The Good German Of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe

(Paperback)

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In 1937, as the invading Japanese Army closed on Nanking, then the capital of China, all foreigners were ordered to leave the city. One man, a mild 55-year-old German named John Rabe, who ran the local Siemens factory, refused on the grounds that it would show a bad example to his Chinese workers. Sending his wife and family to safety, he watched in horror as the Japanese began to wipe out the population. Hastily contacting the tiny remaining community of foreigners - fewer than 20 people - and using the flimsy authority of a pact Hitler had made with the Japanese, Rabe spent months safeguarding and providing refuge for thousands of Chinese, often interposing himself physically between the executioners and their victims. Every night Rabe would record these extraordinary events in his diary, the contents of which are presented in this book.

Reviews

'A story of wondrous humanity in the face of insane savagery' SPECTATOR 'A testament of truly remarkable fortitude and charity by one man ... it restores faith in humanity' TLS 'He out-Schindlered Schindler ... His unbelievable tenacity, courage and ingenuity make him the most unexpected unsung hero of modern times' EVENING STANDARD 'This is an important contribution to our understanding of those years.' SUNDAY TIMES 'His story is a significant document.' THE TIMES '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 traumatised. The "Rape of Nanking" still causes international controversy, as Japanese politicians refuse to unequivocally apologise 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 Seimens, 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 organise a Safety Zone as refuge of last resort for Chinese civilians. The Good German 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 humour, placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese soldiers begin their pointless 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, AMAZON.CO.UK Review

Author Bio

John Rabe was born in Hamburg in 1882, and died in Berlin in 1949.