Five years ago, German writer-director Felix Randau was approached by French producers who wanted him to make a miniseries about Felix Kersten, the former massage therapist to Nazi SS head Heinrich Himmler.
When the producers first pitched the project, there was one sentence which leapt out. “They said that if Steven Spielberg had known about Felix Kersten, he would have shot a film about him, not about Oskar Schindler.” Who was this intriguing, largely overlooked figure, who claimed to have saved countless Jews and other concentration camp prisoners from certain death?
Randau went on to make his own movie about Kersten, but it certainly does not portray the Gestapo chief’s personal therapist as a hero. 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.
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.
This wasn’t an easy film to cast or finance, partly because the director didn’t want to portray Himmler as a grotesque comic book villain. The SS chief was “sadistic and completely nuts”, he says, but he was “still a human being”.
“Some actors turned it down because they said I would provide a stage for evil. I think that is really ridiculous because if you cancel evil, it will grow in the dark.” (Himmler was eventually played by Martin Müller, an unsung actor best known for his TV work.)
Ask Randau about the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and he says he finds it “terrifying”. “Of course, this is a period movie but I think it has a lot of connections to our present time. There are no more fundamental agreements about what is true and what is not true. This is one of our main problems – and that was the thing I was interested in.
“I think it’s because all the people who experienced war are dead now. My father died some months ago. He was 86 and his first memory was of him and his mother running with bombs falling down, streets burning and piles or corpses. But this generation doesn’t exist any more.”
Kersten doesn’t emerge well from the movie. For all his surface charm, he is eventually revealed as overbearing, thin-skinned, dishonest and prey to tantrums. Nonetheless, having spent so long researching and making the movie, Randau retains a certain sympathy for him.
“I think he did good things but for bad reasons. He was maybe bored with his life and so tried to stage it. But he was still deeply involved in all the shit.”
• I Is Another premieres at the Locarno film festival on 7 August
