Wolf Messing - Stalinův jasnovidec – Küppers Topsy (2007)

It took a long time for a book about Wolf Messing to appear in the Czech language. His prophecies, reportedly conveyed to J. V. Stalin, changed the course of events in the Second World War. He was undoubtedly the greatest clairvoyant phenomenon of his era, considered more credible than the supposed adviser to Hitler, Erik Jan Hanussen; in twentieth-century parapsychological literature, only the legendary Gérard Croiset can perhaps be compared with him. Born in Poland in 1899, Messing travelled extensively and worked in various circuses and variety shows, then highly popular, where his performances filled halls and amazed audiences. He even stayed in India, and in Vienna met Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, whom he visited at his famous apartment at Berggasse 19. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Messing fled to the Soviet Union, where his abilities attracted Stalin’s attention. At their first meeting, he clairvoyantly warned the dictator about his “ally”, Adolf Hitler. Stalin was shocked, since at the beginning of 1940 there was still nothing to suggest that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact might collapse. This book by Austrian author Topsy Küppers is a highly informed historical study of Messing’s life, accompanied in its Czech edition by several remarkable period photographs. It contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of the Second World War, as well as of clairvoyance and its significance in human history.