The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II

In this illuminating and variegated group biography, Buruma (The Churchill Complex) reconsiders three notorious WWII figures: Felix Kersten, the “plump bon vivant” who became S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler’s masseur and confidant; Friedrich Weinreb, a Hasidic Jew who betrayed some of the Dutch Jews who paid him to save them from deportation to the concentration camps; and Kawashima Yoshiko, a “cross-dressing Manchu princess who spied for the Japanese secret police in China.” Writing that all three “reinvented themselves in a time of war, persecution, and mass murder, where moral choices often had fatal consequences but were rarely as straightforward as we were told to believe after the dangers had lifted,” Buruma documents how his protagonists downplayed German and Japanese atrocities and self-mythologized their own acts of resistance and courage. Kersten, for example, falsely claimed credit for dissuading Himmler from deporting the entire Dutch population to eastern Europe, while Yoshiko helped spread propaganda casting the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo as a peaceful and modern “Asian utopia.” Buruma sifts through his subjects’ complex, multinational backgrounds in fluid prose and brings a welcome measure of sympathy to their lives without minimizing the repercussions of their actions. It’s a captivating portrait of what happens when survival turns into self-deception. Photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Mar.)