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

ALSO BY IAN BURUMA

The Churchill Complex: The Rise and Fall of the Special
Relationship from Winston and FDR to Trump and Johnson

A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir

Their Promised Land:
My Grandparents in Love and War

Theater of Cruelty:
Art, Film, and the Shadows of War

Year Zero: A History of 1945

Taming the Gods:
Religion and Democracy on Three Continents

The China Lover: A Novel

Murder in Amsterdam:
Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance

Conversations with John Schlesinger

Occidentalism:
The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Avishai Margalit)

Inventing Japan: 18531964

Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing

Anglomania: A European Love Affair

The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West

The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan

Playing the Game: A Novel

Gods Dust: A Modern Asian Journey

Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers,
Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters and Other
Japanese Cultural Heroes

The Japanese Tattoo (text by Donald Richie;
photographs by Ian Buruma)

This edition published by arrangement with Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Ian Buruma, 2023

The moral right of Ian Buruma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Photo credits appear on page 281.

Book design by Amanda Dewey

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-765-0

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-766-7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Hilary

O n the face of it, the three main characters in this book have very little in common: Felix Kersten was a plump bon vivant who became famous, or notorious, as the personal masseur of Heinrich Himmler, mass murderer and head of the SS. Himmlers fond nickname for him was the Magic Buddha. Aisin Gyoro Xianyu, or Jin Bihui, or Dongzhen (Eastern Jewel), but best known by her Japanese name Kawashima Yoshiko, was a cross-dressing Manchu princess who spied for the Japanese secret police in China. Friedrich, or Frederyck, or Freek Weinreb, was a Hassidic Jewish immigrant in Holland who took money from other Jews by pretending to save them from deportation to the death camps, but in fact ended up betraying some of them to the German police.

In May 1947, Weinreb was about to be sentenced for his wartime behavior. A stocky, slightly stooped figure with thick glasses, he had the air of a Talmudic scholar whose mind floated high above worldly affairs. His judges belonged to the Special Court for cases of treachery and collaboration during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The public prosecutor accused Weinreb of the most fantastic swindle ever perpetrated in his country. Defenders of Weinreb saw him as a modern-day Dreyfus, a Jewish scapegoat for crimes committed by Gentiles. Some Jews who had survived the war and known Weinreb during the occupation regarded him as a ruthless fraudster who collaborated with the Gestapo. Weinreb himself liked to compare the story of his life to a Hassidic miracle tale.

The trial of Kawashima Yoshiko, in October 1947, was a much more raucous affair. The court in Beijing was overwhelmed by huge crowds who wanted to get a glimpse of the Mata Hari of the Orient. Pandemonium inside the courtroom prompted the judges to shift the action to the gardens outside, where thousands more people were pressing to get in, some to find a precarious perch in the plane trees surrounding the court. Tofu and watermelon vendors were doing brisk business.

Kawashima, her hair cut short like a mans, wearing purple slacks and a white polo sweater, was accused of betraying her native country of China, organizing a private army in support of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and spying for the Japanese in Shanghai. Her exploits as the lover of senior Japanese officers and swaggering around occupied China like a wild samurai were reported in lurid detail in all the papers. Most of her alleged misdeeds took place in the 1930s, when Japanese armies marauded across China with great savagery.

The oddest thing about Kawashimas trial was that many of the accusations against her were lifted straight from movies, novels, and other fictions, concocted during the war by Japanese propagandists and sensation-mongers, often with her full collaboration. Kawashima was at least partly a fictional figure. The peculiar mixture of fabrication and facts resulted in her execution on a bleak early morning in Beijing.

Himmlers masseur, Felix Kersten, was never put on trial. Born in Estonia but naturalized as a Finnish citizen, Kersten didnt betray his country, since Finland cooperated with Nazi Germany, only changing sides quite late in the war. But Kersten was certainly a collaborator. Still, taking care of a genocidal murderers mental and physical wellbeing, as his masseur and confidant, was reprehensible, perhaps, but not a war crime. Kerstens myths were largely made up after the war, when he reconstructed his past as a story of brave resistance, claiming to have used his unique position in Himmlers court to save millions of innocent lives.

All three were what Germans call a Hochstapler. The word originally referred to a beggar who, when cornered in an awkward situation, puts on the airs of a high-class person. The usual translations in English are fraud, bluffer, or con artist. They were in some ways like the famous fictionalized eighteenth-century Hochstapler Baron von Mnchhausen, who claimed, among other feats, to have traveled to the moon, ridden a cannonball, and wrestled a giant crocodile. They were such successful storytellers that some of their most outlandish claims were still widely believed long after the war was over, in Kerstens case even by some highly respected historians.