What a miracle this is. Once the predator and the prey, they are now shaking hands in the vestibule of my estate.
For his part, Himmler was dressed in his full black SS officer’s uniform with an almost obscene display of military medals on his right chest. Mutual defiance, it appeared, so the two sides had each scored points.
Kersten glanced at Mazur and wondered if he was thinking that each gleaming medal on Himmler’s chest represented some act of brutality or depravity against his people in the name of the Reich.
Himmler apologized graciously that he had been detained by a birthday party for Hitler the night before. The group sat down at an elegant dining room table, each with a glass of Finnish vodka before them. Then followed the tinkling of cups and glasses and the triviality of small talk, which made the scene almost commonplace and even a facsimile of friendliness. Himmler and Mazur sat opposite each other, separated by dishes of jam, butter, and plates of brown rye bread and cakes.
Both understood that in the space between them hovered thousands, by now perhaps millions, of shadowy ghosts of emaciated skeletons and burned human flesh. How much of the apparition Himmler saw, Kersten couldn’t tell. But as he looked at Mazur, he saw a man who was most acutely aware of their presence. In his work, Mazur had followed every occasion of the horrors on the hundreds of killing fields. Everywhere it had been the same, the shattered glass, the yellow stars, the night raids, the forced marches through the snow, the endless convoys where the living were led to the showers and the dead were carried to the crematory ovens.
A wave of sudden despair washed over Kersten. The space between Himmler and Mazur seemed like a chasm too fraught with bitter hate and grisly death to be bridged.
Himmler, however, surprised them all by saying, “I promise to do all I can toward granting Herr Mazur’s requests. I want to bury the hatchet between Germans and the Jews. As Dr. Kersten knows, if I had had my own way, many things would have been done differently.”
The tension around the polite table diminished noticeably. Kersten felt himself slowly releasing the breath he had been holding in suspense. He wondered if Mazur, or he himself, could trust Himmler’s sincerity.
It appeared as though Himmler had decided that his opening statement would constitute the entirety of his remarks. He remained uncharacteristically silent during the negotiations. Even when asked his opinion, he demurred by saying, “Dr. Kersten speaks for me.” He looked beyond resigned.
“In the Name of Humanity” was signed first by Mazur, then Schellenberg, and then Kersten. Everyone noticed that Himmler was hanging back. Kersten recognized the fear on Himmler’s face. At the threshold of signing the document, Kersten knew the abject fear Himmler was experiencing. Even at this last minute, especially now, Himmler was terrified that he would be found out by Hitler somehow. He was paralyzed by the possibility not so much that he would be punished by death himself as that he was betraying the man to whom he had dedicated over twenty years of his life and work.
All eyes were on Himmler.
“Herr Reichsführer?” Kersten held out the pen to Himmler and gave a reassuring nod.
After yet another pause, slowly, cautiously as though the pen were an explosive device, Himmler took it into his hand. He looked again at Kersten, and then at Mazur. Mazur was looking down at the floor and didn’t return the glance. The large standing grandfather clock clicked the seconds that felt like minutes. Click. Click. Click. Himmler took a deep, extended breath. Finally, with a trembling hand, he signed the document.
There was an almost sacred silence immediately afterwards. The only sound was the crackling of the flames in the giant fireplace.
~~~
On the morning after the conclusion of the conclave, Kersten met Himmler outside in the driveway as Himmler was trying to elude the others and leave for Berlin before breakfast.
“I give you my word, Kersten, that I have intervened and canceled the Führer’s order that the concentration camps be blown up before the Allies arrive. I believe that after our luncheon several years ago with Kaltenbrunner, he is sufficiently sobered and humbled to pass on my canceling the Führer’s order down the line of command.”
Kersten and Schellenberg had taken steps in advance to guarantee that he would. They had strategized the evening before the formal signing that even if Himmler were to sign the document, Schellenberg and Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s private adjutant who had been so helpful to Kersten, would take necessary steps to ensure that Hitler’s orders would not be passed on, especially by Kaltenbrunner. In fact, Schellenberg had reported to the group after Himmler had departed that Himmler had already intervened after dinner the previous evening to halt the destruction of Buchenwald.
“Himmler ordered the Kommandant that if he had information that the Allies were within fifteen kilometers he should raise a white flag over the camp. When they arrive, he was to greet the Allied commander like a proud soldier and surrender his firearm.”
The others were visibly gratified by the news.
“I think I speak for the others that we are truly appreciative of your faithfulness to the document shown by your order concerning Buchenwald,” Kersten said to Himmler on the driveway beside Himmler’s limousine whose motor was already running.
“I know that you never really had faith in a German victory in this war, Kersten.”
“How could I have believed in a German victory? You yourself gave me insight into the way in which the Führer was imprudently and impulsively unleashing a vast conflict against the whole world. Wasn’t it an unequal conflict for Germany right from the start?”
“Ach, Kersten, we didn’t think so at the start. We have made serious mistakes. I always wanted what was best for Germany, but very often I had to act against my real convictions. But the Führer decreed that it be so and so. As a loyal soldier, I had to obey. Can a state really survive without obedience?”
Kersten looked at Himmler with a mixture of woe and compassion and empathy.
“How long I have to live now remains to be seen. What does it matter in any case? My life now has become meaningless. What will history say of me? Petty minds, bent of revenge, will hand down to posterity a perverted and false account of the great and good things we have accomplished. The finest elements of the German people will perish with the National Socialist Party.”
It was true again what had happened so many times before in Kersten’s complicated relationship with Himmler. No sooner had Kersten felt compassion and even admiration for Himmler one moment than Himmler would pollute the air with the familiar, tiresome Nazi blind arrogance the next.
Both knew the time for parting was at hand. Both were uncomfortable. The spring air was sweet and refreshingly welcome, yet for Himmler and Kersten, heavy with melancholy.
“Don’t you think it’s rather ironic, Kersten?” Himmler asked. “‘You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.’ Do you know that verse, Kersten? It’s in the fiftieth chapter of Exodus, as I recall. It’s Joseph talking to his brothers, who had sold him as a slave. But ironically, it’s precisely because Joseph was a slave in Egypt that the brothers and their father Jacob are saved from starvation.”
Kersten was fascinated. Was Himmler actually quoting Hebrew scripture? Down to the point of knowing the chapter and verse? Did Kersten think it was rather ironic, Himmler had asked. Very ironic, Kersten thought.
Kersten remembered that before he bowed down on his knees to the Baal of Nazism, the former altar boy Heinrich had been as devoted to Roman Catholicism as he was later to Hitler’s sacrilege. Some remnants of it, like the fiftieth chapter of Exodus, still remained buried in the hidden crevices of Himmler’s heart.
“I’m not entirely sure I know what you mean, Herr Reichsführer.”
“I was incensed beyond recognition when you told me about the attempt on your life, as you surely recall. It wasn’t difficult to trace the plot back to your old nemesis–our old nemesis—Kaltenbrunner. The despicable bastard meant to do you harm, o
f course. But the whole vile affair made me realize once again how precious you are to me. I rededicated myself to ensuring your safety and welfare—doing whatever it takes. Rather selfish of me, I know. Now my earnest dedication and selfishness has brought us to this juncture where I am actually conspiring with you against my Führer to grant freedom to thousands of Jews, from camps I myself had ordered to be built, of all things. Rather ironic, supremely so, wouldn’t you say? I meant it all for evil, for ridding the continent of Jews, but somehow it’s ending up for good...for you and the Jews, at least.” Himmler gave out a final acquiescent, self-deprecating laugh that was devoid of bitterness, but tinged, Kersten thought, with an ominous note of self-loathing and debility.
“Rather morally brave of you, nonetheless, Sir. And compassionate.”
“If the world knew, they’d find it ironic and unbelievable to think that Heinrich Himmler had a compassionate cell in his body.”
“But that body has a soul.”
At that, Himmler shook Kersten’s hand firmly, gratefully, and finally. He got in the car and then rolled down the rear window.
“Kersten, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the years in which you have given me the benefit of your medical skill. My last thoughts are of your family, which sacrificed so much for me. Farewell, my good friend.”
Himmler had tears in his eyes as he spoke. Kersten had never seen tears in Himmler’s eyes except when he was in acute physical pain.
The rear window rolled shut, and the car drove off.
Kersten stood in the drive a long time and watched Himmler’s vehicle grow smaller and smaller as it drove over the horizon toward Berlin. He contemplated his seven-year relationship with Himmler. No, he thought, Himmler was not the devil personified as he had assumed when he first entered the forbidding Chancellery, nor simply a monster. He was more than that, and less than that, too. Himmler had grown in Kersten’s mind into an absolutely fathomless mystery, an inscrutable paradox. Indeed, what a chaotic bundle of contradictions he was. So dogmatic and yet emotionally so insecure. Somewhere on the journey of his youth, the humble village schoolteacher had lost his way. The Roman Catholicism and idealism of his childhood upbringing had eroded as the foul, choking winds of the Great War blew over him and continued to descend on Germany in the decades following. But every now and then, as recently as that very day, in fact, remnants of that childhood idealism and decency would re-emerge from the remote untapped corners of his psyche where he had stashed them.
Kersten still wondered if the brutal suffering he had wrecked upon the Jews and others was simply a matter of a deep-seated hatred, or merely a product of his dogged devotion to conscientiousness, unquestioning loyalty, eagerness to please and methodical efficiency. Most would say “conscienceless efficiency,” Kersten supposed, but he was confident Himmler’s physical ailments were symptomatic of a fragile, tortured, split, pathetically disjointed conscience.
There will be simplistic minds and readers of history who regard evil as black and white, to be sure, and that the only solution is to eliminate evil completely somehow, as though that were humanly possible. The Allies and Russians may feel that by defeating Hitler they will have erased forever the kind of evil perpetrated by the Nazis from the face of the earth. “Never again!” people will shout. I truly wish it were so.
Whose hands are completely clean of the Jews’ blood, however? Or the blood of the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the mentally ill or retarded, the Poles, the Slavs, uncooperative Christian clergy and priests? What about the hands of the ordinary German husbands and fathers who served in the police battalions, conducting routine police duties in the cities and towns, hired to merely maintain the rule of civil law...until they were assigned by the SS to round up Jews and deliver them alive to the train stations? Are their hands clean of blood?
Or the hands of the farmwife who came to market in town and saw a haggard group of exhausted, broken, demoralized Jews being marched forcibly through the center of town to the waiting trucks at the town square? Did it never occur to them to wonder who these Jews were and where the trucks were taking them? Or didn’t they have the moral courage or imagination to wonder, and just went about making their quotidian purchases instead?
What about the hands of the engineer of the cattle train that was requisitioned by the SS to transport these Jews from the trucks to the camps? Did he and his fireman ask each other what the Jews in the cattle cars would do once they arrived at the work camp? Did they ever discuss what the working conditions were like at the camp, and how the Jews were treated by the guards? Or did they consider it none of their business?
Or the hands of the farmer out in his potato field. Did he not notice the unusual odor of smoke drifting downwind from the “work camp” between the neighboring village and his? Did he not know what...or who...was being burned? Did the men with whom he had a glass of beer or two at the local watering hole at the end of a work day ever mention to one another the odor, or the smoke? Did they ever acknowledge, even to themselves, their suspicions about what really went on in the camp?
Or mine? Are my hands clean? Did I not bring comfort and relief to Himmler that, in effect, extended his life? Perhaps Kaltenbrunner and Heydrich were right when they referred to me as “Himmler’s whore.” Isn’t that what I became? Someone who performs an act of providing physical relief, if not even pleasure, to Himmler in exchange for remuneration, unorthodox as that remuneration might have been? Does the worthy end of the rescue of Jews justify the deceptive, manipulative means?
If we don’t acknowledge to ourselves our own capacity for evil, won’t we, like Himmler, project it and attack it elsewhere?
Yet, no thoughtful person would claim that Himmler was a good man, either, Kersten concluded. At the start, or at some juncture in his life that remains unreachable now, didn’t Himmler have as much potential for good as for evil? Could he not have chosen to continue to shape young lives as a schoolteacher? No, he himself was not the devil incarnate. Rather, someone who somewhere, sometime, must have been lured into the lair of the Prince of Darkness itself, and become its monkish, dutiful acolyte.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Stockholm: May 25, 1945
At his new home in Sweden, Kersten had heard on Sveriges Radio on May Day the report of the suicide the day before of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun in the depths of the bunker deep underneath the Chancellery in Berlin. Göbbels remained true to character and took his devotion and loyalty to Hitler so far as to administer cyanide pills to his wife and children as well.
Irmgaard asked Felix, “He was close to the Danish border. You don’t think he was trying to get to Sweden, do you, to come and seek refuge with us?”
Felix lowered the newspaper so that his face was no longer hidden behind it. He said nothing, but just shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Back on April 27, a little more than a week before the ultimate Nazi capitulation, Hitler had discovered that with the assistance of the Swedish Red Cross and World Jewish Council, his “loyal Heinrich” had attempted to negotiate a confidential separate peace with the Allies. He had done so with the intention of freeing up all German resources to push back the rapidly approaching Soviets in the east. The Allies refused, telling Himmler that nothing short of a total, unconditional surrender by Germany would be acceptable.
Hitler had been devastated by Himmler’s attempted betrayal. He stripped Himmler of the leadership of the SS and dismissed him unceremoniously from the Nazi party. Hitler ordered Himmler’s immediate capture and arrest. But the crafty, resourceful ex-Reichsführer SS had managed to evade his Nazi pursuers and almost made it out of the country.
Evaded his pursuers, yes, reflected Kersten. But how does a man like Himmler cope with the sudden destruction of his dream and lifelong ambition and the suicide in disgrace of the one man who had given his life meaning and purpose? A fate worse than death, perhaps.
The day after his discovery and arrest by the B
ritish, Himmler had swallowed the capsule of potassium cyanide he always carried with him. He was to be buried that very day, May 25, in a secret unmarked place near Lüneberg.
EPILOGUE
Amsterdam: January 8, 1957
TO: The Norwegian Nobel Committee
Henrik Ibsens Gate 51
0255 Oslo, NORWAY
Dear esteemed members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
Please accept this missive as an official nomination for the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize of Doctor Felix Kersten, currently a citizen of Sweden, formerly a citizen of Finland, and former resident of Berlin, Germany, and Den Hague, The Netherlands.
I write to you as the Founder and Director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and as Professor of Economic History at Leiden University. I have been deputized to write to you by the Het Nederlandse Rode Kruis, the Dutch chapter of the International Red Cross, whose board of directors has voted unanimously to recommend Dr. Kersten for the Nobel Peace Prize.
We are joined in this nomination by the World Jewish Congress of New York, NY.
The Red Cross and World Jewish Congress have followed the outstanding career of Dr. Kersten, not only as a medical practitioner, but more importantly and germane to your work as the Nobel Committee, for his extraordinary accomplishments in helping save the lives of untold thousands of Jews during the Second World War. Some of our number, myself included, labored alongside Dr. Kersten in rescuing Jews in the Netherlands. He is held in particularly high regard in this country for intervening with the High Command of the German Reich to delay for several years the forceful deportation to Poland of Dutch citizens, Jewish and gentile, after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940.
Although not a Dutch citizen during his years in the Netherlands, Dr. Kersten served as personal therapist for the Royal Family, and maintained contact and provided financial and moral support to Her Royal Highness Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government-in-exile in Great Britain until the conclusion of the war.
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