The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe - Hardcover

Rabe, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037540211X ISBN 13: 9780375402111

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

A unique and gripping document: the recently discovered diaries of a German businessman, John Rabe, who saved so many lives in the infamous siege of Nanking in 1937 that he
is now honored as the Oskar Schindler of China.
As the Japanese army closed in on the city and
all foreigners were ordered to evacuate, Rabe felt
it would shame him before his Chinese workers and dishonor the Fatherland if he abandoned them. Sending his wife to the north, he mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized an "Inter-
national Safety Zone" within which all unarmed Chinese were to be--by virtue of Germany's pact with Japan--guaranteed safety. As hundreds of thousands of Chinese streamed into the city, the Japanese army began torturing, raping, and massacring them in un-
told numbers. All that stood between the Chinese and certain slaughter was Rabe and his committee, and it is thought that he saved more than 250,000 lives.
When the siege lifted in 1938 and Rabe finally felt able to leave, the Chinese gave him a banner that called him their Living Buddha, or Saint. Back home
in Germany, he wrote Adolf Hitler to describe the Japanese atrocities he had witnessed. Two days later, the Gestapo arrested him. Miraculously, he was not sent to the camps. As it turned out, Rabe survived
the war and the starvation that followed because the Chinese government learned that he was alive, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had food parcels sent to him.
This book is the journal he kept each night during those months of horror and the difficult years that
followed. It is the record of an unpretentious hero who, when faced with the inhuman, refused to yield his ground.

About this title

About the Author

John Rabe was born in Hamburg in 1882.
He lived in China from 1908 to 1938, where his last position was that of director of the Siemens
office in Nanking. He died impoverished and unrecognized in Berlin in 1950.


Dr. Erwin Wickert, noted scholar and German ambassador to China from 1976 to 1980, first met Rabe in 1936 in Nanking. He is the author of several books about East Asia, including the best-selling China Seen from the Inside.



With 2 maps and
59 illustrations

From the Inside Flap

gripping document: the recently discovered diaries of a German businessman, John Rabe, who saved so many lives in the infamous siege of Nanking in 1937 that he
is now honored as the Oskar Schindler of China.
As the Japanese army closed in on the city and
all foreigners were ordered to evacuate, Rabe felt
it would shame him before his Chinese workers and dishonor the Fatherland if he abandoned them. Sending his wife to the north, he mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized an "Inter-
national Safety Zone" within which all unarmed Chinese were to be--by virtue of Germany's pact with Japan--guaranteed safety. As hundreds of thousands of Chinese streamed into the city, the Japanese army began torturing, raping, and massacring them in un-
told numbers. All that stood between the Chinese and certain slaughter was Rabe and his committee, and it is thought that he saved more than 250,000 lives.
When the siege lifted in 1938 and Rabe fi

Reviews

Considered the Oskar Schindler of China, Rabe was a German businessman who saved the lives of 250,000 Chinese during the infamous siege of Nanking. But Rabe was also a member of the Nazi party and a man whose motto was "Right or wrong-my country." This gaping paradox adds a fascinating complexity to his newly translated diaries, which primarily focus on the six-month Nanking siege in 1937 and 1938. When the Japanese air raids began over Nanking?where Rabe was regional director of the German industrial giant Siemens?Rabe's wife, along with most foreigners, evacuated the city. But Rabe stayed to protect his Chinese staff and co-workers; as he put it, "I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me." As the magnitude of the Japanese assault became apparent, Rabe, along with American doctors and missionaries, created an International Committee whose purpose was to set up a Neutral Zone where Chinese civilians could take refuge. Six hundred of the poorest Chinese were soon living in Rabe's own house, symbolically protected by an enormous canvas painted with a swastika; thousands more took shelter in the arbitrary Neutral Zone that Rabe continually begged the Japanese to respect. Lacking food and medical supplies, Rabe was mobilized to continue his good works by the atrocities he witnessed; his descriptions of the sadistic rapes, torture and slaughter perpetrated by Japanese soldiers are chillingly vivid. Similar in some ways to Giorgio Perlasca, the Italian fascist businessman who helped save Budapest's Jews (Enrico Deaglio's The Banality of Goodness, Forecasts, June 1), Rabe was a complicated figure whose ultimate reasons were very matter-of-fact: "You simply do what must be done."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Diaries of a man who is justly called the Oskar Schindler of China. In December 1937, the Japanese army conquered and occupied the Chinese city of Nanking. What followed was, as Rabe notes, ``destruction barbaric beyond all comprehension.'' Japanese soldiers raped, tortured, and murdered indiscriminately, and in all, as many as 300,000 people were butchered. Rabe at this time was Nanking director of Siemens, the German industrial concern. He was also a member of the Nazi Party and an (apparently naive) admirer of Hitler. Easily able to leave the city, he chose to stay and by staying was able to blunt some of the effects of the Japanese onslaught. At first he simply opened his home to Chinese desperate for sanctuary: The number of refugees in his house and (not very large) yard eventually totaled 600. More significantly, he became head of an international committee that was able to create a safety zone in the city where it was hoped noncombatants would be afforded protection. Some 250,000 Chinese streamed into this zone, where, quite literally, the only thing standing between them and the depredations of the Japanese soldiers was the courage of Rabe and a handful of other Westerners. Rabe's diaries describe in detail the atrocities committed by the Japanese, but also how Rabe cajoled, flattered, and when necessary bullied the Japanese authorities into tolerating the safety zone. Like Schindler, Rabe was quite aware that his Nazi affiliation afforded him a degree of influence and protection. This does not, however, account for the heroism and steadfastness with which he saved thousands of lives. Rabe's dramaticand perhaps, to some, ambiguoustale shows how unremarkable people can sometimes do remarkable things, and how one evil can, sometimes, be used to fight another. (42 b&w photos, 2 maps) (First printing of 40,000) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Joining the ever-growing shelf of World War II memoir literature, this carefully edited book recounts the wartime experiences of an obscure German businessman who is now known as the "Oskar Schindler of China" and revered as a saint by the Chinese. Rabe (1882-1949) lived in China for almost 30 years, most notably as the director of the Siemens branch in Nanking during the infamous 1937 siege. Working closely with American friends, he organized an International Safety Zone that offered relative security to 250,000 Chinese during the brutal Japanese occupation. This book, based on a journal he kept then, describes his rescue efforts as well as the atrocities he observed. Called back to Germany shortly thereafter, he was arrested by the Gestapo and forbidden to speak of his experiences. The editor, a friend who first met Rabe in China in the early 1930s, explains the general political and military background and, more importantly, summarizes the political information that was available to Rabe himself. Recommended for academic and informed lay readers.AMarie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rabe, a minor German businessman, kept a diary for much of his life. By all judgments, he can be seen as a fairly unremarkable man--except for a period of time in 1937 in Nanking, where it is thought that he saved more than 250,000 Chinese lives. Many westerners know little of the history of China during the period between the two world wars. Japan had invaded China, and the brutality with which the occupation was carried out is only now being fully documented. Rabe used his influence with the European community in Nanking and a pact between Germany and Japan to set up a "safety zone" for nonarmed civilians. The matter-of-fact way that he writes about those extraordinary events serves to underline the horrors experienced by all in Nanking. After six months, he was recalled to Germany. The book draws to a close with an excerpt from Rabe's Berlin diary at the end of World War II. The book's strength is not the quality of the writing but rather the immediacy of the story being told. This is one worth telling. Danise Hoover

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037540211X
• ISBN 13: 9780375402111
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 294