The Collaborators

On 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. 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. The highly eccentric lives of Kersten, Kawashima, and Weinreb all contain elements that mark the stories of many collaborators: greed, idealism, thrill-seeking, power hunger, opportunism, and even a conviction, not always misplaced, that they were doing some good. All three reinvented themselves in a time of war, persecution and mass murder, when moral choices often had fatal consequences but were rarely as straightforward as we were told to believe after the dangers were lifted. The Collaborators. tells the story of these three complex lives spanning the World War II era, while interrogating post-war narratives of resistance and collaboration. It is also an examination of the power and credibility of history: truth is always a relative concept but perhaps especially so in the midst of war. These three individuals allowed their deception - perhaps necessary for survival - to become self-deceptions, which is what sets them apart. Turning their own lives into fictions, they perhaps were left with no identity at all.