'The Collaborators' by Ian Baruma
If a brutal dictatorship seized power, meeting protest with tanks, arresting all dissidents in a massive dragnet and executing many of them, you’d do what? Honestly, most of us would grumble and mumble and keep heads down, hoping this too would pass. Armed resistance would be the minority response. And another minority would actively work with the new regime, collaborating out of shared beliefs or profit or maybe just to survive.
Essayist Ian Baruma examines three fascinating case studies from World War II in The Collaborators. All three of his subjects sit uneasily on the scales of justice as Baruma weighs the known facts against the fiction they each created. The shadow of doubt follows them, even with new information that has surfaced in the years since the war’s end.
Of the three, Friedrich Weinreb faced the most heinous accusations. A Ukrainian Jew who fled with his parents from the antisemitic chaos of World War I to the relatively tolerant Holland, he grew up in a secular, culturally German family. When the Nazis occupied his adopted country, Weinreb turned conman. Claiming connections with a nonexistent German general, he charged Jews for admission to an imaginary list of people exempted from deportation to the east, journeys by train that ended in death camps (albeit the scope and full nature of the Holocaust was unclear at first for many victims). Baruma compares Weinreb with Bernie Madoff, his exploitation of his own people sold to the victims with the promise of exclusivity. For this reason, Weinreb turned some applicants down. Adding to his odiousness, he sexually abused some women while performing the “medical examinations” he imposed on his applicants.
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After the war, Weinreb defended himself by claiming that he sold hope. He may have saved a handful of lives by encouraging his applicants to lay low while waiting for their nonexistent exit visas. He may also have had a good time while outfoxing witless Nazi functionaries. Weinreb survived and was sentenced to a short prison term by a Dutch court, all the while spouting off about his own victimhood, claiming he was scapegoated by the Dutch for their own complicity with Hitler. Many believed his stories.
If Weinreb’s career could have been scripted by a bitterly sardonic Mel Brooks, Kawashimo Yoshiko (aka many other names) has in reality become the subject of anime, manga and computer games and is a recurrent figure in Japanese pop culture. Yoshiko was a Manchu princess raised in Japan, a cross-dressing gender fluid woman who never seemed entirely at home. She was abused by men, and in turn, exercised sexual power over them. Despite her self-created legend as a paramilitary ninja, Yoshiko probably never killed anyone, yet her infamous advocacy for Japanese aggression against her native China led to her execution by the Chinese. She may have believed that Japan would remake China into a better place. She remains a monstrous butterfly impossible to pin down.
Yoshiko is alone among Baruma’s three subject in suffering the ultimate penalty of a death sentence for her wartime activities. The author compares her fate to the harsh treatment meted out to female “collaborators,” especially those who slept with the enemy, across Europe. “Women were often used as the prime symbols of national humiliation,” he writes.
The Collaborators’ final subject, Felix Kersten, never killed anyone but as massage therapist to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, his hands regularly touched one of the war’s architects of mass murder. Like Weinreb and Yoshiko, Kersten told tall tales of his heroic wartime exploits on behalf of the oppressed. In reality, he may have been involved in negotiations between Himmler and Sweden that saved several thousand Jews as the war ended. Serious historians once took Kersten’s grandest claims seriously. Buruma is skeptical but accords him some benefit of the doubt.
A study into the complexity of human psychology, The Collaborators tries to untangle the motivations of Weinreb, Yoshiko and Kersten, only to find more knots. Many “facts” will always remain assertions or subject to various interpretations, yet Buruma has no patience for the sophists who claim there is no truth. It may be hard to find, but we ignore even the most unpleasant truths about history and human nature at our own peril.
