The Good Man of Nanking

by John Rabe

  For the businessmen of Nanking, who often did not leave China for years, home was far away. Eurasia, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, was the only airline in China, but as yet there was no direct link by air to Europe or America. The voyage from Shanghai to Genoa, where most Germans disembarked to complete the trip home by rail, lasted four to six weeks; the trip via the Trans-Siberian Railway took ten to twelve days. Most people preferred the comforts of a sea voyage.

  John Rabe had no clear picture of what had happened in Germany since his last brief stay in 1930. He learned of Hitler’s seizure of power, the Röhm putsch, the fundamental changes in the political landscape, only from newspapers. He read the British North China Daily News,China’s most serious English-language daily, published in Shanghai. He also subscribed to the Ostasiatischer Lloyd,based in Shanghai as well, which essentially restricted itself to passing on the dispatches from Transocean and from the official German news agency. Its editorial policy therefore reflected the standard jargon of the Reich Propaganda Ministry.

  This little German paper knew only good things to say about Germany, its Führer, and its party. But even the North China Daily Newswas generally rather sympathetic, if somewhat condescending, in its reports about Germany and its policies. German newspapers from home were usually two to three weeks old when they arrived in Nanking and thus of little interest. But these newspapers, too, had nothing negative to say; they reported about a new German nation that had risen up and broken the humiliating chains of the Versailles Treaty, that no longer paid reparations, and, with the defeat of 1918 behind it, that now demanded and got the same respect as other nations. The Jews were often attacked. Why?—that wasn’t very clear in China’s world of international business, where you dealt daily with people of the most diverse religions, races, and nationalities. And at first there was very little in the German press about the actual measures taken against the Jews in Germany—nor in the North China Daily Newsfor that matter. For years most of the foreign press treated Hitler’s policy of anti-Semitism as a disagreeable topic of German domestic politics in which outside nations would do better not to meddle.

  Far more important to the press were Germany’s foreign and economic policy, its rearmament, and, after 1938, increasing worries about whether Hitler’s policies might lead to war. In China people learned details about the treatment of German Jews only toward the end of the thirties, when increasing numbers of them began to emigrate to Shanghai. After that, however, it was impossible not to have some idea of what was going on.

  John Rabe, who had lived in China for almost thirty years, was more at home there than in Germany. He was one of the fabled “old China hands,” who could speak fluent English but no Chinese, conversing instead with the Chinese in Pidgin English, and yet who could think like locals and who understood, admired, and loved the Chinese. These old China hands were an inexhaustible source of anecdotes and experiences, living pieces of history who could offer vivid accounts of the Chinese and China’s otherness. When they returned home to Europe, however, they found it difficult to settle back into a homeland that now felt strange. The same thing happened to John Rabe.

  His home in Nanking was open to every guest. I was there in the autumn of 1936, returning from studying at an American college, traveling on a shoestring through Japan and China, and wanting to see and know everything.

  In Shandong province I had visited Herr Klicker, a remarkable German who lived far in the interior, where life was made insecure by army deserters and bands of thieves, including those who had pulled off the legendary robbery of the Shanghai Express—later to be turned into a successful movie. He was the director of a mining company owned by a Chinese corporation and had provided the workers of this large enterprise with many social services and benefits, so that it would have been considered a model operation even in Germany. He had given me a letter of introduction to John Rabe. I could stay with him, and he could tell me a great deal about China.

  By the early light of dawn on a November morning, I arrived in Pukou by train, took the ferry across the Yangtze, rode a ricksha through an imposing gate of the Nanking city wall, and pulled up before Rabe’s house, a modest villa with an office attached. Everyone was still asleep. I walked up and down the street and didn’t ring until breakfast time.

  John Rabe and his wife immediately had a third place set at their table and a bed made up for me in the guest room. They kept me with them for over a week, longer than I had originally planned. We went to the movies once and saw an American film. Otherwise our evenings were spent sitting in the living room, while Rabe talked about his years in China, about the Chinese, their ways of thinking and living, about China’s curious domestic politics, the regime of Chiang Kai-shek, the corruption, the German military advisors. He had even experienced the final years of the Ch’ing dynasty and the infamous Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, the Imperial German “Kiaochow protection zone,” and the building of the city of Tsingtao.

  John Rabe spoke in concrete terms, emphasizing and explaining for me what is often incomprehensible about the Chinese. He read from his diaries: humorous verses or observations on the life of his servants and their families or on business practices in China. In those days before television, people had much more time for conversation.

  I had to tell him about the United States and my trip through Manchuria. He was outraged to hear that Japanese army trucks were racing with impunity about Peking, even in the legation district to which the Chinese government had granted extraterritorial status.

  Like all Germans in China, he was worried that Hitler was making approaches to Japan. The Anti-Comintern Pact that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, had initiated and signed without any participation of the Foreign Ministry, proved it. Nonetheless John Rabe did not believe the rumor that Hitler would withdraw German military advisors from China, for they had all signed private contracts with the Chinese government. (Hitler did it all the same in 1938, and von Ribbentrop threatened the advisors and their families with “serious consequences” if they did not return posthaste.) We did not talk much about conditions in Germany itself—back then it was a faraway place for him. Nor did he mention that he was a member of the NSDAP or that he had temporarily stood in for Legation Councilor Lautenschlager as the party’s local group leader. He probably saw it as a formality not worth mentioning. I heard of it myself only long after the war.

  The Rabes took touchingly good care of me. I had exchanged some of my money in Shandong. But the currency was not accepted anywhere in Nanking, because it had been issued by a northern Chinese warlord. John Rabe found a bank, or so he said, that would exchange it for valid currency. Nowadays I ask myself if he didn’t simply replace my currency with money out of his own pocket.

  The Rabes drove me out to the tomb of Hung-wu, the founder of the Ming dynasty in the fourteenth century, to the huge mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the republic, and to Nanking’s other historical monuments; or they simply let me roam the city alone, which in some places did not even look like a city. There was a center, where new large ministries had arisen along with broad avenues and squares, like the ones that the Nanking Germans called “Potsdamer” or “Leipziger Platz.” But wide expanses of fields, lakes, ponds, and thickets, where not a house was to be seen, were also part of Nanking.

  All of it—Purple Mountain, Lotus Lake, the rock formations of the Stone Citadel—was enclosed within the magnificent city wall that the first Ming emperor had ordered built around his capital, the largest and longest city wall in the world, the work of two hundred thousand people over twenty years. It is twenty-one (some say more than twenty-five) miles long, and from North Gate to South Gate measures six miles. The wall was already too big for the city when the first Ming emperor had it built. It would have taken an entire army to defend its circumference. Despite its wall, Nanking has been conquered and razed several times in its history. The last time had been in 1864. Even in 1936, it still had not completely recovered from th
at most recent devastation.

  Yangtzekiang and the Nanking city wall

  Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, a village school teacher in southern China, had a vision in which he was told that he was the younger brother of Jesus. He collected about him a group of fanatically religious revolutionaries, and their number quickly grew. They soon constituted a small army, and moving northward, they defeated the Imperial forces sent out against them and took Nanking. This “brother of Jesus” now called himself “Heavenly King” and named Nanking the “Heavenly Capital” and his empire Taiping Tienkuo,the “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.” It was, as we would call it today, both a fundamentalist theocracy and a cruel dictatorship.

  The leaders of the Taiping Rebellion (1852–1864) came close to conquering the whole empire and toppling the Imperial dynasty. But the Imperial government raised new armies and, after a long series of battles, finally defeated the “Taipings,” whose leadership was now falling apart. It was the most deadly civil war in world history; some thirty million Chinese died in the struggle for the Heavenly Kingdom.

  When Imperial troops retook Nanking in 1864, they engaged in a bloodbath that lasted for days, not only slaying the Taiping rebels, but also murdering almost all the inhabitants of the city, looting their homes, and finally burning everything to the ground. Nanking perished. Only what was made of stone remained.

  The Taiping rebels had themselves already blown up the Great Pagoda of blue, green, and red porcelain, with its one hundred fifty bells that rang in the wind, one of the wonders of the world in the early fifteenth century. A small portion of the palace in which the Heavenly King had perished, plus a little park and lake, still remained, but at the time were considered Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s official residence and could not be visited.

  Taking Rabe’s advice, I took a stroll along the city wall, which in some places is over fifty feet high and up to forty feet wide across the top. The city gates were themselves great fortifications, each containing a sequence of gates and courtyards, so that troops who broke through one gate would find themselves facing yet another and surrounded on all sides. The top of the wall was wide enough for two wagons to drive abreast easily.

  About two-thirds of the wall was still standing. It led almost down to the Yangtze, which is three-quarters of a mile wide here, yet far upriver from Nanking still remains navigable—for a total distance of well over six hundred miles from its mouth at Shanghai. There is a bend in the river here, and in that bend, as if in a protecting hand, lies Nanking. From the wall you could look out over the city, which was almost lost in the green of trees, meadows, fields, and ponds.

  I saw a child’s bright red cap lying in the tall grass growing on top of the wall, picked it up, but then dropped it again at once in horror. Beneath it lay the half-decomposed head of a child. The worst part were the fat white maggots.

  That evening when his wife had gone out, I told John Rabe about it. He was very upset.

  “In Shanghai,” he said, “that sort of thing happens every day—dead bodies of poor people who die on a cold night are lying in the streets come morning. But not in Nanking. There are no dead bodies lying around here!”

  The next morning he called the chief of police. That was at the end of 1936. About one year later, he was to write in his diary: “We literally climbed over dead bodies. It was worst at Christmas.”

  But during that December of 1937, hewas, as he wrote this, to all effects the chief of police, indeed the mayor of the city of Nanking.

  And how that came to be is what he describes in his diary, from which the following chapters have been taken. He typed a clean copy of it during the war and added certain materials: documents, public notices he had himself written, notes to embassies, proclamations, newspaper clips, letters, and photographs. As a way of protecting himself from the Gestapo, who had forbidden him to write or speak in public, he added a foreword to his final copy:

  This is not intended to be read for entertainment, though it may perhaps look like that at first; it is a record of facts, a diary, which was not written for the public but for my wife and the closest circle of my family. Should its publication, which for obvious reasons has at present been prohibited, ever seem appropriate, that should be done only by permission of the German government. All reports and correspondence of the International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone to the Japanese embassy have been translated by me from English into German, which is also the case of correspondence exchanged with American authorities.

  Berlin, 1 October 1942

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  THE FOLLOWING PORTION of this book contains excerpts from the two volumes of John Rabe’s diaries, which he assembled during the war by combining selected documents and what he considered the most important entries from the private diary originally written for his wife and family. His experiences in Germany after returning from China have been taken from accounts he wrote for his family and a small manuscript diary from the postwar period.

  I have attempted to select passages that show John Rabe in all his many facets and have also included material that he himself might have left out today because the period in which he lived is in so many ways no longer understandable. To those who make an effort to grasp what the conditions of that period were, John Rabe will not appear any weaker for it. Since he wrote his diary for his family, I have occasionally recast careless sentences into more standard language and have omitted entries that concern only his immediate family.

  In his diary, Rabe included accounts written by his German helpers, Krischan Kröger and Eduard Sperling, as well as some reports from the German embassy. These have been supplemented with a few accounts by other eyewitnesses. I have added still other documents taken from the political archives of the German Foreign Ministry, the Federal Archives, and the Military Archives in Freiburg, which, although they express different views of these same events, also complement and confirm what Rabe himself observed and described. In an afterword based on documents of the period, I have attempted to sketch the general political background, various perspectives in Berlin concerning German policy in the Far East, and a summary of what information was available to Rabe himself, in order to make his own position more understandable, particularly his relationship to Hitler and National Socialism as he understood it.

  The transcription of Chinese characters has always presented problems. I have generally followed Rabe’s spelling of Chinese names, though not without a few minor changes here and there.

  Summarizations and remarks by the editor within the text of the diary are set in italics.

  PART 1

  FROM JOHN RABE’S NANKING DIARY

  CHAPTER 1

  HOW IT BEGAN

  In 1931, after meeting no opposition worth the name, the Japanese army occupied Manchuria, China’s northernmost region, and declared it to be the sovereign state of Manchukuo, though in reality it was totally under Japanese control; nor did it become any more independent once the former Chinese emperor P’u-Yi was placed on the throne. A few years later, the Japanese army advanced into other northern Chinese provinces. Early in June 1937, there was a skirmish in Peking with Chinese troops on an old marble bridge that foreigners called the Marco Polo Bridge—and at first no one attached any real importance to the encounter.

  It marked, however, the beginning of Japanese aggression against China, the goal of which was to subjugate the entire land and its people. In terms of international law, both sides spoke only of an “incident,” although the Japanese would go on to conquer Nanking, Hankow, and large parts of China. As a result, diplomatic relations were not broken. Even after Japanese troops had occupied Nanking and the Chinese government had long since retreated to Hankow, or later to Chungking, Japan’s embassy continued to function in the old capital, if only at lower levels. The ambassador himself resided in Shanghai.

  Summers in Nanking are unbearably hot. The city, along with Hankow and Chungking, is called one
of China’s “three ovens.” With the onset of the summer heat, John Rabe’s wife, Dora, had departed for the coastal resort of Peitaiho, north of Tientsin. John Rabe joined her there at the end of August. He writes:

  Chinwangtao had already been conquered by the Japanese by then, and with them came an unrelenting stream of troop trains heading for Tientsin, some equipped with antiaircraft artillery, which gave me pause for thought. Things looked much more serious than I had expected.

  In Peitaiho, about an hour north of Chinwangtao, there was no evidence that Japanese occupation was now an accomplished fact, but there was a certain tension in the air that convinced me to book my return trip to Shanghai from Chinwangtao right away. I was told: “Booked full for two months.” While I was still considering the quickest way to arrange to get back, we heard news that the Japanese had attacked Shanghai, so that for the moment a return trip via its harbor was out of the question.

  Good advice was scarce. When word leaked through that Nanking was under attack by Japanese aircraft and had been heavily bombed, I realized that the situation was truly serious. My only option was to travel by boat from Tientsin via Cheefoo or Tsingtao and from there by train to Nanking via Tsinanfu. On 28 August 1937, I said good-bye to my wife in the dark of night.

  On 7September 1937, after an eleven-day journey that in peacetime would have taken forty hours, Rabe reached Nanking. Because he did not want his wife to share the risk of air raids, he had left her behind in the resort town of Peitaiho. She remained in the north for a few months and then later moved to Shanghai.