Rabe, John ___ 1882-1949 ___ German ___ merchant

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Rabe was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a father who was a sailor. Rabe was apprenticed with a merchant and then assigned to a post in Africa. In his mid-20s, he went to China and then, from 1910, was employed by Siemens in its Beijing office. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the foreign community and much of the Chinese population, including the government, were evacuated from Nanjing, where Rabe was living. Although Siemens ordered him to leave too, he declined (although his family did leave). With other foreign nationals, Rabe established a temporary safety zone for Chinese refugees. Subsequently, he was made head of an international committee to administer the zone. During what became known as the Rape of Nanjing, the committee and its efforts managed to save many lives, possibly hundreds of thousands. In 1938, Rabe travelled to Germany, where he undertook a series of lectures, using photos and an amateur film, on the extent of Japanese violence in China. At one point he was arrested by the Gestapo, and only released (under censorship) after an intervention by Siemens. He was posted to Afghanistan briefly. After the Second World War, as a member of the Nazi party, he was obliged to go through denazification procedures. He appears to have left Siemens employ in 1945, and, thereafter, lived in poverty until his death. Rabe's detailed diaries (all 1,200 pages) only surfaced in the 1990s, and their publication has shed new light on the Nanjing story.
A biography link
Wikipedia bio

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1937-1938 ___ military health historyeye China Nazism

WEB TEXT LINKS
one longish extract
about
about

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
 

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe
 

May 2005, July 2008
Please email if you have any corrections, additions or comments, or if you've found the site useful. Thank you.

IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.