In a Nutshell
When Japanese troops captured Nanking in December 1937 and began weeks of mass rape and murder, the German businessman who ran the city’s local branch of the Nazi party stayed behind and used his position to save hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. His name: John Rabe.
The Whole Bushel
In December 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army broke into Nanking, then China’s capital, and turned on its people. Over the following weeks, soldiers carried out mass executions of unarmed men, raped tens of thousands of women and girls, and burned and looted much of the city. Estimates of the dead are still disputed, ranging from around 100,000 to the figure of 300,000 recorded by the postwar Nanjing tribunal and inscribed at the city’s memorial today. It remains one of the worst atrocities of the war, and for the people trapped inside the city there was almost nowhere to run.
One of the few refuges was organized by John Rabe, a German who had lived in China for decades as a representative of the electrical company Siemens and who ran Nanking’s local branch of the Nazi party. As the army closed in, Rabe joined a small group of American, British, and other Western missionaries, doctors, and teachers to set up the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. It covered an area of roughly 3.8 square kilometers in the west of the city. Rabe was chosen to chair it, in part because Germany was allied with Japan and his Nazi standing carried weight. Inside the zone’s camps, up to 250,000 civilians found food and shelter, and Rabe opened his own property to another 650 people.
His most dangerous work came at night. Armed with nothing but his party uniform and the swastika, Rabe confronted Japanese soldiers who had come to loot and kill, using the flag of Japan’s own ally to face them down and pull people out of harm. He also kept a detailed diary of what he witnessed, which survives as one of the most important eyewitness records of the massacre. Decades later the American writer Iris Chang helped bring it to public attention, and it was published in English as The Good Man of Nanking.
The contradiction at the center of the story was never resolved. Rabe was a committed member of the Nazi party who still believed his own government would want to stop what he was seeing. In 1938 he wrote to Hitler, enclosed film of the atrocities, and asked him to intervene. Instead the Gestapo detained and questioned him, seized the film, and ordered him to stay silent. He returned to a ruined postwar Germany, was investigated over his party membership, and fell into such poverty that his family lived on porridge made from acorn flour and wild nettles. In 1948 the citizens of Nanking, remembering what he had done, raised money and sent food packages to keep him alive. He died in Berlin in 1950. His original headstone was later moved to Nanjing, near the site of the killings—a marker for the ardent Nazi whose humanity, in the end, is what people remember him for.
Show Me The Proof
At the Rape of Nanking: A Nazi Who Saved Lives
Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing
The Nazi Leader Who, in 1937, Became the Oskar Schindler of China
