Himmler's masseur

I guess it was inevitable, given the number of people involved, but it still kind of surprises me when new stories of intriguing people and what they did in World War 2 just keep turning up this long after it ended.  

The reason for this post is the movie discussed here in The Guardian:  

Himmler’s ‘anti-Nazi’ masseur: Claes Bang stars as SS chief’s ‘magic Buddha’

Felix Kersten, the personal therapist of Hitler’s principal enforcer, claimed to have saved countless lives from the Holocaust. A new feature film exposes him as a narcissist prone to myth-making 

Some extracts:

In I Is Another, which has its world premiere at the Locarno film festival this week, he is played by Danish actor Claes Bang (once a Dracula for the BBC), as a mercurial, charming but very slippery figure.

The myth the masseur promoted in his postwar memoirs was that he had used his influence over Himmler to save many people from being sent to the gas chambers.

A biography by French journalist Joseph Kessel, The Man With the Miraculous Hands, reinforced the idea that Kersten had helped “entire populations escape the terror of deportation” and that he “prevented the crematory ovens from receiving their full quota of corpses”. Randau now dismisses the book as “full of lies”.

In the film, Kersten is shown on a long train journey to Oslo where he hopes he will be awarded the Nobel prize. During the journey, he is accosted by a fictional investigative journalist Hedda Wohmann (Valerie Pachner) who strongly suspects he is liar and hopes to catch him out.

In preparation for the movie, Randau did extensive research of his own and discovered the masseur’s SS membership card in an archive in Berlin. Kersten had always concealed his SS membership but Randau found a letter in the archive in which the masseur asked if he was allowed to wear the SS uniform in public, undermining his later claims that he was an avowed anti-Nazi. There was also plentiful evidence that Kersten forged several of the documents which showed him in the best light.

However, when it comes to establishing whether or not Kersten really was spying on behalf of the Swedes, as many have claimed, he hit a dead end. For reasons no one could explain, all the files still remain classified (although Randau can’t help but notice how well connected the masseur was with Swedish government sources).

“I think he definitely saved some people’s lives but not thousands,” Randau concludes. “I am sure he did it only because he wanted to save his own reputation, maybe even his own life.

“He was a narcissist, and like all narcissists, his self-confidence was really weak. For him, it wasn’t enough to be a hero, he wanted to be a superhero and that was his mistake.”

The writer-director believes that after the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, Kersten realised that the ship was sinking. “He had to jump off somehow. At that point, he started to manipulate Himmler and there was this mutual whitewashing with other guys involved. A lot of letters and documents are definitely fake, letters saying things like, ‘thank you for being such an enemy of the Nazi system like I am’ and stuff like that.”

One fact was incontrovertible. Kersten, who died in 1960, was a brilliant masseur. He provided instant relief for Himmler from his excruciating intestinal spasms. The SS chief called him “a magic Buddha who cures everything” and was extremely indulgent toward him as a consequence. 

He seems to have shared a similar feature to Schindler in his private life:

Kersten was personable too. People tended to like him. He was, the director says, “a skirt chaser, a ladies’ man” and he is rumoured to have lived in a menage a trois with his wife and his secretary. 

 (Not that Schindler did the menage a trois, since if the movie was correct, there's no way his wife would have accepted it.)