The Memoirs of Doctor Felix Kersten

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Text originally published in 1947 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE MEMOIRS OF DOCTOR FELIX KERSTEN

EDITED BY

HERMA BRIFFAULT

Translated by Dr. Ernst Morwitz

Introduction by Konrad Heiden

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

INTRODUCTION 5

I—1939: HEINRICH HIMMLER BECOMES MY PATIENT 24

II—1940: I ORGANIZE MY PRIVATE UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE 31

III—SS REICHSFÜHRER HEINRICH HIMMLER AND THE SS 44

IV—1940-41: RUDOLF HESS—DR. ROBERT LEY—COUNT CIANO 56

V—1941: THE NAZIS HAVE A PLAN FOR HOLLAND 66

VI—1941-42-43: LOS VON ROM! 74

VII—1942: CONCENTRATION CAMPS—AND OTHER MATTERS 81

VIII—1942-43: RIBBENTROP—AND THE SWEDISH MATCH TRUST CASE 90

IX—1943: GERMANY IN FERMENT 99

X—THE NAZIS PLAN A NEW WORLD 110

XI—ADOLF HITLER: 1943-44 118

XII—THE JEWS 129

XIII—1944: BEGINNING OF THE CRACK-UP 146

XIV—LAST DAYS: 1945 160

SHORT LIST OF CHARACTERS 185

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 189

INTRODUCTION

A STRANGE PHOTOGRAPH, dating from the early days of National Socialism, has been bequeathed to us. Taken during the civil war of the twenties in Germany, it depicts a street filled with barbed wire, machine guns, and uniformed men. In the center stands a thin, stiff figure in that unnaturally calm pose that denotes inner conflict. Behind their spectacles the eyes of this figure have a resolute but embarrassed look that avoids both people and objects—the kind of look typical of certain German students who unceasingly direct a question to eternity from their burning eyes—though the actual object of the stare at that moment may be only a professor holding forth on the importance of artificial manure to modem agriculture.

To be sure, the armed young intellectual in the photograph is looking at something that may seem to him infinitely more sublime. With outstretched hand he is clasping a flagpole that stands as straight and rigid as he does—in the same attitude of ostensible belligerency belied by inward trembling. Figure and flag standard give the impression of a twin figure, neither half of which can stand without the other; one asks oneself whether the man holds the flag or the flag the man.

The flag-bearer is that student of agricultural science and certified farmer, Heinrich Himmler.

Today we know that the flag held the man. For Himmler and his type represented something that was not innate—their acts scarcely accorded with their natures, in either the good or the evil sense. These people’s life, rise to power, and fall encompass a far mightier and more appalling slice of contemporary history than the thin substance of the great majority of these personalities could have created from their own resources. It is the story of the dwarf who threw a gigantic shadow—merely because he happened to be near the fire. This has been brought out again by the present book, the chief subject of which is the person of Heinrich Himmler.

The very name of Himmler sounds like an echo of his master’s name, only the terror going out from it seems to have thickened and become even more sinister, if possible.

When we speak of the most frightful and most sickening atrocities of history and their perpetrators—and, numerically speaking, the Nazi atrocities are probably the most multitudinous in history—we are less apt to think of the supreme Führer of the Third Reich than of his first lieutenant: that is what Himmler was in his last, most dreadful years. To the entire world his face, that of a swine with bird’s eyes, has become the symbol of inexorable cruelty. The fact that it was probably not actual bloodthirst but a terrible stupidity, disguised as a sense of duty, which drove him on makes him even more repulsive.

This puts him in a class with many great bloodsuckers of history; take, among others, Robespierre—a man Himmler resembles in such other traits as obstinacy, frugality, and diffidence. Of the principal leaders of National Socialism, he was the meanest, the dumbest, and the most imbecilic. And, to boot, he was about as mysterious as an empty cupboard. What he accomplished for his cause may be explained only by an extraordinary will power. This will, however, was not his own. In my book, Der Führer, I compared Himmler with a length of wire whose electric current was supplied from outside; to the very end Hitler was that current. This volume substantially bears out that interpretation. For Himmler did not follow his inner voice; he followed the flag.

All his life he clung to the ambiguous symbol that waved above him. A series of coincidences helped to fan this loyalty to the flag. For Himmler had been a Fahnenjunker (standard-bearer) in a Bavarian infantry regiment—one of those junior officers on the waiting list, for whom World War I ended far too soon, cheating them out of their promotion to full officers. Later Himmler was a member of one of those many private armies that sprang up during the civil war. This army called itself Reichsflagge (Flag of the Reich), and it is possible indeed that the name originated with Himmler. After he had joined the National Socialists he was the keeper of the blood flag—a piece of cloth with which Hitler himself carried on a somewhat eerie cult.

For a while these people talked of their flag of the stragglers, and openly boasted of themselves as dangerous outlaws. The World War had been lost, the German Army scattered; thus they had lost their refuge, their security. Smaller wars, residues of the larger one, had flared up for a while in various parts of Europe; now these, too, were ending. In many countries, especially those of Central and Eastern Europe, fragments of armies similar to those in Germany remained. These, too, had difficulty adapting themselves to peacetime conditions and brought hardship to the peoples of Hungary, Poland, southern Russia, and particularly Italy. So-called bloody border quarrels over land, rights, and property, among the states that had been carved out more or less arbitrarily from the corpse of annihilated Imperial Austria, provided the pathetic causes for this unrest. In Italy such border fanaticism helped to put fascism in the saddle, and in Poland it made the semi-fascist legionary movement the most powerful faction in the country. New nations with new frontiers made their appearance—and, as a corollary, these stragglers that World War I had left in its wake now followed new flags in many parts of Europe.

But even more deeply embedded in the minds of these stragglers than worry over the bloody borders was the fear of Russian Bolshevism, which in 1920 had nearly succeeded, with its enormous armies, in overrunning Poland. If that had happened, perhaps Germany would have been engulfed as well. The national and social enmities that were aroused at that time have not changed much since then. German armies, at first regular troops and then volunteers and adventurers, fought in Finland and in the former Russian Baltic provinces, Estonia and Lithuania, against Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Red soldiers: the same battlefields over which they were to fight in World War II. At first the Western Allies permitted and supported this struggle; later they forced the Germans to retreat, and there is ground for speculation as to whether this changing Allied policy nearly overthrew or in fact saved Bolshevism. Part of the German adventurers’ army had fought with the Russian imperial eagle on their caps; not a few among them had seriously believed that the Czar, once reinstated by them, would make them landed proprietors in his reconquered empire.

Grimly disappointed, they returned home. And for many years this group remained in Germany, a wandering human volcano that intermittently erupted in revolts, coups d’état, and minor border wars.

About this time also a swarm of Russian refugees marched into Germany: officers and their men, members of the upper and petty bourgeoisie, a few liberals and socialists. With them, the refugee problem made its appearance in the world. Many of these people were of authentic Russian extraction; others belonged to the German minority in the Russian Baltic countries. The latter were the so-called Baltic Germans, mostly of the middle class or the aristocracy, and often intellectuals. Many of them did not know whether they were Russians or Germans—they were humorously called Juniper Saxons, because the juniper does not know, either, whether it is in fact a tree or a shrub.

The repatriated German soldiers of fortune and the Russian refugees together formed a beaten, disillusioned, desperate mass. In Germany they encountered a similar mass: the Himmlers and their like, German intellectuals and semi-intellectuals—discharged officers, civil servants, young lawyers, doctors, engineers, all without future, their careers doomed by a lost war and a revolution that had at first seemed to be launched against special privilege. The more radical among the refugees, repatriates, and natives banded together, united by the common bond of hostility to the Russian and German revolutions. They considered the fall of the Czar and the Kaiser separate parts of one world event; the returned German czarist soldiers formed a natural connecting link. Particularly in Munich, something like a Russo-German social life developed, in which former Russian barons and former German generals set the vogue. It was from such a circle that the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion was launched. This pamphlet was a little-known forgery fabricated fifteen years before in Russia; it set out to prove that modern-day revolutions were the products of a Jewish secret world clique. It is astonishing to note what kind of people in 1920—and the foremost names in the world were among them—seriously believed this mischievous nonsense; but it is perhaps even more astonishing that many people still believe this fiction.

A crushing inflation in the early twenties brought the disinherited German intellectuals to the extreme of grinding poverty; a creeping economic depression kept many with diplomas and college degrees in a state of partial or total unemployment. The worldwide aggravation of this depression added large numbers of proletarians, particularly white-collar proletarians, to these ranks. Here, too, the question of the bloody borders remained a constant irritant—in the form of the Versailles Treaty, which many naive souls blamed for all the economic troubles. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik bugbear grew with the years, and thus all the ingredients of a new ideology were present.

This ideology blossomed in a soil that had been tilled for it for decades. The belief that power alone rules the world had gradually become a national intellectual tradition. Surrounding Germany were a number of world powers and empires which were pointed out as irrefutable proofs of this thesis. Germany’s own history provided examples of how in times of national impotence the Reich had continually been the battlefield for half of Europe and how, in the end, only brutal force of arms had succeeded in making Germany a unified and powerful nation. A similar situation had obtained in Italy, and with similar intellectual and economic results. The dogma that power must be the basis for all human society became the general, tacitly admitted assumption, became a metaphysical conviction that needed no proof.

But this dogma extended far beyond Germany’s borders, indeed far beyond the borders of any single nation. All radical socialist theories have been based on it. Their fundamental thesis is that power is essential to human happiness. No matter what name the prophets gave the monster power—State, Nation, People, Collective, Commune, or even Democracy—what they really meant was that human happiness, justice, and freedom could be obtained only by means of power.

It would be easy to prove historically that the great teachers of modern socialism—Marx, Lassalle, Lenin, Trotsky‒studied and admired Napoleonic and Prussian militarism as one admires a serious and successful opponent from whom one may learn; or to show how they were inspired by the uses of military power. The history of all socialist movements is shot through with the argument between advocates of armed power and advocates of liberalism; the split into communism and social democracy, which has taken place nearly everywhere, is a direct result of that conflict. It was not fascist Italy but communist Russia which became the first dictatorship after World War I, an example to other nations, admired and publicly praised, in spite of bitter enmity, by members of the Prussian General Staff. One of its leading members, Colonel Max Bauer, wrote a book in defense of Soviet Russia.

And now in Germany, as well as elsewhere, a new generation arose for whom power was no longer an avenue to human happiness but simply happiness itself.

Unemployed officers and soldiers, intellectuals, and workers, at first in small numbers, then in larger numbers, now and then an unemployed prince or a few unemployed Russians—that was the generation in which National Socialism took root. One could not say that every one of them was a social misfit. But generally speaking, there was around them a cadaverous atmosphere of failure, inability to run their own lives, quarrelsome inadequacy. And it characterizes them all that they almost never blamed themselves for their misfortunes, but always the lost war and the general misery of the Fatherland—this Fatherland owed them a better life, but had not kept its promise. Gradually they discovered that the responsibility rested on the dark powers of Jewry, world capitalism, sometimes even on the Catholic Church. The fact that the Germans were apt to bear their ills with sheepish patience was, in the opinion of quite a few, due to the debasing influence of Christianity, that Asiatic superstition.

The best of them found refuge from the despair of their daily life in a perverse fanaticism, symbolized by their flag, and warmed themselves at a fire whose flickering light distorted the gloomy conditions of contemporary Germany. Thus there developed among them that which the German philosopher, Ernst Bertram, called the Myth, and the Frenchman, Georges Sorel, termed the mysticism of a political movement.

Germany was the perfect place for this development. In almost no other country were so many miracles performed, so many ghosts conjured, so many illnesses cured by magnetism, so many horoscopes read, between the two World Wars. A veritable mania of superstition had seized the country, and all those who made a living by exploiting human stupidity thought the millennium had come. General Ludendorff, who had commanded the German armies in World War I, tried to make gold with the assistance of a swindler boasting the appropriate name of Tausend (meaning thousand). There was scarcely a folly in natural or world history to which the great general did not lend credence; when the German Republic, which he hated so intensely, had the barriers of the railway crossings painted red and white for better visibility, Ludendorff declared that the Jews in the government were doing this because Moses had led the Jews through the desert under these colors.

Another high-ranking general was convinced that he possessed the secret of the death ray and that he could halt airplanes in their flight and stop tanks in their tracks. A steamship company dismissed its managing director because his handwriting had displeased a graphologist. Motorists avoided a certain road between Hamburg and Bremen because, it was rumored, from milestone number 113 there emanated certain mysterious terrestrial rays, which provoked one accident after another. A miracle worker, who had the faculty of making the dead Bismarck appear during his mass meetings and who healed sickness by application of white cheese, had enough followers to establish a city; another crackpot was almost elected to the Reichstag; and still a third, who also barely missed election, promised to perform the greatest miracle of all by undoing the German inflation that had depreciated the mark to the value of one trillion paper marks for one gold mark.

Among Hitler’s intimates was a man on whose visiting card appeared the word magician to indicate his profession—and he meant it in all seriousness. Many were firmly convinced that the course of world history was the sinister result of the ministrations of ancient secret societies—as such they considered not only the Free Masons, but also the Jews and the Jesuits.

The churches of all denominations raged against this fraudulent substitute for religion which, with stupid hocus-pocus, was designed to assuage man’s craving for the supernatural and the divine. But if one had accused these astrologers, quacks, necromancers, and fake radiologists of witchcraft and sorcery, most of them would have replied indignantly that they occupied themselves with science—naturally, a science that the experts did not understand, for it was the science of the future, perhaps a science predicated on experiments that were still imperfect. But by no means were their doctrines, they would argue, an imitation of religion.

To be sure, there was much talk of intuition, of presentiment, of what they called vision and the like. But nearly always it was considered an advance by abnormally endowed natures into certain fields of the spirit that in the near future would be investigated by conventional methods. The stock explanation in that world of deception and self-deception was that everything was done along strictly scientific lines, which shows to what extent the cult of science had taken the place of religion. And this, by the way, long after the Bible had had to demonstrate, rather humbly, that in no way did it contradict the theory of evolution.

A peculiar report from the world of these occult sciences deserves mention. It came from an author who wrote for a cultivated and exacting audience and whose books enjoyed a large circulation. This report asserted that in the early twenties a society of Asiatics, who lived in Paris and were versed in occultism, had decided to destroy European civilization by means of secret forces. For this purpose someone had to be found who was possessed with a demoniac mania for annihilation—someone, to be sure, who in the absence of exalted guidance might have contented himself so far merely with murder, rape, arson, and such other common transgressions of the Ten Commandments; but occult spiritual guidance from afar, of which he himself would be totally unconscious, would train and guide him to infinitely larger tasks. The person in question was found eventually—but not in Paris, not even in France. Since the matter was a top secret we will not divulge it; we will say only that the initials of the great evildoer were A.H.

In any event, the uprooted band of which Himmler was a member found their myth. There appeared before them a man who became their flag and their fire, who towered above them and illuminated them; one who with magic eloquence (mere outsiders would call it very adroit eloquence) expressed what they thought.

The mystic spell that Hitler cast over millions and millions has often been compared to hypnotism; and as an analogy we may accept it. But mental compliance is a prerequisite to being hypnotized—no matter how hidden that compliance may be. I listened to Hitler dozens of times and in the closest proximity during the years of his rise, and occasionally had the opportunity of observing him in intimate company from a short distance. But what fascinated me at that time was his audience rather than the man himself.

As for the speeches, my juvenile opinion was fixed even before I heard them: nothing but nonsense and lies, and stupid lies at that; everything he said seemed so ridiculous that anyone—at least that was what I thought—would realize their absurdity at once. Instead the listeners sat rooted to their chairs, many of them with blissful expressions that had no connection whatever with the theme of the speech but reflected only the beatitude of a soul stirred in its depths.

My immature opinion of Hitler was not shaken by this, but my dismay taught me something about people. How often have I, after such meetings, heard troubled souls tell me in effect, To be sure, I don’t agree with everything....Yes, here and there he certainly goes too far....Naturally the man exaggerates...but... And only this but signified something. Often they said, amazingly enough: Well, you mustn’t blame him for that—he just doesn’t know better—but...

Once I heard Hitler talk about the coming German war of revenge and liberation. Years later I read this speech again and had to admit that it was a masterpiece of rhetoric; many sentences could not have been improved by Napoleon. But while I heard them spoken by his own lips, I could only think, When will he stop spouting this nonsense? And I could not understand why General Ludendorff’s voice trembled with emotion when he rose and modestly, almost respectfully, thanked the speaker, who at the time was recognized only by a small group, for his wonderful words.

On another occasion a journalist colleague sat next to me, a man who was almost an intimate. I had reason to believe that in political matters he thought about as I did; and so I whispered to him after a scarcely endurable hour of Hitlerian eloquence, Well, we’ve heard enough now. We might as well go. I can’t stand any more of this rot! But he poked me in the ribs and hissed angrily, Quiet, quiet! The man talks beautifully!

Hitler’s speeches were probably the greatest examples of mass sorcery that the world has heard in modern times; certainly