‘The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II’
By Ian Buruma
Penguin Press, 320 pages

How can a book be so absorbing and yet so disappointing? Ian Buruma is a good narrative biographer who does not seem to know what to do with what he narrates.

The book focuses on three World War II collaborators: Heinrich Himmler’s hefty masseur with magic hands, Felix Kersten; a Japanese spy who convinced herself that she was also working on behalf of her native China, Kawashima Yoshiko; and a Dutch chasid, Friedrich Weinreb, a part-time holy man who conned his fellow Jews into believing that paying to be on his lists of those marked for departure from Nazi-occupied Holland could save them from concentration camps.

These diverse collaborators have in common a basic confusion about the locations of their loyalties and identities. The Finnish Kersten, for one, faithfully massaged the cramped up Himmler, pretending to be on his side, then made bogus claims about how his therapy induced his patient to save innocents that the Nazis marked out for extinction. 

Yoshiko thought that she could arrange some kind of Japanese authority over China that the Chinese would actually welcome. Like Kersten, she made up many of her exploits, turning herself into a romantic figure — though, in the end, she is the only collaborator in this threesome who paid for such fantasies with a death sentence.

Why believe anything these collaborators say and do? Well, at least in some ways, Mr. Buruma can document that all three were capable of doing some good and perhaps, in certain instances, staved off the worst from happening to people who would otherwise be exterminated.

More than that, though, Mr. Buruma’s own background may account for his tolerance of his despicable subjects. He is Dutch and explains that he grew up in a post-war Holland that told itself the myth of its own resistance to the Nazis — when, in fact, compared to say, the Danes, the Dutch did relatively little for the Holocaust-bound Jews and cooperated with their Nazi occupiers.

When you are part of a culture of collaboration, and you see, as Mr. Buruma does, that virtually no one can get by without some kind of duplicity, then those who boldly make a business out of collaboration are owed some attention and even (though he does not use the word) regard.

Mr. Buruma’s collaborators, in other words, are their culture’s leading indicators, so to speak, and examples of just how far many people will go in order to survive. Who then can take the high moral ground with the confidence that in similar circumstances, collaboration might not be their only way to endure evil?

Okay, but what else do we learn about collaboration, and how do we measure Kersten against Yoshiko against Weinreb? I thought, perhaps, that some deeper exploration of these collaborators would be forthcoming in the book’s Epilogue, that Mr. Buruma would then drop his neutrality.

Instead, the author offers banalities and truisms that in their redundancy match some of his expressions such as “true facts.” Mr. Buruma concludes: “I don’t believe many people are totally good or bad.” Okay. We are told that “they lived in an age of propaganda when speaking the truth was dangerous.” Okay, but they sought to thrive by lies while others died for the truth.

His vision expands: “In many parts of the world, we live in an age of dogmatism.” People and governments create their own realities. Okay, but how does that really explain why these three collaborated? What is it about their choices, and their fates? 

Kersten and Weinreb got off fairly easily and enjoyed post-war careers that continued on the paths of prevarication. So, was it, in fact, the pressure to lie that mattered to men who were liars anyway? Yoshiko seems to have been in a muddle about what her life meant, and the Chinese executed her.

In short, we get three distinct stories that occasionally coincide thematically, but that are left dangling in an inept Epilogue bereft of a coherent argument. The best Mr. Buruma can say is that these collaborators conned themselves. It’s a bad thing, he concludes, to turn “your own life into a fiction” because “you don’t really have an identity at all.” Okay, I guess.

Mr. Rollyson’s own experience with the lives of collaborators is in his biographies of Lillian Hellman and Rebecca West.