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The collaborators : three stories of deception and survival in World War II / Ian Buruma.

by Buruma, Ian.

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Penguin Press, 2023.

940.530922 B974c

Kersten, Felix, 1898-1960.

Weinreb, Friedrich, 1910-1988.

Kawashima, Yoshiko, 1906?-1948.

World War, 1939-1945 -- Collaborationists -- Biography.

9780593296646 (hc)

307 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-289) and index.

"On the face of it, the three characters in this book seem to have little in common -- aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were 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 his 'magic Buddha.' Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender-fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a con artist, he was regarded by supporters as the 'Dutch Dreyfus.' 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."--Publisher.

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