Magic at War

The second part of this blog about Nivelli, a German Jewish magician, continues the story of his journey through The Holocaust, and how he used magic to survive in the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp...   Magic for survival   When Nivelli arrived at the  Auschwitz II-Birkenau  ‘family camp’ he was  tattooed wi th the number #A1676. In this inhumane and impersonal environment, the Nazi guards - and even the inmates themselves - referred to each other by their numbers; such was the degeneration of life there. But, among the several thousands Jews and other   untermensch  [Nazi term: sub-humans, such as Romani people and homosexuals] in the family camp, Nivelli had an identify beyond a number. “When the S.S.  [abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, Nazi paramilitary organisation]  found out that I was ‘Nivelli, the Magician’ whom many had seen in leading theatres throughout Germany, they sought me out and commanded that I entertain ...

Europe’s Jewish population in the 1930s numbered nine million. By the time World War Two ended in 1945, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime had murdered six million European Jews. They reduced many to ashes in extermination camps built specifically for the annihilation of Jewish people. The Nazis referred to the murder of Jews as ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’. Today, we call this genocide The Holocaust.    Herbert Lewin, a German Jew and magician, was one of those persecuted by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.    The story of his journey through The Holocaust, and how he used magic to survive, is both shocking and incredible…   Growing up in pre-war Germany   Born on 9 September 1906 in Berlin, Germany, Lewin became an amateur magician as a teenager. He favoured manipulation and stage tricks.   Lewin grew up during difficult times. Germany fought and lost World War One during his childhood. And it experienced an unprecedented period of hyperinfl...

During World War Two, Sydney Piddington was a prisoner-of-war (POW) in Singapore, where he developed a two-person telepathy act with fellow prisoner, Russell Braddon.   In the final part of this four-part article, we learn how the war ended for Piddington and how – along with his wife Lesley - he drew on his POW experiences to become one of the most famous mentalism acts of the Twentieth Century. End of the war In early 1945, Sydney Piddington and Russell Braddon’s telepathy demonstrations ended when Braddon – and most other prisoners in Changi – were sent out by the Japanese in groups of a hundred to various parts of Singapore to construct defences to defend the island from an Allied invasion. Piddington, doing invaluable service on Changi Jail’s secret radio was kept – under the pretext of illness and “completely unfit for all duties” – back in the camp.   On 6 August 1945, Piddington and his two colleagues operating the secret radio, learned of the atomic bo...