Film 'I Is Another' debunks Himmler masseur Kersten myth
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- Felix Randau's film "I Is Another" has its world premiere at the Locarno film festival this week, starring Claes Bang as Felix Kersten, Martin Müller as Heinrich Himmler, and Valerie Pachner as a fictional investigative journalist who confronts Kersten on a train to Oslo where he hopes to collect a Nobel Prize.
- Randau's archival research in Berlin uncovered Kersten's SS membership card and a letter in which Kersten asked permission to wear the SS uniform in public — directly contradicting Kersten's postwar persona as an avowed anti-Nazi.
- Randau also found evidence that Kersten forged several self-flattering documents and dismisses Joseph Kessel's biography "The Man With the Miraculous Hands" — which credited Kersten with preventing the crematoria from "receiving their full quota of corpses" — as "full of lies."
- Kersten saved some lives, Randau concludes, but not thousands; the director argues the masseur began manipulating Himmler only after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, once Kersten realized "the ship was sinking" and needed to save his own reputation.
- Himmler called Kersten "a magic Buddha who cures everything" and indulged him because of his ability to relieve Himmler's excruciating intestinal spasms; Kersten was known as a ladies' man who reportedly lived in a ménage à trois with his wife and secretary.
- Randau links the film's themes to contemporary Germany, calling the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland "terrifying" and noting that the wartime generation is dying out — leaving "no more fundamental agreements about what is true and what is not true."
Why it matters: Backed by a newly surfaced SS membership card and evidence of document forgery, the film recasts one of the most-cited "savior" narratives of the Holocaust as narcissistic self-mythologizing — a revision that lands as Germany's far-right AfD rises and the last wartime eyewitness generation passes, sharpening the stakes around who gets to define historical truth.
