Foreword by ErwinWickert
JOHN RABE WAS B0RN in Hamburg, Germany, on 23 November 1882. His father was aship's captain; he died whi1e his son was still young, so that John had to leave schoo1 after passing genera1 exams. He then worked for a Hamburg export firm, first as an apprentice for two and a ha1f years, and then as an office c1erk. At his boss's recommendation he was sent to Lourenco Marques in Mozambique, a Portuguese co1ony in southeast Africa, where he worked for a we11-estab1ished Eng1ish firm. There he 1earned to speak fluent Eng1ish.
A bout of malaria forced him to return home in 1906, but he was on his way again by 1908, this time to Peking. In 1909 he went to Shanghai, where hemarried his childhood sweetheart from Hamburg. With only a few brief interruptions, he lived in China for the next thirty years. At first he workedfor a Hamburg firm, and then in 1911 joined the Siemens branch in Peking, wherehe remained throughout the First World War, even though, under pressure fromthe Allies, China declared war on Germany in 1917. He was able to convince theChinese authorities, however, that it would be in both China's and their ownbest interest if he continued to run the Siemens office in Peking during thewar. That sort of thing was possible in China.
But in 1919, under pressure from the British, he was repatriated to Ger-manyalong with all his fellow countrymen. German competition was not wanted. A yearlater, however, he returned to China via the backdoor of Japan andreestablished the Siemens branch in Peking under the cover of a Chinese firm,until Siemens China Company was permitted to reopen, with its main oflice inShanghai. At first he worked in Peking and Tientsin, but from 1931 on, he wasthe director of the Siemens branch in Nanking, which at the time was the capital of China. The firm called him home in March 1938 and transferred him toits main ofiices in Berlin, where, however, he was not given any position ofreal responsibility. In 1947, he retired at age 65; two years later, on 5January 1949, he died.
The life of an international businessman, then, nothing unusual, nothingparticularly exciting-had not John Rabe outgrown that mundane role for a periodof six months when he placed, and often risked, his life in the service of 250,000 Chinese. In the Memorial Hall of the city of Nanking, there is a tableterected in honor of his exemplary humanity. Those who may thnk humanity isunknown in China are wrong.
The student Fan Chi asked the Master what "jen" (humanness) means. "To love men," Confucius replied.
In the philosophy of Confucius, jen is the central ethical concept. Confuciusreturns to it again and again. What he taught and what the Chinese peoplelearned for two and a half millennia has never ceased to be a challenge to humankind.
John Rabe was a simple man who wanted to be no more than an honest Hamburgbusinessman. He was always ready to help, was well-liked, showed good commonsense, and maintained a sense of humor even in difficult situations, especiallythen. He always found ways to come to an amicable agreement, never thrusthimself to the fore, and was more likely to do the opposite. If he records some complaint in his diary he usually adds: "But it's the same for others" or "Others are a lot worse off." He often writesabout people who are in need, and how he helped or tried to help them. He sawthat as his task, and it distinguished hirn from his fellows.
He had a great many friends in China, both among the Germans and the other Westerners there . We know that he spoke excellent English; but his written French is impeccable as well. He wrote a whole series of books, mostly about life in China, embellishing them with photographs and little humorous drawings.The books are mostly of a private nature and have never been published, but thebound manuscripts are still extant. He knew a good deal about Chinese art,without ever becoming an expert. Literature, music, and the sciences were nothis strong points, but sentimental poerns could move him to tears. He had asoft heart, but didn't like to show it.
He was a practical man, both adept and lucky in practical matters. He was onlymoderately interested in politics, essentially only to the extent that itconcerned China, German commerce in China, and German foreign policy in Asia.But he was a patriot, and for a long time he thought Hitler wanted peace.
In 1934, he founded a German school on his property in Nanking---and not forhis own two children. His daughter was already past school age, and his son wasat a boarding school in southern Germany As chairman of the school board, whichhad to work through official channels of the Reich and get approval of the NaziParty for teachers and funds, he joined the NSDAP in 1934.
A simple man whom people prized for his common sense, his humor, and hiscongeniality, but certainly not in any way a conspicuous man-and yet he earnedpeople's highest admiration for the way that his love of his neighbor, of hisChinese fellow men in their plight, grew and outgrew itself, for the way he notonly rescued them as a Good Samaritan, but also displayed political savvy, atalent for organization and diplomacy and unflagging stamina in their cause.Working closely with American friends and often at the risk of his life, hebuilt a Safety Zone in Nanking that prevented a massacre and offered relativesecurity to 250,000 Chinese during the Japanese occupation. That he also foundtime to keep a diary is almost incomprehensible . What he did and saw duringthe six months between October 1937 and March 1938 is the topic of this book.
He was highly praised by his friends, revered as a saint by the Chinese,respected by the Japanese, whose acts of misconduct he constantly resisted. Andyet he remained the same modest man he had been before, who nevertheless couldlose all his gentle hurnility when he saw a wrong being committed; who eruptedinto hot fury when he saw a soldier about to rape a woman, roared at him inGerman, held his swastika armband under the man's nose, grabbed him by thecollar, and threw him out of the house. And by all accounts he was also aflgure of strict paternal authority in his own home .
He was modest, yes, but now and then a little vanity shines through, as, forinstance, when he sits down dressed in tails and adorned with medals to posefor a prominent Berlin photographer. Or in the hurt he felt when the editor ofthe Shanghai Ostasiatischer Lloyd simply blue-penciled a joke with which he hadspiced up an article.
He left Germany in 1909 when Kaiser Wilhelm was still on the throne. Hereturned in 1919 for a brief period---when the German empire had been replacedby a republic that still rested on very uneasy foundations. When the Communiststook over the town hall in Hamburg, John Rabe was beaten up because-incharacteristic fashion-he tried to help a man who had been trod underfoot bythe mob.
In Berlin he saw machine guns appear on the street during a strike by Siemensworkers. He began to keep a diary. It became his great passion, and not alwaysto his wife's delight, for even after ofiice hours he was often not availableto the family A constant theme of the entries is Rabe's worry that in suchunsettled times the volumes of his diary might get lost. They were his mostprecious possession. He had preserved his times and his life in them.
He wrote about that year in Berlin:
Then came the Kapp putsch. I knew and understood nothing about domesticpolitics. Only later did it become clear to me that those days in Germany werefar worse than they had appeared to me at the time. To my left, in the MusicHall on Stein Platz, was the army to my right, the Communists were quartered inthe Riding Academy on Uhland Strasse, and they shot at each another during thenight, so that I had to move my family from the bedroom out into thecorridor.
It was not very pleasant in Berlin. Those were the days of the General Strikeand the Organization for Maintenance of Supplies, the days when starvingstudents became gigolos and opera singers sang for pennies in the backcourtyards. Those were the days of hoarding and want. At the Siemens officesthere were days for using bacon ration cards and days for using boot-resolingration cards. I never missed a one. Herr Brendel, a friend and coworker atSiemens, had told me about a place inside Siemens where you could get cheapbeans and peas. I tried to haul two large bags of peas home, but it began torain and there were no streetcars. My bags turned soggy and I got home withabout half. I really didn't fit in Berlin!
I shared my food on the streetcar with a young girl who fainted because she hadnothing in her stomach. I remember another gross example of the misery that Iran across almost every day Herr Braun, our bookkeeper in Shanghai, hadreturned from vacation and invited Herr Brendel, me, and a few other friends,to share a pint of beer and some Bavarian snacks he had brought fromhome---white bread, butter, and sausage---at the Pschorr Beer Hall on PotsdamerPlatz. We had all eaten our fill, and Herr Braun gave everything that was leftto a little girl of perhaps eight, who carried matches in her apron and soldthem for one mark a box. With a great sob the little thing let her entire stockof wares fall to the floor and ran with her treasure to her mother waiting atthe door. The beer didn't taste good to us after that. Who can blame me forheaving a sigh of relief when I received news that I would be able to return tomy old workplace in China.
Over the next two decades Rabe was in Germany only twice, both timesbriefly---first in the twenties, the second time in 1930, when he came home loget over a "head flu," as he called it. After that he became the director ofthe Siemens branch in Nanking, China's new capital city. He did not see Germany again until his flrm recalled him in 1938.
Nanking had been China's capital since 1927. By 1937, it had a population ofabout 1.3 million. Siemens had built the city's telephone system and lheturbines of its electrical power plant; it had also supplied the hospitals withGerman equipment. Chinese technicians trained by Siernens serviced thesefacilities round the clock. Rabe spent his days at various governmentalministries trying to win contracts for Siemens.
There was a German hotel in Nanking. The farnous German bakery Klessling 8(Bader in Tientsin had a branch here. The German embassy under AmbassadorTrautmann had made the move from Peking to Nanking, and the other foreignembassies had set up shop in Nanking as well. Based in Nanking, the TransoceanNews Agency kept the world abreast of political events in China, while Shanghairemained the nation's financial center---a relationship sornething like thatbetween Washington and New York.
Marshal Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo, governed from Nanking, and wantedto modernize a backward country that had disintegrated into spheres ofinfluence, most of them controlled by various warlords, each in charge of hisown private army and one, the province of Yen-an, by Mao Zedong, who had set uphis headquarters there at the end of his famous Long March. There were thirtyto forty German military advisors stationed in Nanking, most of them retiredGerman ofEcers, some with their families. Chiang Kai-shek had begun to bringthem in under private contract as early as 1927. They were supposed to turn hisarmy into an elite flghting force that could resist both Mao's revolutionaryforces and the Japanese.
The chief advisor frorn 1934 to 1935 had been retired Colonel-General Hans vonSeeckt, the former commander in chief of the Weimar Republic's army Hissuccessor was General Alexander von Falkenhausen. They began the training ofseveral elite divisions, which in fact were able to hold their own against thestronger Japanese for much of the autumn of 1937.
Housed in a separate colony, built for them by the generalissimo, the Germanofficers in Nanking kept to themselves for the most part. They lived much thesame casino-based life that they knew from home. They normally signed up foronly a few years and had little interest in China, its land and people, itsculture and history. Their main topics of conversation were their work,servants, transfers, war stories. Since these men came from very differentpolitical backgrounds, there were frequent enough serious arguments forColonel-General von Seeckt to have to set up a court of honor.
For the businessmen of Nanking, who often did not leave China for years, homewas 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 voyagefrom Shanghai to Genoa, where most Germans disembarked to complete the triphome by rail, Iasted four to six weeks; the trip via the Trans-Siberian Railwaytook ten to twelve days. Most people preferred the comforts of a seavoyage.
John Rabe had no clear picture of what had happened in Germany since his lastbrief stay in 1930. He learned of Hitler's seizure of power, the R?putsch, thefundamental changes in the political landscape, only from newspapers. He readthe British North China Daily News, China's most serious English-language dailypublished in Shanghai. He also subscribed to the Ostasiatischcr Lloyd, based inShanghai as well, which essentially restricted itself to passing on thedispatches from Transocean and from the official German news agency Itseditorial policy therefore reflected the standard jargon of the ReichPropaganda Ministry.
This little German paper knew only good things to say about Germany, its F? andits party. But even the North China Daily News was generally rathersympathetic, if somewhat condescending, in its reports about Germany and itspolicies. German newspapers from home were usually two to three weeks old whenthey 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 hadrisen up and broken the humiliating chains of the Versailles Treaty, that nolonger paid reparations, and, with the defeat of 1918 behind it, that nowdemanded and got the same respect as other nations. The Jews were oftenattacked. Why?---that wasn't very clear in China's world of internationalbusiness, where you dealt daily with people of the most diverse religions,races, and nationalities. And at first there was very little in the Germanpress about the actual measures taken against the Jews in Germany----nor in theNorth China Daily News for that matter. For years most of the foreign presstreated Hitler's policy of anti-Semitism as a disagreeable topic of Germandomestic politics in which outside nations would do better not to meddle.
Far more important to the press were Germany's foreign and economic policy itsrearmament, and, after 1938, increasing worries about whether Hitler's policiesmight lead to war. In China people learned details about the treatment ofGerman Jews only toward the end of the thirties, when increasing numbers ofthem began to emigrate to Shanghai. After that, however, it was impossible notto have some idea of what was going on.
John Rabe, who had lived in China for almost thirty years, was more at homethere than in Germany He was one of the fabled "old China hands," who couldspeak fluent English but no Chinese, conversing instead with the Chinese inPidgin English, and yet who could think like locals and who understood,admired, and loved the Chinese . These old China hands were an inexhaustiblesource of anecdotes and experiences, Iiving pieces of history who could offervivid accounts of the Chinese and China's otherness. When they returned home toEurope, however, they found it difEcult to settle back into a homeland that nowfelt strange. The same thing happened to John Rabe.
His home in Nanking was open to every gnest. 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 provimce I had visited Herr Klicker, a remarkable German who livedfar in the interior, where life was made insecure by army deserters and bandsof thieves, induding those who had pulled off the legendary robbery of theShanghai Express-later to be turned into a successful movie. He was thedirector of a mining company owned by a Chinese corporation and had providedthe workers of this large enterprise with many social services and benefits, sothat it would have been considered a model operation even in Germany He hadgiven me a letter of introduction to John Rabe. I could stay with him, and hecould 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 ofthe Nanking city wall, and pulled up before Rabe's house, a modest villa withan office attached. Everyone was still asleep. I walked up and down the streetand didn't ring until breakfast time.
John Rabe and his wife immediately had a third place set at their table and abed made up for me in the guest room. They kept me with them for over a week,Ionger than I had originally planned. We went to the movies once and saw anAmerican film. Otherwise our evenings were spent sitting in the living room,while Rabe talked about his years in China, about the Chinese, their ways ofthinking and living, about China's curious domestic politics, the regime ofChiang Kai-shek, the corruption, the German military advisors. He had evenexperienced the flnal years of the Ch'ing dynasty and the infamous EmpressDowager Tz'u-hsi, the Imperial German "Kiaochow protection zone," and thebuilding of the city of Tsingtao.
John Rabe spoke in concrete terms, emphasizing and explaining for me what isoften incomprehensible about the Chinese. He read from his diaries: humorousverses or observations on the life of his servants and their families or onbusiness practices in China. In those days before television, people had muchmore time for conversation.
I had to tell him about the United States and my trip through Manchuria. He wasoutraged to hear that Japanese army trucks were racing with impunity aboutPeking, even in the legation district to which the Chinese government hadgranted extraterritorial status.
Like all Germans in China, he was worried that Hitler was making approaches toJapan. The Anti-Comintern Pact that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Germanambassador in London, had initiated and signed without any participation of theForeign Ministry proved it. Nonetheless John Rabe did not believe the rumorthat Hitler would withdraw German military advisors from China, for they hadall signed private contracts with the Chinese government. (Hitler did it allthe same in 1938, and von Ribbentrop threatened the advisors and their familieswith "serious consequences" if they did not return posthaste.) We did not talkmuch about conditions in Germany itself----back then it was a faraway place forhim Nor did he mention that he was a member of the NSDAP or that he hadtemporarily stood in for Legation Councilor Lautenschlager as the party's localgroup leader. He probably saw it as a formality not worth mentioning. I heardof it myself only long after the war.
The Rabes took touchingly good care of me. I had exchanged some of my money inShandong. But the currency was not accepted anywhere in Nanking, because it hadbeen issued by a northern Chinese warlord. John Rabe found a bank, or so hesaid, that would exchange it for valid currency. Nowadays I ask myself if hedidn'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 dynastyin the fourteenth century to the huge mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, the founder ofthe republic, and to Nanking's other historical monuments; or they simply letme 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 broadavenues and squares, Iike the ones that the Nanking Germans called "Potsdamer"or "Leipziger Platz." But wide expanses of fields, Iakes, ponds, and thickets,where not a house was to be seen, were also part of Nanking.
A11 of it---Purple Mountain. Lotus Lake, the rock formations of the StoneCitadel-was enclosed within the magnificent city wall that the flrst Mingemperor had ordered built around his capital, the largest and longest city wallin the world, the work of two hundred thousand people over twenty years. It istwenty-one (some say more than twenty-five) miles long, and from North Gate toSouth Gate measures six miles. The wall was already too big for the city whenthe first Ming emperor had it built. It would have taken an entire army todefend its circumference. Despite its wall, Nanking has been conquered andrazed several times in its history The last time had been in 1864. Even in1936, it still had not completely recovered from that most recentdevastation.
《 Yangtzekiang and the Nanking city wall 》
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Hung Hsiu-ch'tian, a villageschool teacher in southern China, had a vision in which he was told that he wasthe younger brother of Jesus. He collected about him a group of fanaticallyreligious revolutionaries, and their number quickly grew. They soon constituteda small army and moving northward, they defeated the Impenal forces sent outagalnst them and took Nanking This "brother of Jesus" now called himself"Heavenly King" and named Nanking the "Heavenly Capital" and his empire TaipingTienkuo, the "Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace." It was, as we would call ittoday, both a fundamentalist theocracy and a cruel dictatorship.
The leaders of the Taiping Rebellion (1852-1864) came close to conquering thewhole empire and toppling the Imperial dynasty. But the Imperial governmentraised new armies and, after a long series of battles, finally defeated the"Taipings," whose leadership was now falling apart. It was the most deadlycivil war in world history; some thirty million Chinese died in the strugglefor the Heavenly Kingdom.
When Imperial troops retook Nanking in 1864, they engaged in a bloodbath thatlasted for days, not only slaying the Taiping rebels, but also murdering almostall the inhabitants of the city, Iooting their homes, and finally burningeverything to the ground. Nanking perished. Only what was made of stoneremained.
The Taiping rebels had themselves already blown up the Great Pagoda of blue,green, and red porcelain, with its one hundred fihy bells that rang in thewind, one of the wonders of the world in the early fifteenth century. A smallportion of the palace in which the Heavenly King had perished, plus a littlepark and lake, still remained, but at the time were considered GeneralissimoChiang 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 placesis over fihy feet high and up to forty feet wide across the top. The city gateswere themselves great fortifications, each containing a sequence of gates andcourtyards, so that troops who broke through one gate would find themselvesfacing yet another and surrounded on all sides. The top of the wall was wideenough for two wagons to drive abreast easily.
About two-thirds of the wall was still standing. It led almost down to theYangtze, which is three-quarters of a mile wide here, yet far upriver fromNanking still remains navigable-for a total distance of well over six hundredmiles from its mouth at Shanghai. There is a bend in the river here, and inthat bend, as if in a protecting hand, Iies Nanking. From the wall you couldlook out over the city, which was almost lost in the green of trees, meadows,flelds, and ponds.
I saw a child's bright red cap lying in the tall grass growing on top of thewall, picked it up, but then dropped it again at once in horror. Beneath it laythe half-decomposed head of a child. The worst part were the fat whitemaggots.
That evening when his wife had gone out, I told John Rabe about it. He was veryupset.
In Shanghai," he said that sort of thing happens every day----dead bodies ofpoor people who die on a cold night are lying in the streets come morning. Butnot 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 overdead bodies. It was worst at Christmas."
But during that December of 1937, he was, as he wrote this, to all effects thechief 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 thefollowing chapters have been taken. He typed a clean copy of it during the warand added certain materials: documents, public notices he had himself written,notes to embassies, proclamations, newspaper clips, Ietters, and photographs.As a way of protecting himself from the Gestapo, who had forbidden him to writeor speak in public, he added a foreword to his flnal copy:
This is not intended to be read for entertainment, though it may perhaps looklike that at first; it is a record of facts, a diary which was not written forthe public but for my wife and the closest circle of my family. Should itspublication, which for obvious reasons has at present been prohibited, everseem appropriate, that should be done only by permission of the Germangovernment. A11 reports and correspondence of the International Committee ofthe Nanking Safety Zone to the Japanese embassy have been translated by me fromEnglish into German, which is also the case of correspondence exchanged withAmerican authorities.
Berlin, 1 October 1942
～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
T H E F O L L O W I N G P O R T I O N of this book contains excerpts from thetwo volumes of John Rabe's diaries, which he assembled during the war by
combining selected documents and what he considered the most important entriesfrom the private diary originally written for his wife and family. Hisexperiences in Germany after returning from China have been taken from accountshe wrote for his family and a small manuscript diary from the postwarperiod.
I have attempted to select passages that show John Rabe in all his many facetsand have also included material that he himself might have left out todaybecause the period in which he lived is in so many ways no longerunderstandable. To those who make an effort to grasp what the conditions ofthat period were, John Rabe will not appear any weaker for it. Since he wrotehis diary for his family I have occasionally recast careless sentences intomore standard language and have omitted entries that concern only his immediatefamily.
In his diary Rabe included accounts written by his German helpers, KrischanKrdger and Eduard Sperling, as well as some reports from the German ernbassyThese have been supplemented with a few accounts by ( ,ther eyewitnesses. Ihave added still other documents taken from the political archives of theGerman Foreign Ministry the Federal Archives, and t he Military Archives inFreiburg, which, although they express different views of these same events,also complement and confirm what Rabe himself observed and described. In anafterword based on documents of the period, I have attempted to sketch thegeneral political background, various perspectives in Berlm concerning Germanpolicy in the Far East, and a summary of what information was available to Rabehimself, in order to make his own position more understandable, particularlyhis relationship
to Hitler and National Socialism as he understood it.
The transcription of Chinese characters has always presented problems. I havegenerally followed Rabe's spelling of Chinese names, though not without a fewminor changes here and there.
Summarizations and remarks by the editor within the text of the diary are setin italics.
JOHN RABE WAS B0RN in Hamburg, Germany, on 23 November 1882. His father was aship's captain; he died whi1e his son was still young, so that John had to leave schoo1 after passing genera1 exams. He then worked for a Hamburg export firm, first as an apprentice for two and a ha1f years, and then as an office c1erk. At his boss's recommendation he was sent to Lourenco Marques in Mozambique, a Portuguese co1ony in southeast Africa, where he worked for a we11-estab1ished Eng1ish firm. There he 1earned to speak fluent Eng1ish.
A bout of malaria forced him to return home in 1906, but he was on his way again by 1908, this time to Peking. In 1909 he went to Shanghai, where hemarried his childhood sweetheart from Hamburg. With only a few brief interruptions, he lived in China for the next thirty years. At first he workedfor a Hamburg firm, and then in 1911 joined the Siemens branch in Peking, wherehe remained throughout the First World War, even though, under pressure fromthe Allies, China declared war on Germany in 1917. He was able to convince theChinese authorities, however, that it would be in both China's and their ownbest interest if he continued to run the Siemens office in Peking during thewar. That sort of thing was possible in China.
But in 1919, under pressure from the British, he was repatriated to Ger-manyalong with all his fellow countrymen. German competition was not wanted. A yearlater, however, he returned to China via the backdoor of Japan andreestablished the Siemens branch in Peking under the cover of a Chinese firm,until Siemens China Company was permitted to reopen, with its main oflice inShanghai. At first he worked in Peking and Tientsin, but from 1931 on, he wasthe director of the Siemens branch in Nanking, which at the time was the capital of China. The firm called him home in March 1938 and transferred him toits main ofiices in Berlin, where, however, he was not given any position ofreal responsibility. In 1947, he retired at age 65; two years later, on 5January 1949, he died.
The life of an international businessman, then, nothing unusual, nothingparticularly exciting-had not John Rabe outgrown that mundane role for a periodof six months when he placed, and often risked, his life in the service of 250,000 Chinese. In the Memorial Hall of the city of Nanking, there is a tableterected in honor of his exemplary humanity. Those who may thnk humanity isunknown in China are wrong.
The student Fan Chi asked the Master what "jen" (humanness) means. "To love men," Confucius replied.
In the philosophy of Confucius, jen is the central ethical concept. Confuciusreturns to it again and again. What he taught and what the Chinese peoplelearned for two and a half millennia has never ceased to be a challenge to humankind.
John Rabe was a simple man who wanted to be no more than an honest Hamburgbusinessman. He was always ready to help, was well-liked, showed good commonsense, and maintained a sense of humor even in difficult situations, especiallythen. He always found ways to come to an amicable agreement, never thrusthimself to the fore, and was more likely to do the opposite. If he records some complaint in his diary he usually adds: "But it's the same for others" or "Others are a lot worse off." He often writesabout people who are in need, and how he helped or tried to help them. He sawthat as his task, and it distinguished hirn from his fellows.
He had a great many friends in China, both among the Germans and the other Westerners there . We know that he spoke excellent English; but his written French is impeccable as well. He wrote a whole series of books, mostly about life in China, embellishing them with photographs and little humorous drawings.The books are mostly of a private nature and have never been published, but thebound manuscripts are still extant. He knew a good deal about Chinese art,without ever becoming an expert. Literature, music, and the sciences were nothis strong points, but sentimental poerns could move him to tears. He had asoft heart, but didn't like to show it.
He was a practical man, both adept and lucky in practical matters. He was onlymoderately interested in politics, essentially only to the extent that itconcerned China, German commerce in China, and German foreign policy in Asia.But he was a patriot, and for a long time he thought Hitler wanted peace.
In 1934, he founded a German school on his property in Nanking---and not forhis own two children. His daughter was already past school age, and his son wasat a boarding school in southern Germany As chairman of the school board, whichhad to work through official channels of the Reich and get approval of the NaziParty for teachers and funds, he joined the NSDAP in 1934.
A simple man whom people prized for his common sense, his humor, and hiscongeniality, but certainly not in any way a conspicuous man-and yet he earnedpeople's highest admiration for the way that his love of his neighbor, of hisChinese fellow men in their plight, grew and outgrew itself, for the way he notonly rescued them as a Good Samaritan, but also displayed political savvy, atalent for organization and diplomacy and unflagging stamina in their cause.Working closely with American friends and often at the risk of his life, hebuilt a Safety Zone in Nanking that prevented a massacre and offered relativesecurity to 250,000 Chinese during the Japanese occupation. That he also foundtime to keep a diary is almost incomprehensible . What he did and saw duringthe six months between October 1937 and March 1938 is the topic of this book.
He was highly praised by his friends, revered as a saint by the Chinese,respected by the Japanese, whose acts of misconduct he constantly resisted. Andyet he remained the same modest man he had been before, who nevertheless couldlose all his gentle hurnility when he saw a wrong being committed; who eruptedinto hot fury when he saw a soldier about to rape a woman, roared at him inGerman, held his swastika armband under the man's nose, grabbed him by thecollar, and threw him out of the house. And by all accounts he was also aflgure of strict paternal authority in his own home .
He was modest, yes, but now and then a little vanity shines through, as, forinstance, when he sits down dressed in tails and adorned with medals to posefor a prominent Berlin photographer. Or in the hurt he felt when the editor ofthe Shanghai Ostasiatischer Lloyd simply blue-penciled a joke with which he hadspiced up an article.
He left Germany in 1909 when Kaiser Wilhelm was still on the throne. Hereturned in 1919 for a brief period---when the German empire had been replacedby a republic that still rested on very uneasy foundations. When the Communiststook over the town hall in Hamburg, John Rabe was beaten up because-incharacteristic fashion-he tried to help a man who had been trod underfoot bythe mob.
In Berlin he saw machine guns appear on the street during a strike by Siemensworkers. He began to keep a diary. It became his great passion, and not alwaysto his wife's delight, for even after ofiice hours he was often not availableto the family A constant theme of the entries is Rabe's worry that in suchunsettled times the volumes of his diary might get lost. They were his mostprecious possession. He had preserved his times and his life in them.
He wrote about that year in Berlin:
Then came the Kapp putsch. I knew and understood nothing about domesticpolitics. Only later did it become clear to me that those days in Germany werefar worse than they had appeared to me at the time. To my left, in the MusicHall on Stein Platz, was the army to my right, the Communists were quartered inthe Riding Academy on Uhland Strasse, and they shot at each another during thenight, so that I had to move my family from the bedroom out into thecorridor.
It was not very pleasant in Berlin. Those were the days of the General Strikeand the Organization for Maintenance of Supplies, the days when starvingstudents became gigolos and opera singers sang for pennies in the backcourtyards. Those were the days of hoarding and want. At the Siemens officesthere were days for using bacon ration cards and days for using boot-resolingration cards. I never missed a one. Herr Brendel, a friend and coworker atSiemens, had told me about a place inside Siemens where you could get cheapbeans and peas. I tried to haul two large bags of peas home, but it began torain and there were no streetcars. My bags turned soggy and I got home withabout half. I really didn't fit in Berlin!
I shared my food on the streetcar with a young girl who fainted because she hadnothing in her stomach. I remember another gross example of the misery that Iran across almost every day Herr Braun, our bookkeeper in Shanghai, hadreturned from vacation and invited Herr Brendel, me, and a few other friends,to share a pint of beer and some Bavarian snacks he had brought fromhome---white bread, butter, and sausage---at the Pschorr Beer Hall on PotsdamerPlatz. We had all eaten our fill, and Herr Braun gave everything that was leftto a little girl of perhaps eight, who carried matches in her apron and soldthem for one mark a box. With a great sob the little thing let her entire stockof wares fall to the floor and ran with her treasure to her mother waiting atthe door. The beer didn't taste good to us after that. Who can blame me forheaving a sigh of relief when I received news that I would be able to return tomy old workplace in China.
Over the next two decades Rabe was in Germany only twice, both timesbriefly---first in the twenties, the second time in 1930, when he came home loget over a "head flu," as he called it. After that he became the director ofthe Siemens branch in Nanking, China's new capital city. He did not see Germany again until his flrm recalled him in 1938.
Nanking had been China's capital since 1927. By 1937, it had a population ofabout 1.3 million. Siemens had built the city's telephone system and lheturbines of its electrical power plant; it had also supplied the hospitals withGerman equipment. Chinese technicians trained by Siernens serviced thesefacilities round the clock. Rabe spent his days at various governmentalministries trying to win contracts for Siemens.
There was a German hotel in Nanking. The farnous German bakery Klessling 8(Bader in Tientsin had a branch here. The German embassy under AmbassadorTrautmann had made the move from Peking to Nanking, and the other foreignembassies had set up shop in Nanking as well. Based in Nanking, the TransoceanNews Agency kept the world abreast of political events in China, while Shanghairemained the nation's financial center---a relationship sornething like thatbetween Washington and New York.
Marshal Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo, governed from Nanking, and wantedto modernize a backward country that had disintegrated into spheres ofinfluence, most of them controlled by various warlords, each in charge of hisown private army and one, the province of Yen-an, by Mao Zedong, who had set uphis headquarters there at the end of his famous Long March. There were thirtyto forty German military advisors stationed in Nanking, most of them retiredGerman ofEcers, some with their families. Chiang Kai-shek had begun to bringthem in under private contract as early as 1927. They were supposed to turn hisarmy into an elite flghting force that could resist both Mao's revolutionaryforces and the Japanese.
The chief advisor frorn 1934 to 1935 had been retired Colonel-General Hans vonSeeckt, the former commander in chief of the Weimar Republic's army Hissuccessor was General Alexander von Falkenhausen. They began the training ofseveral elite divisions, which in fact were able to hold their own against thestronger Japanese for much of the autumn of 1937.
Housed in a separate colony, built for them by the generalissimo, the Germanofficers in Nanking kept to themselves for the most part. They lived much thesame casino-based life that they knew from home. They normally signed up foronly a few years and had little interest in China, its land and people, itsculture and history. Their main topics of conversation were their work,servants, transfers, war stories. Since these men came from very differentpolitical backgrounds, there were frequent enough serious arguments forColonel-General von Seeckt to have to set up a court of honor.
For the businessmen of Nanking, who often did not leave China for years, homewas 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 voyagefrom Shanghai to Genoa, where most Germans disembarked to complete the triphome by rail, Iasted four to six weeks; the trip via the Trans-Siberian Railwaytook ten to twelve days. Most people preferred the comforts of a seavoyage.
John Rabe had no clear picture of what had happened in Germany since his lastbrief stay in 1930. He learned of Hitler's seizure of power, the R?putsch, thefundamental changes in the political landscape, only from newspapers. He readthe British North China Daily News, China's most serious English-language dailypublished in Shanghai. He also subscribed to the Ostasiatischcr Lloyd, based inShanghai as well, which essentially restricted itself to passing on thedispatches from Transocean and from the official German news agency Itseditorial policy therefore reflected the standard jargon of the ReichPropaganda Ministry.
This little German paper knew only good things to say about Germany, its F? andits party. But even the North China Daily News was generally rathersympathetic, if somewhat condescending, in its reports about Germany and itspolicies. German newspapers from home were usually two to three weeks old whenthey 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 hadrisen up and broken the humiliating chains of the Versailles Treaty, that nolonger paid reparations, and, with the defeat of 1918 behind it, that nowdemanded and got the same respect as other nations. The Jews were oftenattacked. Why?---that wasn't very clear in China's world of internationalbusiness, where you dealt daily with people of the most diverse religions,races, and nationalities. And at first there was very little in the Germanpress about the actual measures taken against the Jews in Germany----nor in theNorth China Daily News for that matter. For years most of the foreign presstreated Hitler's policy of anti-Semitism as a disagreeable topic of Germandomestic politics in which outside nations would do better not to meddle.
Far more important to the press were Germany's foreign and economic policy itsrearmament, and, after 1938, increasing worries about whether Hitler's policiesmight lead to war. In China people learned details about the treatment ofGerman Jews only toward the end of the thirties, when increasing numbers ofthem began to emigrate to Shanghai. After that, however, it was impossible notto have some idea of what was going on.
John Rabe, who had lived in China for almost thirty years, was more at homethere than in Germany He was one of the fabled "old China hands," who couldspeak fluent English but no Chinese, conversing instead with the Chinese inPidgin English, and yet who could think like locals and who understood,admired, and loved the Chinese . These old China hands were an inexhaustiblesource of anecdotes and experiences, Iiving pieces of history who could offervivid accounts of the Chinese and China's otherness. When they returned home toEurope, however, they found it difEcult to settle back into a homeland that nowfelt strange. The same thing happened to John Rabe.
His home in Nanking was open to every gnest. 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 provimce I had visited Herr Klicker, a remarkable German who livedfar in the interior, where life was made insecure by army deserters and bandsof thieves, induding those who had pulled off the legendary robbery of theShanghai Express-later to be turned into a successful movie. He was thedirector of a mining company owned by a Chinese corporation and had providedthe workers of this large enterprise with many social services and benefits, sothat it would have been considered a model operation even in Germany He hadgiven me a letter of introduction to John Rabe. I could stay with him, and hecould 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 ofthe Nanking city wall, and pulled up before Rabe's house, a modest villa withan office attached. Everyone was still asleep. I walked up and down the streetand didn't ring until breakfast time.
John Rabe and his wife immediately had a third place set at their table and abed made up for me in the guest room. They kept me with them for over a week,Ionger than I had originally planned. We went to the movies once and saw anAmerican film. Otherwise our evenings were spent sitting in the living room,while Rabe talked about his years in China, about the Chinese, their ways ofthinking and living, about China's curious domestic politics, the regime ofChiang Kai-shek, the corruption, the German military advisors. He had evenexperienced the flnal years of the Ch'ing dynasty and the infamous EmpressDowager Tz'u-hsi, the Imperial German "Kiaochow protection zone," and thebuilding of the city of Tsingtao.
John Rabe spoke in concrete terms, emphasizing and explaining for me what isoften incomprehensible about the Chinese. He read from his diaries: humorousverses or observations on the life of his servants and their families or onbusiness practices in China. In those days before television, people had muchmore time for conversation.
I had to tell him about the United States and my trip through Manchuria. He wasoutraged to hear that Japanese army trucks were racing with impunity aboutPeking, even in the legation district to which the Chinese government hadgranted extraterritorial status.
Like all Germans in China, he was worried that Hitler was making approaches toJapan. The Anti-Comintern Pact that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Germanambassador in London, had initiated and signed without any participation of theForeign Ministry proved it. Nonetheless John Rabe did not believe the rumorthat Hitler would withdraw German military advisors from China, for they hadall signed private contracts with the Chinese government. (Hitler did it allthe same in 1938, and von Ribbentrop threatened the advisors and their familieswith "serious consequences" if they did not return posthaste.) We did not talkmuch about conditions in Germany itself----back then it was a faraway place forhim Nor did he mention that he was a member of the NSDAP or that he hadtemporarily stood in for Legation Councilor Lautenschlager as the party's localgroup leader. He probably saw it as a formality not worth mentioning. I heardof it myself only long after the war.
The Rabes took touchingly good care of me. I had exchanged some of my money inShandong. But the currency was not accepted anywhere in Nanking, because it hadbeen issued by a northern Chinese warlord. John Rabe found a bank, or so hesaid, that would exchange it for valid currency. Nowadays I ask myself if hedidn'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 dynastyin the fourteenth century to the huge mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, the founder ofthe republic, and to Nanking's other historical monuments; or they simply letme 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 broadavenues and squares, Iike the ones that the Nanking Germans called "Potsdamer"or "Leipziger Platz." But wide expanses of fields, Iakes, ponds, and thickets,where not a house was to be seen, were also part of Nanking.
A11 of it---Purple Mountain. Lotus Lake, the rock formations of the StoneCitadel-was enclosed within the magnificent city wall that the flrst Mingemperor had ordered built around his capital, the largest and longest city wallin the world, the work of two hundred thousand people over twenty years. It istwenty-one (some say more than twenty-five) miles long, and from North Gate toSouth Gate measures six miles. The wall was already too big for the city whenthe first Ming emperor had it built. It would have taken an entire army todefend its circumference. Despite its wall, Nanking has been conquered andrazed several times in its history The last time had been in 1864. Even in1936, it still had not completely recovered from that most recentdevastation.
《 Yangtzekiang and the Nanking city wall 》
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Hung Hsiu-ch'tian, a villageschool teacher in southern China, had a vision in which he was told that he wasthe younger brother of Jesus. He collected about him a group of fanaticallyreligious revolutionaries, and their number quickly grew. They soon constituteda small army and moving northward, they defeated the Impenal forces sent outagalnst them and took Nanking This "brother of Jesus" now called himself"Heavenly King" and named Nanking the "Heavenly Capital" and his empire TaipingTienkuo, the "Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace." It was, as we would call ittoday, both a fundamentalist theocracy and a cruel dictatorship.
The leaders of the Taiping Rebellion (1852-1864) came close to conquering thewhole empire and toppling the Imperial dynasty. But the Imperial governmentraised new armies and, after a long series of battles, finally defeated the"Taipings," whose leadership was now falling apart. It was the most deadlycivil war in world history; some thirty million Chinese died in the strugglefor the Heavenly Kingdom.
When Imperial troops retook Nanking in 1864, they engaged in a bloodbath thatlasted for days, not only slaying the Taiping rebels, but also murdering almostall the inhabitants of the city, Iooting their homes, and finally burningeverything to the ground. Nanking perished. Only what was made of stoneremained.
The Taiping rebels had themselves already blown up the Great Pagoda of blue,green, and red porcelain, with its one hundred fihy bells that rang in thewind, one of the wonders of the world in the early fifteenth century. A smallportion of the palace in which the Heavenly King had perished, plus a littlepark and lake, still remained, but at the time were considered GeneralissimoChiang 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 placesis over fihy feet high and up to forty feet wide across the top. The city gateswere themselves great fortifications, each containing a sequence of gates andcourtyards, so that troops who broke through one gate would find themselvesfacing yet another and surrounded on all sides. The top of the wall was wideenough for two wagons to drive abreast easily.
About two-thirds of the wall was still standing. It led almost down to theYangtze, which is three-quarters of a mile wide here, yet far upriver fromNanking still remains navigable-for a total distance of well over six hundredmiles from its mouth at Shanghai. There is a bend in the river here, and inthat bend, as if in a protecting hand, Iies Nanking. From the wall you couldlook out over the city, which was almost lost in the green of trees, meadows,flelds, and ponds.
I saw a child's bright red cap lying in the tall grass growing on top of thewall, picked it up, but then dropped it again at once in horror. Beneath it laythe half-decomposed head of a child. The worst part were the fat whitemaggots.
That evening when his wife had gone out, I told John Rabe about it. He was veryupset.
In Shanghai," he said that sort of thing happens every day----dead bodies ofpoor people who die on a cold night are lying in the streets come morning. Butnot 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 overdead bodies. It was worst at Christmas."
But during that December of 1937, he was, as he wrote this, to all effects thechief 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 thefollowing chapters have been taken. He typed a clean copy of it during the warand added certain materials: documents, public notices he had himself written,notes to embassies, proclamations, newspaper clips, Ietters, and photographs.As a way of protecting himself from the Gestapo, who had forbidden him to writeor speak in public, he added a foreword to his flnal copy:
This is not intended to be read for entertainment, though it may perhaps looklike that at first; it is a record of facts, a diary which was not written forthe public but for my wife and the closest circle of my family. Should itspublication, which for obvious reasons has at present been prohibited, everseem appropriate, that should be done only by permission of the Germangovernment. A11 reports and correspondence of the International Committee ofthe Nanking Safety Zone to the Japanese embassy have been translated by me fromEnglish into German, which is also the case of correspondence exchanged withAmerican authorities.
Berlin, 1 October 1942
～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
T H E F O L L O W I N G P O R T I O N of this book contains excerpts from thetwo volumes of John Rabe's diaries, which he assembled during the war by
combining selected documents and what he considered the most important entriesfrom the private diary originally written for his wife and family. Hisexperiences in Germany after returning from China have been taken from accountshe wrote for his family and a small manuscript diary from the postwarperiod.
I have attempted to select passages that show John Rabe in all his many facetsand have also included material that he himself might have left out todaybecause the period in which he lived is in so many ways no longerunderstandable. To those who make an effort to grasp what the conditions ofthat period were, John Rabe will not appear any weaker for it. Since he wrotehis diary for his family I have occasionally recast careless sentences intomore standard language and have omitted entries that concern only his immediatefamily.
In his diary Rabe included accounts written by his German helpers, KrischanKrdger and Eduard Sperling, as well as some reports from the German ernbassyThese have been supplemented with a few accounts by ( ,ther eyewitnesses. Ihave added still other documents taken from the political archives of theGerman Foreign Ministry the Federal Archives, and t he Military Archives inFreiburg, which, although they express different views of these same events,also complement and confirm what Rabe himself observed and described. In anafterword based on documents of the period, I have attempted to sketch thegeneral political background, various perspectives in Berlm concerning Germanpolicy in the Far East, and a summary of what information was available to Rabehimself, in order to make his own position more understandable, particularlyhis relationship
to Hitler and National Socialism as he understood it.
The transcription of Chinese characters has always presented problems. I havegenerally followed Rabe's spelling of Chinese names, though not without a fewminor changes here and there.
Summarizations and remarks by the editor within the text of the diary are setin italics.
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