The Collaborators

One

Paradise Lost

1: Helsinki

After the war, when Felix Kersten was anxious to settle with his wife and three sons in Sweden as a Swedish citizen, his previous occupation as the private masseur of Heinrich Himmler was a problem. The Swedes, already a trifle defensive about their neutral position during the war, when business relations with Germany had been profitable and useful services had been rendered to the Third Reich, were not especially keen to bestow nationality upon a man who had been in the thick of the Nazi elite.

The swift publication in various languages of Kersten's memories and wartime notes, all heavily edited, must be read in this light. What makes his accounts especially confusing is that they are so different from one another. The Kersten Memoirs, first published in the United States in 1947, reads like a series of short essays about Himmler's character, and his disobliging views on such subjects as Jews and homosexuals. Much of the rest of the book is about Kersten's heroic interventions on behalf of political prisoners, the Dutch population, Scandinavians, and Jews. The Swedish translation is similar but gives conflicting accounts on various matters. The German edition omits Kersten's most dramatic feat (dramatic, but not necessarily true): how he persuaded Himmler (and by extension Hitler himself) not to carry out a plan to deport the entire Dutch population to Poland in 1941. Himmler (so Kersten tells us) was ready to abandon this grandiose and no doubt murderous project if only Kersten could relieve his intolerable stomach pain through the magic of his healing hands. The story is of course included in the Dutch edition of 1948, entitled Clerk and Butcher (Klerk en beul), edited and amended by a young man who had worked for the underground resistance press during the war-"good" in other words. This man, Joop den Uyl, would one day be the socialist prime minister of the Netherlands.

The picture of Kersten's childhood, as conveyed in the Dutch edition (the others don't go into his youth), is idyllic, almost like a fairy tale of a "good" man who loved people of all races and creeds. He was born in 1898, in Dorpat, a town in Livonia, part of Estonia, once ruled by the Swedish king, but then a province of the tsar's Russian empire. In the sixteenth century, Kersten's paternal ancestors had moved from Holland to Germany, where they lived as farmers until Kersten's grandfather Ferdinand was killed by an angry bull. His widow then moved to a huge baronial estate in Livonia, where her son, Friedrich Kersten, met a Russian woman named Olga Stubbing, whose family owned quite a lot of land. They flourished, and Olga gave birth to Felix, who was named after the French president Felix Faure by his godfather, the French ambassador in Petersburg. The family had done well.

Kersten describes the sleepy environment of his childhood as a kind of cosmopolitan paradise, a cultural crossroads combining the best of everything: Scandinavian individualism, Russian grandeur, and European humanism and enlightenment. German was the dominant language of his class, but Kersten's idea of Germany, he assures his readers, had nothing to do with Prussian militarism. Rather, it was the land of Goethe that was cherished, with its culture of "freedom, education, universality and love." His school friends were Baltic Germans, like himself, as well as Russians and Finns. They all got along fine. And the "Jewish problem" didn't exist at all. Kersten remembers the Jewish milliners and tinsmiths in his town with great fondness. He could still taste the delicious matzos handed out by Jewish friends during Passover. He often mused, later in life, why the whole of Europe could not be as peaceful as the lovely Livonian countryside of his childhood.

This rather pink-spectacled vision of his Baltic Garden of Eden leaves out certain things that are revealed in an admiring account of Kersten's life, entitled The Man with the Miraculous Hands (Les mains du miracle), by Joseph Kessel, himself a fascinating figure. He was a Jewish member of the French resistance during the war, and author of, among other books, Belle de Jour, which Luis Bu–uel made into one of his greatest films. Kessel, although skeptical at first, decided to believe Kersten's stories, many of which Kessel heard firsthand. It is not immediately clear why. Kessel cannot have been naive. Kersten must have appealed to his romantic imagination. He liked heroic tales. Apart from Belle de Jour, Kessel is also the author of one of the best books written about the French resistance during the war, Army of Shadows (L'armee des ombres). Unlike his later book on Kersten, this was meant to be an imaginary account based on true facts. It was published in London before the end of the war. Fiction came easily to this superb journalistic storyteller. Army of Shadows, too, was the source of a cinematic masterpiece, made in 1969 by Jean-Pierre Melville, the great director of French gangster pictures.

Kessel paints the Estonia of Kersten's youth as a Gogolesque outpost of the Russian empire, where the peasants would drop to their knees whenever families of Kersten's rank passed them on the road. Kersten, he says, used to a life of ease, would have been oblivious to the misery of the people around him. He also mentions that Kersten's mother, Olga, sang beautifully at charity parties, earning her the name of Livonian Nightingale. Her other talent was for massage. She is said to have had the power to cure people of all kinds of ailments with her expert hands, a gift inherited by her son.

The Livonian idyll came to a sudden end in the revolutionary era of the early twentieth century. Kersten writes that armies from different countries brought death and destruction to his native land, and that hatred was sown between the different peoples by their rulers. Estonia was an important base for the Russians during World War I, and Estonians first fought on the Russian side. Then, after the tsar's regime was toppled in 1917, Estonian nationalists attempted to establish an independent Republic of Estonia. They were opposed by Estonian Bolsheviks, who wanted to be with their Russian comrades, as well as by Baltic Germans, who hoped to be the rulers of a German-dominated United Baltic Duchy. In 1918, German troops occupied the country, but not for long. They were soon replaced by Russian Bolsheviks, and Estonia became part of a Russian empire once again. Kersten's parents lost their properties and were deported to a remote village on the Caspian Sea.

Kersten himself was in Germany when the war began. He had done poorly at school. A spoiled, lazy youth clinging to his indulgent mother, Kersten mainly took pleasure in eating too much. His reputation as a gourmand started early. As a teenager, he already looked and acted the part. His father thought he needed a firmer hand and sent him first to a boarding school in Riga, where the boy failed to shine, and then decided that he should study agriculture in Germany. This, too, was not much to his liking, but cut off from his family by the war, he somehow finished his studies and found a job on a large estate in Anhalt, in the eastern part of the country.

What happened to Kersten then is very hazy. One version-Kessel's-has it that Kersten was drafted into the kaiser's army, since the German government considered the Baltic Germans to be compatriots, as they would in World War II. Another book mentions a claim that Kersten won the Iron Cross at the Battle of Verdun. The author speculates that Kersten might have invented this feat himself to gain a smooth entry into the Finnish army. In yet another account, by the German writer Achim Besgen, Kersten became a soldier only when a German army, led by General Rudiger von der Goltz, entered Finland to fight with the Finns against Russia. It is possible that he was part of a regiment of Finns in the German army, or he might have joined the Finnish army.

This was Kersten's first experience of confused loyalties and collaboration. As a Baltic German, he was on the German side; as a subject of the tsar, he was on the Russian side; and as an Estonian, he would, at different times, have been opposed to both powers. In any event, he did take some part in the struggle for independence in Finland and the Baltic states. Collaborating with Germany would have been the best way to confront the common Russian enemy. But it wasn't quite so simple. Finland, like Estonia, had been part of the Russian empire and declared independence only in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. "Red" Finns, supported by the Russians, then fought a civil war with the "whites," supported by Germany. When Kersten entered Finland and the Baltic states as an officer in a Finnish army, not only was he was fighting for independence from Russia, but he was doing so as an anti-Communist ally of Germany. Allegiance to this cause did not end with the defeat of imperial Germany in 1918.

Kersten's military career was short. After spending much of the winter of 1918 in the freezing Nordic marshes, his legs were paralyzed by rheumatism, and he spent several months in a hospital in Helsinki. "I entered my new fatherland on crutches," is how he put it. Again, his manner of leaving the army is controversial: he claimed that he did so of his own free will, but there are Finnish reports that say he was dismissed for forging documents to get a promotion. He was in any case now a Finnish citizen, and terribly bored. Lying in bed, Kersten watched the doctors tending to the wounded men, and, as he later recalled, childhood memories of the helplessness of injured people came back to him. He wanted to help. This would be his stated mission in life, helping the suffering and the wounded.

Massage was a popular form of therapy in Finland at the time, and one of the top practitioners was a Dr. Ekman, a major in the Finnish army, and head of the hospital in Helsinki. In Kersten's own story, Major Ekman took one look at Kersten's big, powerful hands and said they were worth a fortune. Joseph Kessel's book, unusually, is slightly less dramatic. In his version, Kersten told Ekman that he wanted to be a surgeon. Ekman said that that would take years of study. Kersten was not the studying type. No, he said, grasping Kersten's meaty palm, these hands are perfect for massaging, not surgery.