Bernhard Sindberg and Karl Günther: the Jiangnan Cement camp

Refugees at Qixia Temple outside Nanjing, 1937–38. Buddhist monks sheltered thousands of people at the temple, near the Jiangnan Cement Works where Bernhard Sindberg and Karl Günther ran their own camp. Photo: Unknown photographer, Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre collection, PD China via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Rape of Nanking, 1937–1938

Bernhard Sindberg and Karl Günther: The Jiangnan Cement Camp

A 26-year-old Danish adventurer and a China-born German engineer who turned a cement factory outside the walls into a refuge.

Content note. This page contains one blurred photograph, taken by Bernhard Sindberg, of the bodies of executed Chinese soldiers. Click the image to reveal it.

The Nanking Safety Zone lay inside the city walls. Outside them, in the countryside where the Japanese armies had passed, there was no zone and no committee, and the killing, rape and burning that the Westerners recorded in the city went on in the villages with fewer witnesses. One of the few places of refuge was a cement factory. The Jiangnan Cement Works, built with Danish engineering by the firm F. L. Smidth, stood near Qixia, some 15 to 20 kilometres northeast of Nanjing, close to the Buddhist temple of Qixia Si.

When the Japanese arrived in December 1937 the plant was in the hands of two foreigners. Karl Günther, born in China to a German family, was its acting manager. Bernhard Arp Sindberg, a Dane of 26, had been hired as a guard a few days before the city fell. With Danish and German flags painted on the roofs and flown over the gates, they made the factory a refuge for thousands of Chinese peasants and townspeople, and extended their protection to the refugees crowded into Qixia Temple nearby.

Their story was barely known for sixty years. Sindberg did not talk about it; Günther stayed in China until 1950 and then went home to Germany. It came back to light through John Rabe’s diary, published in 1997, through Sindberg’s photograph album, now at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, and through Chinese and Danish research since 2000. This page sets out what is documented and where the figures differ. The Safety Zone inside the walls is described in Chapter 5.

An unlikely pair

Sindberg was born in Aarhus on 19 February 1911. His early life, as his biographers tell it, was a series of escapes: he ran away from home as a child, went to the United States at 17 for three years, served about ten months in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco before deserting, and reached China in 1934 as a stowaway on a Danish ship. In China he demonstrated Danish rifles to Chinese buyers. In the summer of 1937 he was in Shanghai as driver and assistant to Pembroke Stephens, a correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, who was killed by Japanese fire during the battle for the city. F. L. Smidth then hired him as a guard for its cement works near Nanjing. By the Danish accounts he arrived on 2 December 1937, eleven days before the city fell.

Karl Günther was a different kind of man. He was born in the autumn of 1903 in Tangshan, in northern China, to a German family, studied in Germany and spent most of his life in China. He worked for a cement company in Tangshan, moved south in the 1930s and became acting manager of the Jiangnan plant. He spoke fluent Chinese. When the war came he was the only other foreigner at the works.

Flags on the roof

The two men used the same instrument as John Rabe in the city: the flags of neutral and friendly nations. Denmark was neutral; Germany was Japan’s partner in the Anti-Comintern Pact. They painted a very large Danish flag and a German swastika flag on the factory roofs to ward off Japanese aircraft. Sindberg later called his the largest Dannebrog in the world. Attacks on the refugees did not stop entirely, Danish accounts say, but they slowed after about six weeks.

The refugees came from the surrounding villages, where Japanese units passing toward and away from Nanjing were killing men, raping women and burning houses. By one account about 6,000 people took refuge in the factory grounds. Sindberg and Günther then extended their protection to Qixia Temple nearby, where the monks were already sheltering large numbers, by fencing it and marking it with hand-painted flags. The total number of people under their protection is given in different sources as anything from about 6,000 to about 20,000.

A clinic, food runs and a camera

The refuge needed more than flags. Sindberg set up a small clinic at the factory, staffed by Chinese nurses, and drove repeatedly into Nanjing to bring back food and medicine from the Red Cross in the city, where the Nanking Committee of the International Red Cross was chaired by John Magee. He appears in Rabe’s diary.

He also took a camera. Sindberg’s album, now in the Harry Ransom Center (collection PH-02638), contains his photographs of the camp and of what he found in the countryside, with his own captions. One shows a small pond outside Nanjing full of the bodies of Chinese soldiers; his caption says they had surrendered on a promise of good treatment. Like Magee’s film, these are contemporary images with contemporary captions, and they come from an area the Western residents of the city rarely saw.

Sent away

The Japanese authorities did not welcome foreign witnesses outside the city. After almost three months, in the spring of 1938, Sindberg was dismissed under Japanese pressure and sent to Shanghai, and from there to Europe. His father met him in Italy. In Geneva, the Chinese delegation to the League of Nations thanked him; by one account he asked reporters to keep his name out of their stories. Günther stayed. By one account he negotiated with the Japanese in June 1938 for the safe return of the remaining refugees to their homes.

Sindberg emigrated to the United States, married in 1941, and served in the American merchant marine during the Second World War, later as a captain. He received a letter of thanks from President Harry S. Truman for his wartime service at sea. He died in California in 1983, having said almost nothing in public about Nanjing. Günther lived in China through the war and the civil war, worked at the plant as a chemical engineer under the new government, and left for Germany with his wife and children in December 1950. He died in 1987.

Remembering them

Sindberg’s story resurfaced after the publication of Rabe’s diary. In 2000, his sister recognized him in a newspaper appeal connected with a Chinese exhibition in Aarhus, and his family has since travelled to Nanjing several times to receive honours on his behalf. A yellow rose named “Nanjing Forever – the Sindberg Rose” was planted outside the Memorial Hall. One survivor, Wang Yongli, who spent about 100 days at the factory as a teenager, told China Daily in 2011: “Without his help, we would not have had any chance to survive.” In 2024 the historian Peter Harmsen published the first full biography, Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing.