Felix Kersten

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Felix Kersten

Eduard Alexander Felix Kersten (born September 30, 1898 in Dorpat , Livonia Gouvernement , † April 16, 1960 in Hamm ) became known as the personal physician of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler . He is also said to have been responsible for rescuing numerous Jews and concentration camp inmates.

Life

Youth and early career

His parents were the estate manager Friedrich Kersten and his wife Olga nee Stübing. Felix Kersten had been with Irmgard, geb. Neuschäffer, married. The couple had three sons, one named Arno Kersten.

After attending the Progymnasium in Wenden , he studied agriculture from 1914. He joined in 1919 a Finnish-Estonian volunteers troupe called Pohjan Pojat (Sons of the North) that the independence of Estonia fought. On the intercession of the commander, Colonel Hans Kalm , Kersten received Finnish citizenship. At the time he developed rheumatoid arthritis . Treatment of this ailment prompted him to train as a massage therapist in Helsingfors after his recovery . Elsewhere, Kersten writes that he had tried massage therapy out of boredom .

Research and documents from the Finnish State Archives revealed that Kersten first appeared in Finland during this time in June 1919 and made use of the military passport of Edvard Alexander Kersten , who had served in the military since 1914. When Kersten applied to the Finnish government for recognition of his years of service since 1914, the internal controls of the Finnish army determined that the military passport belonged to another person and was being used incorrectly by Kersten, which Kersten admitted. Kersten had to leave the Finnish army. Before they could do further research, Kersten had left the country in the spring of 1922.

From 1923 to 1925 he continued his training in Berlin , most recently with the well-known Chinese doctor Dr. B. Ko. When Ko returned to China , Kersten was able to take over some of his patients and set up an international practice . One of his first aristocratic patients was Adolf Friedrich , the former Duke of Mecklenburg. He recommended him to his brother Hendrik , consort of the Queen of the Netherlands, where he became permanent health supervisor and advisor to the royal family. Kersten moved to the Netherlands in 1928 . The following year he published the book Manual Therapy and referred to himself as a "Finnish massage therapist". Only in 1934 did he move back to Germany, where he acquired the Hartzwalde estate 80 km north of Berlin .

Role in World War II

Through the mediation of August Diehn , Kersten was introduced to Himmler in 1939, who suffered from stomach cramps . He also treated Himmler during the Second World War and often spent long periods of time in Himmler's headquarters . One of his patients was the industrialist Friedrich Flick . In October 1942 Kersten went to Rome with Himmler, where Galeazzo Ciano and other leading figures of fascism became his patients. In the last phase of the war he played an important role as a mediator in the contacts that Himmler made with the Swedish government. In 1943 Kersten settled in Stockholm , where he continued his practice after the war.

The Swedish Committee of the World Jewish Congress had learned that Kersten had helped rescue several prisoners from German prisons and concentration camps on behalf of the Swedish Foreign Ministry . Gilel Storch , a Latvian businessman of Jewish faith, therefore contacted Kersten, who agreed to negotiate with Himmler to improve the situation of the Jews in the concentration camps. At the beginning of March 1945, Kersten brokered a meeting between a representative of the WJC and Himmler. These negotiations, which Himmler et al. a. led to Gut Hartzwalde with Norbert Masur , probably contributed to the fact that the Germans surrendered some concentration camps without a fight.

Outsiders in Sweden knew of Kersten's frequent trips to Germany and viewed him as a National Socialist . On June 13 or 14, 1945 Kersten received a call from Folke Bernadotte , which Kersten interpreted as meaning that as a Finnish citizen he was threatened with deportation to Finland, where he was awaiting Soviet imprisonment due to his ties to Himmler. In his need, he turned to the Dutch Baron van Nagell (the former ambassador of the Netherlands), who stood up for him with the Swedish Foreign Minister Christian Günther . The new Swedish government rejected Kersten's application for Swedish citizenship. Kersten then lived in the Netherlands.

After the war

After the Dutch public became aware of his person, his memoirs first appeared in Dutch ( Klerk en Beul ), and later in other languages. 1952 in German with the title Totenkopf und Treue. Heinrich Himmler without a uniform. From the diary sheets of the Finnish Medical Council Felix Kersten . They were viewed as an important historical source for the SS complex and especially for Himmler. According to the historian and journalist Loe de Jong , however, only Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus was convinced of the correctness of the memoirs, which differed in not insignificant points in the various translations.

The German Nazi historian Peter Longerich judges the reliability of the memoirs in his biography about Heinrich Himmler:

“Under the hands of the masseur, who, two years older than Himmler and of massive stature, had a calming charisma, Himmler generally relaxed, and Kersten used the treatments to build a relationship of trust with the Reichsführer. Whether Himmler actually, as Kersten claimed in his memoir, gave him deeper insights into his world of thought or whether Kersten thought up these conversations after the end of the war, remains to be seen; in any case, especially in the final phase of the war, Kersten should take over important services for Himmler in arranging foreign contacts "

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De Jong, who was working at the Riod ( Dutch Institute for War Documentation ) at the time, checked Kersten's “documents” around 1970 on his successful engagement against an alleged deportation plan of the National Socialists, which provided for the resettlement of the (depending on the version) complete Dutch population. He established that the plan and its evidence are a construct ("... pieces of text with a largely, if not entirely, phantasized content ...") that Kersten had been able to make plausible thanks to his convincing presentation and probably donations of money to Posthumus of the Dutch Commission of Historians . Thus the Orange Nassau Order awarded in 1950 was undeserved. De Jong's findings were hardly discussed in Holland for reasons of embarrassment.

On August 17, 1950, at the palace Palais Soestdijk , Netherlands, he received from the hand of Bernhard, the Prince of the Netherlands , the appointment of Grand Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau for his “deeds in the name of humanity” and “in gratitude for the historically unique services to Holland ”. He was also honored in Finland with the title of Medical Councilor and the appointment of Commander in the Order of the White Rose .

Kersten, who had acquired a small estate near Stockholm in the post-war years , had applied for Swedish citizenship as early as 1945 , which certain political circles in Sweden refused or delayed again and again because of Kersten's ambiguity and proximity to Himmler. A new approach and application by Kersten was rejected by the Stockholm Riksdag in 1952 after a debate . Kersten now went public with a letter from Count Bernadotte - who was murdered in 1948 and could no longer respond to the accusations - which Bernadotte allegedly wrote to Himmler in March 1945 and in which he discredited himself and the Swedish state to the utmost . He said that Sweden was as little interested in released Jews as Himmler himself, only the private citizen Kersten had brought the Jewish prisoners into conversation on his own. As an "encore" for Himmler, Bernadotte added a small sketch of London with worthwhile goals for the German V2 rockets. After questioning some witnesses, a commission again found the letter, which was only available as a copy of a copy, to be genuine despite its absurd content, and the Swedes made Kersten, this time more or less tacitly, their fellow citizens in 1953. It was not until 1978 that the English historian Gerald Fleming found out that the so-called "Bernadotte letter" was also a forgery from Kersten's hand. This research result, too, which remained uncontested, barely reached the public.

Kersten was able to devote himself to the development of an extensive international practice and published the book Die Heilkraft der Hand in 1958 . There is nothing to be read in it from his patient Himmler.

Felix Kersten died at the age of 61 in Hamm in North Rhine-Westphalia.

reception

  • In 1958 the WDR broadcast a feature of 60 min. about Felix Kersten
  • In 1998 Arto Koskinen released the film Who Was Felix Kersten ( Kuka oli Felix Kersten? ) In Finland .
  • On January 18, 1999 the WDR broadcast: Himmler's masseur and Sweden's extra tour; How Gilel Storch saved more than ten thousand Jews from the Nazis ( Olof Palme's diary entries made this film possible from archive material and recreated scenes from the game.)
  • In April 2013 Deutschlandfunk broadcast a feature about Himmler's masseur .

Honors

Works

The writings and especially the memoirs are partly not insignificantly different versions: (cf. criticism in De Jong )

  • Manual therapy. 1929
  • The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten . New York 1947 / English m- Introduction v. Konrad Heiden.
Skull and loyalty. Hamburg 1953, is a greatly expanded version of the "Kersten Memoirs".
The Kersten Memoirs 1940-1945. With an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper . 1957
  • Samtal med Himmler . Stockholm 1947.
  • Klerk en beul - Himmler van nabij . Amsterdam 1948.
  • The healing power of the hand. Ulm 1958

literature

  • Lena Einhorn: human trafficking under the swastika. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-608-94010-3 .
  • Arno Kersten, Emmanuel Amara: Felix Kersten. Le Dernier des Justes. P. Robin, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-35228-009-5 .
  • Joseph Kessel : Medical Councilor Kersten: The man with the magic hands. Nymphenburger, Munich 1961.
  • Norbert Masur: A Jew speaks to Himmler. translated by Hauke ​​Siemen. Stockholm 1945. In: Niklas Günther, Sönke Zankel (Ed.): Abrahams Enkel. Jews, Christians, Muslims and the Shoah. Steiner, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-515-08979-9 ( online ).
  • Baruch Nadel: Bernadotte Affaeren. Branner og Korch, Copenhagen 1970, ISBN 87-411-1712-3 .
  • Werner Neuss: murderer, mentor, philanthropist: Himmler's personal physician Felix Kersten - the solution to a riddle. 2nd Edition. Projekt-Verlag Cornelius, Halle 2013, ISBN 978-3-95486-413-3 .
  • Raymond Palmer: Felix Kersten and Count Bernadotte: A question of rescue. In: Journal of Contemporary History . Volume 29, Issue 1, 1994, pp. 39-51.
  • Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Louis de Jong : Two legends from the Third Reich. Source-critical studies (= series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Vol. 28). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-01680-1 .
  • John H. Waller: The Devil's Doctor: Felix Kersten and the Secret Plot to Turn Himmler Against Hitler , Wiley 2002

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kersten, Eduard Alexander Felix. BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon Digital.
  2. ↑ Felix Kersten with his wife and three sons , photo from Spiegel Online , accessed on April 21, 2014
  3. ↑ Archives post on Dradio culture 'hands-saving' - evidence of the son Arno Kersten, accessed on April 21, 2014
  4. ↑ The Order under the Skull, The History of the SS (20th continuation)
  5. ↑ Norbert Frei: The Flicks - the company, the family, the power. In: welt.de . September 18, 2009, accessed August 2, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Klerk en Beul - Himmler van nabij on archive.org, (Dutch); Retrieved May 3, 2014
  7. ↑ Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Louis de Jong: Two legends from the Third Reich. Source-critical studies (series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Vol. 28). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-01680-1 ; P. 81
  8. ↑ Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Louis de Jong: Two legends from the Third Reich. Source-critical studies (series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Vol. 28). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-01680-1 ; Pp. 119-125
  9. ^ Peter Longerich : Heinrich Himmler. Biography. Munich 2010, p. 394.
  10. ↑ Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Louis de Jong: Two legends from the Third Reich. Source-critical studies (series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Vol. 28). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-01680-1 ; P. 131
  11. ↑ Radio play feature by Peter Kaiser on Deutschlandfunk : Himmlers Masseur , accessed on April 12, 2013
  12. ↑ The Kersten Memoirs on Archive.org; Non-printable version of 'Daisy', 900 kB - accessed April 21, 2014.
  13. ↑ Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Louis de Jong: Two legends from the Third Reich. Source-critical studies (series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Vol. 28). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-01680-1
personal data
SURNAME Kersten, Felix
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kersten, Eduard Alexander Felix (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Heinrich Himmler's masseur
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Dorpat , Livonia Governorate
DATE OF DEATH April 16, 1960
Place of death Hamm