Oskar Schindler of China saved over 300,000 people

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The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe – NAZI

Oskar Schindler of China saved over 300,000 people

Sad to say, when history judges the actions of a person, their personal affiliations affect how they are remembered. It’s not enough to say that a person did good things – other political beliefs and private actions are also called into question. 

It is in this light that the actions of German citizen and paid-up Nazi party member John Rabe are explored, through a fascinating collection of letters and diary entries cataloguing his selfless actions to defend Nanjing’s citizens during the infamous Rape of Nanjing by Japanese invaders in 1937. 

A businessman working for Siemens in China from 1911 to 1938, Rabe became a hero to the people of Nanjing when he refused to leave the city when the rest of the foreign community was evacuated, choosing instead to act as guardian of the Safety Zone, alongside Minnie Vautrin, head of studies at Jinling Women’s College. The internationally administered Zone is credited with saving the lives of an estimated 250,000 residents living within its confines, although the guardians were by no means sheltered from the horrors the Japanese soldiers visited upon the city in the massacre that saw an estimated 300,000 die.

Rabe’s memoirs and letters form an End of Empire tale that begins with the gins, tonics, and ‘coolies’ that eased life for Nanjing’s ex-pats in the early part of the 20th century. It then follows the tense buildup to the arrival of Japanese soldiers in the city, the horrors of the events as they unfolded, and his final return to poverty in Germany as a Nazi outcast – and recipient of food parcels from the grateful folk of Nanjing for his role in their savior. 

The Good German reads like it is – the diary thoughts of a man who believed he did what any other person would do given the extreme situation. The tone of the book is staid, focused on actions such as founding the International Safety Zone Committee and petitioning of international governments, as well as attempts to instill a sense of normality, rather than going into gory detail of the atrocities: 

“24 December: This morning, I carefully packed up the red Advent star we lighted yesterday evening… The woman who was admitted because of the miscarriage and had the bayonet cuts all over her face is doing fairly well. A sampan owner who was shot in the jaw and burned over most of his body when someone poured gasoline over him… will probably die in the course of the day.” (p. 119)

As far as his support of the Nazi party goes, Rabe writes that news of Hitler’s activities and anti-Semitism didn’t reach Nanjing, and he says he genuinely believed Hitler was seeking peace in Europe. In the Berlin sections of his diary, he writes that the sole reason he remained a member of the party was the subsidy from the German Reich he received to finance a German School in Nanjing. 

The Good German is undoubtedly a tribute to the great deeds of a great man who sacrificed much in the service of the people of Nanjing. While this is a must-read for those wanting to see this troubled period of Chinese history from a different perspective, the collection of diary extracts, letters home, and inserted comments from the editor can feel a little stilted and lacking in emotion. But the raw emotion is definitely there for those who wish to read between the lines. 

On September 22, 1937, John Rabe picked up his pen with the same determination that the Japanese soldiers advancing on Nanking picked up their rifles, and began to record their terrible atrocities. The testament he produced will confound those cynical about altruism, as well as naysayers who deny the brutality — or even the occurrence — of the Rape of Nanking.

Rabe was a Hamburg businessman posted to the city. When Japanese forces advanced on Nanking, he organized a sprawling International Safety Zone, “that eventually saved over 250,000 lives even as reportedly an equal number of people lost theirs”. His diary details his activities and what he witnessed during the several weeks of murder, rape and pillage that started in mid-December 1937.

In one important way the, middle-aged, balding Rabe was like Oskar Schindler. He followed his conscience, and this, along with the circumstances, allowed him to attain greatness. As Shakespeare wrote ?Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them?.

He gave several motives, some mundane, others noble, for remaining in the doomed city. First Rabe cited professionalism, or duty to his company. Then he wrote of the power of personal bonds, insisting that, “I cannot bring myself to betray the trust” [of friends and employees]. He invoked compassion when he wrote ?Anyone who has ever held a trembling Chinese child during an air raid? cannot run.

When circumstances stranded him and Nanking’s helpless citizens in a moral desert, Rabe created an oasis of relief and safety. Once a blast shook a bomb shelter crowded with civilians and Rabe reacted by saying that fear could be controlled by “a few cheerful words, a really rotten joke, grins all around?.

Even though he was usually good-humored, Rabe demonstrated a capacity for righteous rage when encountering a soldier about to rape. This chubby, bow-tied businessman hollered at, and then shoved away the armed soldier, who then ran off.

The diary?s’ credulity seems enhanced by Rabe’s obsession with accuracy. He usually recorded the precise time, location, and nature of an atrocity, as he maintained composure, never inflaming emotions. For instance, he wrote plainly that “The older [child] was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword?.

The Chinese calculate that 300,000 people were murdered in Nanking. However, Japanese revisionists claim that either the massacre did not happen or that perhaps only 50,000 people died. Rabe cites no figures. Unlike Iris Chang’s exhaustively researched, “The Rape of Nanking”, a vivid account of terror and death leading to genocide, Rabe’s diaries are surprisingly understated. One reason might be because “cases are pouring in faster than we can type them out?.

Sometimes words failed him, for the horrors were “indescribable?. And, ironically, their ubiquity encouraged shorthand such as, “You hear of nothing but rape?. At other times Rabe indicated that the suffering dumbfounded him.

To be sure, the cruelty was extreme. Women had golf clubs or bamboo poles rammed up their genitals, and others were raped up to 40 times, with even 70-year-olds victimized. Children were murdered and raped. Hospital patients were executed, and looting was constant. Any Chinese man suspected of being a soldier was bound, killed, dumped into a fire, or kicked into the river. Some were buried alive.

Although the Japanese had pledged to respect the Zone, they killed and raped within it. Sometimes, needing to demonstrate their superiority, the soldiers humiliated the Chinese. Rabe cites an incident in which a Japanese soldier, passing a poor Chinese family sitting down to eat, paused to urinate in their common bowl of rice gruel. And when the Japanese realized that Rabe monitored gunfire, they switched to bayoneting their victims. Rabe wrote that an additional reason for staying was to witness these horrors “so that one fine day the truth will out.”

A Japanese diplomat in Nanking referred to the soldiers as “rascals?. This diplomat tried to win Rabe?s good will at a reception by playing Western songs. One was “Chinatown, My Chinatown?. Rabe was chagrined that most Japanese in Nanking, instead of facing the truth and reforming, hid behind denials or excuses. Tragically, many do to this day. [When the Japanese version of the diaries were published in Japan, many of the atrocities were censored].

In 1938, Rabe left for his homeland, Germany, where he continued to keep a diary. Rabe’s China diaries make it apparent that when he was in Nanking, this apolitical man seems never to have understood that the evil tide of fascism was flooding his homeland. Later, in Germany, the apparently still naive Rabe tried to tell the Nazi’s about Nanking’s suffering in the vain hope that Germany might help China. But the Gestapo censored him in order to preserve the good relations between Berlin and Tokyo.

He died in 1950. The diaries resurfaced in 1996 after his startled daughter read a reference to them in a newspaper and realized then that her father’s diaries were in her possession. When they were published, they caused a stir among specialists on Japan and the war. Battle lines have been drawn around Rabe’s attempt to get the truth out. Rabe’s contemporary allies insist that the diaries are an unbiased account of Nanking’s suffering. These allies include the Japanese journalist Katsuichi Honda, who has written prolifically on Nanking. In America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is lending its immense moral prestige and influence to assist victims of Nanking and other atrocities gain redress. [Within China, the diaries are being widely read; filmmaker Xie Jin has announced that he will make a movie about the rape of Nanking to educate people world wide.]

But Japanese reactionaries are fighting back. When the diaries were published in Japan recently, many of the atrocities were censored. Shintaro Ishihara, the right wing politician, continues to insist that the massacre is a Chinese lie; as the mayor of Tokyo, he has a pulpit from which to preach. When a Tokyo theatre tried to show a film about Nanking recently, right wingers burst in and slashed the screen with a sword. Rabe’s supporters will likely always find that when they try to speak up within Japan, their adversaries can speak as, or even more, loudly.

Rabe died poor and in obscurity. Sadly he was forced to barter his treasured Chinese art for food, and traded away his statue of Kuanyin — the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, for a handful of potatoes.

The report of a Nazi who saved thousands of Chinese lives during the infamous 1937- 1938 “Rape of Nanking” of World War II has been discovered, after decades of remaining a mystery to scholars.

The original 260-page report of Japanese atrocities — recorded by German businessman John Rabe in the Chinese city of Nanking and submitted to Adolf Hitler — has resurfaced this week. The report is further proof of the existence of the Nanking (or Nanjing) massacre, which some Japanese right-wing politicians, museum officials, and historians claim never occurred. Copies will be made available to the public through several archives.

The report emerged when author Iris Chang of Sunnyvale, California, investigated details of the “Rape of Nanking” for a book on the topic (Basic Books/HarperCollins, January 1998 publication date). After months of searching for John Rabe, she located Ursula Reinhardt, a granddaughter of Rabe’s who kept his report, diaries and personal papers in her private family archives.

Reinhardt is now donating copies of the report to the Yale Divinity School Library in New Haven, CT, and to the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall in the People’s Republic of China.

Chang calls John Rabe the “Oskar Schindler of China” for his role in rescuing thousands of Chinese civilians from extermination by the Japanese during a reign of terror in Nanking, then the capital of China. From November 1937 to February 1938, John Rabe, leader of the local Nazi party in Nanking, served as the head of a war relief committee known as the International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone.

Rabe, the son of a sea captain, was born in Hamburg, Germany, on November 23, 1982. After serving an apprenticeship with a merchant in Hamburg and working in Africa, Rabe went to China in 1908. In 1910, he worked for the Peking office of the Siemens China company. In November 1931, Rabe was transferred to the Nanking office, where he sold telephones and electrical equipment to the Chinese government.

In November 1937, when Japanese forces converged on Nanking, Rabe and a small group of Western missionaries, scholars, doctors and businessmen established a neutral zone in the city to assist Chinese refugees with food, clothing and shelter. Originally, members of the committee wanted the zone to be a temporary haven for refugees during the anticipated confusion between Chinese military retreat and Japanese entrance into the city.

But when the Japanese began an orgy of rape, arson and mass execution in Nanking, the missionaries decided to keep the zone open for months. For six to eight weeks beginning December 1937, the Japanese killed approximately 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanking. They also raped 20,000 to 80,000 women and destroyed more than one third of the city. In desperation, some 100,000 refugees crammed into a zone that was only two square miles in size.

The safety zone administrators endured Japanese threats and even physical violence in their efforts to stop the massacre and rape. Night and day, they also worked to secure food for the Chinese refugees, to nurse wounded soldiers and civilians, and to document atrocities for the world media.

In February 1938, John Rabe returned to Germany to alert the Nazi government of the Japanese atrocities. He gave lectures on the subject in Berlin, showing audiences photographs, reports and an amateur film of the Japanese violence in Nanking. But after sending the information to Adolf Hitler, Rabe was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. The Nazi government eventually returned the report to Rabe but confiscated the film. They also forbade him to lecture or write on the subject again.

Immediately after the war, Rabe was denounced for his past affiliation with the Nazi party. Although he was eventually exonerated of any wrongdoing, the trial depleted him of his health and savings. Food shortages in Germany caused Rabe to succumb to malnutrition and skin disease. He died of a stroke in 1950.