he now saw potential benefits for the Third Reich. He simply needed someone to pen suitable interpretations. Goebbels asked Loog to do it, but he bowed out, so he turned to Karl Ernst Krafft, a Swiss-born “psychological adviser” who had recently published a treatise on astrobiology. A second version of this story holds that Krafft himself had warned Hitler in 1939 that the stars announced an upcoming plot against him. The Gestapo brought him in at once. In the course of his interrogation, he talked about Nostradamus and disclosed that quatrain 5.94 mentioned a great leader who would “shift toward greater Germania / Brabant & Flanders, Ghent, Bruges, Boulogne.” This is exactly what Goebbels was looking for.¹⁸

By November 1939, Goebbels was telling underlings that Nostradamus would yield dividends for a long time to come. He commissioned forecasts and ordered agents to spread the rumor that quatrain 5.94 predicted the temporary occupation of France and a thousand-year empire. Given the French population’s misgivings about a new war, it should prove easy to weaken their resolve. In March 1940, Goebbels approved a Nostradamus pamphlet announcing the demise of France and Great Britain. Eighty-three thousand copies were printed, one-quarter for France, and the rest for Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Secret radio transmitters broadcast quatrains about the French government’s flight and German plans to confiscate bank deposits. They also announced that a white man from the Danube would defeat France and establish the most powerful kingdom in history. Meanwhile, secret agents and warplanes distributed pamphlets in which Nostradamus predicted that German “flying-fire machines” would target northern France while sparing the southeast. The goal was to sow panic, create a glut of southbound refugees, make roads impracticable for the French army, and turn German victory into a fait accompli.¹⁹

Nostradamus seemed so effective that the Nazis enlisted the quatrains in other campaigns. A British speaker on German radio quoted the Prophecies to announce the destruction of London and demoralize the English during the Battle of Britain. In 1941, Krafft’sHow Nostradamus Perceived the Future of Europe predicted a collective nervous breakdown in London, world domination for totalitarian states, and the reign of Great Germania. That same year, the propaganda bureau of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a brochure titled The Prophecies of Nostradamus. The leader who hailed from the Mountains of Noricum would fell the British Empire and regenerate Europe. At the ministry of propaganda, Goebbels continued to deem the quatrains effective. They “must once again submit to being quoted,” he declared in 1942. And so they were, in countless languages.²⁰

By this time, the Nostradamus phenomenon no longer played the same political role as in earlier centuries. It no longer fed political theories, promised divine protection, or influenced negotiations. And yet it could still tar enemies and order chaotic events by providing a distant stamp of authority in uncertain times. These secular predictions, written by a French prophet rather than a threatening German, lent themselves to repeated use across the continent. They corresponded so well to propaganda as Goebbels understood it: penetrate the psyches of ordinary people by appealing to their emotions; repeat simple, unequivocal notions with unwavering certainty; spread truths but do not hesitate to impart lies as long as no one can disprove them. In Germany, Nostradamus’s forecasts might demoralize the population by raising false hopes and sowing anxiety. Abroad, however, his resurgent appeal and global fame made it possible to repackage rumors in campaigns that frightened enemy populations while promising a reprieve if they accepted Nazi supremacy. Nostradamus’s apocalyptic images would tap fears, intensify feelings of panic, and prevent people from acting decisively. “The Americans and English fall easily for that type of thing,” Goebbels assured his staff.²¹

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Goebbels may have read English surveys in which nearly half of the respondents claimed to believe in astrology. Regardless, Great Britain marshaled Nostradamus in its own propaganda ventures. In 1943, agents smuggled into Germany fake issues of the astrological magazine Der Zenit and a pamphlet titled Nostradamus Predicts the Course of the War. The operation was the brainchild of Louis de Wohl, a colorful Hungarian journalist who had moved from Berlin to London in 1935 and become a professional astrologer. By 1941, he was also attached to British counter-intelligence and propaganda services. The eccentric de Wohl, who stayed at the ritzy Grosvenor House and liked to parade down Piccadilly in his captain’s uniform, was convinced that Hitler consulted Krafft before making strategic decisions. He thus challenged the astrologer to a long-distance duel. “I realized the danger: Hitler now had first rate astrological advice,” he explained in 1945. “This man Krafft had to be fought.” De Wohl devised a war on several fronts. His calculations would divulge Krafft’s advice to Hitler and help the allies time their actions. His horoscopes of leading German generals would grasp their temperament and anticipate their decisions. And his interpretations of fifty quatrains would demoralize the German population. Having accurately predicted Hitler’s rise to power, Nostradamus now announced his demise in Italy as well as devastating Allied air raids. While some English officers looked askance at this unpredictable astrologer, others lauded his “great gifts as a psychologist and excellent insights into the Continental mind.” ²²

Prior to writing this pamphlet, de Wohl has been sent on a propaganda mission to the United States in the summer of 1941—part of the effort to draw Roosevelt into the war. In lectures and radio talks, this “modern Nostradamus” warned about a Nazi invasion of the U.S. through Brazil once Saturn and Uranus entered Gemini, America’s ruling sign. As he addressed the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers in Cleveland, de Wohl may well have marveled at the country’s craze for divination. Fortune-telling had become a multimillion-dollar business. Soothsayers received top billing on the lecture circuit. Prophecies attributed to Mother Shipton and others circulated widely. As for Nostradamus, Americans had begun turning to the quatrains in the late 1930s for a handle on the global crisis. This interest intensified after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Wire services reported that spring that an Indianapolis librarian had linked quatrain 9.90 to Hess: “A captain of Great Germania shall come to yield himself.” After Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, Americans applied the quatrains to their own situation, just as they had during the Civil War, but on a much grander scale.²³

Within a couple of years, American astrologers, journalists, translators, and librarians had published a dozen books relating the quatrains to world events. They linked Nostradamus to esoteric traditions and Egyptian cosmogony or else maintained that the telepathic prophet had tapped what psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung called the collective unconscious, a world soul that apprehended past and future within an eternal present. Nostredame’s main interest, they insisted, had always been the current conflict. Since so many of his earlier predictions had come true, why not listen to what he said about future battles and the war’s outcome? The esteemed Modern Library reprinted a fifty-year-old interpretation of the Prophecies, added an afterword, and sold it for ninety-five cents. Librarians recommended such books as “background on the news” while newspapers published hundreds of articles on Nostradamus. The syndicated columnist Elsie Robinson claimed that the astrologer had urged Americans to shape their destiny by combining high hopes with hard work. “We could all be Nostradamus,” she wrote. Books about the predictions climbed the best-seller lists. The Prophecies, declared the Washington Post, have “replaced Mein Kampf as the infallible authority on what is going to happen next.”²⁴

But the nation of readers was increasingly becoming one of moviegoers. Three-quarters of Americans now went to the movies every week. This was Hollywood’s heyday, and the studios knew how to spot an up-and-coming trend. On the West Coast, Nostradamus became a “U.S. cinema star,” per Time magazine, and an American tool of propaganda.²⁵

Nostradamus was in some respects a natural for the screen. As the poet Harold Norse (a Nostradamus aficionado during those years) put it, “The great psychic physician saw the future like a Fox Movietone newsreel.” Catastrophic panoramas and legendary tales provided rich visual material. Building on his theatrical productions, Georges Méliès had included Nostradamus in A Trip to the Moon, his 1902 short film about six zany astronomer-magicians who encounter man-eating aliens on the moon. Five of the characters were fictional (with names like Barbenfouille and Alcofribas), and Nostradamus came across as such as well. Soon afterward, the Gaumont movie studio commissioned a historical fiction about the astrologer, his imaginary daughter, and King Henri IV. There was even a Mexican adaptation of Michel Zévaco’s novel in 1937. But the phenomenon’s punch had always rested on its proximity to reality, on the possibility that, even if the man eluded our grasp, the predictions might be true. As biography and legends faded from view, it became more difficult to make movies around Nostradamus. Features that borrowed from the documentary were better fits.²⁶

The documentary had come into its own between the wars as a genre that aimed to record reality instead of fictionalizing it. There were social advocacy films and political manifestos, avant-garde adventures and ethnographic depictions of distant peoples. In the 1930s, Hollywood shorts began blending the documentary’s informative stance with the feature’s entertainment value. These shorts were highly profitable, and MGM’s unit was considered the best at turning cultural trends into tight cinematographic concentrates. In the late 1930s, it launched a series that, in the words of one reviewer, would “educate the public in regard to the facts of psychical research.” Each episode investigated a strange occurrence that could be explained as a coincidence or the result of supernatural forces. Early topics included telepathy, ghosts, and encounters with the dead. The host was Carey Wilson, a dapper producer whose life followed the arc of a rags-to-riches story. By age twenty, this upstate New York native had dabbled as a projectionist, a production hand, a traveling film salesman, a foreign rights agent, and a scriptwriter. But he still scrambled to make a living and spent many nights in Manhattan subway stations. Then came his break: a fortuitous encounter with studio head Samuel Goldwyn on a midtown sidewalk in 1921. Goldwyn requested a script; Wilson wrote it overnight; a Hollywood contract ensued. Out west, Wilson quickly made his mark as an indefatigable scriptwriter and rewrite man who understood the business. His motto was to give the public what it wanted, whether it was a star or a story. This served him well as he climbed the rungs at MGM and soon hobnobbed with the likes of Greta Garbo.²⁷

In 1937, Wilson came across a magazine article on Nostradamus—an ideal subject for this new series. The short that ensued, Nostradamus: A Historical Mystery, was a fast-paced eleven-minute movie full of flashbacks, lantern slides with off-camera commentaries, and interpretations that traveled across time. The producers included a reference to the German annexation of Austria (across the Hister) and ended with the annihilation of Paris in the year 3420. Their Nostradamus was both a star and a story. But the film said nothing about politics. Unlike the French, Americans did not feel an existential threat at home. Instead, MGM played on wonder and curiosity. At once thrilling and accurate, its “riddling of the future” joined the spirit of seventeenth-century broadsheets (without the gore) with the inquisitiveness of Eugène Bareste (without the erudition). Nostradamus was present at the birth of a new genre—the probing, entertaining journey into the strange and the mysterious, the incredible but true—and then accompanied its formidable growth throughout the twentieth century, when it sometimes morphed into docudrama. The radio show Strange as It Seems devoted a segment to Nostradamus in 1939, and others followed. With its didactic yet spirited tone, its authoritative commentator who distilled the results of research, its music and special effects, and its claim to serve the public interest, MGM’s Nostradamus dwelled somewhere between middlebrow and lowbrow cultures.²⁸

This short was so well received that the studio produced three others of the kind between 1941 and 1944. Following their usual assembly line approach, the producers recycled material from one to the next. But each film provided “new and even more amazing predictions.” To cull this material and make these shorts credible, Wilson enlisted three Los Angeles–based experts. Franco Bruno-Averardi, an Italian literary scholar who had cofounded UCLA’s Italian department, translated quatrains. Nina Howard, an astrologer who had published Follow Your Lucky Stars (“a stellar road map” to life), identified quatrains that could be linked to the Nazis. And Manly P. Hall, a creature of California’s occultist milieu, wrote commentaries that, he insisted, pertained to the war. A magnetic presence, Hall had turned his mystic retreat in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park neighborhood into the headquarters of a venture that sold magazines, correspondence courses, and self-improvement plans. Building upon theosophical teachings, he linked the psychic instability of humanity to current crime waves, pollution, and the World War. To recover lost feelings of community and sacrifice, modern civilization had to delve into a trove of esoteric wisdom that ranged from Indian rituals and Greek allegories to the predictions of Nostradamus.²⁹

MGM had brought together academia, popular astrology, and occultism around Nostradamus. It was an odd partnership, but all three of these purported experts belonged to the entertainment-publicity nexus. Even Hall believed that cinema would impart metaphysical themes in ways that no book or lecture ever could. Like other media figures before them, the studios recognized a commercial opportunity, tapped a preexisting interest, and sought to create broader demand. MGM’s publicity department thus instructed theater managers to capitalize on the appeal of astrology in order to launch these shorts. Bundle advertisements with predictions about local and national events, they said. Invite local astrologers, psychics, and clairvoyants to advance screenings. Organize Q&A’s between these seers and the audience. And play the press, of course. Wilson told journalists in 1943 that his team had studied only seventy quatrains so far. They were far from done. “Now, we’re digging for something on the Roosevelt-Churchill conference at Casablanca.”³⁰

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By then, such digging contributed to wartime propaganda. Like de Wohl, many Americans seemed to believe that the Führer gave credence to Nostradamus and kept several astrologers on hand. “Read the fateful happenings predicted tomorrow for Europe and America by the sixteenth century soothsayer whom Hitler relies upon today,” beckoned the Modern Library. Newspapers reported that Hitler was terrorized by quatrain 2.24 and the prospect of ending up in an iron cage. One Long Island resident wrote toLifemagazine suggesting that a giant cage should be built, with a placard announcing that it awaited the superstitious dictator. This never happened, but Nostradamus seemed to offer a good way of beating Hitler at his own game.³¹

Most studio heads were Jewish immigrants with little sympathy for fascism or isolationism. Still, they remained politically cautious during the war’s early years in order to retain access to foreign markets. Once Hitler forbade the distribution of American movies in Germany, they contributed generously to the war effort. In Washington, Roosevelt was convinced that the heavy-handed European approach to propaganda would backfire in the United States. Public entertainment was more promising. Films, in particular, could influence viewers without their being aware of it. They could sell the war, energize the home front, and entertain soldiers. The Office of War Information and other agencies thus commissioned movies and encouraged studios to produce battle dramas, training films, newsreels, documentaries, and shorts. The agency provided what Richard Goldstone, production supervisor in MGM’s shorts unit, called “a certain doctrinaire policy line to follow.” The studios followed this line, but without heeding every recommendation. Who, after all, knew the American public better than they did?³²

MGM’s Louis B. Mayer put his shorts department to work. Its output ranged from paeans to Max the Mechanic to cartoons about Adolf the wolf to Nostradamus. Seeing no contradiction between universal wisdom and patriotism, Manly Hall had provided quatrains that denounced what he called the idiocies of isolationism and fascism, announced an allied invasion of France, and prefigured the demise of Hitler and Mussolini. This was standard fare in these shorts. MGM’s Nostradamus told different things to different peoples. The French should not surrender their fleet. The British would regain strength and contribute to a united democratic front. The Italians were done for. Hitler could not trust his own henchmen. Latin American countries should beware Nazi invasion plans. Americans, finally, should expect tribulations but remember that commitment to the war effort would usher in a reign of peace and justice. “The United States will be prominent in reestablishing unity,” Wilson said, claiming to channel Nostradamus, “and war will be outlawed for centuries to come.”³³

The facets that made Nostradamus so appealing to Goebbels applied here as well, but with notable differences. MGM began with entertainment and ended up at the junction of show business and propaganda. The studio moreover targeted its own population without worrying about subversive readings of the quatrains. Finally, Wilson and his colleagues moved organically toward Nostradamus, without heavy governmental oversight. This is why the shorts combined the media figure’s multiple dimensions: learned yet distant earnestness, flights of fancy, and urgent projections into the future. The multifaceted Nostradamus proved ideal for films that sought not to pummel or frighten enemies but to astound, entertain, reassure, and energize during uncertain times. It was a playful affair, and yet deadly serious.

It also had to seem true. One of the challenges facing democratic propagandists was to reconcile political designs with an attachment to truth. They could not come across as liars. The Office of War Information warned filmmakers not to give audiences reason to believe that they were being misled. Here too, Nostradamus was well suited to modern persuasion since producers could combine history and outright invention while remaining loyal to their principles. In their postwar oral histories, Wilson and other producers explained that they had tried to get Nostredame’s life story right and devoted several months to each short for the sake of accuracy. At the same time, they felt free to draw from what they called the Gothic legend. One short opened with eighteenth-century intruders violating the prophet’s tomb in the middle of the night. This ghoulish scene was straight out of the old almanacs. Interpretations of quatrains followed. MGM granted itself the latitude to select and then elucidate verses that Richard Goldstone later deemed easy to manipulate. The task, he explained, was to “make a given verse say what you wanted it to say, in terms of the times and in terms of the interest and in terms of the dramatic value of your interpretation.” It was not difficult to come up with explanations that seemed to pertain to specific events.³⁴

MGM spoke in one respect to the awed beholder in each spectator. “The psychology of these Nostradamus features is irresistible,” marveled one American columnist in 1942. “You sit back and watch Carey Wilson conclusively prove that this monk of medieval times forecast the present war,” and you exhale after hearing about Hitler’s inglorious end. The English critic J. A. Hammerton was less charitable in 1943, when he wrote that these movies added to the mental confusion of a thoughtless public. Perhaps, but American propagandists were sensitive to their audience members’ sense of themselves as citizens and consumers in ways that Goebbels was not. They hence appealed to the decoders and ambivalent spectators as well. Each short ended with a question followed by the same tagline. Could Nostredame peer into the unknown? What do you think? Would Hermann Göring or Himmler slit Hitler’s throat? What do you think? “We toss you a little problem to work out for yourselves,” Wilson said on camera in Nostradamus IV. It was up to the spectators to answer the question, examine the prophecies, and either make up their own minds or carry the uncertainty home. Wilson does not provide answers, explained Coronet magazine. “You have to seek out Nostradamus yourself and become your own interpreter.”³⁵

This was not accidental. The producers wanted spectators to wonder whether all of this could possibly be true. For dramatic and perhaps political reasons, they deemed question marks more effective than definitive statements. Like others before them, these Nostradamian providers exploited the phenomenon’s remote authority and open-ended mystery. As they guided Americans, they supplied the illusion of control, coupled with distance for those who needed it, and an invitation to dig deeper on one’s own. The Brooklyn teenager who rushed from the movie theater to the library in 1944 played his part perfectly.

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One of the lessons of World War II is that the quatrains could maintain and perhaps magnify their wondrous appeal in the mid-twentieth century. In the United States, they could espouse the contours of a noble American destiny, written in the stars and in the past, but doomed to failure unless the country’s citizens worked, fought, and made sacrifices. The quatrains reached more people and at a faster speed than ever before, even though some people remarked that, like a pendulum, Nostradamus resurfaced during each major crisis. Time explained in 1941 that “new generations have constantly dusted off its well-worn prophecies to fit newborn events.” Two lasting notions rooted themselves in the media at this time. The first held that the present frenzy for Nostradamus was unprecedented: a small cult was morphing into a mass phenomenon. The second, in contrast, depicted this frenzy as a cyclical delusion. The latter drove some people away, but not all. In 1944, two Texas pilots looked to Nostradamus for the date of D-day. How they came upon him is unclear, but the very media that fostered critical awareness continued to feed curiosity as well.³⁶

Propaganda also played a part. The Nazi counterintelligence officer Walter Schellenberg reflected after the war that, due to Nostradamus, French efforts to “divert the great streams of refugees from attempting to reach southeastern France proved useless.” I have been unable to confirm this assertion—foolproof sources just are not there. It is equally possible that Nazi Germany drew people involuntarily toward the great white man in London. Still, propaganda heightened Nostradamus’s visibility in Europe. The Modern Library and MGM did the same in the United States. The shorts played in hundreds of theaters and earned an Academy Award nomination. Educational catalogs recommended them for high school and college courses in history, English, and psychology. Wilson obtained recognition as the “energetic movie scholar who discovered Nostradamus for the screen.” Thanks to him, said Coronet magazine, “a whole army of Nostradamus addicts has sprung up all over the country.” More mail reportedly poured in for Nostradamus at MGM than for the studio’s own Mickey Rooney. Wilson claimed to have answered five thousand letters, from Catholic priests in Texas, lumbermen in Wisconsin, and book collectors in Atlanta. Some treated Nostradamus as their personal astrologer, though most wanted to know when the U.S. air force would next bomb Tokyo or when the German people would revolt.³⁷

The shorts’ prophetic strand and hopeful endings played upon deep-rooted notions of national destiny while promising an American victory. Spectators could nonetheless take Nostradamus in whatever direction they wished. What Goebbels called “occultist propaganda” could both deny human powers of decision making and at the same time spur people to action. It could provide authority and at the same time discredit. But perhaps it had become too obvious for an increasingly savvy era. Time denounced this avalanche of Nostradamus books, and a Manhattan rabbi compared the true prophet Isaiah to this false one in one of his wartime sermons. These objections were not new, but something else was: criticism of such interpretations as modern propaganda and mass persuasion. In 1940, leading newspapers in England, Sweden, and Spain responded to Krafft’s pamphlet by printing the headline “Who Is Nostradamus?” The answer came days later: “Nostradamus Is Adolf Hitler.” Shortly thereafter, André Breton scolded the European masses for attributing extrahuman powers to Hitler and assuming that he consulted astrologers before making decisions. These kinds of assumptions fed Nazi designs as well as collective psychosis. By 1942, some American journalists were mocking MGM and others for claiming that the Allies would lick Hitler in no time. How could we conclude otherwise, asked the New York Times, when we make Nostradamus “an ally on the propaganda front”? Should the United States ever create a Ministry of Fun, added one syndicated columnist, its “Mein Kampf for propagandizing” should go to Nostradamus.³⁸

Perceptions of propaganda had changed since World War I. In some quarters, a term that had once described public-health campaigns now denoted deceit and indoctrination in the service of the state or capitalism. The massive Fascist campaigns did not help matters. During the war, Americans debated whether propaganda was a curse word or not, and whether it lurked behind every billboard or screen. Some diplomats and members of Congress were alarmed. From a practical perspective, moreover, propaganda is most effective when it remains subtle and seems plausible or at least sincere. These uses of Nostradamus did not fit the bill. What made the phenomenon so appealing as a political device also made it appear coarse, if not blatantly cynical. Could Nostredame have been as sanguine about our side or as glum about our enemies? Should we really give credence to these arcane prophecies? And did the Nazis and MGM producers even believe their own interpretations? Goebbels referred privately to the quatrains as “silly rubbish” that was good enough for the French. In Los Angeles, Wilson was intrigued by the occult while Hall included the quatrains within his philosophical framework, but other producers claimed privately that no member of the shorts unit wanted to be identified with “this superstitious philosophy.” Political opportunism seemed more naked than at any other time in Nostradamus’s history.³⁹

This transpired in the final product. By 1944, some Nazi counterintelligence officers felt that Goebbels’s uses of Nostradamus had proved clumsy. That same year, German forces in France contemplated a different approach. This time, they would use the name totaint the Resistance. They prepared a clandestine edition of the Prophecies that bore the imprint of the leading underground publisher, the Editions de Minuit, and printed eighty thousand copies. When one of Minuit’s cofounders, the writer Vercors, saw a copy, he found it laughable. “It was an anti-English ersatz of Nostradamus’s prophecies, so foolish that one almost wishes that it had circulated,” he wrote in his memoirs. This edition was never released, perhaps because such operations seemed futile at this time or because priorities shifted as the Allies gained ground. Nostradamus now came across as an instrumental device, both in Nazi Berlin and Hollywood. The propagandists had gone too far. They had stained the phenomenon with pejorative connotations and sucked out what remained of its political respectability. World War II was thus the zenith of Nostradamus propaganda and also its nadir—the coda to a political history that had begun four centuries earlier. Since then, no state has marshaled Nostradamus in this fashion. Saddam Hussein commissioned a translation of quatrains because he was convinced that they mentioned him, but even the Iraqi dictator kept this to himself.⁴⁰

In 1945, three convictions thus surfaced in the American media. The first held that Nostradamus had been proved wrong. Most of these wartime prophecies had failed to come true, including those about VE Day. “Possibly as the seer looked farther into the future, his vision became clouded,” wrote the science-fiction writer De Witt Miller. Second, the West had reached its limit. “Enough of Nostradamus!” exclaimed the Atlanta Constitution. Third, there would be no place for the ex-king of prophets in the postwar order. “Amidst the jubilation of the Allied world, poor old Nostradamus was forgotten,” declared the Fairmont Herald-Mail. It was not just the demise of Nostradamian propaganda. Military victory and the prospect of a lasting era of peace also erased the chaos and uncertainty under which the quatrains had thrived. But this prophetic fatigue, too, was but a fleeting moment. The idea that Nostradamus was finished, that the modern world had vanquished its demons and moved past an era in which such predictions were both needed and pertinent—this illusion and this mantra, too, became part of the modern phenomenon.