Film Casts Himmler's Masseur as Forger, Not Hero
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- "I Is Another" world premieres at the Locarno Film Festival, with Claes Bang playing Felix Kersten, the massage therapist to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, in a role the director says portrays him as "mercurial, charming but very slippery."
- Felix Randau discovered Kersten's SS membership card in a Berlin archive, along with a letter in which Kersten asked permission to wear the SS uniform in public — directly contradicting Kersten's postwar claim to be an avowed anti-Nazi.
- The film depicts Kersten as a document forger: Randau says he found "plentiful evidence" that Kersten fabricated papers presenting himself as a rescuer, including fake thank-you letters from supposed Nazi opponents — what the director calls "mutual whitewashing."
- Joseph Kessel's biography "The Man With the Miraculous Hands" reinforced the postwar myth that Kersten saved "entire populations" from gas chambers; Randau now dismisses the book as "full of lies."
- Randau's verdict: Kersten "definitely saved some people's lives but not thousands," and he concludes the masseur acted to protect his own reputation after the 1943 Stalingrad defeat convinced him "the ship was sinking."
- Himmler dubbed Kersten "a magic Buddha who cures everything" because his massages relieved the SS chief's excruciating intestinal spasms, and was "extremely indulgent" toward him as a result.
- Martin Müller, a German TV actor, landed the role of Himmler after several actors refused, telling Randau they feared the film would "provide a stage for evil."
Why it matters: Randau's archival findings — an SS card Kersten concealed, forged "thank you" letters, fake rescue documents — directly undermine a foundational postwar European myth about a Nazi-adjacent figure credited with saving thousands from the camps. The director explicitly connects the project to the present, citing the rise of Germany's far-right AfD and the disappearance of the last generation with living memory of WWII as the reason a fact-based reassessment matters now.
