The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe

The Good Man of Nanking is a crucial document for understanding one of World War II's most horrific incidents of genocide, one which the Japanese have steadfastly refused to acknowledge.??It is also the moving and awe-inspiring record of one man's conscience, courage, and generosity in the face of appalling human brutality.

Until the recent emergence of John Rabe's diaries, few people knew abouth the unassuming hero who has been called the Oskar Schindler of China.??In Novemgber 1937, as Japanese troops overran the Chinese capital of Nanking and began a campaign of torture, rape, and murder against its citizens, one man-a German who had lived in China for thirty years and who was a loyal follower of Adolph Hitler-put himself at risk and in order to save the lives of 200,000 poor Chinese, 600 of whom he sheltered in his own home.

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 traumatized. The Rape of Nanking, as it is commonly known, still causes international controversy, as Japanese politicians refuse to apologize unequivocally 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 Siemens, 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 organize a safety zone as refuge of last resort for Chinese civilians. The Good Man 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 humor, placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese soldiers begin their 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 Stevenson