Nostradamus’s claimed birthplace in the rue Hoche, St-Rémy-de Provence, France/By The original uploader was PL at English Wikipedia. — Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons. Original: Self-made by me, Peter Lemesurier, 1997. For a higher-resolution version, contact me via my website., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1049409

The Prophet the Nazis Edited

Berlin, spring 1940. Karl Krafft sits at a desk in the Propaganda Ministry with a sixteenth-century book open in front of him. The verses run four lines each. The French is strange, with Latin and Greek pushed into it like stones into a pocket. He has one job. He must find the lines that say Germany wins.

He does not have to look hard.

The man and the book

Title page of Les Prophéties of Nostradamus (Lyon, 1568)./By Carlo Patrian — This image was scanned by sumaru from Carlo Patrian, Nostradamus Le Profezie, Roma, 1978. This frontispiece itself (published in 16th century) is in the public domain., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1658547

Michel de Nostredame was born in Provence in 1503. He trained as a physician, treated plague patients, and later Latinised his name to Nostradamus. He earned money publishing almanacs, which were cheap booklets of weather guesses and astrological forecasts. In 1555 he published Les Prophéties, a collection of rhyming four-line verses called quatrains, grouped in hundreds.

The verses are not clear. He wrote in Middle French and mixed in Latin, Greek and Provençal. He almost never gives a date and almost never names a person. Scholars who study the text full time disagree about what many lines mean, and about what many individual words mean.

That vagueness is the whole product. A prediction that names nothing cannot be wrong. It can only wait.