John Rabe. Der gute Deutsche von Nanking

Wickert, Erwin:

ISBN 10: 3421050988 / ISBN 13: 9783421050984

Published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt DVA, 1997

About this Item

448 Seiten; 29999/364 (S) Sprache: Deutsch Gewicht in Gramm: 670.

Seller Inventory # 110659

Bibliographic Details

• Title: John Rabe. Der gute Deutsche von Nanking
• Publisher: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt DVA
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: German
• ISBN 10: 3421050988
• ISBN 13: 9783421050984
• Binding: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Condition: Gut
• Weight: 670 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biografien & Erinnerungen

About this title

Synopsis

In November 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army took Nanking (Nanjing), the capital of China and home to 1.3 million people, and began an orgy of murder, rape, and looting. By the time discipline was restored two months later, hundreds of thousands of Chinese were dead, with hundreds of thousands more homeless, starving, and traumatized. The Rape of Nanking, as it is commonly known, still causes international controversy, as Japanese politicians refuse to apologize unequivocally to China and school textbooks continue to misrepresent the events.

Like Oskar Schindler of Schindler's List, John Rabe was an enterprising and fundamentally decent German businessman caught up in war. Head of the Nanjing branch of Siemens, the German electronics firm, he had lived and worked in China for almost 30 years. Rather than flee from the threatened city, he stayed to organize a safety zone as refuge of last resort for Chinese civilians. The Good Man of Nanking is his firsthand description of the terrible events and his ultimate success in saving perhaps a quarter of a million lives. The diary format provides a forum for the extraordinary power and immediacy of John Rabe's words, including his gallows humor, placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese soldiers begin their massacres. Rabe's trials were not over when he returned to wartime Germany; diary entries that he wrote during the occupation of Berlin by the Soviet army form a fascinating coda to this book. --John Stevenson