The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The quack, the princess and the masseur
What do a fake gynaecologist, a cross-dressing Chinese spy and Himmler’s belly-rubber have in common?
COLLABORATORS: THREE STORIES OF DECEPTION AND SURVIVAL IN WORLD WAR II by Ian Buruma
320pp, Atlantic, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£20, ebook £8.99
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For decades after the Second World War, historians wrestled with the moral issue of collaboration with the enemy, painting the messy human realities in more and more shades of grey. Is there anything still to be added on the subject? Ian Buruma’s new book does manage to say new things, but it does so by picking out three utterly untypical individual lives. The word “Collaborators” in the title hardly begins to convey the nature of their stories; the subtitle’s phrase “Deception and Survival” does a better job, and in each case the degree of deception involved is, to this day, a matter of dispute.
They make an odd trio. I had previously heard of only one of them: Felix Kersten, the man known as “Himmler’s masseur”. A Finnish citizen, born in Estonia to Germanspeaking parents, he was a gifted physiotherapist who had apparently learned the techniques of oriental shiatsu, manipulating hidden pressure points to relieve chronic pain. Industrialists and aristocrats sought him out and showered him with money; some treated him as a special confidant, a sort of non-sinister Rasputin.
A portly, plump-faced bon viveur and amiable conversationalist, Kersten was certainly not a sinister man; but the same could not be said of all his patients. Finding himself in Germany at the start of the war, he accepted an offer from Heinrich Himmler to become his personal therapist. Thereafter he led a charmed life, easing the stomach cramps of a mass murderer. Yet at the same time, according to his own later accounts, he used his peculiar influence over the man to persuade him to order various acts of clemency.
During the final months of the war, Kersten helped to broker an arrangement that spared the lives of many thousands of prisoners, including more than 2,000 Jews. That much seems certain; but later he made other grandiose claims about having saved entire populations or cities – claims which, as Buruma shows, do not stand up to scrutiny. A fierce public debate ensued, in which the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper took Kersten’s side.
In 1960 Joseph Kessel, a French novelist who was also a war hero, published a glowing biography of Kersten, The Man with Miraculous Hands, heaping a larger pile of exaggerations around what was a small-to-medium-sized kernel of truth. His book is now being reissued, with a new preface wisely casting doubt on many of its asserTHE tions. But the reason for the republication seems to be that a film based on the book is in preparation, starring the American actor Woody Harrelson as Kersten. I think we can guess which version of the story Hollywood will prefer.
The second member of Buruma’s trio, the bearded, bespectacled economist Friedrich Weinreb, also claimed to have saved the lives of Jews, and was the focus of public controversy after the war. But there the similarities end. Weinreb was the son of middle-class Ukrainian Jewish refugees who settled in Holland; growing up there, he resented being looked down on by Dutch Jews as well as Gentiles, and joined the Hasidic movement of Orthodox Jews, dreaming of a special destiny as a wonder-working rabbi.
As the Nazi restrictions and round-ups began to bite in occupied Holland, he adopted the role of a saviour. Thousands of Jews paid him money to be put on his secret lists of people who would be allowed – thanks to a mysterious, indulgent German general – to embark on special trains and travel to France. The money was real (and he later claimed that he gave some of it to poor Jews to help them go into hiding); but the general, and the trains, were not.
Arrested by the German authorities, Weinreb was quickly “turned”. And while he may have thought that he was still cleverly stringing them along, he gave them the details of at least 22 Jews, perhaps many more, who were then taken away and murdered. Scrupulously, Buruma explores the moral ins and outs of his story. But at an early stage, while Weinreb was still compiling his lists, we are told that he insisted that potential passengers on his magical trains, if young and female, must undergo a gynaecological check-up at his own hands – for which purpose he forged a letter from a professor, awarding him medical qualifications. I confess that at that point I gave up on the man entirely, ceasing to care what slightly lighter shades of grey might be found in his subsequent record.
The third person here led such an extraordinary life that she deserves a whole book to herself. Several have in fact been written, but mostly in Japanese. Kawashima Yoshiko was a Manchu princess, born into the courtly world of the last Chinese Emperor; she was then adopted by a hard-line Japanese nationalist and schooled in Tokyo. Wilful, quixotic, apparently highly sexed – the long list of her lovers includes gangsters, army officers and politicians – and also keen on dressing as a man, she worked for Japanese interests in China. Dubbed the “Eastern Mata Hari”, she was more a propaganda tool than a spy; her role was exaggerated by the Japanese media, and she seems to have believed her own myth. So too, unfortunately, did the Chinese, who tried her in Beijing in 1947, citing details from a novel as evidence for the prosecution, and put a bullet in the back of her head.
What do these three characters have in common? Deracinated backgrounds? Yes; but all sorts of people had those. Strong powers of fantasy and a taste for game-playing, in the service of sometimes desperate self-interest? Certainly. But the nature of the “collaboration” in each is completely different. Only one thing, in the end, fully unites them: they make the perfect subjects for investigation by Ian Buruma, a British-Dutch author who also reads Japanese and Chinese, and who wrote long ago the best study of war guilt in Germany and Japan. The result here is a fascinating book, sometimes disturbing, sometimes entertaining, never dull.
Kersten claimed he influenced Himmler to save whole cities – but he exaggerated