The Collaborators

Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II

By: Ian Buruma

Narrated by: Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma’s spellbinding account of three near-mythic figures—a Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmler’s masseur—who may have been con artists and collaborators under Japanese and German rule, or true heroes, or something in between.

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 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. 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. In times of life-and-death stakes, the truth quickly gets buried under lies and self-deception. Now, when demagogues abroad and at home are assaulting the truth once more, the stories of the collaborators and their lessons are indispensable.

©2023 Ian Buruma (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Ian Buruma's new book is a gripping dissection of wartime lies. But it is also something more. Rather than indict his subjects, Buruma, a historian of novelistic temperament and imagination, seeks to navigate the grey zone they inhabited, and to explore what their behavior (and self-rationalizations) might tell us about ordinary men and women living, as we increasingly do, in a world of alternative facts. Imagine Better Call Saul set in a country occupied by the Axis powers, and you will have an idea how this fascinating book reads.” —Adam Shatz, US editor, London Review of Books

“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.” —Publishers Weekly

“In The Collaborators, Ian Buruma brings his rare combination of attributes—intelligence, discipline, a commitment to truth (but wariness of certitude), modesty, wisdom, and wit—to revisit the celebrated and clouded sagas of three notorious World War II scoundrels. Their range taps into yet another of Buruma's gifts: his fluency in the cultures and histories of two continents. Telling their tales, disassembling their dissembling, he catalogues the very different set of traits that helped the three survive and even, thanks both to their own lies and the connivance of chroniclers lacking everything Buruma exemplifies, find a measure of rehabilitation they did not deserve.” —David Margolick

Excellent history and excellent entertainment. Beautifully written.

As a student of this war and of collaboration within it, I found Ian Baruma’s book to be both entertaining and informative.

Fantastic

Superb scholarship, lively narrative style, and great reading. I just want more now about collaborators through the ages.