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

Ian Buruma

Category: History

Narrator: Ian Buruma

Tags: History, Military

Ian Burumas spellbinding account of three near-mythic figuresa Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmlers masseurwho 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 commonaside 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 Himmlers indispensable personal masseurHimmler 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 Ar