The Good Man of Nanking; an Eastern Schindler

Watching City of Life and Death has drawn to my attention the life and career of John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party, who did his best to protect Chinese civilians during the Nanking Massacre. He was instrumental in setting up the Nanking Safety Zone helped to save thousands from the indiscriminate slaughter by the Japanese Army, in what must count as one of the most loathsome acts in that country’s history. Rabe’s conduct enjoys the same moral and practical significance as that of Oscar Schindler in Europe.

Rabe, who had worked in China for many years, explained his reasons for setting up the Safety Zone in simple ethical terms;

…there is a question of morality here…I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me.

While the occupation underway, Rabe effectively used his status as a citizen of a power friendly to Japan, as well as his membership of the Nazi Party, to delay the killings sufficiently to allow thousands of refugees to escape to the Safety Zone, established in embassy district and the city’s university. The Japanese had previously agreed not to attack these areas on the understanding that they were free of Chinese troops. By his actions he is estimated to have saved the lives of up to 250,000 civilians, which makes his achievement if anything more startling than that of Schindler.

On his return to Germany in February 1938 he took with him a large number of documents detailing the things he had witnessed. He also wrote to Hitler asking him to exert his influence to stop the Japanese indulging in any future actions of this kind. His letter was never delivered. Instead he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, only released after the intervention of Siemens, the company he worked for. Although he was allowed to keep the evidence he had accumulated he was forbidden from lecturing or writing on the subject.

Rabe died in January 1950. Prior to this the poverty and hunger of his family among the chaos of post-war Germany was ameliorated by the Chinese government, which sent him monthly food and money parcels in thanks for his actions. In 1997, sixty years after the Massacre, his tombstone was moved from Berlin to Nanking, where it was installed in a place of honour at the massacre memorial site.

Death in the City

City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan, is a remarkable and powerful piece of film-making. It deals with what is perhaps one of the most emotive subjects in Chinese history – the Rape of Nanking.

In December 1937 Nanking, then capital of China, fell to the Japanese, following the outbreak earlier that year of the Sino-Japanese war. In the following weeks the Japanese murdered thousands of prisoners of war and civilians, as well as raping thousands of women, sometimes to death.

The exact number of people caught up in this atrocity has never been established with any precision, though the Chinese authorities estimate it at 300,000, not that much greater than the 260,000 given by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. In Japan, where the episode is bound up in issues of national pride, the figures have been revised sharply downwards.

Clearly numbers are important, though just as important, if not more so, is an understanding that something dreadful happened in this city not excused by quibbling over figures. The only logical position would to reject the history altogether, as indeed have some on Japan's nationalist fringes, their version of Holocaust denial.

In part the movie offers a kind of perspective on the events, that of Kadokawa, a young sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army, who is both caught up in the violence and bewildered by it, an altogether admirable performance by Hideo Naikaizumi. It does not in any sense detract from the horror; if anything it heightens it, that these crimes are our crimes, not those of monsters or aliens.

But it’s on this point that the movie has proved most controversial. Shortly after it was released in China in April of last year many were shocked enough by the humanised depiction of a Japanese soldier that calls went out to have it deleted from the history of Chinese cinema. Lu even received a number of death threats on his official blog.

Although City of Life and Death continued to have the support of the authorities, it was not included in the official list of films celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, or the Chinese version of the British Academy Awards. Even so this stark and honest movie has been praised outside China, recently winning the prize for best movie at the Asian Film Awards. Whether it is ever screened in Japan remains open to question.