Kersten’s Lists: A Saviour in the Depths of Hell

It dawned on me that I was henceforth under his thumb. The vagaries of war had chained me to the man who, apart from Hitler, was considered to be the most powerful and the most dangerous of them all …Oskar Schindler is well known for having saved a thousand Jews from Nazi extermination during World War II. Yet Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler’s personal physician, remains almost unknown to this day. Only Kersten was able to relieve the Reichsführer of his crippling and chronic abdominal pains. Though despising the Nazis, he continued to work for Himmler throughout the war, using his position to pass intelligence to Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands, and demanding as payment from Himmler the liberation of victims sentenced to imprisonment or death. Drawing on unseen archive material from Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands and Israel, François Kersaudy guides us in the footsteps of a man who exploited the politics of hatred and fear within the Third Reich to save the lives of over a hundred thousand people, including sixty thousand Jews