Locarno Film Festival, Portrays Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler's Personal Masseur, As a Narcissistic Myth-maker Rather Than the Hero He

Kersten, who died in 1960, asserted in postwar memoirs that he used his influence over the SS chief to save countless Jews and concentration camp prisoners from the gas chambers, a story reinforced by Joseph Kessel's biography "The Man With the Miraculous Hands, which Randau now dismisses as "full of lies. In the film, Danish actor Claes Bang plays Kersten, who is confronted on a train to Oslo by a fictional journalist, Hedda Wohmann (Valerie Pachner), who suspects he is a liar. Randau's research uncovered Kersten's SS membership card in a Berlin archive, along with a letter asking permission to wear the SS uniform in public, undermining his anti-Nazi claims, and evidence that he forged documents.

Swedish intelligence files on Kersten remain classified. Randau concludes, "I think he definitely saved some people's lives but not thousands, adding that Kersten acted to protect his own reputation and was a narcissist with weak self-confidence. After the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, Kersten began manipulating Himmler, and many letters and documents are likely fake. Kersten was undeniably a brilliant masseur who relieved Himmler's intestinal spasms, earning the nickname "a magic Buddha who cures everything.