The New York Times
December 12, 1996

At the Rape of Nanking: A Nazi who Saved Lives

By DAVID W. CHEN

When the invading Japanese Army overran the Nationalist Chinese capital
in December 1937, soldiers embarked on a two month rampage of looting,
rape, and killing that left tens of thousands Chinese civilians dead in
what became known as the "Rape of Nanking."

Now a recently unearthed diary reveals an unlikely rescuer of thousands
of Chinese: a German businessman living in China who was the leader of
the local Nazi organization.

The businessman, John Rabe, kept a 1,200-page diary that provides a rare
third party account of the atrocities. In it, he writes of digging
foxhole in his backyard to shelter 650 Chinese and of repelling Japanese
troops who tried to climb over the wall, of dashing through war-torn
areas to deliver rice, and of stopping Japanese soldiers
from raping Chinese women. He even wrote to Hitler to complain about the
Japanese actions.

'These escapades were quite dangerous," he wrote in his diary. "The
Japanese had pistols and bayonets and I as mentioned before - had only
party symbols and my swastika armband."

Mr. Rabe (pronounced RAH-bay), who died in 1950, lived and worked in
China from 1908 to 1938. His diary sheds light on a heretofore
little-known man, who, although a Nazi loyalist, risked his life and his
status to save people who would later become his country's enemies
Indeed, Mr. Rabe's outspoken support for the Chinese upon his return to
Germany appears to have ruined his career.

Some who have followed his case say that he, like Oscar Schindler, the
German industrialist who protected Jews under very different
circumstances, offers another example of the durability of humanitarian
impulses in the cruelest of times.

Scholars say Mr. Rabe's diary, which includes reports from other foreign
observers. photos and other memorabilia, is valuable not so much for
revealing new historical facts, but because ii provides an unusually
detailed and personal account from a German witness to an incident
considered among the most brutal in modern warfare.
They believe the diary to be authentic, be cause American missionaries
in China who) were Mr. Rabe's contemporaries knew of his actions and
supplied similar accounts of atrocities.

The diary also offers a counterweight to claims by some Japanese
officials who have long denied either the existence or the scale of the
massacre in Nanking, which is now known as Nanjing.
"It is an incredibly gripping and depressing narrative, done very
carefully with an enormous amount of detail and drama," said William C.
Kirby, a professor of modern Chinese history at Harvard University, who has read parts of the diary in German, "it will reopen this case in
a very important way in that people can go through the day-to-day
account and ad l 100 to 200 stories to what is popularly known.''

The diary has only now come to light because the efforts of Iris Chang,
Sunnyvale, Calif., author. While researching a book on the Nanjing
massacre a few years ago, she stumbled upon a few references to Mr.
Rabe's humanitarian efforts. She tracked down Mr. Rabe's grand-daughter,
Ursula Reinhardt in Berlin, and upon discovering that Mr. Rabe had kept
a diary, persuaded the family to make it public.That will formally
happen today at news conference at the Hotel Intercontinental in
New York, with Mrs. Reinhardt among those expected to attend. The public
announcement is being organized by the Alliance in Memory of Victims of
the Nanjng Massacre, a Chinese-American group, said Tzuping Shao, a
past president. Eventually, copies of the diary are to be donated to
Yale Divinity School Library and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, in
China.

Martha L. Smalley, research services librarian at Yale Divinity
School, said Mr. Rabe's accounts are corroborated by documents on
display at a current Yale exhibition called "American Missionary
Eyewitnesses to the Nanjing Massacre.One such missionary, Robert O.
Wilson, a Harvard-trained doctor who worked in China in the 1930's,
wrote of Mr. Rabe:

He is well up in Nazi circles and after coming into such close contact
as we have for the past few weeks and discover(ing) what a splendid man
he is and what a tremendous heart he has, it is hard to reconcile his
personality with his adulation of 'Der Fuhrer.' "

It is not clear whether Mr. Rade embraced the oppression of Jews and
other groups in Nazi Germany. He lived outside Germany during the time
of Hitler's rise to power, and there is no record of the extent of his
activities in the Nazi Party after he returned
to Germany in 1938, according to Ms. Chang. Because scholars, who
received the diary only a few days ago, have not finished reading it,
they cannot say if it contains expressions of anti-Semitism. But Mr.
Rabe was outspoken in his support for Nazism. In a lecture he delivered
after his return to Germany in February 1938, he said, 'Although I feel
tremendous sympathy for the suffering of China, I am still, above all,
pro-German and I believe not
only in the correctness of our political system but, as an organizer of
the party, I am behind the system 100 percent."

Born in Hamburg in 1882, Mr. Rabe spent much of his life in China
working for the Siemens Company, rising to become its top representative
there, selling telephones, turbines and electrical equipment. His
children and grandchildren were born in China, and he had many Chinese
friends. He spoke the language fluently.But by 1937, Hitler's Germany
was shifting its loyalties away from China and toward
Japan. So when Japanese forces converged on Nanjing, many Germans who
were working in Chin a felt torn, Professor Kirby said.

Mr. Rabe was ordered by Siemens to leave for the safer grounds of Wuhan,
a few hundred miles west on the Yangtze River. But he refused. Instead,
he became chairman of a group of about two dozen German and American
missionaries, doctors and professors who established a neutral zone in
Nanjing as a haven for Chinese refugees.

It was a daunting task. Mr. Rabe witnessed people who were shot, doused
with gasoline and burned alive. He saw bodies of women lanced with beer
bottles and bamboo sticks.

In his diary entry for Jan. 1, l938, Mr. Rabe wrote: "The mother of a
young attractive girl called out to me, and throwing herself on 11ev
knees, crying, said I should help her. Upon entering (the house), I saw
a Japanese soldier lying completely naked on a young girl, who was
crying hysterically. I yelled at this swine, in any language it would
be understood, 'Happy New Year,' and he fled from there, naked and with
his pants in his hand." In another entry, referring to the Chinese he
had hidden, Mr. Rabe wrote that it was
hard to sleep with 650 people snoring in his backyard. On Dec. 10, with
water and power failing and the city ringed by fire, he noticed that his
canary, Peter, sang in rhythm to the sound of gunfire.

Upon his return to Germany in February 1938, Mr. Rabe wrote a letter to
Hitler, asking him to persuade Japan to stop the atrocities. But he was
arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated for three days and ordered to keep
silent on the subject.From there Mr. Rabe's life headed into a downward
spiral. Between 1938 and 1945, Mr. Rabe worked on and off for the
Siemens Company, including a brief stint in
Afghanistan.

As World War II intensified, Mr. Rabe wrote increasingly in his diary
about hunger and the ravages of war; he and his family in Berlin had to
eat nettles and acorn soup.Because Mr. Rabe was one of the about 9
percent of Germans who were members of the Nazi party, he had to
petition to be de-Nazified by the Allies after the war in order to
hold a job. His first petition was denied and Mr. Rabe had to appeal.
Ultimately, in June 1946, Mr. Rabe was granted de-Nazification status
because of his humanitarian acts in
China according to Ms. Chang. But the investigation proved draining, and
he died of a stroke in 1950.

"He was humiliated because he had to go through de-Nazification," Mrs.
Reinhardt said in a telephone interview from her home in Berlin.
Mr Rabe's diary may bolster the efforts of Chinese organizations hike
Mr. Shao’s alliance who contend that as many as 300,000 Chinese were
killed in Nanjing massacres, to extract an apology, or possibly war
reparations, from the Japanese Government. Unlike Germany, Japan has
been perceived as resisting responsibility for
wartime atrocities. Some high ranking Japanese officials, including a
former Minister of Justice, Shigeto Nagano, maintain the incident never
happened.

Ms. Chang, whose book, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of
World War II," is to be published next year by Basic Books, said of Mr.
Rabe: "I think he felt that he could make a difference, that if Germany
knew what Japan was doing, then maybe Germany could have influenced
Japan to stop it. It may have been naïve. But to
me, John Rabe is the Oskar Schindler of China, another example of good
in the face of evil.''