THE MEMOIRS OF DOCTOR FELIX KERSTEN (288 pp.)—Translated by Ernst Morwitz—Doubleday ($3.50).
This is history told by a masseur who sometimes snooped. The late Heinrich Himmler believed that his frequent, gnawing stomach pains could be relieved by massage. He went to a masseur named Felix Kersten, who now, through Himmler's thoughts-while-being-rubbed, tells what the peace might have been had Germany won.
Claiming to have been always firmly anti-Nazi, Dr. Kersten is a Finnish citizen who now lives and practices in Sweden. He declares that he treated Himmler (also Ribbentrop, Hess, Ley, et al.) simply to protect his own family. He was also instrumental, he says, in sending thousands of victims of German concentration camps to safety into Switzerland and Sweden. Documents reproduced in his Memoirs, and an introduction by Biographer Konrad (Hitler) Heiden, indicate that his claims are true. So also may be his reports of tall Nazi ambitions. Samples:
¶ Once the war was won, German would be declared the official language of Europe. English and Russian would be outlawed promptly; Danish, Dutch, Polish, French, Norwegian and Swedish were to be tolerated for a decade.
¶ West of Germany, Hitler and Himmler intended to set up a new state called Burgundy, which would sprawl across parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. The capital city: either Ghent or Dijon. Its chancellor would be Léon Degrelle, Belgian Fascist leader.*
¶ The entire Dutch nation was to be herded east to Poland and settled along the Bug and Vistula rivers, as punishment for its pro-Allied attitude. All Dutch real estate and capital goods would be forfeited to the Reich and distributed among deserving SS men, who would then establish an "SS Province Holland."
¶ All the aristocrats in Europe were to be hanged. German princes & princesses would lead the way at a mass execution held in front of Berlin's Imperial Palace. The charges: sexual perversion, espionage, high treason.
Dr. Kersten says that some of these plans came out in Himmler's rubdown ruminations, but that he discovered others for himself by peeking through documents in SS headquarters. One day Himmler showed him a medical case history covering "26 typed sheets of paper" and asked Kersten if he would be willing to take the patient. Dr. Kersten says he refused, when he saw that the man's troubles included vertigo, insomnia, laryngeal polyps, latent tuberculosis, progressive paralysis, impotence and syphilis. The patient's name: Adolf Hitler.
*One of the biggest fish who got away. Belgium's arch-collaborator fled the country in the last month of the war, in a plane which crashed in Franco Spain. After he had been interned for 15 months, the Spanish Government announced that he had mysteriously escaped. He is now believed to be either in South America or still in Spain.