Lol! Vidiot - Yup...I am like the dog in your picture - I am always getting distracted by "squirrels"!
But back to Millie's inquiry about Dr. Felix Kersten, the hero of the JWs during WW2 and the doctor who practiced "bloodless surgery" on Heinrich Himmler.
James Penton, in his book Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich: Sectarian Politics Under Persecution, speaks about the relationship that Kersten had with the JWs, On pages 194/5, he says this:
As Hoss noted, many Witness women were released to the farms around Ravensbruck. This allowed Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler’s personal masseur, to ask Himmler to assign several of them to his estate at Harzwalde, which was situated between the Ravensbruck and Buchenwald concentration camps. After learning of the terrible conditions in the camps, Kersten began to cooperate fully with his Witness employees. Not only did he influence Himmler to take a more benign attitude toward Jehovah’s Witnesses, which he did, but he, Kersten, also became involved in importing The Watchtower to Harzwalde and through it to Witness prisoners in Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen. Kersten obtained permission from Himmler to take a young woman prisoner, Anni Gustavsson, from Germany to Sweden, where he had a second home. There she was free to associate with her Witness brethren and to obtain Watchtower publications. When Kersten travelled back to Germany after visiting Sweden, he would ask her if she wanted to send anything to Harzwalde in his suitcases, which she packed. He knew he would not be searched because of his relationship with Himmler eve though there were Nazis who wanted to take action against him. So Kersten became a major conduit for the importation of Watchtower magazines to Nazi concentration camps.
One of the sources that Penton lists for this material is the 1974 Yearbook of the Jehovah's Witnesses - pages 196-9.
I did some research on Dr. Kersten to try to confirm the 'smuggling story' that the WTS and Penton spoke about. The rest of this post is a copy and paste from a few years back, from material that I wrote at the time I was researching him.
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Kersten has been called many things. "The Devil’s Doctor" (a book by J.H. Waller); "The Man with the Miraculous Hands" (another book…can’t remember the author…); Savior of the Jews; Nazi collaborator; informant for Finland…..the list goes on. And on. In many of the other books that I was reading at the time and have read since, Kersten is often referenced as a source and/or influence on events during the Second World War.
Some historians see Kersten as somewhat of a suspect source, while others view him as fairly credible (Peter Padfield - Himmler).
And now, according to the Tower itself (and supported by historian Penton), Kersten was the savior of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Penton, in his notes, acknowledges Kersten as the source for the story about the Watchtower smuggling.
So, I got my hands on a copy of Kersten’s Memoirs. And I read it. Twice. I didn’t find the story about the Watchtower smuggling. In fact, there was not one single reference to Jehovah’s Witnesses, International Bible Students, or any group of that kind in the Kersten’s Memoirs that I read.
Something was up. I kept reading. And I found out that Kersten, or editors with Kersten’s permission/collaboration, published several copies of his memoirs. Kersten had produced, as a diary during his time spent as Himmler’s doctor during the Second World War, over 900 pages of hand written ‘manuscript’. Apparently, (bear with me here…this is from memory retrieval…) he first published one or two ‘memoirs in German(?) and then a copy in Swedish (?) Anyways, I believe there were up to 6 English editions published, from various places and years. So, overall, a person would have to compile a study of all of the publications together to get a more accurate picture of Kersten’s movements and apparent ‘observations’ during his war years.
I believe that Kersten’s memoirs were strategically produced, depending on which ‘political positioning’ was most advantageous to him at the time. The immediate post-war era was one of ‘foot shuffling’ and ‘positioning’ for many of its participants and key players. Kersten, in particular, walked a lot of political tightropes during his wartime ‘career’, and that did not change in the post war years. He had been extensively investigated by the Allied countries, and, in the latter years of the war, had been influential in setting up potential post-war alliances for Himmler. At the same time, he negotiated the release of many of the Jewish camp prisoners and saved thousands of lives during the course of the war.
However, it was critical, for Kersten, to find a ‘home country’ and a place of safety for himself and his family after the war, and it is apparent that the publications of his ‘diary/memoirs’, have been carefully ‘selected/edited’ in order to present certain alliances politically for himself and others, depending on the country and timing of publication. After all, he had over 900 pages to select from, and, with creative translation, his diary would prove to be a malleable material from which to work from.
John H. Waller, in his book The Devil’s Doctor: Felix Kersten and the Secret Plot to Turn Himmler Against Hitler, published in 2002, gives more detail to the relationship that Kersten developed with the JW’s:
from pg 24:
Kersten claimed that his reaction was one of horror when he heard from Himmler that total destruction would be the fate of the Jews. He protested to the Reichsfuhrer, expressing shock at such "fearful cruelty" and the sinfulness of wanting "to destroy men simply because they were Jews." He asked "Hasn’t every man a right to live?" Himmler’s monologue in rebuttal – he often lapsed into lectures rather than be outscored in dialogue – sounded to Kersten as unreal as it was terrifying. Unfortunately, it was all too unreal. On November 16, 1941, Kersten noted in is diary that he had tried to reopen the conversation about the fate of European Jews, but Himmler, contrary to all his habits, only listened in silence. Kersten’s reactions were frank: "Since I labour in vain against the atrocious principles to which Himmler is committed...I will undertake as many interventions as possible to rescue Jews, hoping that they will be granted by Himmler."
Kersten often invoked his license to bring up most any subject with Himmler – and always got away with it. In raising a lesser known but similarly cruel Nazi breach of human rights, the masseur discussed with Himmler the imprisonment of some eight thousand members of the Jehovah’s Witness sect, known in Germany as the Bibelfurscher, whose faith forbade their taking part in or even countenancing war. Nor could they approve joining the Nazi Party on the grounds that "man’s welfare comes from God, not man." To extend the Nazi salute to a megalomaniac like Hitler would be to blaspheme the true God.
The plight of Jehovah’s Witnesses was close at hand to the Kersten family. The concentration camp of Ravensbruck where most of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were kept, was only ten miles or so from Kersten’s country home. In 1942, Kersten realized that because of the shortage of agricultural workers, many of the farmers in this area were permitted to draw on Ravenbruck’s inmates to work their fields. 5t helped the farmers, and it helped the government by sustaining agricultural production when labour was sort because of the military draft. But it also made life more bearable for the hapless Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were thus fed and housed relatively humanely by the farms to which they were paroled.
It was when Kersten, with Himmler’s permission, took on parole workers from Ravensbruck that he was able to gain firsthand knowledge of the appalling conditions that existed at the camp. Ten women prisoners were initially assigned to Hartzwalde; soon male farm workers were also assigned. Hearing their tales of mistreatment and seeing the state they were in made clear that they had barely survived the starvation-level diet on which they had been forced to exist. They told stories of filth, malnutrition, unattended illness, and abuse by the guards. Kersten was "horrified to the point of being sick" upon hearing details about their treatment. It was then that he recorded in his diary that as a physician, his obligation was to heal; he thus vowed to try to do something about this sort of institutional mistreatment. He launched his campaign by informing Himmler about the inmates of concentration camps and how they were systematically tortured and killed.
Himmler scoffed at Kersten, accusing him of falling for enemy propaganda. From then on, Kersten claimed to have used his growing influence on Himmler to free innocent people unjustly persecuted. As a beginning, he used Hartzewalde as a haven for a "great number" of Jehovah’s Witnesses, for whom he and his wife provided food, honourable work, and the shelter of a good home. Above all, the Kerstens treated them sympathetically. Thanks to Kersten’s influence on Himmler, Hartzewalde was given immunity from search and investigation from the Gestapo. But because Kersten was beyond the reach of the secret police, Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller had to satisfy himself with rumours and self-inspired fantasies. Muller convinced himself that Kersten was using Hartzewalde as a secret refuge for escaping English POWs and German resistance collaborators and Jews on the run sought by police. "Gestapo" Muller complained to Himmler, but the Reichsfuhrer insisted that the Gestapo must not harass the Kerstens in any way – an order honoured in the breach.
Understandably, Kersten’s instincts and actions were more complex than performing humanitarian acts for their own sake. He was concerned with his and his family’s safety during the War and conscious of the need to prosper after its conclusion. Somehow he had to counteract what he feared might be a tendency on the part of the Allies – if they were destined to win the War - to link him to Himmler as an accessory to the Reichsfuhrer’s war crimes. While the War still raged and his very existence depended on pleasing Himmler, he needed at the same time to nurture contacts in western Europe on whom he could depend after the war.
Sweden was of practical importance to him since he hoped to be granted Swish citizenship, enabling him to settle there to carry on his profession as a physical therapist free from the still-raw, roiling sentiments that would surely be rampant in a disillusioned, defeated, and economically depresses postwar Germany. But it would be inaccurate and unfair to imply that Kersten was not genuinely appalled by Nazi atrocities. Trapped as he was in Himmler’s domain, he would do his best to mitigate his master’s dreadful misdeeds and, within his limitations, succour victims of Nazi terror.
Anyways.
The copy of Kersten’s memoirs that I read was published in Great Britain, 1954(?), and, from what I have been able to gather, I think that the copy that would have the story of Kersten’s involvement with the JW’s, would be the one that was published, of course, in New York.
Now...that was a pretty big squirrel, wasn't it? All skinned and ready for the soup pot.... :)
