The Good German of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe Book

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 StevensonRead More