A new film, I Is Another, premiering at the Locarno film festival, challenges the postwar legend of Felix Kersten, personal masseur to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who long claimed to have saved countless Jews and concentration camp prisoners from death. Director Felix Randau's research suggests Kersten was in fact a narcissistic self-mythologiser who concealed his SS membership and forged documents to burnish his reputation, complicating the widely accepted narrative that cast him as an unlikely wartime hero.

Randau's investigation uncovered Kersten's SS membership card in a Berlin archive along with a letter in which he asked permission to wear his SS uniform in public, undermining his later insistence that he was secretly anti-Nazi. The film, starring Claes Bang as Kersten, follows him on a train journey to Oslo hoping to receive the Nobel prize, where a fictional journalist confronts him over his fabrications; Randau concludes Kersten likely saved some lives, though nowhere near the thousands he claimed, acting chiefly out of self-preservation rather than altruism.