A PERSONAL STORY: Im Letzten Leben (In My Last Life)

Since my late teenage years, I have been on an earnest quest to clearly understand who I am — more specifically, why I had the unusual interests, feelings, notions, and frustrations that I did.  Together, they all seemed incongruous with my nominal identity as the only child of modestly middle-class, religiously liberal, Jewish parents from New York City and rural Ontario, growing up in peaceful urban Toronto in Canada.  As a young adult, after graduating from a local university and a short career as a systems engineer, I decided to move to Denver, Colorado to attend law school and there begin a new profession.  My ultimate aim was either federal elective ofiice or a civilian career in national security.

Just over a year after graduating, exercising an additional long-time interest in paranormal phenomena, I began to meet and get readings from various psychical practitioners, primarily astrologers and psychics, and later a remarkable “trance channel” — a person through whom an unnamed discarnate sentient entity ostensibly spoke.  Being naturally inquisitive and sharp-minded, and seeking core truth, I measured all they told me about myself with what I already knew objectively — and regularly came away astounded.  My astonishments stemmed not just from what they said about my life and personality but also what was revealed about my deeper motivations, core traits, and the wellsprings of my various moods and predilections. 

One major disclosure in particular, given to me in April 1988 by a voluble and keenly insightful astrologer, Phyllis Firak, really “rocked my world.”  Without any prompting by or “frontloading” from me via spoken clues or cues, this lady informed me thusly:

“Looks like you popped [into this life] right out of a ‘mass death’ situation in other incarnations – some kind of a Gestapo chief or very intense militaristic lifetime (maybe World War II).  And what you’re learning about is self-forgiveness.  Incredible judgment there . . . .  [T]here’s a deeper core that goes back to a previous lifetime that deals with a fundamental betrayal of an authority to you.  Maybe a World War II lifetime; also, some Atlantean things where a lot of people were affected by decisions that you had made, and it was an incredible dilemma on your part between the honor of the position and the sabotage that was occurring.”

Later, she emphasized to me again, “You left that [previous] life with incredible self-judgment, feeling less than a maggot, and so a big part of what you are learning in this current life is self-forgiveness.” 

I was stunned.  Apart from immediate reactions of shock and revulsion, I instantly grasped that if these assertions were true, they would go a long way towards accounting for most, if not all, of the numerous anomalies I experienced as a child and teenager, to wit: (i) I had been fascinated by Nazi uniforms and German small arms (particularly the P-38 pistol and MP40 submachine gun), as well as submarines, Tiger tanks, and Stuka dive bombers, which I doodled regularly while attending school; (ii) I was very attracted to feature films about the Second World War era (from The Sound of Music to The Battle of the Bulge) and to speaking German, even though no one I knew spoke the language; and (iii) I was very interested in studying modern German history, beginning with the rise and reign of Otto von Bismarck in the 19^th century. 

But most discomfiting to me was my conscious ambivalence towards, and sometimes even palpable discomfort at, being Jewish.  I tended to gravitate towards the gentile kids at school, making friends with them more easily than the Jewish kids.  Too, I was consciously attracted more to blond looks than dark looks in both boys and girls, regardless of ethnicity; I myself was auburn-haired, blue–eyed, and not obviously ethnically Jewish.  And once, most strangely, when I was just 6 years old and walking on the playground heading to school, I wondered out of the blue what it would be like to commit suicide; thankfully, this notion was merely fleeting; what sparked it then remains a mystery to me to this day.  Later, at age 8, when my mother first told me about the Holocaust (in even tones) in response to questions I had about the war, it impacted mightily, causing me to cry uncontrollably.  I was especially pained that even young children had been murdered. with my emotional state being more intensified by the realization that one of those destroyed children could have been me.  A striking reaction, to be sure.

(Much later, once in high school, I eagerly chose to study German as well as the required French, and quickly developed an easy facility for the former language, scoring the highest grade in all my classes throughout my entire educational experience there. Apart from being able to readily memorize German’s nouns, their genders and plural forms, and its complex verb forms, the close sound-symbol congruence (one pronounces German the way it is written, according to uniform rules), my primarily visual learning style, and my capacity for mimicry combined to enable me to speak it with near-native pronunciation early on. Truly, I spoke better German after only two years of study than I did French after having studied it for five.)

After the astrologer’s gripping revelation, I became determined to try to validate it, if that were even possible.  My motivation led me to seek out “past-life regression therapy”, which at the time was not a technique widely practiced in conventional psychotherapy circles, at least in my state.  My first stop was a private session with a trance channel, Janet Laurel Pfister, in Denver with whom I had begun having very compelling and insightful semi-private sessions in November 1986. (Some of my experiences with “the Critters”, a collective of discarnate entities that appeared able to “read” me and others with astounding precision, will be detailed in a follow-on posting.) In that 2-hour session, which took place in the late spring of 1988, I was regressed to the last days of my most recent past life, with the aim of exploring my state of mind and emotions before I made my transition to the next realm (i.e., “died”). In short order, I was engaged in high catharsis, wracked with great pain at being in a concentration/extermination camp as an SS officer, agonizing over what I had been doing, participating in the ideological mass murder of men, women, and children and constant brutality there. Engulfed in a level of anguish unknown to me in my current life, I heard myself cry out internally, “But what else can I do?! I don’t know what to do!!” with great sobs. I did not hear myself answer these plaintive cries with words, but I somehow mentally knew that I decided to kill myself out of raw desperation. As emotionally riveting as the session was, I saw no images or “mental videos” nor received any cognitive information about who I was or what had happened before or afterwards. And so, my many substantive questions remained unanswered.

More promisingly, in early 1991 I met a cutting-edge clinical psychologist and regression-therapy trainer who agreed to regress me hypnotically as a subject in a training session for aspiring past-life therapists.  Paul Hansen, Ph.D. of Longmont, Colorado was then the official training director for the Association for Past-Life Research and Therapies (APRT). I attended his training session in Boulder, Colorado in April 1991.

I was a very good hypnotic subject, easily placed into trance.   In that session, on a cold black night in a Nazi concentration camp, I saw myself standing “inside the wire” clad in the warm greatcoat of an SS officer; in the near distance and also outside of the inmates’ barracks lit by floodlights, a trio of fellow Germans was huddling against the cold, smoking cigarettes and talking amongst themselves, paying me no mind; the ground beneath us all was laden with a shallow layer of snow.  Suddenly, I noticed an inmate on his knees tugging at my greatcoat, crying and babbling at me tearfully and fearfully in a language I did not know (it sounded like Polish).  I saw his visage clearly under his little cap: a shaved pate, pale blue eyes, a round face, chin stubble, and half circles under his eyes.  Under the rules of the camp that all knew, inmates were prohibited from making physical contact with any German unless ordered to do so; the penalty for any first infraction was instant execution.  Aware of my fellow guards standing nearby, who only seemed to fleetingly notice what was occurring, I did what my training and “duty” obligated me to do:  I drew my P-38 service pistol from its belt holster and shot the erring inmate point-blank, the bullet striking him in the head through his left eye. He died instantly.

I then saw another scene: This personal act of murder has shaken me apparently because I saw myself “looking the other way” when I spotted a young inmate stealing or hiding food, another camp offense punishable by death. I perceived that I was starting to have doubts about what I had been doing at the camp.

I then saw another scene: Viewing from above and looking down, I saw myself sitting on a military bunk, elbows on my knees with my head in my hands, sobbing, my pistol lying on the bunk to the right beside me. My jacket is off, and I am clad in gray riding-style pants, black boots, and a gray sweater. I am in emotional agony, not knowing what to do. I know that I cannot resign, for that would result in my being shot or sent to the Eastern Front for combat — and could bring shame (and perhaps worse) to my family. I also know that I cannot escape to the east because the Russians, upon capturing me and identifying me as being SS, would torture me and then kill me. Facing the inevitable, so riven with guilt, shame, and self-loathing, I saw myself pick up the P-38, place its muzzle in my mouth, and quickly pull the trigger, killing myself.  The bullet entered my head at the bottom of the skull.  

Earlier in that regression session, I had viewed episodes from other incarnations, seemingly unrelated to the above scenes; still, while none were so intensely lurid, all were of males in different cultures and eras — a coastal Viking raid as a young teenager and a Native American “trust fall” rite of passage as a chief’s son — all themed around developing masculine courage.  However, in the days following my first session, several discrete daytime memory flashes occurred that related only to the riveting life as a Nazi SS officer:

• I am in a full-length leather coat with a peaked military cap standing in the middle of a wide street (in a country not my own; Poland?) at a short distance while some men (Jews?) are being herded up and onto the bed of a truck at rifle-point by two soldiers.  I catch a glimpse of myself watching this scene: sandy hair, gray-green eyes, a young man with a thin, slightly angular nose. 

• I am sitting on a train, in black SS dress uniform with swastika armband (and my peaked cap off), watching the countryside roll by; I am emotionless. I see my face: sandy hair, gray-green eyes, a thin, slightly angular nose.

• I see an oval-framed photograph of my father in military uniform hanging on a wall in my family home; he wears red collar tabs that suggest an Imperial German Army officer, perhaps a general, presumably from the World War I era. He looks a lot like my father as a middle-aged man in my current life: spare dark hair combed back, pale blue eyes, with a thin, straight nose. His face betrays no emotion.

All of the above occurred while I was going about my mundane daily business, awake and calm, and not in any state of emotional concern or distress about anything. They seemed to be authentic afterthoughts to what had been revealed in my regression session.

I entered into conventional talk therapy to work through the startling, conflicting emotions that my remembrances evoked and stoked in me.  My paradigm immediately shifted to include the reality of reincarnation and deepened my drive to better understand the nature and purpose of all of earthly human experience, not just my own.  In the years following, I encountered two different women at separate social events who, without any verbal clues from me beforehand, communicated to me or a mutual acquaintance that their meeting me triggered their own past-life memories of being in Holocaust camps in their previous lives. 

Later still, in this present life, I met and had an enigmatic, emotionally tortuous romantic relationship with a woman whom I much later came to learn (via a psychic) had had a personal “encounter” with my former self in the camp, which both started and ended atrociously.  Her contemporary personal history had compelling echoes of that horrific time and place in terms of sexual and physical abuse, but unrelated to me and our time together as a couple. Our relationship in this life ended unhappily, and she passed away suddenly less than two years later in the midst of an even more challenging personal liaison for her with another man.  Last, just two years after my regression session, in 1993, I met and briefly befriended a Russian-born Jewish man on a trip to Israel, ten years my junior, who, I later realized, bore a striking facial resemblance to the man whom my previous persona had shot in the vision I had in my regression.  Although born in Moscow twenty years after the end of World War II, and his parents spared the direct horrors of the Holocaust while there, he was reluctant to watch modern films that re-enacted any aspect of that horrific atrocity.  Whether he too had unconscious memories from that time, I do not know.  We never discussed it, and for some reason I did not make the possible connection consciously until many years later.

On January 31, 2001, I went to see my physician for a vision complaint I had in my right eye.   LASIK surgery had been performed on me in Toronto in April of the previous year, which corrected my eyesight to virtually 20/20 in both eyes, a wonderful result that allowed me to dispense with the wearing of glasses.  However, during the early weeks of 2001, I began to experience some fuzziness of vision in my right eye, both close-up and at distance, with some occasional lateral distortion as well.  This was all very distressing, needless to say.  I recalled that, back in September 2000, I would awaken on several separate occasions in the morning with a very light soreness on my right temple, which would radiate around to the back of my head and then refer to some light soreness in my shoulders and middle back.  Not feeling any real discomfort at all due to this, and, attributing it to just daily stress or perhaps my sleeping posture, I did not seek medical help for it. 

On that late January morning, my physician was savvy enough to peer into my eyes and notice what appeared to be pressure on the optic nerve at the back of my right eyeball; he called it a “papilla edema.”  (Later, he related that, in his 30 years of looking into patients’ eyes medically, mine was the first viewing that had possibly signaled any serious problem.)  Calmly, he suggested that “checking my brain” was the “first order of business” and therefore scheduled me for a diagnostic MRI imaging session the very next morning.  I attended it and visited a neurosurgeon in the early afternoon of the same day to receive a prompt interpretation of the results.  

While I was in the waiting room there, I called my family doctor to check in; sounding very agitated, he informed me that a staff radiologist had already preliminarily reviewed my results and had seen a large tumor that “has to come out.”  My own physician was equally insistent, “It has to come out, so you need to schedule a surgery as soon as you can!”  Inexplicably, I felt quite nonchalant at hearing this news and offered him no resistance; I was actually a bit taken aback by his vehemence.  Why my nonchalance?  I really cannot say, because he had not opined on the nature of the tumor, whether it was benign or malignant.  So, whether this notification was a signal that I was facing a serious threat to my life, I had no idea or any intuition at that time. 

Soon I was visiting with the neurosurgeon, viewing the MRI films from the diagnostic session earlier that day.  He explained that my tumor was very large, occupying about a quarter of my cranium.  He opined that it was almost certainly a “meningioma”, a benign tumor, the second easiest to remove — with cranial surgery, of course.  By its size, he further asserted it had been in my head for between two and ten years — a slow grower — and perhaps even as long as twenty.  Why it was there and how it got there, he couldn’t say.  He claimed that no one in the medical community knew these answers (the “etiology”), but what was known is that many people are living their lives with tumors they are unaware of having.  Many of such are only discovered, in fact, once a given person dies and a postmortem, performed for other reasons. discloses it.          

My MRI images disclosed that my benign tumor was located in the right sphenoidal wing at the base of my skull; it appeared to be the size of a small, balled fist.  (After its removal, it would later be measured as being 6 cm x 8 cm x 6 cm, about the size of a hackysack ball.)  Clearly it needed to come out; otherwise, other, more noticeable symptoms would start to develop and then worsen over time as it continued to grow.  I was told I could expect the eventual onset of dizziness and nausea and, if it were not then attended to, past that point it would ultimately compress my brain and kill me.  Still feeling no fear or any resistance at all, I readily agreed to surgery, which took place three weeks later, on Wednesday, February 21st.  The neurosurgeon announced the prognosis to be very good, particularly given my otherwise excellent health and long habits of clean living.  

The very next day, I awoke early and went for a walk to consider this new development in my life.  An air of surrealism was now enveloping me, even though I felt no palpable fear and my body felt fine.  Was I in shock or just fatalistic?  I don’t know.  As I walked, it swiftly came to me that this tumor represented a little sack into which my mind had decided to deposit all the bad memories and outmoded beliefs that had been running in my subconscious mind for many years — owing to my most recent, morally challenging past life and the harshly negative self-image engendered by the severe judgments that I apparently had made about myself while in it. 

By 2001, I was well and truly convinced that reincarnation was real and likely a feature of every human being’s Earth experience.  But what made my belief even stronger, however, is what happened over the next ten days when I went on three separate walks in a local park with three different friends of mine, all of them female and consciously spiritual.  During our discrete times together, when I asked each for their opinion of my situation without first offering my own, they each, independently and spontaneously, voiced the same notion to me as I had first thought to myself!  And none of them knew at that time of my personal belief that I had lived before!           

In the surgery, it took my doctor a full 12 1/2 hours to excise the tumor from my cranium, using three consecutive surgical teams to assist him and four different extraction techniques of varying sophistication.  At the end, he had to make use of a dental mirror and a little handheld tool to scrape the last remnants of the tumor from inside my head.  This medical marathon was made necessary by the fact that my long-resident tumor was so well entangled, even encrusted, in the vasculature of my brain that it needed to be teased out very carefully so as not to harm or disrupt the surrounding blood vessels.  My doctor related all of this detail to me at my bedside at 8 AM the very next morning, a scant 7 1/2 hours after I had been wheeled into the intensive care unit for post-operative care.  Wrapping up, he noted that he felt confident that he had “gotten it all,” such that the tumor was totally removed from my skull.  By this time fully awake and lucid, I was roundly impressed by all of his relaxed demeanor, apparently indefatigable focus, and evidently amazing skill.     

Having undergone a preoperative procedure to try to stanch the bloodflow to the tumor before the actual cranial surgery began, I was under general anesthesia for a total of 16 hours.  Still, mirabile dictu, I emerged from my long slumber on Thursday morning totally awake, fully lucid, with all of my muscular strength and neurological functioning intact.  Possessed of a truly ravenous appetite too, my energy level was high.  Over the next four days, I slept but two hours each night and ate five full meals (plus snacks) for the first two days.  At no point did I ever feel any pain or experience headache, dizziness, nausea, or other overt discomfort.  My head, very thickly and largely bandaged, didn’t even begin to palpably swell from the surgery until late in the evening on the day after the event.  From then on, I managed the painless swelling with handheld cold packs until I was ready for sleep. 

After just two days of post-operative hospital stay, I announced – quite sincerely and without hubris — that I felt quite fine and was ready to go home.  My neurosurgeon conveyed to me that he was taking the weekend off and would like to examine me next on the following Monday morning, and so asked if I wouldn’t mind staying in the hospital till then.  I assented, knowing my insurance would fully cover my stay and that I would have an easy time of it, keeping daily company with my father and his wife, and various friends who would come to visit.  Reading, watching television, and some occasional journaling would round out the rest of my time.     

Upon Monday’s arrival, true to his word, my neurosurgeon returned to examine me and quickly pronounced me fit to leave the hospital.  While still fully bandaged and now quite chubby from the anti-seizure steroidal drugs I was taking, I nonetheless felt robust and, upon being discharged, walked unassisted to my car, got into it, and then drove my father and his wife back to their hotel to have lunch.  Just a week later, still bandaged and now looking bruised in the face from dried internally seeping blood, I went dancing in the evening for a couple of hours, my usual Wednesday-evening activity from before.  Gentle meditational dancing and singing, to be sure, but dancing nonetheless.  I knew I looked very odd, but I truly felt fine.     

I felt great gratitude for this experience overall — not just because of the blessedly easy, if lengthy, surgery and uneventful recovery but due to the transcendental spiritual validations that it provided me.  First, the “direct knowings” granted me ahead of the surgery about my tumor’s purpose, and the intuitive assurances I would be protected and emerge alive and in good health.  Again, these “knowings” has been corroborated by sensitive friends with whom I spent time on three separate occasions in the first many days after I had been diagnosed.  Mercifully, at no time did I ever experience any anger, dread or disabling fear, self-pity, or doubt about the positivity of the outcome.  With these clear awarenesses, my perspective on living shifted tangibly, causing me to see “a bigger picture” about my life’s significance and to become more consciously heartfelt and compassionate towards others in general.  

Second, most vitally, I became convinced of the power of positive healing prayer, as it turned out I had been the beneficiary of a lot of it, both from my personal circle of friends and from several organized healing prayer groups, some of whose loving support ahead of time had been solicited unbeknownst to me.  Apart from my wondrous result, what evidence was there that such prayer support had worked?  In the afternoon of the first day after my surgery, a young day nurse began to enter my room and stopped suddenly at the threshold.  Her eyes wide as saucers, she scanned the room and exclaimed, “There’s so much positive, loving energy in this room and all around you, it’s incredible!”  We had not met before, let alone talked about any notions of spirituality, and so her spontaneous outburst was quite inspiring — and confirmatory that something special had indeed been happening to and for me.   

Was all of this merely coincidental?  Perhaps, but two events occurred afterwards that dispelled that notion and suggested that my tumor truly had an antecedent provenance.  A year after its surgical removal, I related its reveal and location to another hypnotist with whom I had worked after my initial past-life session with the clinical psychologist in 1991.  When I mentioned its location as having been in my skull’s right sphenoidal wing, it was she who made the correlation with my recall in trance of where the fatal bullet had entered my head in my previous life.  That was a veritable Eureka! moment, for sure.   

Soon thereafter I had my own “explosive” epiphany:  When I was a boy of about age 10, my mother remarked to me that, strangely, I had a very small circle of gray hair in my otherwise then all light-brown head of hair, at the center back of my head!  So, if indeed my recalled earlier-life’s ending by a self-inflicted gunshot were true, this “new” fact from my present life would be consistent with a past-life rear-exit wound caused by a bullet fired into my head from the front.  While I never visualized an exit wound in my past-life recollections, I had learned from study in the years since that the past-lives research literature of several decades is replete with instances of objective correlation of certain, odd physical features (viz., port-wine-colored birthmarks and limb deformities) that people possess in their present lives with physical traumas they recall, via regression, having experienced in their past incarnations.  

But my own story was not yet done.  Several years later, in 2006, the vision in my right eye (having earlier returned to normal after my craniotomy in 2001) developed a new vertical-line distortion that impelled me once again to seek medical advice.   Upon examination, an abnormal membrane was found to have developed on the retina’s surface, which accounted for the visual distortion I was having.  I was referred to a retinal specialist, who examined my eye and determined that some surgery was needed to, at the least, address some capillary bleeding he perceived to be happening in it.   

While I was in surgery and under general anesthetic, however, the surgeon discovered that my retina’s abnormal membrane was highly vascularized.  Claiming later that he feared its blood vessels might grow into the retina proper and ruin my vision, he decided – without any prior notification and permission from me — to surgically peel away the membrane from my eye’s retina.  In so doing, the peel damaged the underlying retinal tissue, with the result that my right-eye vision, theretofore clear, became badly degraded: It lacked sufficient clarity and acuity for me to be able to read or drive with it.  In effect, my right eye was now disabled from any practical use, forever. 

So, of what transcendental significance might this medical mishap (and perhaps instance of malpractice) be?   During my initial past-life regression with the clinical psychologist, I had witnessed not only my own demise by my own hand but a dramatic preceding episode in that life that may have prompted it (or at least begun a process of “soul searching” that culminated in it).  This involved the murder of a imprisoned man by shooting him in the eye.

I do believe that this single event of direct, personal murder precipitated a crisis of conscience within the psyche of that German man, for whatever reason, which culminated in his later suicide.  Once his soul had “erupted” with guilt, I imagined (or perhaps recalled?) that neither his overt tendering of an official resignation to his superiors from his gruesome evil “duty” nor his making some clandestine escape to the enemy’s lines would have been a life-saving option for him. Why? For the seemingly self-evident reason that brutal execution would have been his almost-certain fate either way.  After all, I believe it to be well known that the Nazis viewed any abandonment of “sacred service” to the Fuehrer and Fatherland due to “unmanly weakness” just as coldly, remorselessly, and viciously as the Russians viewed all SS cadres per se because of what they were specially purposed to do against the enemy’s civilians — and in fact did, coldly, remorselessly, and viciously.  Thus and so, the notion of terminating one’s own self would actually be the least painful and burdensome, and certainly the quickest, way out for such a man, I daresay.   Because of the Germans’ general cultural odium towards suicide while in military service, the SS could be expected to cover up the cause of the man’s death so as not to disgrace the reputation of the man’s family gratuitously.   

Is my right eye’s badly compromised visual acuity truly a karmic result and consequence of one murder committed by a former personality of my soul in a prior incarnation?  There’s just no rigorously conclusive way to tell — there could be another reason not readily determinable but which might make greater sense based on some other calculus of spiritual evolution that I am unaware of.  The question must thus perforce remain open for the time being.                      

But to what can I attribute the extraordinary ease of the cranial surgery I underwent to excise the tumor and my following recovery, apart from the prayer support that was rendered me?  Had I by that time in fact performed sufficient psychical or psychological healing work, gained enough cognitive insight into my soul’s history, become enough of a “good person”, or just “burned off” enough bad karma for this existential event to be so successful and ill-effect-free?  Again, I have no objective way to tell, and no reason has manifested itself to date with any captivating clarity.  All I can report is that my mundane life has not changed in any notable way since 2001.

I have learned, at the very least, via the totality of these experiences that suicide is not a viable escape option from the many, even severe, challenges of human living.  Why? If my experience is any indicator, one is likely to return to physical life on Earth sooner and with the added karmic burden of one’s self-destruction — due perhaps to the culpable abrogation of some sacred soul contract made before one’s incarnation here.  Positively, I know clearly that my current life’s personal lessons include self-forgiveness, the release of relentless, harsh self-judgment, and heaps of compassion for both myself and others, much as I would expect the loving Almighty G-d of Judaism and Christianity to grant me at some point.  

If that is indeed true, then several generalized purposes of earthly life may have also been illuminated here:  To evolve personal conscious awareness of the need to work on healing one’s imperfections; to grow one’s capacity for both self-love and to honor, love, and treat others with loving kindness; and to develop a deep sensitivity to the impacts each of us has on others — intentional or not — by our individual actions or omissions to act.  These, in sum, may well be the Almighty’s greatest opportunity-gift to every soul in every incarnation, each time the choice is made to live a life in human form on the Earth.     

POSTSCRIPT

I have had several unusual encounters with women since April 1988 that seem to militate in favor of the notion that my most recent incarnation on Earth was as an SS Totenkopf division officer serving in a Nazi concentration/extermination camp during World War II.  In an effort to marshal all the possible evidence as comprehensively as possible, I recount them here, in chronological order, to the best of my memory. 

A. In 1989, I was introduced to Marilyn M. by a mutual female friend who was her roommate.  She was reputed to be a very good psychic medium, and I was anxious to have a reading with her to determine who I might possibly have been during World War II.  Because I was working as a lawyer at the time, I initially fancied that I might have been Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer prior to World War II and the head of the Government General of Poland after that nation had been conquered by the Nazis in September 1939; a defendant at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, he was convicted and hanged in 1946 for his crimes against humanity.  In our time together, on a walk around a nearby park, Marilyn disabused me of that notion, stating that I had “not made the history books” in that lifetime.  She said, however, that I had been a middle-grade Nazi officer in a camp and that many people had wanted me dead — inmates in the camp where I had “worked.” At some point, she said, something happened and I changed my behavior towards them — for example, by “looking the other way” at inmate infractions (such as returning with hidden food from work details outside the camp) that would normally be cause for harsh beatings or even execution.  Such behavior, she said, was noticed by the inmates and served to ameliorate their hatred towards me a little bit.

B. In 1990, I attended a psychical practice circle organized by a woman I knew and to whom I had earlier confided my supposition that I had been a Nazi officer in World War II.   Upon entering the circle before our session began, I sat down in the low-lit room beside a woman I had never met before, and we both nodded a quick greeting to each other.   Her facial features struck me as being unusual, looking almost “melted” in appearance.  Throughout the session that followed, however, we never spoke to one another.  One exercise that all of the dozen attendees performed that evening was to silently amble around the semi-darkened room looking at each other’s faces while soft music played, seeing if we could discern a past-life visage in the faces of anyone we encountered.  I had no such experience.  Chatting with the organizer (Autumn), the next day, however, she mentioned to me that after the circle had concluded the previous evening, the woman whom I had sat down beside at the start had come up to her and said:  “When he [meaning me] sat down beside me, I remembered that before they killed us, they shaved out heads.”   That was all — a cryptic memory apparently from another lifetime that was untethered to any other interaction we shared that evening, before or afterward.

C. In January 1994, I took a sabbatical from my employment and lived in Naples, Florida for nine months. Before I left, a friend of mine with psychic gifts, Jane R., told me that I would meet a woman there with whom I could have a relationship; she mentioned that this lady had two kids and was a bit overweight. When I replied that that did not sound appealing, she responded with, “But she’s rich!” I knew, though, that that quality alone would not move me to be with someone whose appearance and life circumstances did not comport with what I idealized in a mate. In June, as I was about to leave Naples for a short trip overseas, I did indeed meet a woman, Bonnie, who fit Jane’s description perfectly: Divorced with two kids, she was plain and overweight and yet the heiress to a Midwest papermill fortune. As a courtesy to me in wanting to get to know me, she let me stay overnight in her large home, in my own bedroom, before I left on my trip the next day. As she was also interested in paranormality, I shared with her what I had learned in my April 1988 astrological reading with Phyllis Firak. As we sat across from one another talking in her sunny living room the next morning, she paused for a while after hearing my story, looked at me without affect and said levelly: “I think you did a lot of raping.” Needless to say, I was stunned at such a terse declaration, delivered matter-of-factly and yet fraught with so much emotionality. I asked if there was anything else she “picked up” about this revelation, but she just gently shook her head.

When I returned from my trip overseas and found a new place to stay in Naples, I called Bonnie to thank her again for her hospitality before my departure. We chatted amiably, but neither of us was motivated to see one another again. I never encountered her again at the Unity church where we had first met, for the rest of my time in Naples.

D. In 1995, I met a woman, Deborah, on a flight that I had been predicted to meet four months earlier by two psychics, one a gifted astrologer, the other a gifted palmist.  One told me the exact week of the exact month upcoming that we would meet, which happened exactly as predicted: on the second last day of the second week in September of that year.   I was told that the attraction would be strong and mutual – for me it was quite irresistible in fact, as she was all of white but dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark–complected, and very shapely – and quite immediate, but that the relationship would be fraught with mutual illusion as well, and so would not last. (All of that came to pass as well.)  Still, the many synchronicities we quickly discovered upon talking soon after we met while flying on a commercial airliner from Salt Lake City to Denver quickly amplified our mutual attraction: She lived and worked in Toronto, Canada — the city I had been raised in; she worked for AT&T there – the selfsame company I then worked for in Denver; her father had served in the British Royal Navy during World War II – my father had served in the U.S. Navy during that same conflict; her mother had lost a brother in land combat in Europe fighting for Canada – my mother’s Canadian fiancé had perished on D-Day just before his landing on Juno beach in Normandy; her mother was reputedly psychic – as was my mother; and her parents and I shared the very same street address and apartment numbers at that time — 1210 and 301.       

Nonetheless, after a year together as a couple (once she had moved to Denver to be with me, six months after our meeting), we separated at my instigation, neither one of us having ever meaningfully connected with the other either emotionally or mentally.  Despite ongoing efforts to communicate with her, her mien towards me became catatonic, verbally mum and with a blank affect all of the time. (Only later did I piece together why she was like that, sourced in this life and likely the last one.) It was a very painful experience for us both, leaving me wondering why our romance had ever happened at all – so much initial attraction, yet so little true compatibility!  Yet even more grievously, only 19 months on she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, apparently triggered by the cumulative stresses of a subsequent relationship that she found to be mentally abusive.  Much later, in the summer of 2018, I had occasion to query another gifted psychic/ palmist, Jan Main Born, with whom I had consulted many years earlier, about the reason for our unhappy relationship. She related the following, without any “frontloading” of details by me: My late lover and I had met in the Nazi death camp in our last lifetimes — she as an inmate and I as a guarding officer.  Returning from a work detail outside the camp, I caught her trying to escape and then raped her.  Despite it being a rape in both fact and appearance, it was a passionate encounter for us both, and so I decided to “keep her around”, presumably for ever more bouts of sexual activity.  Ultimately, however, I “tired of her” and then had her “dispatched” – that is, murdered — again, presumably, without any remorse.  Thus and so, our unexpected and sudden encounter, mutual attraction, and subsequent relationship in this lifetime appears to have been a kind of karmic “return engagement” of some sort, likely for some spiritual purpose having to do with learning, balancing, releasing, or healing — or, all of the foregoing.  Regrettably, by my measuring, it did not go well at all, and I continue to carry remorse about it to this day, a quarter of a century later. 

Much later, in 2006, I saw a Dutch film titled Swarte Boek (Black Book) set in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II. The story focused on the experiences of a young Dutch Jewish woman whose family, together with other Jews, is betrayed and then massacred by SS troops while attempting to flee under cover of darkness via a canal boat. Jumping ship immediately once the shooting starts, she is the sole survivor of the mass murder and soon finds refuge with the Dutch Resistance. There she is asked to go undercover and use her sultry good looks and background as a cabaret singer to win the affections of a senior SS officer — even, if necessary, becoming sexually intimate with him. The purpose being to enable Dutch Resistance fighters to locate and liberate several of their members who had been captured while attempting to smuggle guns and were then being brutally interrogated to denounce their comrades. The woman is successful in her seduction very quickly and what follows is an intimate liaison that becomes as emotionally charged with empathy as it is steamy sexually — despite all of the agonizing trauma she had personally undergone at the hands of his savage cohorts only weeks before. Needless to say, watching this wrenching drama unfold was deeply poignant for me even though I had no conscious memory at that time of the gross similarities it shared with what was revealed to me in the summer of 2018. Sadly, as with my own apparent past-life experience, the film story ended rather sharply — albeit this time with the “better” SS officer being denounced upon Holland’s liberation by the now-freed Dutch, but then summarily dispatched after betrayal not by them but by his own superior officer! The Jewish woman survives the overall ordeal emotionally distraught, but then she redemptively goes on to have a happy Jewish married life with children in Israel. A sharply riveting tale it is, in many ways.

In 2020, a documentary was released spotlighting an actual love affair between a Slovakian Jewish woman imprisoned in Auschwitz and one of her SS overseers there. Titled Love It Was Not, the film consists of interviews and photographic re-enactments that detail the SS man’s infatuation with the attractive dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with a magnetic singing voice. Risking execution if found out, he protected her from being abused and murdered from the time of her arrival in the camp in late 1942 until liberation in 1945, and even — at her insistence — saved her sister (but, hauntingly, not the sister’s small child and baby) from the gas chambers just before the doors were closed. All three of them survived the war, the sisters immigrating to Israel and the SS officer presumably returning to his native Austria (although his interviewed daughter speaks with a South African accent). All were married after the war’s end and raised children, the sister starting a new family after the loss of her first. Equally poignant with all that had gone before, however, the Jewish woman, Helena Citron, in 1972 received a letter in German from the wife of Franz Wunsch, her loving SS protector, asking her to come to Austria as a “return favor” to testify in his defense at a war crimes trial in which he was the defendant. How to resolve an impossible dilemma: Will she help a man who brutalized so many people but saved her own life and that of her sister out of a personal love? She decides to attend the trial and tell “both the good and the bad” and let the case take its course with that additional evidence. How much her testimony helped determine the verdict is not known, but, like only three other Austrian SS officers tried for war crimes after the war in Austria, he was acquitted. He died in 2005, and Helena and her sister both died in 2007, all of natural causes it seems.

E. In 2004, I dated a woman, Gabi, who had been born in Germany to a German mother and a Greco-Syrian father; dark-eyed and dark-complected, she was nonetheless naturally blond.  Orphaned at 4 years old, she was adopted by a U.S. Army nurse in Germany and later raised Roman Catholic by her in New Jersey.  When I met her, she was not at all religious but was in fact seeking to explore metaphysical spirituality.  While we were dating, she expressed interest in attending a Jewish religious service, particularly one in Boulder, Colorado that was led by a very liberal, feminist, and otherwise avant garde lady rabbi.  That one experience with liberal Judaism did not sit well with her, and so she decided to explore further.  Without me attending, her explorations eventually led her to the Orthodox Jewish community in Denver, where she quickly felt that she had found her home – and not among the modern Orthodox but the traditional ones!   She ultimately decided to undergo an Orthodox conversion and, upon visiting Israel in 2005, soon decided in “make Aliyah” – that is, immigrate to Israel as a Jew – despite not speaking any Hebrew and leaving her two grown children and two grandchildren behind in America.  This she all did with great zeal, to a very religious town in the Galilee, and in 2012 she married a younger Orthodox immigrant from Poland with two small children – her fourth marriage.  Whether and to what I extent I may have played any role — karmic or otherwise — in this unique train of events is completely mysterious and thus opaque to me. 

F. In 2012, I met a blond woman, Kristen, ten years my senior and happily married, at a spiritual meetup group we both belonged to in a mountain suburb just west of Denver.  Born into a ranching family in rural Colorado, she was of German Catholic descent and very sensitive psychically, a gifted and very successful oil painter.  That same year, having only met once before and on friendly terms, I casually remarked to her that I believed I had lived before, during World War II.  Upon hearing that claim, she immediately became very teary-eyed and told me that she remembered my face:  I had “been there” when she had been gassed as a 3-year old Jewish child in the Nazi death camps during the war; she remembered no other details. Happily, she and her husband, Gary, have been good friends with me since that time, her tragic memory of a supposed prior “interaction” between us having been released.      

ADDENDUM

In my long efforts to understand, validate, and process the possible reality of a previous lifetime as a Nazi SS officer during World War II and then being reborn as a Jew, I have encountered a double brace of books by two authors that lend credence to such lurid notions.  All four books make for bracing reading, and each has served to bolster my realizations that, first, reincarnation is a genuine fact of human existence, and second, and most compellingly, my most recent, known past life has been the prime shaping — nay, driving — influence in my current incarnation. 

The first two books, written by Orthodox Rabbi Yonassan Gershom, detail encounters he had with people he regressed hypnotically while working in a Minnesota town as a psychotherapist.  These individuals, despite being raised Christian and appearing typically non-Jewish in their looks (viz., light-colored hair, skin, and/or eyes), all reported having strong affinities for one or more aspects of Jewish life (ethnicity, culture, religious ideals/ritual observances, music). When hypnotically regressed, they surprisingly all reported having been murdered as very young Jewish children in the Holocaust, believing their dispatch was caused because they possessed dark hair and brown eyes.  When I asked the rabbi in early 1996 via telephone if he had ever encountered anyone claiming the obverse situation (that is, an “Aryan” German reincarnating as a Jew), he answered in the negative.  Later that same year, I met and heard him speak about his work at a conference on past-life research and therapies but decided against relating my personal story to him. Because I understand that Orthodox Jews believe in the existence of a “Jewish soul”, such that Jews incarnate and reincarnate only as Jews each and every time they do, I chose to avoid any potentially contentious discussion.

Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust (1992)

From Ashes to Healing: Mystical Encounters with the Holocaust (1996)        

The second two books, written by then Ph.D. candidate and later history professor Bryan Mark Rigg, detail the true stories of Germans of mostly partial Jewish descent who clandestinely served in the armed forces of the Third Reich during World War II, always with conscious knowledge of their Jewish heritage and its liability for them and their kin; some, in fact, served with temporary official authorization given to them pending the successful (Nazi) outcome of the war.  Their service spanned all uniformed branches of the Wehrmacht, including one man who served in the Waffen SS, but no man profiled by the author ever claimed service in the SS Totenkopf division units that manned the apparatus of the concentration/extermination camps. 

Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (2002)

Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (2016)          

In a psychic reading I had in 2018 with famed psychic Kevin Ryerson, his channeled source-entity Atun Re suggested the likelihood that my earlier SS-officer personality was in fact of Jewish descent, either in whole or part. This has led me to believe that that factor may well have figured in that personality’s decision to commit the suicide that I saw occur in that lifetime via hypnotic regression in 1991.  Deep guilt can be a very powerful motivator, and that emotion may account in the largest part for the psychological stresses that induced that man to take his own life.  It is this later revelation that may also validate the assertion first made to me by an Orthodox rabbi in Israel in 1993 that there are “Jewish souls” and, as such, they only incarnate as Jewish persons on Earth.  But, as I posed before, who can know for sure?  

Finally, in January 2019, I had a first reading with a medium named Valerie Allen.  Among the many things she said, without any cueing or spoken clues from me, she inquired whether I had German ancestry; what the city of Munich (Germany) meant to me; and whether I was Jewish in this lifetime.  Once I had answered all these questions as accurately and succinctly as I could, she stated, “You came back [to life on Earth] to see how what you did to others, how it can affect people this time.  Have you learned the lessons? Those lessons are: First, you’re no better than the rest of the world. And, second, you need to take and honor people for who and what they are.  For example, don’t judge why street people are the way they are; you don’t know their stories.” She emphasized the importance to me of learning these specific precepts.  In summary, from all of the above experiences and my own analysis of my astrological natal horoscope, it appears that at least one primary purpose of my lifetime this time around — a mere 11 years after my self-initiated exit and release from my earlier one — is indeed one of karmic atonement, as a matter of my soul’s agreement, if not its absolute choice and decision.

For me now, there is no doubt about this whatsoever.

It has certainly felt like it was so — and for a very long time.