Wolf Messing: The Mysterious Mentalist

Imagine a man who could supposedly walk into a bank and rob it with nothing

but a blank piece of paper and a hypnotic stare. This was Wolf

Messing, the 20th century's most famous mentalist, a master of mind reading and

uncanny predictions. But how much of his legend is actually true? Messing claimed to

have met Einstein and Freud, and even outsmarted Stalin. Historically,

evidence is thin. Most of these meetings appear only in his memoirs, written decades later

under Soviet oversight. In the chaos of pre-war Europe and the rigid Soviet era,

people were desperate for a sense of the supernatural. Propaganda and mystery helped his story