In 1937 Japanese troops attacked Nanking , the then capital of China. After taking the city, the Japanese army, in a veritable genocide, killed more than 250,000 Chinese civilian residents. Mass executions, people burned and buried alive, beheadings, rapes, robberies, arson and other war crimes. It is said that Japanese officers competed with each other to see who would kill a hundred Chinese first.
[Source:Fire at will!]
John Rabe
Before the capture of Nanking, many Westerners were residing in the city, most of them for commercial reasons. There was also a large number of missionaries. But most of the foreigners fled to their respective countries, except 22 people . One of them was John Rabe , a German businessman, admirer of Hitler, member of the Nazi Party and representative of the Siemens company in China. John Rabe, horrified by the atrocities that the Japanese army was committing with the Chinese population of Nanking, decided to stay there to direct and organize, together with the rest of the foreigners who also decided to stay, a security zone that was called «Committee International for the Nanjing Safety Zone “, establishing a “safe area” in the city of around 7 square kilometers. Asserting his status as a Nazi and, therefore, an ally of Japan, he obtained an agreement so that the Japanese forces would not attack that part of the city. In this way, and resulting in a terribly ironic fact, he hung Nazi flags on the limits of the "safe area". These flags would mark the entire area and protect it from the barbaric abuses of Japanese troops. Thanks to his perseverance and efforts to get the Japanese to respect the extraterritorial status of the area, he was able to shelter and save the lives of around 200,000 Chinese who, otherwise, would have suffered the cruelties committed outside the security territory.
His diary, of more than 1,200 pages, is conclusive proof of what happened there...
“They kept raping women and girls and killing those who offered resistance, those who tried to flee or just those who were in the wrong place. During his misdeeds, no difference was made between adults and children. There were girls under the age of eight and women over the age of 70 who were raped and then, in the most brutal way possible, beaten and killed […] Anyone would think that It was impossible, but the rape of women happened even in the middle of our area […] We are few foreigners and we cannot be in all places all the time to protect them. We were powerless against these monsters who were armed to the teeth and would shoot at anyone. They only had respect for us foreigners, and yet we have come close to being killed on several occasions. […] Six Japanese have climbed the garden wall and tried to open the doors of the house. They have only stopped when I have put my swastika in front of their eyes. […] I have seen so many corpses in recent weeks that I am hardly surprised by such barbarism. […] A man cannot keep silent about this kind of cruelty! »
He earned the respect and affection of those survivors, who nicknamed him " the German Buddha » and «the good German of Nanking «.
Still from the movie "John Rabe"
On February 28, 1938, Rabe returned to Germany, taking with him a large amount of documentation, film, and photographs of the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking. Rabe showed these films and photographs at various conferences in Berlin and wrote a letter to Hitler in which he asked him to use his influence with the Japanese to stop this brutal inhumane violence. As a result, Rabe was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. Thanks to the intervention of Siemens he was released. After the war he was arrested and accused of belonging to the Nazi Party. He lost his job and was immersed in a long process of « denazification «, Of which he had to pay the costs. The economic situation was very difficult in that post-war Berlin, and even more so for someone accused of belonging to and collaborating with Nazism. Rabe depleted his savings and was forced to sell his estate, scraping by on odd jobs. After several appeals he was finally declared " denazified »On June 3, 1946 thanks to his humanitarian work in Nanking, but at that time both he and his family lived in poverty.
Already in 1948 the citizens of Nanking learned of the very serious situation of the Rabe family in Berlin and, after organizing a collection, sent a large sum of money to help them. They also sent them food packages every month. John Rabe died on January 5, 1950 of a stroke. In 1997 his grave was transferred from Berlin to Nanking, occupying an honorary place in the massacre memorial.
Tombstone of John Rabe in Nanking