The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II by Ian Buruma

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II by Ian Buruma Ian Buruma’s spellbinding account of three near-mythic figures—a Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmler’s masseur—who 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 common—aside 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 Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur—Himmler 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 Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a con artist, he was regarded regarded by supporters as the “Dutch Dreyfus.” All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat story of angels and devils. The Collaborators is a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these incredible figures and what will always remain out of reach. What emerges is all the more mesmerizing for being painted in chiaroscuro. In times of life-and-death stakes, the truth quickly gets buried under lies and self-deception. Now, when demagogues abroad and at home are assaulting the truth once more, the stories of the collaborators and their lessons are indispensable.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to Big Circus in the Sky, folks. The most brilliant podcast assembled for the greatest audience ever assembled.

Known to man. Or at least the audience of The Chris Voss Show. One of those two. Flies. Or both. I don't know. You can run with it any way you want. Anyway, it's wonderful to have you on the show as well.

Check out our recent releases. We recently interviewed another billionaire on the show. And also our coverage of South by Southwest southwest event we just published those over the weekend uh south by southwest 2023 and check out some of the amazing entrepreneurs and innovations we reviewed there uh today we have a returning guest he's been on the show before for his amazing historical books he's pretty prolific on everything he does and what he puts out. And he's written a new book called The Collaborators, Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II.

Just came out March 7th, 2023. Ian Baruma is on the show with us today. And he'll be talking to us about his latest historical book and everything that goes into it. I'm pretty excited to learn about this because the more you learn about history, the more you can change history for the future. Ian was born in the Netherlands.

He studied Chinese at Leiden University and cinema at Nihon University. Am I getting any of these names correct, Ian? Yeah, more or less. More or less. There you go. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, and New York, and he's a regular contributor to Harper's and The New Yorker and writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate and Bloomberg. He's a professor at Bard College and lives in New York City.

Welcome again to the show, Ian. How are you? Very well. Thank you. Great. Awesome sauce. Give us a.com or wherever you want people to find you, get to know you you? Very well, thank you. Great. Awesome sauce. Give us a.com or wherever you want people to find you,

get to know you better on those interwebages in the sky. I'm sorry. I didn't quite hear your question. If you could give us a.com or wherever you want people to find you on the internet. Oh, I see. Okay. All right. Baruma, B-U-R-U-M-A, at bard, B-A-R-D, dot com.

There you go. So what motivated you to write this latest book? Well, I was interested in these three characters, and I'd known about them for quite a while. They're fairly well known in different parts of the world. And I've also been interested in the idea of collaborators and collaboration with bad governments or countries under occupation. I was born in December 1951 in the Netherlands, as you mentioned, and Holland had been occupied by Nazi Germany during the war.

And so I grew up very much in the shadow of that war. And when I grew up, the myths were that, you know, every teacher at school had been a brave resistor and so on. And we knew that we couldn't go buy candy in a certain store because the woman who owned it had had a German boyfriend. So things from seeing good and bad was very clear. And later we realized that things were not quite so clear cut. And I find it in some ways more interesting to figure out why people fall for the temptation of collaborating, doing something bad, than to be a hero. There you go. And, you know, we had you on the show for I think it was the Churchill Complex That's correct

And you've written a lot of books about history How many books do you have in your library? I've no idea, I've never counted them There are quite a lot I couldn't count them either I need to get rid of them, I don't have space Oh there you go Amazon evidently has plenty of space

There's 41 titles according to them So people can go there and order your other stuff as well. So the collaborators, are these villains in history then? Are they good guys? Well, certainly they cooperated with villainous regimes. Whether they're personally completely villainous or not is a harder question to answer because most human beings are not 100% bad and not 100% good. It's a spectrum. Some people are worse than others, that's for sure. And so the choices they made were certainly bad. But simply

to condemn people as villains doesn't make them very more interesting, and it doesn't allow the reader or indeed the writer to come to a greater understanding. There you go. There you go. So give us an overview, a 30,000-foot overview of who these folks were and what's inside the book. Well, one of them was Himmler's masseur. And he was born in Estonia. He had a Finnish passport. And he had magic hands. And he massaged the rich and famous before the war,

mostly in Germany, but really all over Europe. And Himmler had terrible stomach cramps. Himmler was, of course, the head of the SS. And Kerstin, that was his name, Felix Kerstin, was the only one who knew how to relieve his pain. And so Himmler made him into his personal masser. Kerstin later claimed that this was against his own will and so on. Not so likely.

I think he liked, he was a sort of natural servant to the rich and powerful. He liked being close to power, he liked being a man of consequence, of influence and so on. And after the war, he wanted to once again become the Nasser of the rich and famous, but having been Himmler's personal Nasser was not the best calling card. So he embellished his war record and claimed that he'd been a great resister. Now, some of that was true in the sense that he sometimes asked Himmler to release people from concentration camps in exchange for relieving him of his pain. And at the end of the war, Himmler was trying to make a deal with the allies and was even prepared to release some Jews from camps and Kerstin played a kind of role as a

middleman but after the war he embellished this and he had been much closer to the Nazis than he claimed. The second person was a very different but also somebody who wanted to be important and cleverer than everybody else and well-connected and so on. And he was a Jewish immigrant from Lwów, or now Lwów in Ukraine, then Poland, in Holland, and was son of an assimilated secular Jewish family. And to rebel against his parents, he became ultra-Orthodox, a Hasid, and he was a conman. And when Holland was under occupation and the Jews began to be deported to the death camps, he claimed to have lists, and then in exchange for payment to Friedrich Weinrepp, that was his name, you could get on his list,

and he promised that you would be on the train to safety in Switzerland and Portugal or Spain, and the list would be backed by a German general. In fact, the list was completely made up. There was no such thing, nor did such a general exist. It all came from his imagination. He, too, had a checkered career. He was arrested by the Germans, then released, probably cooperated with the Germans, betrayed people, ended up having

to go into hiding himself, survived the war, was tried as a fraudster and a traitor after the war, spent a few years in jail, but then in the 60s became a kind of counterculture hero and he was taken up by the the sort of student rebellions that were taking place in holland just as they were everywhere else and he became a kind of hero who resisted the establishment quite wrongly this was a myth but in any case that was his role after the war. Third person was a Manchu princess, so born in China at the time of the revolution when the Qing dynasty, which was a Manchu dynasty of the Manchu aristocracy, fell. And she was adopted by an ultra-nationalist in Japan. And she collaborated with the Japanese,

hoping that the Qing dynasty would be revived. She was also a cross-dresser. She had bad experiences with men and sort of dressed up in male uniforms and became a legend during the war in Japan. There were fictional biographies of her life. There were movies about her. He was arrested by the Chinese after the war as a traitor and executed. And one of the oddities of the trial is that they used a lot of those things that were made up about her with her own connivance during the war against her as evidence. So what ties them all together is that they all used extreme circumstances of

war and occupation to play roles that were bigger than they really were. And they were fantasists. They were authors of their own, creators of their own myths. There you go. So this is an interesting story. Did the three of them collaborate with each other at all, or did they just collaborate with the enemy? They were even known of each other's existence. There you go. There you go. So this is an interesting story. Did the three of them collaborate with each other at all, or did they just collaborate with the enemy? No, they were even known of each other's existence.

There you go. There you go. And what made the three of these stand out to you, and the reason you chose them? Well, one of the things, as I said, that they had in common was this tendency to make themselves up. I mean, extreme circumstances, and even when they're not so extreme, I mean, take the four years under Donald Trump. When truth goes out the window, people can start making up whatever they like. Being under a foreign occupation, living in a dictatorship and so on, collaboration, of course, allows you to do that. It allows second-rate, third-rate novelists, doctors who've been struck off for acting against the rules of medicine,

failed politicians and so on. They have their chance to reinvent themselves. And so the Trump years in some ways, although I don't refer to it directly anywhere in this book, but it were a spur to write about people who, well, the authors of their own fake news, if you want to put it that way. There you go. There you go. Interesting characters from real life. well, the authors of their own fake news, if you want to put it that way. There you go. There you go.

Interesting characters from real life. So what kind of research did you put into it? How hard was it to track these guys down, understand them, and find out the history that went behind them? Well, you obviously couldn't interview them, and not many people who knew them are still alive. But they all wrote memoirs, not reliable ones. Other people have written about them, also not always reliable.

So in a way, the book is not only about trying to find out what actually happened. It's also a way to describe storytelling, I mean, what people make up and why. Yeah. I mean, I identify as a plant, as I think a palm tree. I think of that. Well, then you are a palm tree. I am a palm tree.

If that's the way you feel, then you have the... Well, you know, I think some people in my audience might think that. That dude's a tree. So clearly he's faking being Chris Voss. We all know that's probably true. So this is really interesting. And the stories that go into them. And then did they all play the part where they were all collaborators with the enemy?

And then when the war was over, you're rounding up and it looked like things were going to go bad for collaborators. They changed their tune? Yes. Certainly Himmler's Massa did. things are going to go bad for collaborators they they changed their tune yes certainly himless massa did i mean he made all kinds of crazy claims that he'd in exchange for relieving himless pain he stopped him from deporting the entire dutch population to poland and so on which certainly could never have happened um in the case of the hasidic conman of course he maintained he'd been a brave resister and all those who wanted to accuse him were really anti-Semites

in the case of poor old Kawashima Yoshiko which was the Japanese name for this Chinese Manchu lady didn't have much time to make anything up because she was quite swiftly tried and executed. Oh, wow. There you go. They didn't take anything out of that.

You know, the story of the Jewish gentleman is interesting because he cost people, well, I guess they all cost people lives when it came down to it, correct? Hard to tell about all of them. I mean, the masser itself was not responsible for anybody dying. I mean, he was responsible for making the life of a mass murderer more comfortable. But you can't really say that he actually was responsible for the murder of anybody. Weinrepp, the Hasidic con man, certainly was. I mean, he did betray a number of people.

We'll probably never know quite how many who ended up in death camps and dying. The case of Kawashima Yoshiko, again, it's so hard to separate myth from reality. You can never quite be sure but she did play a role in military operations and spying and so on uh for the japanese in china that she probably did have some blood on her hands but how how how much her hands were covered in blood uh is very it's hard to tell there you go Did any of this involve money, or it was just a sanction to want to be around power? It did involve money. It certainly involved power.

Weinreb, the fraudster, took money, of course, from people to be on those imaginary lists and made quite a lot of money out of it. Himmler's master, Kasten, was certainly well paid. I don't think there was a huge amount of money. I mean, Kawashima Yoshiko certainly took money from Japanese military officers and so on, but I don't think she enriched herself comfortably. But money probably wasn't the main objective of any of these three. I think they wanted to be, they were insecure people who were all children of collapsing empires who were not entirely sure where they belonged

and wanted to be important, wanted to be near power, wanted to play a role on the big stage. And I think that was probably more important to them than simply getting money. If money were the only objective, it would have been much less interesting as a study of character.

Would you frame them as narcissists in their chase for the thing? Yes. I think all self-invented characters who make up stories about themselves and so on are narcissists absolutely yeah they have to create that facade of of ego and and uh success and everything else uh so did they come from broken childhoods was did you find there was any sort of instigator in their upbringing? Well, Kawashima Yoshiko, the manshu, certainly came from a broken childhood.

I mean, her father, Morris gave her up for adoption to this ultra-nationalist man in Japan. She was probably abused by her stepfather and also had unpleasant experiences with other men, which may have been one of the reasons she decided she was going to be the Oriental, as she put it, the Oriental Joan of Arc and dress up as a man and so on and so forth. So she certainly had a very unfortunate childhood. I'm not sure in the case of the master his childhood accounted for anything he he later did there you go there you go so it's interesting you pick this three these three people out of history and what do you hope readers come away from when they read the book and and uh and learn about these three individuals well

i i'm not the kind of writer who who writes a book to give people one message or a takeaway or something like that there are various things you try and achieve or you hope that the reader gets out of them one is their good stories. You learn something about these characters and therefore about human nature. And at the same time, you learn something about the history they lived through. So I think all those things, and also the dangers of letting go of the idea that truth matters. I think if there's anything that I try to stress, it's that, that truth does matter, that it's not relative, that you can't just make things up unless you're doing it deliberately as a work of art. I mean, that's another thing, of course. Sure.

Yeah. You're just making art at that point. You know, do you see parallels between their stories and the villainous aspect and narcissism and sometimes evil? With, you know, like, for example, what's going on today with the Ukraine war? I mean, we have one man who's decided to just muck up the whole world because he's, I don't know, he's either delusional or cancer-ridden or health-ridden or at the end of his days, and he's decided to go out with a bang. Do you see any parallels between that? Yeah,

I see various parallels. One is the, the, how difficult it, how many gray areas there are when it comes to collaboration. When I remember a piece, I think in the New Yorker, not so long ago,

which was fascinating about collaboration in Ukraine and so you have a town in the Ukraine that gets taken over by the Russian by the Russian army and then there are people who decide it's necessary to collaborate with the Russians in order to feed people for example and they're not necessarily because they're on the Russian side at all but people still need to be fed. Life goes on. Ukrainians take the town back, and these people are then often arrested as wicked collaborators. Well, that becomes very complicated. So I think there is a parallel there. The other parallel, well, the other thing that I think plays a role in it without exaggerating comparisons, again, I think one of the aspects of the Trump years, and I'm not comparing

Trump to Hitler or saying it was a dictatorship or that they were Nazis or anything of that sort, far from it. But one of the things you did see is that all kinds of weirdos and third-raters and bitter failures and so on suddenly saw their main chance and started and took up rather senior positions in the American government where, I mean, they wouldn't have had a chance under more normal circumstances.

So there is a parallel there too. Yeah. I mean, you're watching them all be prosecuted right now. And there was another attorney recently who was censured who was one of the ones telling lies. And, yeah, at the end it became very pirate. It seemed like a pirate ship from the beginning, but it became a real a real uh

shit show at the end with the thing and it and the reason i like these stories the reason i like having historians and authors like yourself on who tell these stories is it's the one thing that i always say the one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history and thereby we go round and round. And until we really understand our history, the patterns of human nature, how we do things, and it's just astounding to me

that we've been on the earth for eons of time, however you want to measure it, and we still can't get this right. We seem to, about every, I don't know, 40 or 50 years, go through the same sort of thing. No one thought we'd have another sort of war that could uh possibly escalate into a world war um and yet here we are well we'll never get it right i'm afraid i mean because of human frailty i mean maybe i'm a bit older than you are i don't know but my generation

has simply been very fortunate, at least if you were living in relatively free and relatively well-off countries, in that we've lived much of our lives in a period of peace and security. That's very rare in history. And I'm not very optimistic that simply by knowing history, we won't repeat the same mistakes. I mean, you can learn a lot about history, but also learn the wrong lessons. And it's not going to prevent us from making mistakes, which are never exactly the same. But nonetheless, it's very important to know history because it allows you to understand uh the world

you live in better i mean without history it's if you don't know any history then it looks as though every day is brand new i mean every day is brand new in one sense but but everything that happens has never happened before you have to know about history in order to realize that that is not not the case i guess i'll be saying my axiom forever then. The one thing Van Kindler for his history is he never looked to his history. He'll just keep on rolling. I'll be using that 50 years

from now if I'm still alive. Well, you've definitely dampened my Tuesday a little bit. I had hope for the human race. Well, we've survived so far. So far. There's still time.

Knock on wood, and we'll look for that to happen. But no, I think it's really interesting. And I love the lesson that you're teaching here, the story of when we suspend truth, when we start going into reality. We're kind of entering a world lately where we've had this society that just kind of lives in a fantasy world. We see it on Instagram. Recently, TikTok's... I was just watching

a video this morning where the TikTok people have created a new filter that can make women look like Victoria's Secret models with the filter that they have on them. And they already have a lot of catfishing that's going on already in the marketplace with that. And people can create these whole fantasy lives. We've seen it in screen work. Well, it's worse than you're saying.

I think it was in today's paper, but that they have found a way to paste on the faces of real people, movie stars and so on, and make them into characters in a porn movie. Wow. And technology is such that you really can't tell the difference anymore. So there you are watching Scarlett Johansson in a hardcore porn film,

even though she was never anywhere near it. Yeah, the deep fakes, even like the chat GPT that's coming out now, I guess there's a new version coming out. Some people are saying they'll be able to write whole books within a very short matter of time, that they can just have the computer do it for them. There's new versions of the new art AI

that's coming out where it's able to create all sorts of fake images that you almost can't tell the difference anymore on. And it kind of almost seems like we're in this world where everything's really going to be artificial and the ability to tell if it's real or not. I mean, what you're able to do, the Nuremberg trials and other trials that took place after World War II to bring these people to reality and to punishment.

You know, we're living in a world where things can get really out of hand if you really think about it. And people can create all sorts of, you know, thank God for, you know, with Donald Trump, there was the, you know, the fourth estate where they could take and, and, you know, people like Carol Lennigan, people could write about stuff and call it out. You know, so many great authors writing about the Trump administration, they called out the amount of lies. You know, at one point, was it the Washington Post? I think there was keeping a tally of all the lies that have been told. Yeah, no, it's very important.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to tell how much effect those things have. It would be a disaster if that didn't exist. I mean, it's absolutely essential that the press does try and find the truth and write about it or broadcast it. But the Trump supporters, to take the example of Trump, are not going to be very excited about what goes on, what's written in the Washington Post or the New York Times. It just confirms to them. And again, as a result of a world in which people feel

that there is no such thing as truth, everything is partisan and everything is propaganda. Well, if that's what you think, then simply because something is reported in the New York Times or the Washington Post, people will say, well, that's partisan. I mean, there's no reason to believe that. Of course they would say that and so on.

And that's another great danger of losing sight of the importance of truth. There you go. I mean, even like the Fox News revelations through the Dominion lawsuit, where they've got the texts and the emails of people going, yeah, we're faking it. Yeah, we're selling BS. And sadly, those people never make that connection or see the truth because Fox doesn't report it. That's all they watch. It's really interesting to me.

I remember back when the Trump administration was coming into play and the fake news was really fake news. They had people that were just average dudes who started making these websites. And at first they targeted Democrats and they were feeding them trying to feed them fake news through facebook and social media and jacking the algorithm and they found that a lot of democrats would research and fact check stuff and so then they played it to the republicans and found that they would buy it and eat it up and it's interesting just the mental game of it the why people choose and why people do what they do, which is what you've studied in your book, The Collaborators.

Anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go? God, I mean, we've covered a lot of ground. Oh, yeah. No, I think we can leave it at that, really. There we go. There we go. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Ian, and see you again. I'm glad you're doing well, and we'll look forward to the next 41 books.

Thanks very much. It's not 41. I think you're exaggerating. I'm taking that off Amazon. So there may be some revision. I think it's more like 14. Is it 14? Well,

not 41. That's for sure. But I'm taking that from Amazon. So maybe they have bent the truth, you know, that's for sure. But I'm taking that from Amazon, so maybe they've bent the truth, you know, those Amazon people over there. But I think those are for, like, revisions and maybe putting out new languages or something like that.

It may be counting, like, the Kindles and the audiobooks. That may be what it's doing. Oh, in that case, maybe, yeah. Yeah, that's most likely what it's doing. But, you know, I tried to pump you up and give you that sort of... Well, thank you. of... But thank you for

being on the show. We really appreciate it. It was a pleasure. There you go. And thanks, Simonis, for tuning in. Be sure to pick it up wherever fine books are sold. But remember, stay out of those alleyway bookstores. They're kind of dangerous and you might need a tetanus shot if you go into some of those alleyways and check it out.

Order of the book wherever fine books are sold. The book is called The Collaborators, Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II. It came out March 7, 2023, and we certainly appreciate you guys being here. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time. And that should have us out.