'To our reader friends:

Les Cahiers Astrologiques ceased to appear starting from the month of June 1940. The conditions then imposed upon the press did not allow us to continue our activity. Our voice was killed like that of every free publication.

Today we are retieing the thread broken by the Hitlerian yoke, although we have come out of it impoverished: two of our main collaborators, two giants of astrological thinking, Eug?ne Caslant and K.-E. Krafft, have disappeared. The first was extinguished on the 1st of December 1940; the second died at Buchenwald in January 1945, but we shall yet publish certain unedited texts by these two great astrologers.'

Two years ago, on the 8th January 1945, was dying at Buchenwald K.-E. Krafft, one of the most original astrologers of our time. To commemorate this sad anniversary, we shall publish in this number an unedited study in his pen, the memories of his friend and confidante Ad. Ferri?re, and the article of one of his co-detainees that appeared in 'La Tribune de Gen?ve', number 179.

There are few men to whom I owe so much, intellectually, as to my compatriot Karl Ernst Krafft, of B?le. If there is a man to whom is suited the appellation, so much misused, of genius, it is certainly to him that one may apply it....

This sparkling of thinking is often accompanied by pride. In Krafft, there was, beside the real feeling of his superiority, an honesty which allowed him to recognise his errors with an admirable simplicity. But [only] on condition of perceiving in his conversational companion the same sincerity. In relation to people of bias, or who boasted about their own superiority as 'men of science' or as 'possessors of the truth' - whatever it might be, religious, occult or material - he could be biting. That certainly earned him some bitter enmities....

If I am a little his father, Krafft soon leapt a hundred leagues ahead of the one who was his initiator into these two fields: philosophy, and the psychology of the unconscious. Expert in matters of living and dead languages, he wrote articles as well in English and in French as in German, his native language. It is thus that the 'genius of language' came equally to agglomerate natal typocosmie.

Why not keep the word 'astrology'? It's a matter of linguistics and history. This term is narrowly linked to a certain tradition which, since the era of Cladius Ptolemy, the author of the 'Tetrabiblos', across the arabic and Christian middle ages, has retained a thousand pearls of great value, but enveloped in a fossil coating which conceals its deep metaphysical truths and has led astray many of its seekers onto paths that end in impasses from the point of view of logic. Whence, it is not to be doubted, comes the 'instinctive distrust' experienced with regard to it by the man of science who is a disciple of Descartes and Spinoza, when he is not a follower of Hegel and Marx....

Krafft was nevertheless the first to recognise the value of astrology used by minds open to the conquests of psychology and critical philosophy. If therefore one grants to the word 'astrology' its etymological sense: logical knowledge of the influence of the stars upon man and nature; if one understands by this term a multi-millennial tradition of a tremendous clearsightedness and going back to some polar civilisation of which many traces subsist in the holy books of the oldest religions, an astrology of which that which we've known for the the past two millennia is barely the issue, being rather in a form bearing witness to the ignorance of authors with regard to the pure sources of the tradition, then yes, let us keep the word: astrology. Let us keep it among ourselves, for we know the meaning that we shall give it. But when one is dealing with a bundle of knowledge that borrows its sources from statistics, from psychoanalysis, from the universal symbolism of religions, without speaking of graphology and physiognomy, would it not be to lead into error the unforewarned public to pretend to be discussing astrology, when this same public understands by that something else altogether?

On 12 June 1941, Karl-Ernst Krafft was arrested and incarcerated at the all-too-famous prison of the Alexanderplatz.... The arrest of K.E. Krafft was not an isolated event, but rather the result of one of these massive clean-up operations, of which the services of the Gestapo were so fond. At the same time were arrested indeed in the whole of Germany, and in particular in the region of Berlin, a large number of intellectuals (or people considered as such) whose theories were considered by the aforesaid services to be pernicious, subversive, and incompatible with the Weltanschauung of National Socialism: astrologers, Bible students, homeopaths, diviners, and fortune-tellers. In short, people whose scientific or pseudo-scientific knowledge or religious convictions impelled them to consider the Reich of one thousand years with less indulgent and optimistic eyes than the official organs [of state]. It is thus in the course of one of these waves of cleanings which swept away so many others that Krafft was arrested. Right after his arrest, they confiscated from Krafft all his documents: as well as an ample library of forbidden books, he then had in his possession very numerous as-yet unpublished manuscripts. What has become of them?

A year to the day after his incarceration, on the 12th June 1942, Krafft was interned with another prisoner in an isolated room of the Propaganda Ministry, in Berlin, where they wanted to force them to draw up horoscopes. After six months of satisfactory (!) work, said one document that the two victims of the Gestapo had to sign, liberty would be granted them; at the slightest disobedience to the orders received, it would be the concentration camp. The statistician from B?le immediately showed himself to be tougher than they had desired him to be. He bluntly refused to draw up fairground horoscopes as they wanted to force him to do. For the eight months (until 12th February 1943) that this intellectual enslavement to which he refused to submit lasted, Krafft made appeal to justice, unable to resign himself to conceiving that it no longer existed in Germany. He was finally led away back into prison, at the Strafanstalt of the Lahrterstrasse, which, for being less well-known, was however no less terrible than the prison of the Alexanderplatz. It is above all there that they strove to ruin with bad treatments the health of our compatriot.

At the end of April, they transported him, weak and ill, to the immense camp of Sachenhausen. The name of this camp, one of the largest in Germany, perhaps does not rouse in the mind of the reader the same scenes of horror as those of Dachau or Buchenwald, which the rapid intervention of the Allies allowed to become known to the revolted world. However, it is a fact well-known to all the internees that, with the exception of Auschwitz, of Lublin (which was razed in 1943), of Neuengamme near Hamburg, and of Mauthausen in Austria (I shall not speak of Belsen, whose character as a camp for the sick reserves for it a separate place in the criminal chronicles), Sachsenhausen passed, especially in the time of the famous Rapportfuhrer, whom we called by the pseudonym of Gustav-of-Iron (der eiserne Gustave) and of the booted and whip-bearing brute who was the Lagerfuhrer S. S.-Sturmbannfuhrer Grunewald, for one of the toughest camps in Germany. Krafft had hardly been there for three or four weeks when he caught a double pneumonia from which he never recovered. A number like the others, number 65,621, nothing distinguished him from any old detainee, and he did not have the benefit of any advantage.

His wife, after taking some tiresome steps, obtained, in September 1944, permission to visit him. This favour, without being an everyday occurrence, was accorded fairly frequently to the relatives of prisoners. The meeting (the last between the spouses) took place in the presence of a functionary of the Sicherheitsdienst of the camp, Krafft having been brought on a stretcher: the perfect state for him. Madame Krafft, having shortly after had to leave Germany to return to Switzerland, entrusted a friend with continuing to send to Krafft some fortifying foods.

Alas! The parcel for Christmas and New Year's Day, put together with care by this generous woman, came back to her towards the 30th of December 1944, accompanied by this laconic mention: 'Please await new address'.

Then, the sad news of the death of our compatriot in the camp of Buchenwald, on the 8th January 1945, was sent to Madame Krafft by the political department, on the 13th April 1945. It seems therefore that Krafft, exhausted by long sufferings, was unable to survive the additional fatigue from Buchenwald, and died there shortly after his arrival. However, on the 16th April, the radio made known the names of the six or seven people finding themselves in the hands of the Anglo-Americans, as a result of the liberation of Buchenwald. Among them, a Kraft, former astrologer favoured by Hitler. Other people heard a new announcement that a Professor Kraft had been killed.

According to the words of several Swiss people, Radio London had announced, in 1940 already, that a certain Kraft was Hitler's astrologer. Michel Ryerson, Reuters correspondent, who speaks of the death of K.-E. Krafft at Buchenwald, could he clarify the question of knowing what Kraft, former astrologer of Hitler, was found in the hands of the English, and what Professor Kraft was assassinated? It will be necessary for us without a doubt, in this affair as in so many others, to wait yet some time before the light will be shed. We would not know what better to do, to end [this piece], than to quote the very words of Madame Krafft, whom we have questioned at length: 'For my part, I have done everything possible do obtain clarifications. Only one fact is certain, I can attest to it: Karl-Ernst Krafft has never been Hitler's Astrologer'.

Years later my friend Ellic Howe told me that he had been involved in the production of this pseudo-Zenit together with Sefton Delmer and the late Louis de Wohl.