So much sleaze oozes out of the morally compromised subjects in Ian Buruma’s disquieting group portrait, “The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II,” that nearly every page leaves a stain of betrayal. The stories, Mr. Buruma acknowledges, will also leave readers queasy.
What made these three figures so slippery, Mr. Buruma tells us, was their uncanny ability to repeatedly rationalize away any inconvenient facts while continuing to reinvent themselves to fit a given moment. Those are the qualities that also make them “alarmingly contemporary,” Mr. Buruma writes, in an era when “critical information is dismissed as ‘fake news,’ and large numbers of people believe in plots and conspiracies that bubble up from the collective imagination of the internet.”
