El médico de Himmler

Even the most fearsome figures in history have their weaknesses, and Heinrich Himmler's was undoubtedly his doctor, whose miraculous hands were the only ones capable of relieving his excruciating abdominal cramps. Felix Kersten, born in Estonia and trained by a Tibetan teacher in Finland, was one of the most prestigious physiotherapists of the 1930s, with an international patient portfolio and a good heritage. In 1939, he received the request to treat Himmler and, after overcoming his initial misgivings, became his personal physician or, in the words of the Reichsführer, his "Magic Buddha". Instead of receiving fees, he asked to be paid by freeing Jews and resistance fighters. We all know Oskar Schindler, who saved a thousand Jews during World War II. But we know much less about Kersten's feat and, nevertheless, the World Jewish Congress established in 1947 that this man had saved in Germany "about one hundred thousand prisoners of different nationalities, among them sixty thousand Jews, risking his life", a figure definitely underestimated. To follow in Kersten's footsteps, François Kersaudy, a great specialist in World War II, has immersed himself in diaries, notes and statements in six languages ??of the main protagonists, and uses all this material to admirably narrate this plot without a apex of fiction