The Collaborators
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiko_Kawashima
The Collaborators
THREE STORIES OF DECEPTION AND SURVIVAL IN WORLD WAR II
By Ian Buruma
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/659322/the-collaborators-by-ian-buruma/
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