John Rabe: the Siemens man who chaired the Safety Zone

John Rabe’s house at Xiaofenqiao 1, Nanjing, photographed in 2018. In the winter of 1937–38 some 600 refugees camped in its garden and dugouts; it is now the John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall. Photo: ScareCriterion12 (Wikimedia user), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Rape of Nanking, 1937–1938

John Rabe: The Siemens Man Who Chaired the Safety Zone

A Hamburg businessman, thirty years in China and a member of the Nazi Party, who used his nationality, his flag and his diary to shield Chinese civilians in Nanjing.

John Heinrich Detlev Rabe was 55 years old when the Japanese armies reached Nanjing in December 1937. He had lived in China since 1908 and had run the Nanjing office of Siemens since 1931, selling the firm’s electrical and telephone equipment in the Nationalist capital. When most foreigners left the capital in November, Rabe stayed. On 22 November 1937 a group of Western residents formed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone and elected him chairman, and for the next three months he was the committee’s public face before the Japanese army and embassy.

His position was unusual. Rabe had joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in 1934, and Germany and Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936. The committee’s American and British members reasoned that a German party member might carry weight with the officers of an army whose government was Berlin’s partner. Rabe used everything he had: his armband, his party badge and the large swastika flag spread over his garden, under which hundreds of Chinese families sheltered. He also kept a diary, written day by day and later filled out with copies of letters and reports, that runs to more than 800 pages.

That diary is the reason Rabe is known today. It was taken to Germany in 1938, kept by his family, and brought to public attention in 1996, after Iris Chang traced his granddaughter in Berlin while researching The Rape of Nanking (1997). This page follows Rabe’s life before, during and after Nanjing, separating what his own 1937–38 writings record from what later biographers and the Memorial Hall add. The wider story of the zone is told in Chapter 5, and the German thread in Chapter 6.

Thirty years in China

Rabe was born in Hamburg on 23 November 1882. The Deutsche Biographie records that he left school with the intermediate certificate, trained at a Hamburg export house and worked there as a clerk. From 1903 to 1906 he worked for an English firm in Lourenço Marques, in Portuguese Mozambique. In 1908 he went to Peking (Beijing), and he married Dora Schubert there in October 1909. Accounts differ on whether he joined Siemens in 1910 or 1911; the Yale Divinity Library biography gives 1910 and the Deutsche Biographie 1911. Over the next two decades he worked for the Siemens China Company in Mukden, Peking, Tianjin and Shanghai, and in 1931 he took over the office in Nanjing, by then the Nationalist capital.

In 1934 he founded a German school for the small community of German families in Nanjing and joined the NSDAP. His appeal to Hitler in 1938 suggests that, like many Germans abroad, he still took the party for something it was not; that is an inference from his conduct, and he tested it at his own cost. Germany was also, until 1938, China’s closest military partner. German advisers trained Chiang Kai-shek’s best divisions, and Siemens was one of many German firms that did business with the Nationalist government.

Chairman of the International Committee

The Safety Zone was the idea of a small group of missionaries, teachers and businessmen who had decided not to leave. The Nanjing committee met on 22 November and chose Rabe as chairman; Lewis Smythe of the University of Nanking became secretary, Christian Kröger of Carlowitz & Co. treasurer, and George Fitch of the YMCA director. The zone, drawn in the northwest of the walled city around the American university and mission compounds, covered about 3.86 km² (about 1.5 square miles). Rabe sent a telegram to Hitler asking him to urge Japan to respect it; the Deutsche Biographie records that it went unanswered. The Japanese never formally recognized the zone, though only a few shells fell inside it during the assault.

Rabe’s reasons for staying are set out in his diary. He wrote that he could not leave the Chinese staff and servants who depended on him, and he framed the decision as a moral one: “I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me.” Elsewhere he found it “touching to see how they believe in me.” Both lines are quoted in the Yale Divinity Library’s biography from the English edition of the diaries.

The city fell on 13 December. From the next day the committee began to send protests to the Japanese embassy, drafted mostly by Smythe and sent in the committee’s name: 69 letters between 14 December 1937 and 19 February 1938, with numbered lists of incidents that by one count had reached about 450 cases by early February. These letters, published in 1939 by Hsü Shuhsi as Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone and reprinted by Timothy Brook in 1999, are contemporary evidence of a high order. They record what the committee members saw or were told by named witnesses, often within hours, and they were addressed to the Japanese authorities themselves.

The house at Xiaofenqiao

Rabe’s own house and the Siemens compound became one of the zone’s 25 or so refugee camps. The committee’s camp lists give 602 people there on 4 January 1938; other accounts give 600 to 650. They lived in the garden, in straw shelters and in the dugouts Rabe had built as air-raid shelters, under a swastika flag laid out flat so that Japanese aircraft would see it. His Chinese colleague at Siemens, Han Xianglin, served the zone as its food commissioner.

The diary records Rabe going out, day after day, to stop soldiers who climbed over his walls or entered the houses around him, and describes the violence in the zone in some of the strongest language in the contemporary record. He compared the Japanese army’s conduct to the “hordes of Genghis Khan” and recorded rapes and killings that he witnessed or that were reported to him within the zone. Most of these entries are corroborated by the committee’s numbered case lists and by the letters of the American members. His diary also shows how little his nationality protected others: by his own account Japanese soldiers ignored his armband as often as they deferred to it.

Rabe also gave the most widely quoted Western estimate of the dead. In the account he prepared in 1938 he wrote: “We Europeans put the number at about 50,000 to 60,000.” That figure is best read for what it is: the judgment of a man who saw a great deal of the city inside the walls, but not the river banks where the largest massacres of prisoners took place. Later tribunals and historians, counting over a wider area and a longer period, arrived at higher totals; the range is explained in Chapter 3.

Back to Berlin, and the report to Hitler

Siemens wanted its representative back at work, and Rabe left Nanjing in late February 1938; the Deutsche Biographie gives 23 February and the Yale biography 28 February. He travelled by way of Shanghai and reached Berlin in the spring, carrying his diary, documents and a copy of the film shot by John Magee. In Berlin he lectured about what he had seen and showed the film. He then wrote a report for Hitler, asking him to press Japan to stop the violence.

What happened next is recorded only after the fact, and the accounts differ in detail. The Deutsche Biographie dates his arrest by the Gestapo to 15 May 1938; many later accounts place it after he submitted the report, which is often dated 8 June. All agree on the outcome. Rabe was detained and questioned, released after Siemens intervened, and told not to lecture or write about Nanjing again; he was allowed to keep his papers, but not, by some accounts, the film. The Yale biography says the letter to Hitler “was never sent,” which may mean that it never reached him. Germany was by then moving decisively toward Japan: Hitler announced the recognition of Manchukuo in February 1938, arms deliveries to China were stopped, and the German advisers were recalled that summer.

I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me.

— John Rabe, diary, on his decision to stay in Nanjing, as quoted by the Yale Divinity Library from The Good Man of Nanking (1998)

Poverty, Nanjing’s parcels and the last years

Rabe remained with Siemens through the war. In 1945 he was arrested first by the Soviet NKVD and then by the British, and released by both after questioning. Denounced for his party membership, he lost his work permit; his first application for denazification was rejected, and on appeal he was formally declared “de-Nazified” on 3 June 1946. Legal costs consumed his savings. The family sold his collection of Chinese art and, by the Deutsche Biographie’s account, suffered from malnutrition.

In 1948 the city he had helped repaid him. When news of his circumstances reached Nanjing, residents raised about US$2,000, and the mayor of Nanjing arranged for food to be bought for him through Switzerland. Monthly food parcels followed from mid-1948 until the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949. Rabe died of a stroke in West Berlin on 5 January 1950, at 67. (The Yale biography gives 1949, an error corrected by German sources.)

Rediscovery and memory

For almost half a century the diary stayed with the family. In 1996 Iris Chang, then writing her book, located Rabe’s granddaughter Ursula Reinhardt in Berlin, and the diary and the 1938 report were made public that year; copies went to the Yale Divinity Library and the Memorial Hall in Nanjing. The German edition, edited by the former ambassador to China Erwin Wickert, appeared in 1997 as John Rabe: Der gute Deutsche von Nanking, and the English translation by John E. Woods in 1998 as The Good Man of Nanking. Chang’s role in bringing the diary to light is one of the lasting contributions of her book, whatever corrections specialists have made to other parts of it; those are discussed in Chapter 9.

His tombstone was moved to Nanjing in 1997. The house at Xiaofenqiao, restored with German support, opened on 31 October 2006 as the John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall, managed by Nanjing University; his grave in Berlin was re-erected in 2013. Florian Gallenberger’s feature film John Rabe (2009) made him a public figure in Germany. In 2015 the Republic of China on Taiwan honoured him and Minnie Vautrin posthumously. The memory has a hard edge that his admirers do not hide: the man remembered as “the living Buddha of Nanking” was a party member who believed, until the Gestapo taught him otherwise, that Hitler would listen.