The horrid fascination which the Hitler epoch exerts on inquiring minds extends to the personalities involved; and the oddest of all the odd lot of queer fish who swam across that scene must by all accounts be the man who built up and operated the SS, Heinrich Himmler himself. If no man is a hero to his valet, no man is likely to be a hero to his masseur, either, and it is Dr. Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur, who presents this picture of him. It is as weird a picture as you are likely to find in all the literature of Hitler’s Germany.

Himmler suffered from some sort of stomach cramps, which assailed him every so often with agonizing, incapacitating pains. As a “manual therapist,” or masseur, Dr. Kersten was able to give him relief. He became, presently, a sort of captive court physician to the man who ran Hitler’s apparatus of terror, and for five years he held a position of strange influence over Himmler. No one else could relieve Himmler’s pains; so, after a time, there was very little that Dr. Kersten could ask for which Himmler would not readily give him. Being a person whose humane instincts had not been stunted by contact with the Nazi tyranny, Dr. Kersten made use of his position to save people from extermination; in the long run he kept thousands of people—Jews, Germans, and citizens of occupied lands—from the gas chambers.

Indeed, if Himmler was the greatest mass murderer in all history, Dr. Kersten must have been one of the greatest lifesavers. Mr. Trevor-Roper, who has dug about as deeply into the Nazi story as anyone, attests to the genuineness of his work. The World Jewish Congress, says H. R. Trevor-Roper, credits Dr. Kersten with rescuing no fewer than 60,000 Jews; and in 1941, when Hitler coolly proposed to transport three million Dutchmen to the dreary wastes of Polish Galicia and the Ukraine, it was Dr. Kersten who talked Himmler out of it. (He persuaded him that the additional strain on his health would probably be fatal; after all, an operation of that size would involve a lot of work and nervous strain.) It is only fair to say that Himmler later was sorry that he had not obeyed orders; it was all the fault, he said, “of my wretched health and the good Dr. Kersten.”

Which is as it may be; but somehow the chief interest in this book—and it really is absorbingly interesting—lies less in Dr. Kersten’s recital of the way in which he saved people’s lives than in the fantastic picture he presents of the completely incomprehensible Himmler himself.

The picture, one hastens to add, is of necessity somewhat lopsided. Dr. Kersten, who was never under any illusion about what the man was really up to, nevertheless saw him from a rather special angle. The Himmler he saw was a somewhat fatuous, bumbling, almost grandfatherly man.