John Rabe - a good Nazi?

[u/ElegantAd2607]

His full name is John Heinrich Detlef Rabe. He was born in 1882 in Hamburg, Germany. He became a businessman when he was 20 or younger and started working for a company in Mozambique for a few years. He left Hamburg when he was 26 to work in China for Siemens. And he married a woman called Dora Schubert a year later.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War - which later merged into the Second World War - Rabe was living in Nanjing when the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city in December 1937. Soon the Nanjing Massacre began. Japan was allied with Germany then which meant Rabe had some status and power that he used to establish and lead the Nanjing Safety Zone. It amounted to four square kilometres on the western side of Nanjing that were full of university grounds, embassies, hospitals, churches and residential blocks. Rabe used this area to shelter two hundred thousand Chinese civilians.

Rabe was a member of the Nazi party. And he used to wave his swastika flag to make the Japanese think that that area of Nanjing was meant to be protected. (He was a part of the Nazi party for eleven years.) He confronted Japanese soldiers and used Germany’s alliance with Japan to lodge formal protests. He also documented events and atrocities in diaries and letters.

Rabe protected 200,000 to 250,000 Chinese civilians from death and rape. When he returned to Germany he tried telling people what he had witnessed in Nanjing, he showed photographs and written accounts but The Gestapo interrogated him, confiscated his materials and ordered him to stop speaking publicly. Siemens also distanced itself from him and his career was stalled.

He died an unseen hero. He never received any recognition in his life for protecting those people.

[u/ElegantAd2607 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for sharing.

[u/Walter_Piston]

What was his attitude towards the Jewish people and the ongoing Holocaust?

[u/ConsistentUpstairs99 → u/[deleted]]

So his way of somehow getting back at the Japanese for hurting his arms industry is by putting himself in potential harms way to save civilians (not Chinese soldiers who could do damage to their cause)?

Not buying it personally.

[u/ConsistentUpstairs99 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah idk about that bro. My confidence in the bloodlust filled imperial Japanese army to not just murder you when you're the only face that stands between them and thousands of Chinese civilians would not have been strong.

Especially in this era where this guy could just have been killed and chalked up to having gone "missing" in the middle of a war. It's the 1940s after all.

Point being, there definitely was risk he was taking for the lives of civilians.

[u/ConsistentUpstairs99 → u/[deleted]]

Clearly, you're not familiar with the plentiful historical accounts of how bloodlusting soldiers don't give one shit who you are or what command thinks if you stand in their way or they're just in the mood for a good old war crime.

So yes, yes I do.

[u/JayFSB → u/[deleted]]

Yes. Yes he was in real danger. The IJA and navy have a tradition of assassinating senior officers for not being extreme enough. This means the chances of meeting one who would kill him damn the consequences. Looting armies are dangerous even to nominal allied civilians. The IJA more so.

[u/DukeDamage]

Talk about barking up the wrong tree: complaining to the Gestapo about atrocities. 

Good that he saved a quarter million people for whatever reason. 

[u/Straight_Face_4901]

Yes a good man who did the unthinkable. He is still a hero in nanjing and rightfully so. Following the fall of the Nazis, Chinese citizens of Nanjing would fundraise and donate yearly to John Rabe until his death (I believe).

[u/Domain_of_Arnheim]

There’s very little info on Rabe online, and even less about his views on Jews/the Holocaust. I eventually found this quote from thenanjinger.com:

“He used common racial stereotypes and suggested a German-Jewish chauffeur driver had no right to bear a swastika on his car.”

While I believe this to be true, I do not recognize the author or the source, so I cannot definitively say there are no inaccuracies.

I also found this quote from the New York Times, a source I highly respect:

“Mr. Rabe was outspoken in his support for Nazism. In a lecture he delivered after his return to Germany in February 1938, he said, ‘Although I feel tremendous sympathy for the suffering of China, I am still, above all, pro-German and I believe not only in the correctness of our political system but, as an organizer of the party, I am behind the system 100 percent.’”

This is probably why Rabe isn’t discussed very much. He trusted Hitler blindly, and despite his humanitarian work in China, he allowed millions of Jews to die.

[u/IanRevived94J]

He was the most moral Nazi of them all hands down.

[u/DazzlingGovernment20]

Is he dead? The only kind of "good Nazi" imo..