The human brain is mysterious, and its complex cognitive powers are far from being understood. In the darkest years of the turbulent 20th century there lived a man who harnessed the mysterious powers of the brain like no other human being known to history.

He was a telepath, a mind reader, a psychic, a remote viewer, and a lucky survivor who avoided both the Holocaust and the death camps of Joseph Stalin. We may never know the full extent of his extraordinary abilities.

Wolf Grigorievich Messing was born in 1899 to a poor Jewish family in the tiny town of Gora-Kavaleriya near Warsaw, in what was then part of the Russian Empire. As a young child he suffered from “lunatism,” a disorder believed to be caused by the phases of the moon.

Messing was cured when his parents placed a tub of cold water by his bed, so he would step into it and wake up.

At the age of six Messing was sent to a religious school, where he distinguished himself by his devotion and his incredible ability to memorize prayers. Later he was enrolled in a yeshiva, but ran away after two years. Messing got on the first passenger train he could find, hid under a bench, and fell asleep. When the train conductor demanded his ticket, Messing picked a piece of paper off the floor and handed it to the man, looking into his eyes and willing that the man believe the scrap to be a genuine train ticket. He was successful, and arrived in Berlin with no further problems.

A Starving Medium

Messing was paid a pittance for menial work, and once fainted from hunger right on the street. He was taken to a morgue, where he was saved from his lethargy by the famous psychiatrist and neurologist Professor Abel. This man was the first to realize Messing’s incredible mental powers and his ability to control his body. Abel began to conduct mind-reading experiments with the boy.

Messing could become cataleptic (entering a trancelike or unresponsive state of consciousness) at will. Later he found out that he could foretell the future in this state. Meanwhile, young Wolf began to work in the Berlin Panopticum (a circus) and a variety theater.

The professor was amazed with results of his experiments. Messing immediately understood all mental commands and executed them with precision. He trained himself by going to the Berlin market to read the minds of the vendors.

Abel also taught the teenager to turn off his feelings of physical pain. Messing became a fakir, and to supplement his income (and send money to his impoverished family), he let people pierce his chest and neck with nails in front of an audience.

International Fame

When he turned 16, Messing began his first tour, traveling to the city of Vienna. But he was no longer a circus attraction. Messing had developed a program of psychological experiments, as he modestly refered to them. During these “experiments” the teenager would execute commands sent to him mentally, tell biographies of people he never met before, and find items hidden by the audience.

Messing’s growing fame attracted the attention of Albert Einstein. The great physicist invited the talented youth to his home, where Messing met Sigmund Freud. The psychologist immediately began his own mental experiments. He gave a mental command to young Wolf to get a pair of tweezers and pluck three hairs from Einstein’s fabulous mustache. The youth did as he was instructed, albeit with embarrassment. But Einstein told him to turn to him for assistance, should he ever need it.

Messing never met with Einstein again, but learned from Freud the art of concentration and self-hypnotism. Later in his life Messing met with other famous people, including Gandhi in 1927.

In 1917, Messing began a world tour, amazing people throughout the planet. His circus days were over. In 1921 he returned to Poland, now a free country, and served in the army. Later, the now-famous young man toured the world again, with a renowned medium as his manager. He had enemies among charlatans who preyed on naïve people and their beliefs; they tried to compromise the psychic, but he knew of their plans through his incredible powers of perception. Messing also solved crimes and found lost valuables.

Enemy of the Third Reich

In 1937 Wolf Messing incurred the wrath of the demented Adolf Hitler. While performing in a Warsaw theater, the telepath foretold Hitler’s demise if the Germans attacked Soviet Russia. Hitler was fascinated by mystical ideas, and reacted immediately and hysterically. The Nazis put a price of 200,000 Reichsmarks on Messing’s head.

It is not clear whether Hitler wanted to murder Messing or to harness his powers in captivity. (His other famed psychic, Hanussen, an influential confidant of the superstitious Führer, was murdered in a Nazi power struggle.) Messing had to hide for a long time to evade the Germans.

After 1939, Nazi-occupied Warsaw was plastered with leaflets offering a reward for Messing’s capture. On one occasion, he wandered carelessly on a busy city street where he was arrested and savagely beaten. At the police station, he collected all his mental strength and willed the guards to come to his cell. As they staggered inside, Messing left it, locked them in, and escaped. He left Warsaw through the sewer tunnels, hiding in a cart covered with hay, and made his way (traveling only at night, with trusted guides) to the Soviet Union. He crossed the Bug River in November 1939.

Stalin’s Cunning Fellow

Messing handed the Soviets a Nazi leaflet that promised a reward for his capture. A Jewish refugee with strange talents, he did not find work immediately. He was lucky not to be sent to the gulag concentration camps. Later, Messing was protected by Panteleymon Ponomarenko, the Communist leader of the Byelorussian Republic, and allowed to perform. Soon thereafter the NKVD (secret police) interrupted his performances and dispatched the psychic to Moscow to meet the formidable Soviet leader.

Stalin became quite interested in Messing. Though he was not a religious believer, he did consider paranormal abilities to be a possibility. Stalin tested the extraordinary refugee by ordering him to rob a bank.

Shortly thereafter, Messing, followed by a squad of police officers, walked into the Central Bank headquarters in Moscow with an order to take away 100,000 rubles. Walking up to the teller’s window, Messing handed him a blank sheet of paper and opened his briefcase. The teller was given a mental order, which he followed immediately and correctly, enthusiastically producing the required sum. Messing left the building with the money, but then immediately came back and gave the money back to the teller. The poor man looked at a blank piece of paper and the stacks of bills, and suffered a heart attack. Messing was happy to learn that the man survived.

Stalin was convinced. Fame came immediately; Messing became something of a superstar, and his success brought incredible income to the government. Messing’s assistant, Valentina Ivanovskaya, recalled that the medium met with Stalin, Beria, Voroshilov, Kalinin, and other Soviet leaders. Once Stalin told him, “What a cunning fellow you are, Messing!” to which the telepath replied in less-than-perfect Russian: “It is not I who is the cunning one, it is you who is truly cunning!”

Kalinin nervously pulled his sleeve, but Stalin was obviously in a good mood that day. Perhaps Messing read the dictator’s mind.

Stalin and Lavrenti Beria (head of the secret police) decided to test the hypnotist’s abilities again. They asked if he could exit the Kremlin without a pass if the guards were warned not to let him out. Messing replied that he could. And he did leave the building without any problems, although a secretary followed him. No one stopped the medium, and he waved to the Soviet leaders from the street. The guards swore that the man who walked out past them was none other Stalin himself.

When Messing walked back into the building (as he recalled in his interview to Leningradskaya Pravda newspaper in 1964), the watch commander sent a message in his mind: “You dirty Yid!” The telepath struck him on the cheek with his own thought. And the officer jumped back.

The psychic consulted both Stalin and the chief of the NKVD on a number of occasions. Other meetings with the top party and secret police officials took place, and Messing suffered much stress as a result.

Aiding the War Effort

Messing did not perform from 1943 until the end of the war, allegedly because the Soviet government sent him on a mission to Siberia where he was placed in charge of an espionage college. But this period of his life has not been covered in his memoirs, and remains a mystery.

Not long before the Nazis invaded Soviet Russia, Messing was invited to speak with top Red Army commanders. He predicted that there would be a massive war with Germany, but it would end between May 3 and 5, 1945, with a Soviet victory. Stalin was informed about this prediction, and when the war ended, the Soviet dictator sent a congratulatory telegram to Messing. He kept the telegram for years.

Messing donated his own money for the construction of two military aircraft during the war, and helped his adopted country in many other ways. His family perished in the Holocaust.

A recently aired Russian television special implied that the famous psychic met Stalin some 20 hours before the dictator’s death, and predicted that he would die soon. Messing initiated the meeting, as he wanted to intervene with Stalin on behalf of the doctors arrested in the infamous “Doctors’ Plot” (in which a circle of Jewish physicians were accused of conspiring to poison senior Soviet leaders, including the dictator; some historians allege the plot was orchestrated by Stalin to justify a new purge of the party and the police and to prepare the country for a war with the West). Stalin warned Messing that he would be sent to the gulag if he did not stop meddling. After his death, Stalin’s heirs quashed the accusations against the doctors and instead arrested and executed Beria; Messing could have predicted as much.

Some have noted that Stalin’s death in March 1953 coincided with the holiday of Purim, and the implication is that the Jewish psychic removed the evil tyrant. But Messing was no murderer, and he did not play a role in the blood sport of Soviet politics. Otherwise, he would not have lived a long life in his adopted country. Curiously, another Russian television film about Messing was aired right after the first one, and made it quite clear that no such meeting ever took place. It looked like someone in Russia was trying to blame Stalin’s death on the Jewish refugee who was given a haven in the USSR, yet there are those who protect Messing’s name and honor.

Soviet Medium

During the war, the famous telepath gave many performances in the Soviet military units, military hospitals, and defense plants. His demonstration of mysterious qualities of human psyche and brain irked Communist ideologues and their materialistic propaganda. Before every performance after 1950, a statement from the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences had to be read to the public announcing that Messing’s abilities to read others’ minds were based on “reflection of thoughts on motor human controls”—that is, he guessed the thoughts of others based on their involuntary and unconscious movements. Telepathy does not exist, proclaimed the so-called scientists, because Marxism-Leninism did not provide the guidelines as to its existence. A human thought cannot exist outside of the brain or the material world, and Messing’s experiments had nothing to do with telepathy—this was the official ideological line.

Messing did not like to perform in big cities because he did not like to attract too much attention from the Communist leaders. But the Soviet people loved Messing’s performances and filled the theaters whenever he was in town.

Once while performing in Kiev in the late 1940s, he was detained and brought to Moscow because Nikolay Bulganin, a top Soviet official at the time, had been ordered by Stalin to find a lost briefcase with top-secret documents. Messing was brought to the office of the individual who had lost the briefcase, where he concentrated his remote viewing abilities as he looked at the items in the room. Messing visualized a scene with a sloping riverbank, a small church, and a bridge across the river. There was a black item under the bridge. It was the briefcase.

Messing spoke with local geography experts, giving them the description in his mind, and they recognized two such locations in the vicinity of Moscow. Two trucks full of armed soldiers were dispatched, and a few hours later the briefcase with its precious contents was placed in front of the Soviet officials.

Messing begged Soviet scientists to study him and provide explanations for his unique abilities. But for the most part such scientists were closed-minded people, terrified of the official Communist party line, and they ignored his pleas. Some tests were carried out in the Institute of Psychiatry of the Academy of Medical Sciences, USSR. But the scientists there preferred not to discuss issues that could not be described by the ideomotor actions. The opportunity to study a new phenomenon was lost.

Wolf Messing believed in the existence of a special “field” responsible for telepathic abilities. He felt it should be discovered and researched, and that it could provide wonderful possibilities, just as the electromagnetic field did. He was also fascinated by hypnosis, and recalled that in his younger days in Poland he used hypnosis to cure mental illnesses in extreme cases.

On at least one occasion, Messing was able to predict a man’s fate by looking at his photograph. He was able to foretell the future (when he was forced to by circumstances) with accuracy. Messing wrote that foresight or clairvoyance does exist. We cannot explain such phenomena because we have yet to clearly understand the essence of time, its connection to space, and the interconnectedness between past, present, and future.

The legendary artist and famous tele­path worked until 1974. By then he was fluent in Russian, Polish, Hebrew and German languages. The KGB allegedly confiscated his personal diaries and notes immediately after his death. The documents remain classified.

Wolf Messing passed away in 1974, and was buried next to his wife at the Vostrya­kovsky cemetery of Moscow.