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

On the face of it, the three characters here seem to have little in common--aside from their all having committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as national disgraces. The three were all mythmakers, larger than life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point. Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler's indispensable personal masseur--Himmler calling him "the magic Buddha." Kersten either did or didn't trade on this relationship to convince Himmler to free thousands of Jews before war's end. Kawashima Yoshiko, a cross-dressing Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese, then and since, as a sort of ur-superhero, a combination of Mata Hari and Catwoman. Friedrich Weinberg was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who told lies to the Nazis about his status among the Jewish community, and to his fellow Jews about his leverage over the Nazis, taking large sums of money on the promise of saving families from the camps, and in the end betraying many to the German secret police.

All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat story of angels and devils. The Collaborators is a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these incredible figures and what will always remain out of reach. What emerges is all the more mesmerizing for being painted in chiaroscuro. Few of us, it turns out, are saints. In times of life-and-death stakes, there's little telling what people will do. About that much, the record is clear. At a time when we see disturbing compromises to power under ugly regimes abroad and at home, the stories of The Collaborators and their lessons are particularly timely.