The Good Man of Nanking

by John Rabe

  On 15 April 1938, he and his wife, Dora, arrived in Berlin. The German press took no notice whatever. He was, however, received by Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, the leader of the Nazi party’s “district abroad,” who was likewise a high official in the Foreign Ministry, where he was the party observer. Bohle awarded John Rabe the medal of the German Red Cross for which he had been nominated by Ambassador Trautmann. The Chinese government presented him with a very prestigious decoration, the star of the Jade Order on a blue, white, and red ribbon, although it was not given to him until some time later. Rabe had himself photographed in tails and wearing both these medals: the splendid photograph, it would appear, of an important diplomat, which would look good in a silver frame atop the grand piano at some diplomatic cocktail party. Yet it bears little resemblance to the John Rabe who waved his swastika armband to intimidate an armed Japanese soldier and thus prevented him from raping Chinese girls.

  John Rabe was proud of his decorations. But the German press was not allowed to mention them either. Rabe gave several lectures, the first on 2 May in the Great Festival Hall of Siemens’s Schuckert Administration Building in Berlin-Siemensstadt. His American friend, the missionary John Magee, had given him a copy of his film about the victims of the Japanese occupation; it was screened on this occasion. Over the next few days, other lectures followed: one at the foreign policy office of Reich Führer Alfred Rosenberg; another at the Far East Association; a fourth before the SS of the suburb of Siemensstadt, which was attended by one of Himmler’s deputies, or so Rabe claimed; and finally a lecture at the War Ministry on Tirpitz Ufer, where only the film was of interest.

  He had worked long and hard on the text of his lecture at the Festival Hall in Siemensstadt. His descriptions of events in Nanking are lively and vivid. Rabe illustrates his comments with concrete experiences, some of them drastic and shocking. From the way he occasionally casts his material in an ironic or humorous light, it is obvious how much the British style of storytelling had become part of him after thirty years of living in semicolonial China. He quotes at length from his diaries, and to avoid repetition, the lecture has not been included among the documents at the end of this book.

  In this lecture he deftly anticipates certain possible objections and refutes or tries to refute them. For example: It was not his intention to engage in anti-Japanese propaganda in Germany or to give public lectures to arouse pro-Chinese sentiments. Though very sympathetic to China’s suffering, he was first and foremost pro-German and not only did he believe in the correctness of “the central thrust of our policy,” but as an officer of the party he also stood “one hundred percent behind it.”

  The Japanese, moreover, had in fact every reason to be grateful to him, because he had attempted to “blunt the arrow” of the many protests lodged against the Japanese in Nanking, “precisely because I was a German and as such both had to and wanted to maintain the friendly relationship between our embassy and that of our ally Japan.” Before sending off their complaints to the Japanese, his American friends had often asked him to mix a little honey into the text.

  He asks and immediately answers the question of why he remained behind in Nanking, although his company had said he was free to leave the city with other Germans and officials of the Chinese government. He had remained behind out of gratitude to China, which had always treated him well—even during the world war—and in order to protect his Chinese coworkers and their large extended families. Of course he also wanted to represent the interests of Siemens China Co.; but he passes over that very quickly, since with the retreat of the government and the occupation of Nanking by the Japanese, not a single order had come Siemens’s way. How very much he misjudged the realities of National Socialism can be seen from his attempt to present his humanitarian efforts in Nanking as simply those of a National Socialist party member doing his duty.

  The conclusion of the lecture is John Rabe all over. He takes up the cause of Legation Secretary Rosen, who had so energetically represented German interests against the Japanese. Rabe of course knew just how precarious Rosen’s situation was and what difficulties had arisen for him from Hitler’s race laws. Rabe pleads for both Rosen and his sense of right and wrong, even though he himself had had his reservations about Rosen’s gruff and at times not exactly diplomatic way of dealing with the Japanese. At the end of his lecture he writes:

  I recall a conversation that he had with a Japanese general. In the course of it, Dr. Rosen used the phrase, “Since your troops got out of control . . . ,” whereupon the Japanese general flew into a rage: “How dare you say so! We have the best disciplined troops in the world.” To which Dr. Rosen replied, “Oh, do you mean to say they did that on orders?”

  Neither in Rabe’s diaries nor in the documents appended here is there any mention of how many Chinese fell victim to the Japanese massacre in Nanking. Indeed, at the time there was no one who compiled statistics or counted how many civilians, prisoners of war, men, women, and children had been murdered. Today people speak of 200,000 to 300,000 victims. In his lecture, John Rabe says:

  We Europeans put the number at about 50,000 to 60,000. According to the Red Swastika Society, which had taken on the task of burying the bodies, but could not bury more than 200 a day, there were about 30,000 bodies still lying unburied in the suburb of Hsiakwan on 22 February 1938, the date I left Nanking.

  It is likely that Rabe’s estimate is too low, since he could not have had an overview of the entire municipal area during the period of the worst atrocities. Moreover, many troops of captured Chinese soldiers were led out of the city and down to the Yangtze, where they were summarily executed. But, as noted, no one actually counted the dead.

  Rabe’s most urgent wish was to report personally to his Führer Adolf Hitler about the occupation of Nanking and the suffering of its people. When it became clear that he would not be granted such an audience, he enclosed the lecture he had given to his coworkers at Siemens in a registered letter.

  Why did John Rabe want to speak to his Führer? Why did he send him his lecture? In his letter, he answers these questions himself:

  My Führer,

  The majority of my friends in China are of the opinion that you have not been provided a detailed report about the actual events in Nanking. In sending you the enclosed copy of a lecture I have given, which however is not intended for the broader public, I am fulfilling a promise made to my friends in China that I would inform you about the sufferings of the Chinese populace. My mission will have been fulfilled if you would be kind enough to let me know that the enclosed copy of my lecture was presented to you.

  I have since been notified that I am to abstain from delivering other lectures of this sort or to show any pictures dealing with the subject. I shall obey this order, since it is not my intention to work against German policy and German government offices.

  Let me assure you of my allegiance and honest devotion.

  JOHN RABE

  John Rabe’s letter to Adolf Hitler

  The majority of his friends in China, Rabe writes, believed that Hitler had not been provided a detailed report about the actual events in Nanking. Who were these friends? Adolf Hitler, to whom the letter is addressed, might have assumed Rabe meant Chinese friends, perhaps even the Americans on the Safety Zone Committee. He had promised them he would inform the Führer about the sufferings of the Chinese people.

  Later, however, Rabe would indulge his fantasy a bit at one point and write that he had promised the “Chinese government” that he would tell Hitler what he had seen and experienced in Nanking. That, of course, is out of the question. After the siege of Nanking began, he had no opportunity to speak with representatives of the Chinese government.

  Nor did he mean his Chinese or American friends. What he had in mind was the German embassy itself, because the embassy knew that what it said had not been going beyond the Foreign Ministry in Berlin to reach the man who made German policy. Rabe had read Rosen’s reports. He sometimes even included them
in his diary. He knew exactly what Trautmann’s views were, knew of his desire to mediate between the Japanese and the Chinese and of his belief that military advisors should remain in China.

  Perhaps John Rabe believed that Hitler would be deeply shocked when he read his report about Japanese war crimes in Nanking, and perhaps even that he would rethink his policies regarding China and Japan. John Rabe probably believed that Hitler, “a man, the same as you and I,” would not leave the Chinese to their plight. He had written as much in his diary.

  He did not suspect that Hitler didn’t give a damn about such bagatelles as the death of hundreds of thousands of Chinese. Hitler thought in the grand categories of world history and was concerned with when and how to take Czechoslovakia in one lightning move.

  John Rabe waited for Hitler to reply. In vain.

  “Then came the surprise,” he writes in a memorandum. “A few days later [after sending the letter to Hitler], I was arrested by the Gestapo, that is, two officials arrived in a car and drove me, along with the six volumes of my diary and the film, to [Prinz] Albrecht Strasse.”

  Once there, he was interrogated for several hours, but “honorably released,” as he wrote. “From then on I could not give any lectures, publish any books, and above all not show the film that had been made by John Magee in Nanking and dealt with the atrocities of the Japanese soldiers. In October 1938, I was given my books back, whereas the police kept the film”—of which, as Rabe surely knew, there were now two copies in Berlin.

  It had not been a third-degree interrogation. The Gestapo had seen that John Rabe “stood one hundred percent behind the central thrust of German policy,” as he himself had always emphasized, and that he would not cause any trouble. “Right or wrong—my country” was, after all, his motto. John Rabe was glad to fall back on that truly dubious maxim. He followed the Gestapo’s orders. He toed the line. He did not make much of a fuss about his brief arrest later, either, when after the war many people were happy to use some minor brush with the Gestapo to turn themselves into resistance fighters.

  I first heard the news of Rabe’s arrest via the grapevine of German China hands, though in rather dramatized form: Rabe had made a film of the atrocities in Nanking, or so it was said, and had shown it to a small circle of Siemens directors back in Germany. He was then denounced, arrested, and sent to a concentration camp.

  In reality the Gestapo had interrogated him because of his letter to Hitler but then left him in peace. According to family tradition, it was Carl-Friedrich von Siemens who then had him sent on a mission to Afghanistan, where he was to look after some Siemens employees who had got into difficulty there.

  Which was why I was unable to reach him by telephone at his office and so believed the reports about his being sent to a concentration camp. In reality he soon returned to Berlin. He worked at Siemens as a clerk until the end of the war.

  During the war he was responsible for the foreign travel arrangements of Siemens employees. He was also responsible for company employees in Kabul and, later, for those held in detainment camps, especially in India. It was his job to keep connections open with the main office. His son Otto Rabe reports his amazement at how often his father would go to a bookstore and put together large packages of the most varied kinds of literature for the people interned in the camp at Dera Duhn, India.

  Rabe kept no diaries after Nanking. He started his last one, his Berlin diary, as the Red Army marched into Siemensstadt on 24 April 1945.

  In my autobiography Mut und Übermut(1991), I devoted a small chapter to John Rabe. His granddaughter Ursula in Berlin read it and got in contact with me. I learned from her that John Rabe’s diaries had not vanished with the Gestapo but that in fact his son Otto Rabe had them stored in the attic of his Black Forest home. The family had never read them; indeed, they had often considered throwing them out or destroying them—after all the cruelties war had brought, they didn’t want to read about still more cruelty.

  At my request, however, his granddaughter had the diaries sent to her in Berlin, and she provided me with photocopies of all the volumes, about which I was then to write an article. I was so impressed by the diaries, however, that upon completing my article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, I decided to publish them as a book. From Rabe’s son I also received the manuscript of the Berlin diary that forms the following chapter.

  In December 1996, a facsimile set of the diaries was displayed in New York, where they caused quite a sensation. The family’s original plan had been to present the diaries to the Chinese, but I persuaded them to give these volumes to the German Federal Archives in Berlin, where they are now to be found and are available to all for research.

  CHAPTER 13

  JOHN RABE’S BERLIN DIARY

  SIEMENSSTADT, 24 APRIL 1945

  NONE OF THE RUMORS flying around here yesterday has turned out to be true. It’s all just pure rumor. But the bridges in the area close-by have been blown up by our troops. Our antiaircraft is firing away constantly, and the enemy air raids did not stop all night. Even this morning there’s whistling and whirring overhead. At three o’clock the water was turned off. But there’s water again now, though not much pressure. We’ve filled all the containers we have in reserve.

  8 P.M.

  The whole day has been filled with air raid alarms, fighter attacks, and artillery fire. At 11:00 a.m. the house at 11 Harries Strasse was hit. The chimney flew out onto the street, the roof was demolished, but with the exception of bits of broken glass no other damage is visible. It appears to have been an artillery shell.

  The Siemens cable works is burning. A huge pitch-black cloud is rising above it. Word is that the Russians occupied part of the works, and so we ourselves then put the torch to the rest. People say we have one division deployed nearby and three divisions that have pulled back from the western front are supposed to be on their way.

  Mutti grows braver every day. I have to keep a tight rein on her. She goes out to shop in the midst of the worst air raid and takes cover only from strafers. She worked in our garden today in the middle of severe shelling— planting peas. Pure recklessness!

  There’s one hell of a racket at the moment. It feels as if we’re being encircled. We’re surrounded by black clouds of smoke.

  25 APRIL

  Last night was relatively quiet. This morning, the air raids started again and have continued with no letup.

  Yesterday evening at 8:30: two hits—probably flak shells—in the roof of the building directly across from us. During this morning’s shelling— there’s not much choice, the shelling never stops—I fetched three loaves of bread from Wunicke near the post office, so that we’re taken care of for a few days. The next street over, from Riepelt Strasse to the waterworks, is occupied by German soldiers and civilian militia. The bombardment has claimed three victims, slain by flak or bomb shrapnel: one woman, a soldier, and a civilian. According to news I’ve heard.

  At 5:00 p.m. a bomb totally destroyed the building at 13 Riepelt Strasse. Five people are buried inside. By 8:00 o’clock we’ve managed to dig out four of them, all more or less badly wounded. The fifth, whom we are unable to bring up alive, is dead. Meanwhile the Russians have entered our part of Siemensstadt, but they don’t stop our rescue work.

  It’s been quiet for a good while, and we go down to the cellar to sleep, after first getting some food gratis from the Konsum store (milk, pudding powder, etc.).

  26 APRIL

  Two armed Russians on patrol came down into the cellar at 4:30 a.m., asked a few questions, and left without bothering us.

  8:00 a.m. We go to get some more groceries from the Konsum, where there’s no one in charge and the door and windows stand open to anyone. Willi58and I haul water over from Riepelt Strasse, since even our garden tap has dried up entirely now.

  More Russians appear in our cellar, but then go away. At about 6:00 p.m. heavy bombardment. Word is that the German troops are staging a massive assault. Rumors, of course, with no way o
f checking on them.

  Yesterday evening as some other civilians and I were carrying a critically wounded man through the woods to the first-aid station at 11 Gamme Strasse (Red Cross, Dr. Busch), we saw huge fires off to the right, behind the transformer house (the Röhren works or Osram. Couldn’t tell exactly).

  12:30 P.M.

  A Russian soldier decorated with four medals enters our apartment, comes down into the cellar, and threatens to shoot us unless we hand over our watches and rings. I have to give him a ring and a pocket watch and Mutti’s gold watch as well. Then with a handshake the Russian bids us a very friendly farewell. A couple of other Russian solders take a glass of cherry preserves from the cellar and wash them down with a bottle of wine and are in a fine mood. These people don’t make a bad impression. They’re simply taking what war tosses across their path.

  Fighter attack. We keep taking refuge in the cellar. This time from German bombs.