by John Rabe
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
PART 1 - FROM JOHN RABE’S NANKING DIARY
CHAPTER 1 - HOW IT BEGAN
21 SEPTEMBER 1937
22 SEPTEMBER
23 SEPTEMBER
24 SEPTEMBER
25 SEPTEMBER
26 SEPTEMBER
3 OCTOBER
6 OCTOBER
9 AND 10 OCTOBER
13 OCTOBER
14 OCTOBER
17 OCTOBER (FROM A LETTER)
LATER
18 OCTOBER
19 OCTOBER
20 OCTOBER
21 OCTOBER, 9 : 1 5 A.M.
22 OCTOBER
24 OCTOBER
25 OCTOBER
26 OCTOBER
27 OCTOBER
28 OCTOBER
29 OCTOBER
6 NOVEMBER
LATER
7 NOVEMBER
8 NOVEMBER
10 NOVEMBER
11 NOVEMBER
12 NOVEMBER
14 NOVEMBER
15 NOVEMBER
16 NOVEMBER
17 NOVEMBER
18 NOVEMBER
CHAPTER 2 - THINGS GET SERIOUS
19 NOVEMBER
20 NOVEMBER
21 NOVEMBER
22 NOVEMBER
LATER
23 NOVEMBER
24 NOVEMBER
25 NOVEMBER
27 NOVEMBER
27 NOVEMBER, EVENING
28 NOVEMBER
29 NOVEMBER
30 NOVEMBER
1 DECEMBER
2 DECEMBER
3 DECEMBER
4 DECEMBER
5 DECEMBER
CHAPTER 3 - WAITING FOR THE ATTACK
6 DECEMBER
7 DECEMBER
8 DECEMBER
9 DECEMBER
LATER
10 DECEMBER
NOON
10:30 P.M.
11 DECEMBER, 8 A.M.
9 A.M.
6 P.M.
CHAPTER 4 - THE JAPANESE MARCH IN
12 DECEMBER
6:30 P.M.
8 P.M.
13 DECEMBER
15 DECEMBER
16 DECEMBER
17 DECEMBER
18 DECEMBER
6:00 P.M.
19 DECEMBER
6:00 P.M.
20 DECEMBER
21 DECEMBER
22 DECEMBER
CHAPTER 5 - CHRISTMAS
23 DECEMBER
24 DECEMBER
25 DECEMBER
26 DECEMBER, 5:00 P.M.
LATER
27 DECEMBER
28 DECEMBER
LATER
30 DECEMBER
CHAPTER 6 - NEW YEAR
31 DECEMBER
I JANUARY 1938
2 JANUARY
3 JANUARY
LATER
4 JANUARY
5 JANUARY
CHAPTER 7 - THE DIPLOMATS RETURN
6 JANUARY
7 JANUARY
8 JANUARY
LATER
9 JANUARY
10 JANUARY
9 A.M.
4:00 P.M.
FROM THE FAMILY DIARY
11 JANUARY
12 JANUARY
CHAPTER 8 - CLOSING DOWN THE SIEMENS NANKING BRANCH
13 JANUARY
4:00 P.M.
15 JANUARY
16 JANUARY
17 JANUARY
18 JANUARY
LATER
19 JANUARY
20 JANUARY
21 JANUARY
22 JANUARY
23 JANUARY
4:30 P.M.
6:00 P.M.
7:00 P.M.
24 JANUARY
LATER
25 JANUARY
10:10 P.M.
CHAPTER 9 - THE JAPANESE WANT TO CLEAR THE SAFETY ZONE
26 JANUARY
27 JANUARY
FROM THE FAMILY DIARY
28 JANUARY
29 JANUARY
30 JANUARY
LATER
FROM THE FAMILY DIARY
CHAPTER 10 - THE LIVING BUDDHA
31 JANUARY
LATER
1 FEBRUARY
2 FEBRUARY
3 FEBRUARY
LATER
4 FEBRUARY
LATER
5 FEBRUARY
2:15 P.M.
CHAPTER 11 - FAREWELL
6 FEBRUARY
7 FEBRUARY
8 FEBRUARY
9 FEBRUARY
10 FEBRUARY
11 FEBRUARY
12 FEBRUARY
5 P.M.
13 FEBRUARY
14 FEBRUARY
15 FEBRUARY
LATER
16 FEBRUARY
17 FEBRUARY
18 FEBRUARY
19 FEBRUARY
20 FEBRUARY
21 FEBRUARY
4:00 P.M.
7 P.M.
22 FEBRUARY
1 P.M.
8 P.M.
23 FEBRUARY, 8 A.M.
LATER (ON BOARD THE HMS BEE)
24 FEBRUARY (ON BOARD THE HMS BEE)
25 FEBRUARY
28 FEBRUARY
BACK HOME AGAIN AFTER THIRTY YEARS IN CHINA
PART 2 - JOHN RABE IN HIS GERMAN HOMELAND
CHAPTER 12 - BETWEEN THE NANKING AND BERLIN DIARIES
CHAPTER 13 - JOHN RABE’S BERLIN DIARY
SIEMENSSTADT, 24 APRIL 1945
8 P.M.
25 APRIL
26 APRIL
12:30 P.M.
27 APRIL
28 APRIL
SUNDAY, 29 APRIL
MONDAY, 30 APRIL
TUESDAY, 1 MAY
5 P.M.
SATURDAY, 5 MAY
SUNDAY, 6 MAY
MONDAY, 7 MAY
TUESDAY, 8 MAY
WEDNESDAY, 9 MAY
NOON
THURSDAY, 10 MAY
FRIDAY, 11 MAY
SATURDAY, 12 MAY
SUNDAY, 13 MAY, OTTO’S 28 TH BIRTHDAY!
MONDAY, 14 MAY
TUESDAY, 15 MAY
WEDNESDAY, 16 MAY
FRIDAY, 18 MAY
SATURDAY, 19 MAY
SUNDAY, 20 MAY (PENTECOST)
MONDAY, 21 MAY
TUESDAY, 22 MAY
THURSDAY, 24 MAY
SATURDAY, 26 MAY
TUESDAY, 29 MAY
WEDNESDAY, 30 MAY
THURSDAY, 31 MAY
FRIDAY, 1 JUNE
TUESDAY, 5 JUNE
THURSDAY, 14 JUNE
SUNDAY, 17 JUNE
MONDAY, 18 JUNE
FRIDAY, 22 JUNE
SATURDAY, 30 JUNE
MONDAY, 2 JULY
24 AUGUST
28 AUGUST
MONDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER
SUNDAY, 14 OCTOBER
18 APRIL 1946
16 MAY 1946
7 JUNE
DOCUMENTS
AFTERWORD
NOTES
Copyright Page
FOREWORD
JOHN RABE WAS BORN in Hamburg, Germany, on 23 November 1882. His father was a ship’s captain; he died while his son was still young, so that John had to leave school after passing general exams. He then worked for a Hamburg export firm, first as an apprentice for two and a half years, and then as an office clerk. At his boss’s recommendation he was sent to Lourenço Marques in Mozambique, a Portuguese colony in southeast Africa, where he worked for a well-established English firm. There he learned to speak fluent English.
A bout of malaria forced him to return home in 1906, but he was on his
way again by 1908, this time to Peking. In 1909 he went to Shanghai, where he married his childhood sweetheart from Hamburg. With only a few brief interruptions, he lived in China for the next thirty years. At first he worked for a Hamburg firm, and then in 1911 joined the Siemens branch in Peking, where he remained throughout the First World War, even though, under pressure from the Allies, China declared war on Germany in 1917. He was able to convince the Chinese authorities, however, that it would be in both China’s and their own best interest if he continued to run the Siemens office in Peking during the war. That sort of thing was possible in China.
But in 1919, under pressure from the British, he was repatriated to Germany along with all his fellow countrymen. German competition was not wanted. A year later, however, he returned to China via the backdoor of Japan and reestablished the Siemens branch in Peking under the cover of a Chinese firm, until Siemens China Company was permitted to reopen, with its main office in Shanghai. At first he worked in Peking and Tientsin, but from 1931 on, he was the director of the Siemens branch in Nanking, which at the time was the capital of China. The firm called him home in March 1938 and transferred him to its main offices in Berlin, where, however, he was not given any position of real responsibility. In 1947, he retired at age 65; two years later, on 5 January 1950, he died.
The life of an international businessman, then, nothing unusual, nothing particularly exciting—had not John Rabe outgrown that mundane role for a period of six months when he placed, and often risked, his life in the service of 250,000 Chinese. In the Memorial Hall of the city of Nanking, there is a tablet erected in honor of his exemplary humanity. Those who may think humanity is unknown in China are wrong.
The student Fan Chi asked the Master what “jen” (humanness) means. “To love men,” Confucius replied.
In the philosophy of Confucius, jenis the central ethical concept. Confucius returns to it again and again. What he taught and what the Chinese people learned for two and a half millennia has never ceased to be a challenge to humankind.
John Rabe was a simple man who wanted to be no more than an honest Hamburg businessman. He was always ready to help, was well-liked, showed good common sense, and maintained a sense of humor even in difficult situations, especially then. He always found ways to come to an amicable agreement, never thrust himself to the fore, and was more likely to do the opposite. If he records some complaint in his diary, he usually adds: “But it’s the same for others” or “Others are a lot worse off.” He often writes about people who are in need, and how he helped or tried to help them. He saw that as his task, and it distinguished him from his fellows.
He had a great many friends in China, both among the Germans and the other Westerners there. We know that he spoke excellent English; but his written French is impeccable as well. He wrote a whole series of books, mostly about life in China, embellishing them with photographs and little humorous drawings. The books are mostly of a private nature and have never been published, but the bound manuscripts are still extant. He knew a good deal about Chinese art, without ever becoming an expert. Literature, music, and the sciences were not his strong points, but sentimental poems could move him to tears. He had a soft heart, but didn’t like to show it.
He was a practical man, both adept and lucky in practical matters. He was only moderately interested in politics, essentially only to the extent that it concerned China, German commerce in China, and German foreign policy in Asia. But he was a patriot, and for a long time he thought Hitler wanted peace.
In 1934, he founded a German school on his property in Nanking—and not for his own two children. His daughter was already past school age, and his son was at a boarding school in southern Germany. As chairman of the school board, which had to work through official channels of the Reich and get approval of the Nazi Party for teachers and funds, he joined the NSDAP in 1934.
A simple man whom people prized for his common sense, his humor, and his congeniality, but certainly not in any way a conspicuous man—and yet he earned people’s highest admiration for the way that his love of his neighbor, of his Chinese fellow men in their plight, grew and outgrew itself, for the way he not only rescued them as a Good Samaritan, but also displayed political savvy, a talent for organization and diplomacy, and unflagging stamina in their cause. Working closely with American friends and often at the risk of his life, he built a Safety Zone in Nanking that prevented a massacre and offered relative security to 250,000 Chinese during the Japanese occupation. That he also found time to keep a diary is almost incomprehensible. What he did and saw during the six months between October 1937 and March 1938 is the topic of this book.
He was highly praised by his friends, revered as a saint by the Chinese, respected by the Japanese, whose acts of misconduct he constantly resisted. And yet he remained the same modest man he had been before, who nevertheless could lose all his gentle humility when he saw a wrong being committed; who erupted into hot fury when he saw a soldier about to rape a woman, roared at him in German, held his swastika armband under the man’s nose, grabbed him by the collar, and threw him out of the house. And by all accounts he was also a figure of strict paternal authority in his own home.
He was modest, yes, but now and then a little vanity shines through, as, for instance, when he sits down dressed in tails and adorned with medals to pose for a prominent Berlin photographer. Or in the hurt he felt when the editor of the Shanghai Ostasiatischer Lloydsimply blue-penciled a joke with which he had spiced up an article.
He left Germany in 1909 when Kaiser Wilhelm was still on the throne. He returned in 1919 for a brief period—when the German empire had been replaced by a republic that still rested on very uneasy foundations. When the Communists took over the town hall in Hamburg, John Rabe was beaten up because—in characteristic fashion—he tried to help a man who had been trod underfoot by the mob.
In Berlin he saw machine guns appear on the street during a strike by Siemens workers. He began to keep a diary. It became his great passion, and not always to his wife’s delight, for even after office hours he was often not available to the family. A constant theme of the entries is Rabe’s worry that in such unsettled times the volumes of his diary might get lost. They were his most precious possession. He had preserved his times and his life in them.
He wrote about that year in Berlin:
Then came the Kapp putsch. I knew and understood nothing about domestic politics. Only later did it become clear to me that those days in Germany were far worse than they had appeared to me at the time. To my left, in the Music Hall on Stein Platz, was the army, to my right, the Communists were quartered in the Riding Academy on Uhland Strasse, and they shot at each another during the night, so that I had to move my family from the bedroom out into the corridor.
It was not very pleasant in Berlin. Those were the days of the General Strike and the Organization for Maintenance of Supplies, the days when starving students became gigolos and opera singers sang for pennies in the back courtyards. Those were the days of hoarding and want. At the Siemens offices there were days for using bacon ration cards and days for using boot-resoling ration cards. I never missed a one. Herr Brendel, a friend and coworker at Siemens, had told me about a place inside Siemens where you could get cheap beans and peas. I tried to haul two large bags of peas home, but it began to rain and there were no street-cars. My bags turned soggy and I got home with about half. I really didn’t fit in Berlin!
I shared my food on the streetcar with a young girl who fainted because she had nothing in her stomach. I remember another gross example of the misery that I ran across almost every day. Herr Braun, our bookkeeper in Shanghai, had returned from vacation and invited Herr Brendel, me, and a few other friends, to share a pint of beer and some Bavarian snacks he had brought from home—white bread, butter, and sausage—at the Pschorr Beer Hall on Potsdamer Platz. We had all eaten our fill, and Herr Braun gave everything that was left to a little girl of perhaps eight, who carried matches in her apron and so
ld them for one mark a box. With a great sob the little thing let her entire stock of wares fall to the floor and ran with her treasure to her mother waiting at the door. The beer didn’t taste good to us after that.
Who can blame me for heaving a sigh of relief when I received news that I would be able to return to my old workplace in China.
Over the next two decades Rabe was in Germany only twice, both times briefly—first in the twenties, the second time in 1930, when he came home to get over a “head flu,” as he called it. After that he became the director of the Siemens branch in Nanking, China’s new capital city. He did not see Germany again until his firm recalled him in 1938.
Nanking had been China’s capital since 1927. By 1937, it had a population of about 1.3 million. Siemens had built the city’s telephone system and the turbines of its electrical power plant; it had also supplied the hospitals with German equipment. Chinese technicians trained by Siemens serviced these facilities round the clock. Rabe spent his days at various governmental ministries trying to win contracts for Siemens.
There was a German hotel in Nanking. The famous German bakery Kiessling & Bader in Tientsin had a branch here. The German embassy under Ambassador Trautmann had made the move from Peking to Nanking, and the other foreign embassies had set up shop in Nanking as well. Based in Nanking, the Transocean News Agency kept the world abreast of political events in China, while Shanghai remained the nation’s financial center—a relationship something like that between Washington and New York.
Marshal Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo, governed from Nanking, and wanted to modernize a backward country that had disintegrated into spheres of influence, most of them controlled by various warlords, each in charge of his own private army, and one, the province of Yen-an, by Mao Zedong, who had set up his headquarters there at the end of his famous Long March. There were thirty to forty German military advisors stationed in Nanking, most of them retired German officers, some with their families. Chiang Kai-shek had begun to bring them in under private contract as early as 1927. They were supposed to turn his army into an elite fighting force that could resist both Mao’s revolutionary forces and the Japanese.
The chief advisor from 1934 to 1935 had been retired Colonel-General Hans von Seeckt, the former commander in chief of the Weimar Republic’s army. His successor was General Alexander von Falkenhausen. They began the training of several elite divisions, which in fact were able to hold their own against the stronger Japanese for much of the autumn of 1937.
Housed in a separate colony, built for them by the generalissimo, the German officers in Nanking kept to themselves for the most part. They lived much the same casino-based life that they knew from home. They normally signed up for only a few years and had little interest in China, its land and people, its culture and history. Their main topics of conversation were their work, servants, transfers, war stories. Since these men came from very different political backgrounds, there were frequent enough serious arguments for Colonel-General von Seeckt to have to set up a court of honor.