A charlatan astrologer duped some of the most senior members of British Intelligence into believing that the secret to defeating Adolf Hitler lay in the stars, according to a declassified MI5 file released yesterday.

Louis de Wohl, a bogus Hungarian nobleman, convinced the intelligence community that Hitler was obsessed with astrology and made no decisions before consulting his horoscope.

Although MI5 gave warning that de Wohl was a “confidence trickster”, he managed to persuade senior figures in the intelligence services that Hitler relied on the forecasts of his personal astrologer, Karl Ernest Krafft. De Wohl assured them that he could replicate the Swiss stargazer’s predictions, the file, released by the National Archives at Kew, revealed.

So impressive was his apparent unique understanding of Hitler’s psychology that the Special Operations Executive (SOE) sent him to the United States in 1941 to persuade the Americans that the Führer’s dependence on his star sign — Taurus with Libra rising — made him vulnerable.

De Wohl became a key part of Churchill’s black propaganda attempt, masterminded by William Stephenson in America, to woo the United States into joining the Allies against Hitler before the Japanese made it inevitable by bombing Pearl Harbor.

He went on a lecture tour of the United States to try to convince the American public that horoscope-mad Hitler could be defeated. It proved a success. The New York Sun ran a report in which the astrologer forecast that Hitler was “doomed” and would be “done away with within a year”.

Many in the senior hierarchy at MI5 had no time for the predictions of the astrologer, who was described as someone with “effeminate inclinations”.

Dick White, later head of MI5 and then MI6, noted in March 1941, when asked to comment on the report that de Wohl had been appointed official astrologer to the War Office: “I don’t like having decisions . . . made by reference to the stars rather than MI5.”

However, the MI5 file indicates that de Wohl’s astrological magic impressed many leading figures during the early 1940s, especially Admiral John Godfrey, the director of Naval Intelligence, who found Hitler’s erratic strategies hard to understand, and Sir Charles Hambro of SOE, who thought that the astrologer was “a splendid chap” and would not hear a word against him.

De Wohl also worked for the Government’s Political Warfare Executive with the arch propagandists Bruce Lockhart and Sefton Delmer, a former Daily Express reporter. Even the Joint Intelligence Committee took his star musings into account.

However, Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge professor and intelligence historian who is writing the official history of MI5, said: “Actually, Hitler regarded astrology as complete nonsense, but the belief that he paid attention to horoscopes entered the corporate mind of the JIC.”

De Wohl, who liked to call himself “the modern Nostradamus”, had spent many years in Germany before moving to Britain as an “enemy alien” in 1935. He wrote an essay on German psychology which was regarded so highly that it was sent to the Vice-Chief of the General Staff. In return he wanted to be commissioned into the Highland Regiment as he loved to dress up in uniforms. Although this was frowned upon by MI5, he got his wish when SOE agreed that he should be a temporary captain in the Army.

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