Hitler’s Destiny Matrix and the Prince Born the Same Day: What a Birth Date Can and Cannot Explain

21 October 202620 min read

Numerologists say a birth date is a verdict: it shows your talents, your illnesses, even a future tyrant. We ran Adolf Hitler’s date through the formula, and then found a boy born on the very same day, with exactly the same numbers, who lived an entirely different life. Below are the video and the full text version: Hitler’s life path number and “destiny matrix”, what really happened in his life, the clairvoyants and astrologers around the Nazi state, and what your own number can and cannot tell you.

A note before we begin: this is a historical analysis. We do not excuse or glorify Nazism. We look at how its rise became possible, so that it never happens again.

Can a birth date explain Hitler?

Numerology readings of Adolf Hitler are popular for a simple reason: they seem to fit. His life path number is linked with charisma and persuasion; his “destiny matrix” contains the Emperor, the Preacher, the Devil and the Wheel of Fortune. It reads like a portrait of a dictator. But on the very same day, 20 April 1889, a prince was born in Stockholm with exactly the same numbers, and he lived a quiet, secluded life and died young. The difference between them was not written in a date.

Hitler’s life path number, and how to work out yours

The life path number is the simplest calculation in numerology. Write out your full date of birth and add up every digit. For Hitler, born on 20 April 1889, that means 2 + 0 + 0 + 4 + 1 + 8 + 8 + 9 = 32. If the total has two digits, add them again: 3 + 2 = 5. (Some schools keep certain double numbers, such as 11 or 22, but 32 is not one of them.)

Try it with your own date and write the number down. At the end of this article we will come back to it and ask what it can honestly tell you.

Numerology books describe the five as the number of freedom, restlessness, charisma and a gift for persuasion. Keep the intermediate number, 32, in mind as well: it will turn up again in his story, in a way a numerologist would love.

Hitler’s “destiny matrix”

The system behind many of today’s viral readings is the destiny matrix, created in 2006 by the Russian author Natalia Ladini. It turns the numbers of a birth date into the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot and arranges them in a diagram. We will not go through the arithmetic here; what matters is the result.

• Day of birth: Arcanum 20, Judgement. Practitioners link it with ancestry, homeland and “awakening”, and in its negative form with rigidity and a readiness to condemn others.
• Month: Arcanum 4, the Emperor. Power, control and order; in the negative, tyranny.
• Year: Arcanum 8, Justice. Law, karma, cause and effect; in the negative, cruelty that a person justifies with their own idea of justice.
• Lower point: Arcanum 5, the Hierophant. Teacher, preacher, ideologue; in the negative, fanaticism and forcing one’s beliefs on others.
• Centre: Arcanum 10, the Wheel of Fortune. Dizzying rises and equally dizzying falls.
• “Karmic tail”: Arcanum 15, the Devil. Said to describe what a person carries over from past lives: temptation, manipulation, power over people.

There is even a “health map” that practitioners use to read the body’s weak points. We will not guess from it. Later in this article we will look at what his doctors actually recorded.

Put together, the Emperor, the Preacher, the Devil and the Wheel of Fortune sound like a ready-made description of a dictator. That is exactly why such readings attract millions of views. There is one problem with them, and we will come to it once we have seen what really happened.

Sacred Avatar also reads the 22 major arcana, but it is a different system with its own positions; our guide to the method explains how it works.

Childhood: a harsh father and a grieving mother

Adolf Hitler was born at about half past six in the evening in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town on the border with Germany. His father, Alois, had been born out of wedlock and for almost forty years used his mother’s surname, Schicklgruber, until in 1876 he took the name Hitler. He had worked his way up from poverty to become a customs official and was proud of it. At home he was strict and quick-tempered. Hitler later told his secretary that he had once counted thirty-two blows from his father without crying. Yes, 32 again.

A numerologist might stop here. A historian goes on: beating children was ordinary at the time, and the overwhelming majority of beaten boys did not become dictators.

His mother, Klara, was Alois’s third wife and twenty-three years younger than him. Four of her six children died young. Gustav and Ida died of diphtheria in the winter of 1887–88, before Adolf was born; his younger brother Otto died within days of his birth; and in 1900 five-year-old Edmund died of measles, when Adolf was ten.

At primary school Adolf did well. At secondary school he failed his classes, quarrelled with his teachers and left at sixteen without a certificate. His father wanted him to become a civil servant; the son wanted to be an artist. In the language of the arcana this is the Emperor and Judgement, a harsh father and the theme of family. But a strict father, children dying young and a poor provincial life describe the childhood of millions of people of that era.

His father died in 1903. In December 1907 his mother died of breast cancer. She was treated by a Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, who charged the family very little and later recalled that he had never seen anyone so crushed by grief as that young man. Thirty years later, when the Nazis took over Austria, Hitler ordered that Bloch be spared, and the doctor was able to emigrate. Such exceptions were vanishingly rare. The man who remembered the kindness of one Jew sent millions of others to their deaths.

Vienna: the failed artist

At eighteen Hitler went to Vienna to apply to the Academy of Fine Arts. He was rejected, and when he tried again a year later he was rejected again. By the end of 1909 his money had run out. The future dictator slept in a homeless shelter and then spent several years in a men’s hostel. He painted postcards and watercolours of the city, which an acquaintance sold for him, often to Jewish dealers. By various estimates he produced two to three thousand pictures in his lifetime.

Numerologists would call this the Wheel of Fortune at the bottom of its turn. What matters more is the city around him. Vienna’s mayor, Karl Lueger, was a populist who had built his career on attacking Jews, and newspapers and pamphlets were full of racial theories. Hitler later wrote that Vienna made him an antisemite. Historians doubt it: at the time he had Jewish acquaintances and Jewish customers, and the first document in which he sets out his hatred of Jews dates from September 1919. Between the failed artist and the preacher of hate lay one more event: the war.

The war that changed everything

In May 1913 Hitler moved to Munich, partly to avoid service in the Austro-Hungarian army. In August 1914, when the First World War began, he volunteered for a Bavarian regiment and served as a dispatch runner, carrying messages between headquarters, often under fire. In 1916 he was wounded in the thigh at the Somme. In August 1918 he received the Iron Cross First Class, which he wore for the rest of his life. The recommendation was written by his superior officer, Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann, a Jew, who later fled the Nazis to the United States and died in California under another name.

In October 1918, near Ypres, Hitler was caught in a gas attack and temporarily blinded. He learned of Germany’s surrender in a military hospital in Pasewalk and took it as a personal catastrophe. This was when the “stab in the back” myth took hold in Germany: the claim that the army had never been defeated in the field but had been betrayed at home by “enemies within”. Millions of Germans saw the Treaty of Versailles, with its lost territories and reparations, as a national humiliation.

A numerologist would see Arcanum 8 here: Justice, karma, retribution. The historian Thomas Weber, who studied the men of Hitler’s regiment, found something else. Hardly any of its veterans supported Hitler after the war; only about two per cent had joined the Nazi Party by 1933. The same trenches, the same gas, the same defeat, and different choices.

The numbers that really explain his rise

In the autumn of 1919 the army sent Hitler to keep an eye on a tiny Munich group, the German Workers’ Party. He came as an informer and stayed. His membership card carried the number 555, because the party had started counting at 501 to look bigger than it was. Later, for years, Hitler claimed he had been member number seven. He simply rewrote his own numbers.

What he discovered was his voice. He was a speaker who sensed a crowd’s fears and handed them back as simple answers: an enemy is to blame, and we know who it is. Contemporaries describe a phenomenal memory, a nose for other people’s weaknesses and a talent for propaganda. Intelligence without compassion is only a tool, and he chose what to aim it at. The matrix would call this Arcanum 5, the Hierophant, the preacher. But a preacher is made not by a date but by a crowd that wants to listen.

The swastika: an ancient sign of well-being

In 1920 the party renamed itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler, by his own account, designed its flag, using a sign that German nationalists were already using: the swastika. The Sanskrit word svastika means well-being or good fortune, and the symbol is still sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Meander ornaments with similar elements appear on mammoth-ivory objects from Mezin in Ukraine, more than fifteen thousand years old. The Nazis turned an ancient sign of good fortune into the emblem of the greatest evil, perhaps the saddest fate of any symbol in history.

In 1923 Hitler tried to seize power by force, and the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich failed. He was sentenced to five years but released after about nine months. In prison he dictated Mein Kampf and drew a conclusion: power had to be taken not by storm but through elections. From then on, the numbers that matter are economic and political, not numerological.

Hitler was not swept into office by a majority of voters. President Hindenburg appointed him on the advice of conservative politicians who were sure they could control him. One of them, Franz von Papen, boasted: “We’ve hired him.” Within a year and a half, after Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, Hitler was sole dictator.

Clairvoyants, astrologers and the Nazi state

Here is a moment that takes numerologists’ breath away. On 26 February 1933 the famous Berlin clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen held a séance at which his medium “saw” a great building in flames. The next evening the Reichstag, the German parliament, was on fire, and the Nazis used the fire to suspend civil liberties. A prophecy? Or did Hanussen simply know more than he should have? He moved among the leaders of the SA stormtroopers and lent them money. We will never know: about a month later, in March 1933, he was murdered, and his body was found weeks afterwards outside Berlin. Hanussen, born Hermann Steinschneider, was born in the same year as Hitler, 1889, and was of Jewish origin.

On 2 November 1939 the Swiss astrologer Karl Ernst Krafft wrote to an acquaintance who worked for Himmler that Hitler’s life would be in danger between 7 and 10 November. On the evening of 8 November a bomb exploded in a Munich beer hall. It had been built and planted, single-handed, by a carpenter named Georg Elser. Hitler had left the hall about thirteen minutes earlier; eight people were killed. Krafft was arrested and then put to work for Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, interpreting the quatrains of Nostradamus so that they “foretold” a German victory.

The British answered in kind. They took on their own astrologer, Louis de Wohl, who argued that Hitler planned his war by the stars, and a secret propaganda unit printed a fake German astrology magazine, Der Zenit, full of “predictions” meant to undermine German morale. Astrology became a weapon, not because it worked but because people believed in it. There is, incidentally, no reliable evidence that Hitler himself consulted astrologers.

On 10 May 1941 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the party, secretly flew to Scotland to negotiate peace. Accounts later emerged that an astrologer had suggested the date, with six planets in Taurus and a full moon; how true that is remains disputed. The regime’s response is better documented. From 9 June 1941 the Gestapo carried out the so-called “Action Hess”, arresting hundreds of astrologers, healers and occultists. Krafft was among them. He died in January 1945 on the way to the Buchenwald concentration camp. A regime that had used astrology for propaganda ended up banning it.

Where pseudoscience led

The darkest part of this story belongs to Heinrich Himmler. He believed in Aryan myths and in 1935 founded the Ahnenerbe, the “Ancestral Heritage”, a pseudo-scientific institute that searched for “proof” of racial superiority. Its 1938 expedition to Tibet measured the heads and faces of hundreds of local people. In 1943 the expedition’s anthropologist, Bruno Beger, selected prisoners in Auschwitz for a skeleton collection planned for the university in Strasbourg; 86 people, most of them Jews, were murdered to become “scientific” specimens. This is where pseudoscience leads when people with power believe in it.

And now the most important numbers in this story. The Holocaust took the lives of about six million Jews. The Nazi regime and its allies also murdered about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, about 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, millions of civilians in occupied Ukraine and Belarus, at least 250,000 Roma, and 250,000 to 300,000 people with disabilities. No arcana explain this. People did it: those who gave the orders, and the many thousands who carried them out.

The real “health map”: what his doctors recorded

By the end of the war Hitler was a sick man. From 1936 his personal physician, Theodor Morell, gave him injections almost daily, and Morell’s notes on “Patient A” include the strong opioid Eukodal. Newsreels show his left hand trembling; some doctors have suggested Parkinson’s disease, but it has never been proven. On 20 July 1944 a bomb planted by conspiring officers exploded at his headquarters. He survived with burst eardrums and splinters in his legs. That is the real health record: written not in arcana but in doctors’ notes.

On 29 April 1945, with Soviet troops already fighting for the centre of Berlin, he married Eva Braun. The next day, 30 April, they both took their own lives in the bunker. He was fifty-six. The Wheel of Fortune had turned full circle, and the price of that turn was tens of millions of lives.

The prince born on the same day

Now the problem we promised. On 20 April 1889, in the Royal Palace in Stockholm, Prince Erik was born, the youngest son of the future King Gustaf V of Sweden. Same date, so the same matrix down to the last digit: Judgement, the Emperor, Justice, the Hierophant, the Wheel of Fortune and a karmic tail with the Devil. Even the life path number is the same five. The same holds for any reading built on the date alone, Sacred Avatar’s included: everyone born on the same day shares one chart.

Who did this prince become? A quiet young man with epilepsy, who lived in seclusion away from the court and died of the Spanish flu in 1918, at twenty-nine. No power, no preaching, no war.

A second test. Four days before Hitler, on 16 April 1889, Charlie Chaplin was born in London, at least according to his own account, since no birth certificate has been found. His matrix has the same Emperor for the month and the same Arcanum 8 for the year. His childhood was even harder: poverty, the workhouse, a mother in a psychiatric hospital. He grew up to make the whole world laugh, and in 1940, in the middle of the war, he released The Great Dictator, a film that mocked Hitler. Two men with nearly identical numbers and the same little moustache ended up on opposite sides of humanity.

And a third. For years a “table of coincidences” has circulated online, claiming that Napoleon and Hitler lived the same life exactly 129 years apart. Check the dates and most of it falls apart.

Only the invasion of Russia truly lines up. The rest was made to fit.

Why the matrix sounds so accurate: the Barnum effect

So why does Hitler’s chart sound so convincing, and why does the description of your own number feel as if it was written about you? Psychologists call it the Barnum effect. In a classic 1949 experiment, the psychologist Bertram Forer gave his students what he said were personal assessments; in fact they all received the same text, put together from horoscopes. On average they rated it as an excellent description of themselves. We recognise ourselves, or someone else, in general statements that fit almost everyone.

Readings of famous people add a second trap. Every arcanum has a “positive” and a “negative” side, so after the fact almost any life can be fitted to it. We already know who Hitler became, and only then do we read his “destiny”. Shown the same chart without a name, nobody would guess a dictator; shown it with Prince Erik’s name, they would read sensitivity and seclusion into the very same cards.

So why did Hitler become Hitler?

Historians answer without mysticism. An ideology of hatred that he chose and preached for years. A lost war, national humiliation and economic collapse that made millions ready to listen. Propaganda. Politicians who believed they could use him. And millions of people who followed him or stayed silent. He was not programmed by his numbers. He made choices, and so did the people around him. That, more than any date, is the real answer to the question “why”: what people do with crisis, fear and hatred.

What your own number can and cannot tell you

Go back to the life path number you worked out at the start. It cannot tell you who you will become, any more than it told the difference between Hitler and Prince Erik. People born on the same day live entirely different lives. What a number can do is offer words and images to think with: a starting point for asking yourself where you feel free or restless, what you are drawn to, what you keep repeating. Used that way, as a mirror for reflection rather than a verdict, it hands the decisions back to you, which is where this story says they belong.

A full reading works the same way, with more to think about: 37 positions instead of a single number, from the karmic knot to the guardian angel. The sample report, calculated from Leonardo da Vinci’s birth date, shows what that looks like.

Questions

Sources

1. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Adolf Hitler: Early Years, 1889–1913. Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org
2. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Adolf Hitler and World War I, 1913–1919. Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org
3. University of Aberdeen (2010). Myth of a “heroic” Hitler whose First World War experience led him to power dispelled by new book. On Thomas Weber’s Hitler’s First War. abdn.ac.uk
4. The Swedish Royal Court. Prince Erik (1889–1918). kungahuset.se
5. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution. Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org
6. Lang, H.-J. Die Namen der Nummern: the identities and biographies of the 86 people murdered for the Strasbourg skeleton collection (in German). die-namen-der-nummern.de
7. Doyle, D. (2005). Adolf Hitler’s medical care. Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 35(1), 75–82. doi.org
8. Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123. doi.org

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