Biography
Messing was born in the village of Góra Kalwaria, 25 km southeast of Warsaw, at a time when Poland was a territory of the Russian Empire. He claimed that his psychic abilities developed in his early life. By the time he was a teenager he was performing to the public. According to Messing, he was able to broadcast mental suggestions in order to alter people's perceptions. In the interview to the P. Oreshkin, Messing said:
... It's not mind-reading, it's, like the "reading of muscles" ... When human thinks hard about something, the brain cells transmit impulses to all muscles of the body. Their movements, invisible to the eye, I can easily feel. ... Often I'm performing mental tasks without direct contact with the inductor. The pointer to me here is the breathing frequency of inductor, the beating of his heart, voice timbre, his walking nature etc.
In 1915, whilst living in Germany, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud both tested the young Messing, although the results have not survived to the current day. However, Messings time in Germany was cut short in 1937 when Hitler put out a 200,000-mark reward to anyone who could kill the performer. Messing had previously predicted that if Hitler 'turned towards the East' then his war effort would fail.
Having fled Germany to Russia, Messing again became known to the authorities and Stalin took a personal interest in his supposed abilities. Messing was arrested and then interrogated by Stalin himself about the outcome of the war. After Messing predicted "tanks emblazoned with the Red Star racing down Berlin's Unter den Linden boulevard", Stalin decided to put Messing's abilities under scrutiny.
Stalin's first challenge to Messing was for him to perform a 'psychic bank robbery'. This Messing supposedly performed by handing a blank sheet of paper to the teller, whom he convinced to hand him 100,000 rubles by hypnosis. Two of Stalin's officials corroborated Messing's account of the event; including the claim that the teller fainted in disbelief once she realized the paper was blank.
Stalin then ordered the supposed psychic to gain entry into his country house using his abilities. Messing was able to gain entry, again he claimed by using hypnosis. The guards insisted that he had successfully claimed to be Lavrenti Beria.
Having gained Stalin's trust, Messing was given free rein to travel over the Soviet Union. It is said that his predictions heavily influenced Stalin's decision to sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Messing went on to perform and become a successful entertainer in Soviet Russia. However, he was still consulted by heads of state up until Nikita Khrushchev, whom he advised regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis. When Krushchev asked Messing what the outcome of the crisis would be, he was assured that it would not lead to world war three.
On 7 March 1944 Messing is said to have predicted Hitler's death date, but there exists no primary account of this supposed prediction.
He died in hospital, on November 8, 1974. He had successful surgery on the femoral and iliac arteries, but for some unknown reason death occurred in a couple of days, after renal failure and pulmonary edema. He was buried at a "Vostryakovskoe" cemetery in Moscow.
Read more about this topic: Wolf Messing
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