Originally published in Project Syndicate, July 28, 2023
Michael Ignatieff’s latest book is On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.
It has taken two generations for most countries that were occupied by Nazi Germany to admit that it was the resisters, not the collaborators, who were the minority. But now we risk swinging too far the other way: normalizing collaboration and making resistance such an exceptional choice that only saints would choose it.
VIENNA – When interviewed for his biography, Isaiah Berlin at one point wondered aloud who, in English high society, would have collaborated had the Germans invaded in 1940. The anti-Semites, chancers, and sycophants of his acquaintance made his list, but who else? Asking himself that question was a way of remaining alert to the possibilities of betrayal lurking beneath the bonhomie and mutual flattery of elite London. Berlin’s point was that when the bottom falls out of the world, you cannot be too sure what anyone will do – yourself included.
Collaborators, argues Ian Buruma in his gripping study of three such figures, are a compelling subject because they have succumbed to a temptation that would confront us all if placed in the same situation. This is not how collaboration used to be understood. When the Nazi occupation regimes were driven out of France and the Netherlands in 1945, collaborators were hunted down as a disgraced minority. Both countries rebuilt their national identities around the myth that their resistance heroes had represented the true spirit of their people.
It has taken two generations for most countries to admit that it was the resisters, not the collaborators, who were the minority. But now we risk swinging too far the other way: normalizing collaboration and making resistance such an exceptional choice that only saints would choose it.
Strange Characters
In The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II, Buruma focuses on Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler’s masseur; Friedrich Weinreb, a Jew who connived with the German occupation authorities in the Netherlands; and Kawashima Yoshiko, a cross-dressing Chinese princess who cooperated with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.
Kersten used his skill in relieving Himmler’s stomach pains to ingratiate himself with the Nazi hierarchy. When the regime began to crumble, he saved his own skin by persuading his master to spare the lives of a few Jews. Even though he traveled on Himmler’s private train into the infernal regions of Poland and Ukraine where mass killings were carried out, Kersten pretended to have no idea about what was going on.
Unlike Kersten, who feigned ignorance, Weinreb, a Jewish migrant from Ukraine, knew exactly what the Nazis would do when they took over the Netherlands in 1940. But he also harbored contempt for the Jewish leadership, which had provided the SS with lists of Jews in the hope of saving their own kith and kin. He thus began recruiting Jews for his own list, telling them that he had secret contacts with a senior German general who would allow them to escape if they paid him, and if the women submitted to medical exams at his hands. Jews who put their faith in Weinreb’s scheme were rounded up for extermination.
Buruma struggles to make sense of Weinreb’s web of lies, concluding that he was a fantasist trapped in his own fantasy. But this may be letting him off too easily. In fact, he was a much more sinister figure, a wretch who exploited other people’s terror for profit, sexual gratification, and the exultant sense of power that comes from having defenseless people at your mercy.
Kawashima was a third type of collaborator: she at least had a discernible political agenda. As a Manchu princess, she collaborated with the Japanese to restore the Manchu dynasty in Manchukuo, the state that Japan created in Manchuria in the 1930s after its conquest of most of China. In her own gauzy fantasy, she would preside over a fusion of the two great cultures of the East. In the event, however, Manchukuo was never anything other than a flimsy attempt to legitimize (to the Chinese) an exceptionally brutal foreign occupation.
Personalities and Politics
Buruma is clearly fascinated by his subjects’ louche, scabrous lives. The most interesting thing about collaborators, he finds, is their skill in exploiting the fissures in totalitarian regimes and wiggling their way through the cracks into positions of power.
Kawashima passed from one Japanese warlord to another, using her erotic wiles to manipulate them for her own ends, only to end up being double-crossed and abandoned in the end. After the war, she was prosecuted by Chinese nationalists and executed as a traitor. By contrast, Himmler’s masseur made it out alive by exploiting the paranoia and hatred within the viper pit that was Hitler’s regime; and Weinreb survived by making the SS believe, at least for a time, that he was working with a secret circle of Wehrmacht officers.
While Buruma does a good job of describing the twisted world of occupation regimes in Europe and Asia, his trio have little in common beyond their capacity for self-delusion. As a result, the phenomenon of collaboration is reduced to the psychopathology of three con artists. But collaboration was much more than an opportunist’s game. It was a fundamentally political choice made by responsible agents, and it had far-reaching consequences for entire societies and peoples.
Consider the agonizing dilemma of the Judenrat, the Jewish councils whose members chose to collaborate with the SS and provided lists of Jews and their whereabouts, in the hope of saving their own families. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, excoriated these choices. But Berlin took a different view. One of his uncles, a Judenrat leader in Riga in 1941, was forced to assist the occupation, which culminated in all the city’s Jews being led out of the town, slaughtered, and tossed into mass graves. Berlin’s judgment of his uncle’s “collaboration” – if that’s what it should be called – was that in situations where you face death no matter what, verdicts like Arendt’s were unpardonably arrogant.
The proper response could only be sorrow and remembrance.
Sword and Shield
While some cases of collaboration represent an impossible choice under extreme conditions, in other cases, it can be defended as an attempt to save a country’s honor following military defeat. One encounters this argument in historian Julian Jackson’s France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, which offers a riveting and meticulous recreation of the Vichy leader’s 1945 prosecution for collaborating with the German occupiers.
Jackson contends that collaboration was the logical consequence of the June 1940 armistice, just as the armistice had been the logical consequence of the appeasement at Munich. Not for nothing, French public opinion was in favor first of appeasing Hitler, and then of collaborating with him after defeat.
The fact that public opinion supported Pétain does not justify collaboration, but it helps to make the decision to collaborate understandable. When the hero of Verdun “made the gift of his person” to the French people in their hour of defeat, he told them, “if I could no longer be your sword, I have wanted to be your shield.”
By signing the armistice with Germany in June 1940, Pétain promised that his regime in Vichy would prevent the Germans from occupying all French territory and protect the French population from the full force of German decrees. In his speech to the French people, he used the word “collaboration” to describe his position vis-à-vis the German authorities. That word, soon shortened to “collabo,” then entered the vernacular of the occupation.
Talleyrand once remarked that treason is a matter of dates. What looks like acquiescence at one moment can turn into betrayal at another. In June 1940, Pétain’s decision seemed, in the eyes of many patriotic French, to have saved the country’s honor at a time when further resistance was futile. General Maxime Weygand, the commander of the French army, had famously predicted after the fall of France that within three weeks, England’s neck would be wrung like a chicken’s. The Americans had not entered the war, and Stalin was on Hitler’s side. Charles de Gaulle’s decision to flee to England and rally a resistance seemed quixotic, whereas collaboration looked like the more realistic option.
Even Léon Blum – the Socialist prime minister in the 1930s who was later interned by the Germans – felt the armistice was an honorable response to catastrophe, preferable even to the flight of the Dutch and Polish governments into exile in London. Pétain insisted that collaboration had spared France from sharing Poland’s singularly horrible fate under Nazi occupation.
Crossing the Line
Pétain’s collaboration turned into dishonor when he betrayed his promise to shield the French people. True, between 1940 and 1942, his regime did manage to delay or modify German diktats. But after the Allies landed in North Africa, in November 1942, the Germans occupied all of France and eliminated any remaining authority that Pétain had. Those who had forgiven his collaboration in 1940 could not understand why he did not leave to join the Free French in Algiers.
Instead, he stayed, while the Gestapo tortured and murdered French résistants. He also gave carte blanche to the French milice (a French fascist paramilitary force) and the Gestapo to hunt down French and foreign Jews and dispatch them to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At the trial, Blum described both Pétain’s failure to leave France in 1942 and his abject inability to stand up to the Germans as a “massive and atrocious abuse of moral confidence.” His behavior, Blum concluded, deserved the name of treachery.
But by the time of his trial in August 1945, Pétain was an 89-year-old shell of his former self. Many of those in the resistance believed that he, as the exemplary symbol of France’s degradation, deserved death, while Vichy’s apologists countered that he was the victim of a witch hunt. Each side understood that the trial had opened the wound of collaboration on the body of a whole society. When the résistant writer Maurice Druon asked, “Do you want to try every gendarme who pushed people onto trains?” someone else in the courtroom shouted “Yes!”
Druon warned that the proceedings were “turning into a trial of France.” But not even résistants wanted to put the whole country in the dock. After the court sentenced Pétain to death, de Gaulle granted him a pardon; and decades later, he laid a wreath on his old commander’s grave.
“A trial like this one,” the writer François Mauriac observed at the time, “is never over and will never end.” He was right. France’s war-time collaboration haunted its politics for 50 years. For example, François Mitterrand – who challenged de Gaulle for the presidency in 1965, led the Socialists to power in 1981, and served as president for 14 years – had to explain when president why there were old photographs of him as a young Vichy functionary being presented to the Marshal. Younger generations, he stressed, needed to understand that it had been a common course for people to begin with collaboration and then to pass over to the side of resistance, as he did in 1943.
Let History Judge?
The trials of Vichy officials who had been complicit in the murder of Jews continued into the 1990s. But not until Jacques Chirac’s presidency (1995-2007) did France publicly acknowledge that the deportation of French Jews to the Nazi death camps had been the work of a French government, French police, and French collaborators.
The issue of collaboration has cast a longer shadow over French life than anyone could have imagined in 1945. When Jackson concludes his exemplary and fascinating tale with the observation that “the Pétain case is closed,” one cannot be entirely sure.
Perhaps the case really is closed in France. But now that Europe is at war again, the question of collaboration remains before us all. Once the war in Ukraine concludes, Ukraine’s leaders will have to decide what to do with those who collaborated with the Russian invaders. If the Ukrainians are forced into an armistice while Russia still occupies its territory, some who fought to expel the Russians will no doubt condemn whoever signs such an agreement as a traitor. But, as with Pétain, whether that judgment sticks will depend on what comes after.
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