In the spring of 1941, a Hungarian astrologer named Louis de Wohl arrived in the United States on what he described as a lecture tour. He was charming, large, multilingual, and precise about one thing: he claimed to know exactly what advice Adolf Hitler was receiving from his personal astrologer, Karl Ernst Krafft. De Wohl knew this, he explained to anyone who would listen, because he knew Krafft’s methods, and he had cast the same charts, and he could therefore reconstruct the counsel that was shaping the decisions of the Third Reich.
Whether de Wohl actually had this capability was, and remains, disputed. What is not disputed is that the British intelligence service had been paying him for at least a year before he set foot in America, that his American tour was partly arranged to help shift public opinion toward intervention in the European war, and that someone in His Majesty’s Government had decided that an astrologer on the payroll was a reasonable expenditure.
That someone, in all likelihood, was not Winston Churchill. Churchill was a great many things, but a believer in astrology was not among them. What the Churchill government’s engagement with astrological intelligence reveals is something more interesting than credulity: a sophisticated awareness that what a leader believes shapes his decisions, and that understanding the beliefs of an adversary is itself a form of intelligence.
What Churchill Actually Thought
Churchill’s own views on the occult were consistent and dismissive. He did not consult astrologers. He did not read horoscopes. His private correspondence contains no indication that he gave any serious weight to astrological or predictive systems, and his public speeches were notable for their grounding in concrete strategic analysis rather than the kind of fatalistic determinism that astrology, at its worst, encourages.
He was, however, deeply interested in the inner workings of Hitler’s mind — arguably more interested in this than in any other single intelligence problem of the war. Churchill had studied Hitler’s character with something close to obsession since the early 1930s, when most British statesmen were still treating the Nazi leader as a manageable irritant. He read Mein Kampf carefully. He tracked the internal politics of the Reich. He understood, better than most of his contemporaries, that Hitler’s decision-making was not primarily strategic in the conventional sense but was driven by a worldview that combined grandiosity, racial ideology, and a mystical sense of personal destiny.
Astrology was part of that worldview. Not a dominant part, not the only part, but a real one — and Churchill’s intelligence apparatus took it seriously for exactly the reason a general takes an enemy’s religion seriously: not because the general shares the faith, but because the faith shapes the enemy’s behavior.
Karl Ernst Krafft and the Question of Nazi Astrology
The story of Hitler and astrology is more complicated than the popular version suggests. Hitler himself was privately skeptical of astrology, and Himmler, who had a genuine fascination with occult systems, was largely responsible for maintaining the Nazi state’s ambivalent relationship with astrological practitioners. The regime both used astrologers and periodically suppressed them — executing some, imprisoning others, employing a few. The relationship was transactional and unstable.
Krafft was the most prominent of those employed. A Swiss astrologer of genuine technical ability, he had predicted in October 1939 — in a letter to an acquaintance in the SS security service — that Hitler’s life would be in danger between November 7th and 10th. On November 8th, a bomb exploded in a Munich beer hall thirteen minutes after Hitler left it. Krafft’s prediction was remembered. He was brought to Berlin and set to work.
His actual influence on Hitler’s decisions was probably limited. Historians have found little evidence that astrological counsel translated directly into operational military choices. But his influence on the propaganda apparatus was real — he contributed to a series of fake Nostradamus prophecies that were distributed in occupied Europe to demoralize resistance — and his existence as a figure who had the ear of elements within the Nazi leadership was itself a fact that British intelligence needed to account for.
This is where Louis de Wohl enters the picture, and where Churchill’s government made a decision that reveals a great deal about how sophisticated actors actually think about divination.
The Counter-Astrology Operation
The British intelligence operation built around de Wohl was not, as it is sometimes characterized, a naive attempt to use astrology to predict Hitler’s moves. It was something more subtle: an attempt to model what Krafft was likely telling Hitler, so that British planners could anticipate how astrological counsel might color the Reich’s interpretation of events and timing.
This is a meaningful distinction. The British were not asking whether the stars actually influence human affairs. They were asking: if Hitler’s advisers believe they do, and if Krafft is generating specific predictions about auspicious and inauspicious periods, what does that imply about when Germany might be more or less likely to take certain actions?
This kind of reasoning — taking an adversary’s belief system seriously as a behavioral input, regardless of whether the analyst shares the belief — appears throughout serious intelligence work. The history of decision-makers and their use of oracles is long enough and consistent enough that any analyst who dismisses it entirely is missing something. The question is never whether the oracle is accurate. The question is whether the person consulting it adjusts their behavior based on its outputs, because behavioral adjustment has consequences that are entirely real.
De Wohl’s contribution to the British war effort was, in practice, modest. He produced astrological analyses that were read by a small number of officials, contributed to some propaganda material, and was eventually wound down as a source when his reliability and discretion came into question. He was a minor figure in a very large apparatus.
But the decision to run the operation at all tells us something about Churchill’s government that pure strategic rationalism would have dismissed. They understood that astrology was not operating as a truth-generating mechanism in the Nazi court. It was operating as a frame — a way of organizing uncertainty into a narrative that permitted decision and action. And frames, Churchill’s intelligence apparatus had concluded, were worth tracking even when their content was considered groundless.
The Deeper Intelligence Question
There is a moment in the Churchill papers, cited by historians of wartime intelligence, where a memo circulates asking whether de Wohl’s astrological analyses have any predictive value. The response from the officer who commissioned the operation is illuminating. He does not argue that they do. He argues that the question is beside the point. What matters, he writes, is whether we understand what Krafft is likely advising, because that understanding is part of understanding what Hitler believes about the near future — and what Hitler believes about the near future is a first-order intelligence problem.
This is sophisticated thinking about the relationship between belief and action that most discussions of astrology never reach. The officer was not defending astrology. He was defending the intelligence value of modeling an adversary’s belief system accurately, including the parts of that belief system a rational Western analyst would find absurd.
Churchill himself understood this principle in a broader sense, even if he never applied it specifically to astrological intelligence. One of his consistent strategic insights was that military planning had to account for the irrational as well as the rational — that an enemy who believed in his own destiny, who experienced setback as a temporary obstacle rather than a decisive signal, would behave differently than a purely strategic actor, and had to be planned for accordingly.
The astrology operation was a small, somewhat farcical expression of that larger principle. But the principle was sound.
What Churchill Did Consult
If not astrologers, what did Churchill consult when facing decisions under radical uncertainty — the condition that is, after all, the core situation that drives people toward oracular systems in the first place?
The historical record suggests several things. Churchill read history voraciously and treated it as a live source of pattern recognition — not prediction, but something like the I Ching’s concept of situational reading: here is a moment that resembles other moments, and understanding those other moments illuminates what this one requires. He consulted a small circle of trusted advisers who were selected partly for their willingness to disagree with him. He kept irregular hours, worked in bed, dictated in the bath, and maintained a relationship with his own intuition that was unusual among major statesmen of his era.
He also, documented in several memoir accounts from those close to him, had a pronounced sense of personal destiny — a conviction, held since youth, that he was being preserved for something significant. This is not astrology in any technical sense. But it is a form of fatalistic narrative about the self that functions, psychologically, in some of the same ways: it reduces the anxiety of radical uncertainty by providing a frame within which present suffering is intelligible as preparation for a future purpose.
Whether this belief was useful or harmful — whether it enabled his extraordinary persistence in 1940 or contributed to his post-war political failures — is a question historians have not settled. What is clear is that even a man who dismissed astrology with contempt was not immune to the underlying human need that astrology, in its more developed forms, attempts to address: the need to locate oneself in time, to understand a present moment as part of a larger pattern, to act under uncertainty without being paralyzed by it.
The Lesson That Outlasts the War
The Churchill-astrology story is usually told as a curiosity, a footnote to the larger drama of the war. Louis de Wohl gets a chapter in books about wartime intelligence oddities. Krafft gets a paragraph about the ironies of serving a regime that eventually imprisoned him. The operation gets filed under “interesting but inconclusive.”
What deserves more attention is the analytical posture that motivated the operation. Churchill’s government did not need to believe in astrology to conclude that astrology was relevant intelligence. They needed only to recognize that a leader who consulted an astrologer was receiving a structured input that shaped his understanding of the present and his expectations about the future — and that understanding that input was part of understanding that leader.
This is, in a different register, exactly what serious practitioners of any divination system have always argued about their own practice: not that the system is literally true, but that it produces structured engagement with uncertainty that would otherwise remain unexamined. The British intelligence officer who defended the de Wohl operation on those grounds was making the same point, from the outside, that any thoughtful practitioner would make from the inside.
The war ended. De Wohl retired to write Catholic historical novels. Krafft died in a concentration camp transport in 1945. Churchill lost the 1945 election before the Japanese surrender, was devastated by it, and eventually came to believe — in a way that sounded, to those who knew him, rather like fate — that it had been necessary.
The sky continued to move. People continued to read it.