153,000 Coins and the Police Sensitives of Western Germany
By Miriam Adler ·
A curated bibliography kept secret for decades maps the boundary between psychiatric theory and the operational use of 'sensitives' to solve crimes and gauge population susceptibility.
The human cost of parapsychological experimentation is usually measured in the psychic break of the subject or the wasted life of the 'sensitive' who believes they are a tool of the state. In the late 1950s, in the fractured landscape of Western Germany, that cost was paid in the currency of professional failure and the silent mapping of a population's subconscious.
What survives in the CIA's reading room is not a series of reports, but a curated digest of summaries from the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie—a specialized journal covering the fringes of the mind. The record serves as a bridge between the academic study of the impossible and the government's desire to weaponize it.
The Utility of Synchronicity
The record opens with a deep dive into the theoretical scaffolding of the paranormal. It cites Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology and the concept of archetypes, specifically his work on "synchronicity," which he describes as a "significant arrangement induced by the expectations of the experimenter based on archetypal conditions" (Document 110). To the public record, Jung was a titan of psychology; to the author of this file, Jung provided a scientific vocabulary for a phenomenon that could be operationalized.
There is a direct line from Jung's theory of acausal connection to the work of Wilhelm H.C. Tenhaeff, a contributor to parapsychology journals who focused on the operational utility of psychic faculties. Where Jung theorized, Tenhaeff applied. The record cites Tenhaeff's analysis of the "practical use of human beings" by the police (Document 116). Tenhaeff did not deal in archetypes; he dealt in results, noting that while success was rare, the failures were of "parapsychological interest" because they revealed how "affective factors often seem to divert the sensitives from the task in question."
This is where the record earns its irony. The government was not merely looking for a psychic who could find a missing person; it was studying why the psychic failed. By analyzing the gap between the "sensitive's" impression and the reality of the crime, the state wasn't just hunting criminals—it was mapping the failure points of the human mind under operational pressure.
The Allensbach Survey
The record moves from the individual sensitive to the mass population. It details a "Demoskopie"—a demographic survey—conducted in Allensbach, a town on the shores of Lake Constance, to determine the "attitudes of the adult population of Western Germany towards astrology."
The findings were precise. According to the record, about half of those interviewed denied a link between destiny and the stars, while 30% believed it to be a fact. Most tellingly, the record notes that for many, this belief was "derived exclusively from acquaintance with popularized 'horoscopes' of the newspapers." Only 7% knew their own individual horoscopes, yet 69% knew their Zodiac sign.
This is not a study in astronomy; it is a study in susceptibility. The record explicitly frames these findings as an "important problem of mental hygiene." When the government measures how many people believe in the stars, it is not doing so to advance the field of astrology. It is identifying the percentage of a population that is prone to believe in external, invisible forces guiding their lives.
The Mechanics of the Impossible
The bibliography catalogs a series of attempts to quantify the paranormal through sheer volume. It cites Sigurd Binski, a researcher at the Psychological Institute of Bonn University who conducted massive-scale probability tests. In one series, 153,000 coins were tossed—hundreds at a time—while subjects tried to "determine in advance the side onto which the coins fell through psychic influence" (Document 117). In another, they attempted to direct 26,200 balls to specific targets on a roulette wheel.
The results were largely unremarkable, sticking to the limits of chance, with one exception: "one subject went considerably beyond the conventional chance limits."
This pursuit of the outlier is the heartbeat of the file. The record also tracks the work of Detlev von Uslar, a researcher from Bodenfelde—a municipality in Lower Saxony situated on the Weser—who argued that telepathic images are not conscious facts but are "elaborated in a dreamlike way" (Document 113). To find the truth, Uslar argued, one must use the methods of dream psychology.
Adding a darker shade to this academic pursuit is the presence of Anton Neuhausler, a writer on precognition whose associations included Stille Hilfe, a relief organization for arrested and fugitive SS members. Neuhausler argued that the ability to foresee a future event—such as the crash of a house—does not mean the future is fixed, but rather that the sensitive sees an "image of the future event" which can be outruled by human freedom (Document 114). The connection between a researcher linked to the remnants of the SS and a CIA-curated bibliography on the "practical use" of humans suggests a continuity of interest in the fringes of human capability that survived the fall of the Third Reich.
The Desk's Reading
The pattern in this file suggests that the bibliography is not a collection of curiosities, but the "white" academic layer of a "black" budget operation. The document provides the intellectual scaffolding—synchronicity, precognition, the dreamlike structure of telepathy—while strictly withholding the command structure and the financial provenance of the research. If this file is shaped the way it looks, it is a proof-of-concept bibliography designed to provide scientific cover for an existing program. It lacks the names of actual assets or the specific operational failures that inevitably follow such high-risk experimentation because those names exist in a different, still-classified file.
The desk's reading is that the Allensbach survey was the most critical piece of intelligence in the record. By quantifying the population's belief in astrology and their susceptibility to "popularized horoscopes," the government was not practicing "mental hygiene." It was conducting a precursor to psychological warfare. The file identifies the target's susceptibility to superstition, but it conspicuously omits the strategy for weaponizing that belief through disinformation.
What a full release would show is the transition from these theoretical parapsychology papers to applied human intelligence (HUMINT) procedures. The gap between the Binski coin-tosses and the Tenhaeff police reports is where the actual training manuals reside. The still-withheld pages are protecting the bridge between the laboratory and the field—the moment the government stopped asking if a sensitive could be used and started documenting how to manipulate the "dreamlike structure" of their assertions to produce a desired intelligence outcome. The people of Western Germany and the "sensitives" of the 1950s were not subjects of science; they were the raw material for a new kind of cognitive mapping, the cost of which was a total, silent surrender of their mental privacy to an agency that viewed their beliefs as vulnerabilities to be exploited.