Film Exposes Himmler's 'Anti-Nazi' Masseur as SS Member and Forger
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- "I Is Another" premieres at the Locarno film festival, with Danish actor Claes Bang (formerly the BBC's Dracula) playing Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler's personal masseur, portrayed as "mercurial, charming but very slippery"
- Director 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, undermining his postwar claim of being an "avowed anti-Nazi"
- Randau's research found evidence Kersten forged documents portraying himself favorably, while files on whether he spied for Sweden remain classified for unexplained reasons
- Randau's conclusion: Kersten "definitely saved some people's lives but not thousands" and acted out of self-preservation after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, calling him a narcissist whose "self-confidence was really weak"
- Himmler called Kersten "a magic Buddha who cures everything" and was extremely indulgent toward him because of the relief he provided from excruciating intestinal spasms
- Several actors turned down the role of Himmler because they didn't want to "provide a stage for evil"; Martin Müller ultimately played the SS chief as "still a human being" rather than a "grotesque comic book villain"
- Randau draws explicit parallels between the film's themes and present-day Germany's rise of the far-right AfD, arguing that with the wartime generation gone, "there are no more fundamental agreements about what is true and what is not true"
Why it matters: The film directly dismantles the heroic Kersten myth cemented by French journalist Joseph Kessel's 1960 biography "The Man With the Miraculous Hands," which Randau now dismisses as "full of lies" — and it lands at a moment when Germany's AfD is polling strongly and the last eyewitnesses to the war are dying out.
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