How West Midland witches and wizards helped bring down Hitler and the Nazis

When the chips were down, England’s Pagan force, with its West Midlands generals, answered MI6’s call to combat the sinister regime with spells.

And they had some success. They played a decisive part in luring Rudolf Hess, the Fuhrer’s deputy, a man jackboot deep in clairvoyance and astrology, to Scotland in a misguided attempt to broker peace.

This is the near unbelievable story of Britain’s secret sorcery war, waged by covert coven commandos. The swastika and pentagram, a Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Satanist saga worthy of John le Carre.

This is Operation Mistletoe, orchestrated by Worcestershire educated warlock Cecil Williamson, directed by Leamington’s leading occultist Aleister Crowley, aided by local men and women who believed in ancient religions and dark arts.

There was method in the secret service’s use of magic: a kind of Wicca warfare run from the “Witchcraft Research Centre”.

For them, it was a powerful propaganda tool. The plan was to unsettle, un-nerve and wrong foot Nazi top brass through the same mystical rites that influenced their vile actions.

And those ruling Germany were becoming increasingly addicted to the occult and primitive rituals.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler, in particular, was near obsessed by Satanism, Viking mythology and the super-natural. He had become reliant on the prophesies of occultist Karl Maria Wiligut who claimed to be a descendant of Norse god Thor.

Hitler’s Achilles’ heel were horoscopes – and British intelligence knew it. They planted fake horoscope predictions that played on the Fuhrer’s unlucky Taurus sign.

Mobile south coast radio stations pumped out bogus news, bogus horoscopes and Nostradamus predictions.

The Third Reich fired back with its own bogus astronomy. The phony star sign skirmish had begun.

Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels also used Nostradamus’ sometimes woolly visions. One favourite was: “The great em­pire, dismembered early, Will grow from the inside out, From a small country. In his lap the sceptre shall rest.”

The German Navy took things to another level. In 1942, they set up the “Pendulum Institute”, comprising astrologers, astronomers, clairvoyants and mathematicians, to discover why so many U-boats were suddenly being destroyed.

Rituals, rites, runes…it was all rubbish to MI6, but these were desperate times that called for desperate measures.

You didn’t have to believe in it, they reasoned, you just had to make the Germans believe you believe in it. At least the Germans who believed in it too.

Those they recruited, however, had no doubt the power to humble Hitler had been harnessed. They pointed out magical ceremonies had thwarted two previous invasions: the Spanish Armada, scattered by storms in 1588, and Napoleon’s plan to over-run this country in 1805. He had second thoughts.

In his 1954 book “Witchraft Today”, Gerald Gardner, civil servant and founder of the modern Wicca religion, said: "Witches did cast spells to stop Hitler landing after France fell.

"They met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler's brain: 'You cannot cross the sea' ... just as their great-grandfathers had done to Boney and their remoter forefathers had done to the Spanish Armada.”