The Collaborators

''A multiple biography with overlapping chronology is a tricky feat and Buruma pulls it off magnificently.'' Ben Macintyre, The Times

On the face of it, the three characters here 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 am