Himmler, the chillingly reasonable dinner guest
TO DESCRIBE the meeting towards the end of the Second World War between Himmler and the Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress Norbert Masur as unlikely is an understatement.
Ben Brown’s latest fly-on-the wall play, which after its run at the Park Theatre is now available on demand, imagines what passed between the two men when they met for two-and-a-half hours. It wasn’t small talk.
Though Buchenwald and Belsen had been liberated by the time the meeting happened, hundreds of thousands of Jews were still at the mercy of the Holocaust’s architect. But what, wonders Ben Caplan’s anxious Masur, could Himmler possibly want from a Jew?
The tension in Alan Strachan’s production is made yet more taut by the camera work in this filmed version which is well directed and edited by Alastair Whatley. Whereas those in the theatre would have seen Himmler’s arrival in the room as just another stage entrance, here the footsteps of the Nazi’s boots are accompanied by close ups of his uniform, the kind of detail that must have frozen Mansur’s Jewish heart when he met the mass murderer.
It is here that Himmler’s motives become clearer. Having seen the writing on the wall for the Third Reich he now wants a better press than that which he has been getting from the papers in the countries fighting the Nazis.
Every time a camp is liberated by the Americans or British the Allies have released really awful images suggesting that atrocities took place there, he complains. If he could have used the phrase “fake news” he would. This does not at all reflect Himmler’s attitude towards the Jews which, he explains to Caplan’s incredulous Masur, is much more benign than he may think. If it were up to Himmler, Jews would have been deported instead of “interned” had western countries such as Britain and America not refused them.
However, the most illuminating exchanges here are between Himmler and Felix Kersten, the man hosting the secret meeting.
As Himmler’s trusted doctor and masseur it was Kersten, played here by Michael Lumsden with the stealth of a man walking through a minefield, who set up the meeting between the Nazi and the Swedish Jew. And it is in Kersten’s shadowy home, in the dead of night with the blinds down so as not to attract Russian and Allied bombers, in which the play is set. Also occasionally present is Kersten’s housekeeper Elisabeth (Audrey Palmer), though their relationship is not entirely clear. Nor is that between Himmler and Kersten which, it is suggested, had a homoerotic element when the Nazi placed himself under the masseur’s hands.
Historically little is revealed by Brown’s play other that Himmler eventually promised a mere 1,000 Jewish women would be released from the camps. The negotiations led to a further 7,000 being freed.
But the sense of period and place is convincingly conveyed and Richard Clothier’s Himmler is gripping.
There is the usual dead-eyed civility that characterises the performance of most actors when playing a Nazi, but to this Clothier convey’s the fraying fanaticism of a man who sees that his cause is lost.
Caplan draws the shorter straw as the Jew whose fear and anger can only be expressed in self censored, lip-biting opposition.