Himmler’s absence from the victory celebrations in France was largely due to his continued ill-health. From the time of the first treatment he had been given by Felix Kersten, the masseur, he had experienced a relief that seemed magical to his strained nerves. Kersten was two years older than Himmler, and very different from him in temperament. After a hard life in his youth, he was determined to enjoy the wealth and position that his highly specialized and lucrative practice among the European aristocracy had brought him. According to his own account, he was born in the Baltic provinces, in Estonia, had studied agriculture in Holstein, managed a farm in Anhalt, served in the Finnish Army during the war against Russia in 1919, becoming as a result a Finnish citizen, and had then entered the Veteran Hospital of Helsinki suffering from rheumatic fever. It was here that his outstanding gift for massage had been discovered. He had determined to make healing through massage his career, labouring, he claimed, as a longshoreman and dishwasher in order to pay for his medical studies. He had first gone to Berlin in 1922; there he had studied at the University and then trained under the celebrated Chinese physician, Dr Ko. Kersten claimed that Dr Ko ‘declared he had never met anyone with hands like mine. He said my sense of touch was nothing short of miraculous.’ So great was the Chinese doctor’s confidence in Kersten that he allowed him to take over his practice in Berlin when he returned to China in 1925.
Kersten delighted in attending the distinguished patients who sought him out, and had established himself at The Hague at the personal invitation of Prince Henry of the Netherlands, who had become one of his patients in 1928. In 1934 he had bought his German estate of Hartzwalde some forty miles north of Berlin, intending eventually to return and become a ‘gentleman farmer’. In 1937 he had married a beautiful girl from Silesia who was barely half his age.
This was the man who on 10 March 1939 had first met Himmler, and had been more than surprised to find him a ‘narrow-chested, weak-chinned, spectacled man with an ingratiating smile’. Left for a few minutes among Himmler’s books, he had seen many volumes on German and medieval history, on Henry the Fowler and Genghis Khan, and on Mohammed and the Mohammedan faith. In his bedroom, he saw that Himmler was reading the Koran in a German translation, a book he kept constantly by him. Kersten, a man of the world, had thought him at the time ‘a pedant, a mystic, and bookish’. Moreover, ‘his hands were soft’.
At the first examination they discussed his symptoms, the immediate cause of which appeared to be ptomaine poisoning that had excited an old nervous complaint originating from severe typhoid fever contracted during the First World War. As a child, Kersten learned, Himmler had suffered from paratyphoid, and as a youth from dysentery and jaundice. Kersten turned back Himmler’s shirt and felt the sensitive area round his stomach. His touch, Himmler said, was ‘like balm’, and he urged Kersten to treat him. Kersten realized he could bring Himmler temporary relief, but never cure him.
Kersten was a man who combined a profound dedication to his unique skill as a masseur with a desire for wealth and social success. He was a fortunate man, whose great gift of healing brought him the gratitude of many people who were in a position to give him the kind of life the more worldly side of his nature enjoyed. His successful treatment of Rosterg, a German potash magnate, had enabled him to acquire his estate of Hartzwalde when Rosterg had given him 100,000 marks. It was at Rosterg’s earnest request that he had first agreed to examine Himmler in 1939.
Before the war began, Kersten had attended him both in Berlin and at Gmund and had grown familiar with the weak and opinionated nature of his patient. He knew that Himmler wanted war as much as Hitler, and he had already learnt how to argue with him on such subjects unscathed. Kersten was, however, notoriously without interest in politics; but he was, after all, not German, and therefore immune from German law and discipline. He could still have withdrawn from treating Himmler when war began, as his wife and friends begged him to do. But when he sought the advice of his contacts in the diplomatic corps at the Finnish Embassy in Berlin, they urged him to stay with Himmler, whose conversation after treatment, free from any sense of discretion, might well prove of the greatest value if what he revealed were passed on to the Embassy. Irmgard Kersten, who was German, liked best to live at Hartzwalde, and when Stalin overran Estonia, Kersten’s native land, and declared war on Finland, the country whose nationality he had taken, it was to Hartzwalde that Kersten brought his father, who was approaching ninety, to live out his life in Germany.
Himmler was not in a position to force Kersten to attend him until the spring of 1940, when he confined him to Hartzwalde and refused him a visa to return to his patients in Holland. A few days later it was Himmler who broke the news to him that Germany had invaded Holland; he had been refused his visa to protect him from the consequences of the invasion. Again the officials at the Finnish Embassy urged him to stay with Himmler rather than leave Germany. This contact with Himmler, they said, was work that could be of the greatest national importance.
On 15 May 1940 Kersten had received his first order to join Himmler’s armoured train and attend the Reichsführer as his official staff doctor. Here he had treated Brandt, Himmler’s secretary, as well as Himmler, and begun another association at headquarters of which he was later to make full use. But from the summer of 1940 until the autumn of 1943, when he managed to persuade Himmler to let him live in Stockholm, he was in effect at the Reichsführer’s complete disposal, though he treated such other patients as he could reach in Germany. Himmler demanded that he give up his home and contacts in The Hague. His services even became a point of barter between Ciano and Himmler, and Kersten won from Himmler the most unusual privilege of using the Reichsführer’s own postal channel for private correspondence, an arrangement supposed to be connected with his love affairs. In fact he used it for keeping in touch with his underground contacts in Holland.
It was in August 1940 that he obtained his first release for a man in a concentration camp — one of Rosterg’s servants who had been imprisoned solely for political reasons. Later, before leaving Holland, he had secured the release of one of his friends, an antiquarian called Bignell, on the strength of a telephone call to Himmler, who was at the time in urgent need of treatment. Kersten soon learned the technique of flattering Himmler and appealing to the right side of his vanity in these moments when, through the relief he could bring, he had the upper hand. The requests gradually became habitual; as Himmler put it himself: ‘Kersten massages a life out of me with every rub.’ Heydrich and the leaders of the S.S. grew jealous of this alien influence in Himmler’s private life. Only Kersten’s special place in Himmler’s favour spared him from interrogation and arrest by the Gestapo; Heydrich’s suspicions of him never relaxed.
The concentration camps remained directly under Himmler’s control. At the beginning of the war, according to Kogon, there were more than a hundred camps with their numerous satellites, though Dachau remained the symbol for all. Other large camps included Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück for women, and Mauthausen near Linz, in Austria. At the height of the war there were some thirty principal camps, some being nominally more rigorous than others. After the war had begun, new camps were set up in the occupied territories, such as Auschwitz and Lublin in Poland and Natzweiler in the Vosges, while others, such as Bergen-Belsen, were established in Germany. Kogon estimates that not less than a million people were held in the camps at any one time during the war, with an increasing flow both in and out as the exterminators developed the pace of their work.