Karl Ernst Krafft, c.1932 Photo from Astrology & The Third Reich

As author Ellic Howe tells the story in Astrology & The Third Reich [Urania’s Children] (1984), “Krafft was a Swiss citizen and…did not move to Germany until 1937.” Clearly sailing against the tide, Karl Krafft effectively threw away his future that year, while on his own private journey to gain admiration and fame as the successor to his idol, statistical pioneer Paul Choisnard. Krafft’s early work repeated Choisnard’s “astral heredity” experiment (1913)—that factor repetitions occur in several generations’ charts within the same family. Later, he studied the role of “cosmic influences on human physiology,” (Influences cosmiques sur l’individu humain, 1923). His hypothesis that, “the birth constellation determines, once and for all, an individual’s physical constitution, also his predispositions and immunities…During the course of his life, successive planetary transits influence his physical development, either stimulating it, or diminishing it (by illness) or ending it (by death)” was restated with further mathematical arguments in 1939. He wished to identify “unexpected angular frequencies or equally unexpected groupings of planets in any small sector of the 360°.”  This work was analyzed by Gauquelin in 1955 and furthered in Birthtimes (1966), where he concurs with Jacques Sadoul (1971) in stating that the work of Choisnard and Krafft contained errors and was of little use, being ahead of its (computer era) time.

After finding that his massive astro-statistical studies were not acceptable as a Ph.D. thesis at any recognized university, Krafft worked briefly in publishing and retailing in Zürich. The period 1926–1930 saw him return to traditional natal astrology, mundane and economic prediction, and graphology, publishing his older statistical material as articles in the German astrological journals Die Astrologie and Sterne und Mensch and in two books, Influences solaires et lunaires sur la naissance humaine (1928) and Astro-physiologie (1928).

Krafft now entered the large and literate German pre-WWII astrological community as a serious writer. He published his Traité (1939) and abandoned statistical work, having relocated with his wife to Germany and his much-admired National Socialism in 1937.

His descent began with his own telegram to the German Head Office for State Security drawing attention to his prediction of a 1939 Hitler assassination attempt, which had turned out to be accurate. Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels took note, as did deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, and, when Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 on a “peace mission,” Krafft was arrested along with hundreds of other astrologers during “Aktion Hess.”  Wilhelm Wulff, later Reich Leader-SSHeinrich Himmler’s personal astrologer, says in Zodiac and Swastika (1973)that “...I had to swear I would no longer work as an astrologer. I was also watched from that moment on.” Hess’s own astrologer, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, was also imprisoned, following a pattern established years earlier with the murders of SA chief Ernst Röhm and his astrologer, Dr. Karl-Guenther Heimsoth, in 1934 (David Berlinski, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky, 2003). Incorrectly dubbed “Hitler’s pet astrologer” (that was probably Hess, and then Elsbeth Ebertin) by British propagandist astrologer Captain Louis de Wohl, who was a German refugee himself (see Bobrick, The Fated Sky, 2005), Krafft was mainly employed by the Nazis to compose predictive disinformation based on the Nostradamus prophecies until, no longer useful to his employers, he was sent to his fate as an unstable and uncontrollable practitioner of a “presumptive” activity.

His real importance lies in the object lesson his life provides for astrologers today. He became famous in spite of himself.

Karl Ernst Krafft died 8 January 1945, en route to Buchenwald concentration camp.

Wilhelm Wulff, one of the few astrologers to survive, says, “National Socialism was smashed and disappeared from the scene. Astrology in Germany, although decades behind the times, remained.”