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Greet Hofmans was, incidentally, not the first to worm her way into the royal family. There was also a certain Felix Kersten. In an interview in 1995 with the director of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Dutch Institute for War Documentation RIOD) Lou de Jong, we read the following (I no longer recall the journalists name): One of the most remarkable historical events set to right by De Jong is the affair surrounding Felix Kersten, that mysterious layer-on of hands who in the 1920s drew Prince Hendrik and Queen Wilhelmina to himself and became the personal surgeon of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who called him 'my only friend, my Buddha'. After the war, Kersten was able to rehabilitate himself completely thanks to his story that it was only because of his whisperings in Himmlers ears that the entire Dutch population was not deported to Poland by way of punishment, as the Nazi top had decided. For his programme of self-rehabilitation Kersten was able to enlist the services of such people as journalist Joop den Uyl and De Jongs predecessor as director of the RIOD, N.W. Posthumus. Den Uyl (who was to become prime minister in 1973), translated his memoirs and wrote an inspiring introduction to them. Posthumus even went as far as to propose Kersten for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1950 Kersten received from Prince Bernhard the decorations belonging to the rank of Grand Officer in the Order of Oranje Nassau, and at his death in 1960 the collective Dutch Press was of the opinion that in Dr. Felix Kersten the Netherlands has lost a great friend of our country. Some years later, however, it turned out that Kersten had been playing a double game all the time. A collection of Kerstens letters dated after the war and written to all kinds of prominent Nazis came into the possession of Amsterdam collector Freek van Rijsinge and since then have been made public. The letters show that Kersten was still singing loud the praises of anti-Semitism, had corresponded with the notorious SS Obergruppenfhrer Gottlob Berger and such types as Leo Hausleiter, one time members of the virulent anti-Jewish Thule Society. Kersten used his excellent relations with the Dutch court to mediate in favour of condemned war criminals such as Christiansen and the infamous Dutch camp doctor Nieuwenhuysen. In 1972 it was De Jong who took the initiative to expose the myth surrounding Kersten. With his article entitled Heeft Felix Kersten het Nederlandse volk gered? (Did Felix Kersten save the people of the Netherlands?) he was the first to untangle the web of lies around the layeron of hands. What you can, in any case, say about Kersten is that he mainly thought of himself, wrote De Jong. For this reason he went to Sweden in 1943 in an attempt to get into peoples good books with his so-called action to save the Dutch population. Nonsense! It would have been possible at the time to see through it if people had taken the trouble to compare carefully the two reports he himself wrote about the saving of the Dutch people. The committee investigating the affair had the two reports on the table but failed to make the comparison. Actually an incomprehensible failure, that eventually led to the decision to
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grant Kersten a high Dutch honour. Unfortunately he was already dead when I started my investigation. Kersten tricked the Dutch people. The only consolation is that after I had published my findings, nobody stood up to say that Kersten was still good. It was generally accepted that he was mainly a dreamer. Just like Greet Hofmans, Kersten was a healer. Count Michael Maier van Rindsbourg, another of the same kind, became the confidant and manipulator of Archduke and Emperor Rodolph II. In his Themis Aurea (1618) he put it in a striking manner: A doctor who treats the sickness rules the emperor. Hubert Luns See also The Greet Hofmans Affair
Published in the satirical Email magazine 't Scheldt No. 816 dated Tuesday 10th July 2007. www.tscheldt.be