Holocaust Revisionism, Part 4: John Rabe’s Assistance to the People of Nanking in 1937

by Mary W Maxwell

This series on Holocaust Revisionism is eclectic. It is not out to disprove the historical literature – which certainly needs much disproving. Rather, it collects interesting material about some of the great conflicts.  The goal of this series is to show that we humans can make big mistakes in attributing blame.

“Blaming the Germans” has been a theme of Word War II writings and “un-blaming the Germans” is the mission of many Holocaust Revisionists. Most of the un-blamers of Germans are deeply into blaming the Jews.

The present article has nothing to do with Jews and little to do with Germany except one German man, John Rabe. He was living in China in 1937 as an employee of the Siemens Company. That’s the year in which the city of Nanking (China’s capital at that time) was invaded by Japan.

John Rabe proceeded to set up an International Safety Zone in Nanking, which was respected by the Japanese. There he gave supported to many foreigners and to any Chinese who could make it to this enclosure.

Iris Chang’s Book: The Rape of Nanking

One day around 1998, I was reading my John Hopkins Alumni magazine and learned that a young woman in the Writing Department, Iris Chang, had turned out a book about some amazing atrocities in China sixty years earlier. Her book covers the period of the Japanese invasion of Nanking. It is titled The Rape of Nanking.

Rape of local women by Japanese soldiers was massive, but the title refers more generally to the attack on the city.

Chang was surprised to find that many Americans in the 1990s knew nothing of it.  Hundreds of thousands of Chinese were slaughtered. She then declared that our silence (or ignorance) about it was “a second rape.”

Other Silences

That reminded me of Ursula Haverbeck  saying that the destruction of Eastern Germany at the end of WWII is so little known and she, as a refugee from Breslau, was not allowed to talk about it. Konrad Adenauer said two million people were missing from that area of Germany after it was ceded to Poland.

All of which pales in comparison to the fact – as stated a few days ago by US Senator Rand Paul – that 17 million Yemeni’s are at present (January 2019) being starved to death as an act of war by the Saudi’s.

I will now quote at length from Iris Chang’s book. You will see that John Rabe was a hero in China, but the US occupiers of Germany did not welcome him home. They put him through de-Nazification.  All this while Geylen was preparing to “invade” the US in a very quiet way.

Ursula Reinhardt is the grand-daughter of John Rabe.  She helped Iris Chang find documents about his life.

Quoting from pages 187 to 197 of The Rape of Nanking (1997):

If there was an expert somewhere on the planet who had studied the history of the German community in China during World War II, Taylor would probably know who he was. Taylor suggested that I contact the historian Charles Burdick of Ferndale, California. Burdick in turn suggested that I write to the city historian of Hamburg; he also gave me the address of Martha Begemann.

To my surprise, a letter came back from Begemann right away. Through a fortuitous chain of events, she had already located Rabe’s family. “I am happy I could help you, and it was not so very difficult,” she wrote on April 26, 1996. …

From that moment on, things moved swiftly. Ursula Reinhardt, I learned, had been born in China; as a little girl, she even visited Nanking only months before the city fell. She was endlessly helpful to my inquiries and sent me many long letters. With handwritten text, photographs, and news articles, Reinhardt filled in some of the missing details of Rabe’s life.

Rabe kept his promise to the Chinese that he would inform the German authorities of the Japanese horrors in Nanking. On April 15, he and his wife returned to Germany, where he received numerous accolades for his achievements.

In Berlin the German secretary of state officially commended Rabe for his work in China; Rabe was awarded the Service Cross of the Red Cross Order. and the Diamond Order Award on a red, white, and blue necklace from the Chinese government.

That May, Rabe publicized the Nanking massacre by lecturing and showing John Magee’s film all over Berlin.  Rabe failed to secure an audience with Adolf Hitler, however, and so on June 8 he sent a letter to the fuehrer, along with a copy of the film and a typewritten report on the Rape of Nanking.

But if Rabe had expected a sympathetic response from Hitler, he was gravely mistaken. A few days later two members of the Gestapo arrived on his doorstep to arrest him. Ursula Reinhardt was there when it happened.

She was seven years old, trying on a pair of new roller skates near the door when she saw two official-looking men in black uniforms with white lapels take Rabe away to a waiting car. “My grandfather looked embarrassed and the two men very severe and stiff so that I didn’t even dare hug him farewell.”

Rabe was warned never to lecture, discuss, or write on the subject again and, most of all, never to show John Magee’s film to anyone. ….The German government informed Rabe that his report was sent to the Ministry of Economics, where it was read by the highest circles of government, but that he should not expect any change in German foreign policy toward Japan because of it.

The next few years proved nightmarish for Rabe. His apartment was bombed out, and the Russian invasion of Berlin reduced his family to poverty. Ursula Reinhardt is convinced that they survived only because they were living in the British, not the Soviet, section of Berlin. Rabe continued to work sporadically for the Siemens Company, translating economic correspondence into English. But the low wage was barely enough to keep his family alive.

He was arrested by the Soviets, who interrogated him for three days and nights before the unrelenting glare of klieg lights. Then he was arrested by the British, who grilled him for an entire day but later gave him a work permit.

The final humiliation came when a German acquaintance denounced Rabe and propelled him into a long, drawn-out “de-nazification” process; he had to pay for his own legal defense, in the process losing his work permit and depleting his savings and energy.

Crowded into one tiny room with his family, fighting cold and hunger, Rabe was forced to sell, piece by piece, his beloved collection of Chinese artwork to the American army in order to buy beans, bread, and soap. Malnutrition caused him to succumb to skin disease, while sorrow and stress all but destroyed his health. In Nanking he was a legend, but in Germany he was a dying man.

Excerpts from Rabe’s diary reveal his state of mind in 1945–46:

Last Sunday I was with Mommy [Dora Rabe, John Rabe’s wife] in the Xantener Straße [Rabe’s bombed apartment]. They broke the door in our cellar and stole my typewriter, our radio and more—Meo fatze!

Now Mommy weighs only 44 kg—we have grown very meager. The summer comes to an end—what will winter bring? Where will we get fuel, food and work? I am now translating Timperley’s What War Means [a book of documents about the Nanking massacre]. At the moment this brings no money, but perhaps I shall get a better food ration card . . . All Germans suffer as we do.

We suffer hunger and hunger again—I had nothing to tell, so I didn’t write down anything. In addition to our meager meal we ate acorn flour soup. Mommy collected the acorns secretly in autumn. Now as the provisions come to an end, day after day we ate stinging nettle, the young leaves taste like spinach.

Yesterday my petition to get de-nazified was rejected. Though I saved the lives of 250, 000 Chinese people as the head of the International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone, my request was refused because I was for a short time the leader of the Ortsgruppenleiter district of the NSDAP in Nanking and a man of my intelligence must not have sought membership of this party.

So I must go on to fight—and I am so tired. At the moment I am questioned every day by the police. In Nanking I was the living Buddha for hundreds of thousands of people and here I am a “pariah,” an outcast. Oh, if I could only be cured of my homesickness!

On June the 3rd finally I was de-nazified by the de-nazifying commission of the British Sector in Charlottenburg.

The judgment runs: “Though you were deputy leader of the district of the NSDAP and though after your return to Germany you did not resign membership of the NSDAP [Ursula Reinhardt notes that doing so would have been suicide!] the commission decided to sustain your objection because of your successful humanitarian work in China” etc.

With this, the nerve torture finally came to an end. I was congratulated by many friends and directors of the SSW and given a holiday by the firm to recover from the strain.

By 1948 news of Rabe’s plight had reached China. When the Nanking city government announced to its people that Rabe needed help, the response was tremendous, almost reminiscent of the conclusion of Frank Capra’s classic film It’s a Wonderful Life.

Within a matter of days the survivors of the massacre raised for Rabe’s support $100 million in Chinese dollars, roughly equivalent at the time to $2,000 in U.S. dollars—no small amount in 1948. From June 1948 until the fall of the capital to the Communists, the people of Nanking also mailed Rabe a bundle of food each month to express their heartfelt thanks for his leadership of the International Safety Zone.

The Kuomintang government even offered Rabe free housing in China and a lifelong pension if he ever chose to return.

The entire family was grateful for the support of the Nanking people, and Rabe himself wrote that the gesture had restored his faith in life.

Rabe died from an artery stroke in 1950. Before his death, he left behind a written legacy of his work in China: more than two thousand pages of documents on the Rape of Nanking that he had meticulously typed, numbered, bound, and even illustrated; these documents included his and other foreigners’ eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, telegrams, and photographs of the atrocities.

The other Nazis on the Nanking International Safety Zone Committee kept quiet about their records as well. Shortly after the discovery of the Rabe papers, I [Iris Chang] learned of the existence of another Nazi diary of the Rape of Nanking, entitled “Days of Fate in Nanking” by Christian Kröger.

His son, Peter Kröger, had found a copy of the diary in his father’s desk after his death at the age of ninety. In fact, at the bottom of the diary is a handwritten scrawl, no doubt Kröger’s, that warns: “Contrary to the current opinions of the Hitler government. Consequently I had to be very careful with this.”

Months later Ursula Reinhardt remained so horrified by her grandfather’s report that she did not hesitate to tell a reporter from the Renming Ribao (People’s Daily) her honest opinion of the Nanking massacre, an opinion certain to provoke controversy: that the Japanese torture of their victims in Nanking surpassed even the Nazis in cruelty, and that the Japanese were far worse than Adolf Hitler himself.

Reinhardt worried about the implications of releasing the diaries to the world. She saw the diaries as political dynamite with the potential to wreck Sino-Japanese relations. But at my urging, and also at the urging of Shao Tzuping, a past president of the Alliance in the Memory of Victims of the Nanking Massacre who worked for the United Nations, she decided to make the diaries public.

She spent fifteen hours photocopying them. Shao, who was fearful that right-wing Japanese might break into her house and destroy the diaries or offer the family large sums of money to buy up the originals, hastily flew Ursula Reinhardt and her husband to New York City, where copies of the diaries were donated to the Yale Divinity School library.

At a press conference that was first announced by a prominent story in the New York Times and then covered by Peter Jennings of ABC-TV, CNN, and other world media organizations on December 12, 1996—the fifty-ninth anniversary of the fall of Nanking.

Historians were unanimous in their proclamation of the diaries’ value. Many saw the diaries as more conclusive proof that the Rape of Nanking really did occur, and as an account told from the perspective of a Nazi, they found it fascinating. …

In the United States, William Kirby, a professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, told the New York Times: “It’s an incredibly gripping and depressing narrative, done very carefully with an enormous amount of detail and drama. It will reopen this case in a very important way in that people can go through the day-by-day account and add 100 to 200 stories to what is popularly known.”

Even Japanese historians pronounced the Rabe finding important. Kasahara Tokushi, a professor of modern Chinese history at Utsunomiya University, testified to the Asahi Shimbun: “The fact that Rabe, who was a vice-president of the Nazi Party, entreated Hitler, the top leader of a Japanese ally, to intervene testifies to the tremendous scale of the massacre.”

Hata Ikuhiko, a professor of modern Japanese history at the University of Chiba, added: “The meaning of this report is significant in the sense that a German, whose country was allied with Japan, depicts the atrocity of Nanking objectively.

— end of excerpt from Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (1996).