Georg Rosen: the German diplomat who reported to Berlin

Kurusu Saburo, Galeazzo Ciano and Adolf Hitler at the signing of the Tripartite Pact, Berlin, 27 September 1940. Two years earlier Georg Rosen’s reports from Nanjing had told the Foreign Ministry what Germany’s future ally was doing in China. Photo: Unknown photographer, National Digital Archives, Poland, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Rape of Nanking, 1937–1938

Georg Rosen: The German Diplomat Who Reported to Berlin

A career diplomat of partly Jewish descent who told the Nazi Foreign Ministry the truth about Nanjing, and was dismissed in the same year.

Georg Rosen was one of the three German diplomats who reopened their embassy in occupied Nanjing in January 1938. Legation secretary at the German embassy in China since 1933, he left the capital with his colleagues on 8 December 1937, aboard a British gunboat, as the Japanese closed in. He came back on 9 January 1938, with two other German officials, to reopen the embassy in the occupied city. What he found there, and what he heard from John Rabe and the other members of the Safety Zone committee, he reported to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.

His reports are some of the most striking documents of the massacre, because of who wrote them and to whom. Germany and Japan had been partners in the Anti-Comintern Pact since November 1936, and by early 1938 the Foreign Ministry under Joachim von Ribbentrop was moving Germany away from China and toward Japan. Rosen’s dispatches described the conduct of Japan’s army in detail to a government that had every political reason not to want to hear it. On 10 February 1938 he recommended that the ministry obtain the film that John Magee had shot of the victims.

Rosen was himself a target of the regime he served. His grandmothers were daughters of a baptized Jewish family, and under the Nazi racial laws he counted as a person of Jewish descent. In 1938 he was forced out of the foreign service. He emigrated, taught in the United States, and returned after the war to serve the Federal Republic. The German side of the story is told in Chapter 6.

An orientalist’s son

Rosen came from a family of scholars and diplomats. He was born on 14 September 1895 in Shirvan, in Persia, where his father, Friedrich Rosen, an orientalist and diplomat, was serving; Friedrich Rosen was briefly German foreign minister in 1921. The grandfather for whom Georg was named was also an orientalist. His father’s and mother’s mothers were sisters, Emily and Serena Anna Moscheles, daughters of the composer Ignaz Moscheles and Charlotte Embden, who were baptized Jews. Under the Nuremberg laws of 1935 that ancestry was enough to mark him.

He volunteered for the Western Front in 1917, completed a doctorate after the war and joined the German diplomatic service in 1921. In 1933 he was posted to the embassy in China as legation secretary. Germany’s relations with Nationalist China were then close: German military advisers trained Chiang Kai-shek’s army, and German firms traded industrial goods and weapons for Chinese tungsten. Rosen served under Ambassador Oskar Trautmann, who in the winter of 1937–38 carried Japanese peace terms to Chiang in an attempt at mediation that ended when the Japanese prime minister, Konoe Fumimaro, announced on 16 January 1938 that Japan would not deal with the Nationalist government.

Out on the Cricket, back in January

On 8 December 1937 Rosen, the chancellor Paul Scharffenberg and the attaché Alfred Hürter left Nanjing on the British river gunboat HMS Cricket, as the Western embassies withdrew their staff from the city; the Americans had gone aboard USS Panay, which Japanese aircraft sank on 12 December. The three Germans were therefore not in the city during the fall or the worst of the killing. They returned on 9 January 1938, three days after American diplomats had reopened their embassy, and reopened the German embassy.

What they found was a city where the killing had passed its peak but the violence had not ended. Rosen had the evidence of his own eyes, the accounts of the German members of the Safety Zone committee, Rabe, Christian Kröger and Eduard Sperling, and the committee’s documents. Scharffenberg, born in 1873 and near the end of his career, died in Nanjing in June 1938.

The reports to Berlin

Rosen’s reports, now in the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office in Berlin, described the atrocities of December and January in detail, and noted that the Japanese army’s conduct was continuing. Some were reprinted in Erwin Wickert’s 1997 edition of Rabe’s diaries. They are contemporary diplomatic evidence, written within weeks, by an official whose duty was to report accurately and whose government had no wish to embarrass Japan.

On 10 February 1938 Rosen wrote to the ministry recommending that it buy a copy of the film that the American Episcopal missionary John Magee had made in December. In John E. Woods’s English translation he wrote that Magee “took motion pictures that eloquently bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese.” A copy did reach Berlin, where Rabe showed it at his lectures that spring. It changed nothing in German policy.

[Magee] took motion pictures that eloquently bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese.

— Georg Rosen to the German Foreign Ministry, 10 February 1938, in the English translation by John E. Woods, The Good Man of Nanking (1998), p. 187

Berlin turns to Tokyo

The months in which Rosen was reporting from Nanjing were the months in which Germany changed sides in East Asia. On 4 February 1938 Ribbentrop became foreign minister. On 20 February Hitler announced in the Reichstag that Germany would recognize Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria. By April German arms deliveries to China had been stopped. In June Ambassador Trautmann was recalled, and in early July General Alexander von Falkenhausen and some twenty other German military advisers left China. German trade with China did not stop at once: imports of Chinese tungsten, essential for armour-piercing shot and machine tools, peaked in 1938 before collapsing.

Dismissed

In 1938 Rosen was forced out of the foreign service. The reason given in the literature is his Jewish ancestry; some accounts add that his presence had become an embarrassment in relations with Japan. He left Germany for London and then the United States, where he taught at several universities through the war years.

He came back. After the war Rosen returned to West Germany and rejoined the foreign service of the Federal Republic, serving at the embassy in London and then as ambassador to Uruguay in Montevideo. He worked to have Germans readmitted to the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford. He retired in 1960 and died in Detmold on 22 July 1961. A Stolperstein, one of the small brass memorial stones set into pavements across Europe for victims of Nazi persecution, now lies outside the former Foreign Office at Wilhelmstrasse 92 in Berlin, among stones for other members of its staff who were persecuted.

Rosen appears as a character in Florian Gallenberger’s 2009 film John Rabe. He was not in the city when the zone was set up or when it fell. His contribution was the one that matters to historians: a record sent to Berlin while the violence was still going on, by an official the regime was about to dismiss.