Foreigners Create Nanking Safety Zone in China’s Capital

FOREIGNERS CREATE NANKING SAFETY ZONE IN CHINA

Nanking, China · November 22, 1937

On this date in 1937 in Nanking (today’s Nanjing), China’s capital at the time, fifteen foreign businessmen, missionaries, and journalists under the leadership of German national and Nazi Party member John Rabe organized the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. The mission of the committee was to shelter Chinese refugees against the looming Japanese assault on the city, which had a prewar population of between 200,000 and 250,000. The Japanese had laid siege to the coastal city of Shanghai (they would enter that city on November 26) and had begun bombing the terrified inhabitants of Nanjing, nearly 200 miles inland, in August.

When Nanjing fell on December 13, the Nanking Safety Zone housed over 250,000 refugees in refugee camps that could fit inside the area of New York’s Central Park (3.5 sq. miles). These refugees were mostly spared the incredible violence and brutality inflicted on Nanjing’s population and their city over a period of nine weeks (December 10, 1937, to February 10, 1938). Historians, period film and photographs, and eyewitness accounts of Westerners, Chinese, and Japanese (Rabe and others kept detailed diaries) agree that tens of thousands of Chinese women, men, and children were raped, sometimes gang-raped in public streets, and 370,000 or more civilians and surrendered soldiers perished in what became known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking.

Reputedly 57,500 Chinese POWs were shot and individually bayoneted on December 18, 1937, in the Straw String Gorge Massacre, their bodies mostly dumped into the Yangtze River, after Emperor Hirohito (the name Hirohito means “abundant benevolence”) had personally approved removing the constraints of international law the previous August on the treatment of Chinese ensnared in “military operations.” The Emperor advised his staff officers to stop using the term “prisoner of war” so that Chinese captives could be “lawfully” executed. After the war neither Hirohito nor Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, the Emperor’s “man-on-the-spot” in Nanjing, was ever charged by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (April 29, 1946, to November 12, 1948), the equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials in postwar Germany, with crimes against humanity.

It baffles me that there remains any controversy surrounding the prewar and wartime role of Japanese Emperor Hirohito, who had taken the auspicious reign-title “Shōwa” (“illustrious peace”) in 1926. Some would like us to believe Hirohito was a passive ruler reluctantly manipulated by an elite group of Japanese militarists and nationalists who controlled the levers of power. Others boldly assert he was a co-conspirator and should have been charged with war crimes in a postwar military tribunal as were Gen. Hideki Tōjō and others who regularly reported to him. Herbert P. Bix, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, consigns the controversy to the ashcan of history. Bix asserts that Hirohito, as commander in chief of his country’s armed forces, must bear the strongest share of political, legal, and moral responsibility for the criminal conduct of his military in the Asia Pacific Theater in the 1930s and ’40s, and he certainly bears direct responsibility for sanctioning the bombing of Chinese cities and Japan’s use of poison gas on Chinese soldiers and civilians. Bix demonstrates to my satisfaction that Hirohito was a repeat violator of international peace, starting in 1931 with Japan’s illegal seizure of Manchuria in Northeastern China, continuing in 1937 with the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War remembered partly for its gruesome eight-week-long Rape of Nanking, and ending in August 1945 only when he and his associates could find no way out of the bloody mess they had made in Southeast Asia. Hirohito was the missing person in the defendants’ dock during the Tokyo Trials of 1946–1948.—Norm Haskett

John Rabe and the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone (November 1937 to February 1938)

John Rabe with several committee members of Nanking Safety Zone, 1937

John Rabe’s office in besieged or occupied Nanking

Left: John Rabe (center in photograph) was elected chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, partly owing to his status as a member of the Nazi party and to his country’s membership in the German-Japanese bilateral Anti-Comintern Pact (November 25, 1936). Rabe, his zone administrators, and other refugees from foreign countries frantically tried to protect Chinese civilians from being killed by unrestrained Japanese soldiers (some who went from house to house in search of young girls) and to halt the wholesale rape, mutilation, looting, and burning. Owing to their efforts, between 250,000 to 300,000 Chinese were protected inside the Nanking Safety Zone or managed to escape the city during the two-month-long massacre.

Right: In China since 1908, Rabe had moved into the top slot of Siemens China Corporation. In this photograph he is seen in his underground office on the grounds of his home during the period of the Nanking Massacre (December 10, 1937, to February 10, 1938). The sign says his office hours are from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.

German flag protects Rabe’s shelter from Japanese aircraft attack, 1937

Rabe’s former home in Nanking after renovation, 2007

Left: Rabe opened up his home and garden to shelter 650 more refugees from the carnage outside the Nanking Safety Zone. In his diary Rabe wrote that from time to time Japanese soldiers would enter the zone, carry off a few hundred men, women, and children, and either summarily execute them or rape and then kill them. Between mid-December 1937 and February 5, 1938, the Nanking Safety Zone Committee forwarded to the Japanese embassy a total of 450 cases of murder, rape, and general disorder by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing.

Right: The former residence of John Rabe located in the then Nanking Safety Zone. On February 18, 1938, the Nanking Safety Zone International Committee was forcibly renamed “Nanking International Rescue Committee,” and the Safety Zone effectively ceased to function. Ten days later Rabe left Nanjing for Germany. With him he took a large number of source materials documenting the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanjing. On returning home he showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations and even wrote to Adolf Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further inhumane violence. By the time of his death from a stroke in 1950, Rabe had amassed more than 2,000 pages of his and other foreigners’ eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, telegrams, and photographs of the atrocities, all meticulously typed, numbered, bound, and illustrated.

Nanking Massacre, 1937: Japanese Aggression in China (Chinese documentary with English subtitles)

WORLD WAR II DAY BY DAY EBOOK

History buffs, there is good news! The Daily Chronicles of World War II is now available as an ebook for $4.99 on Amazon.com. Containing a year’s worth of dated entries from this website, the ebook brings the story of this tumultuous era to life in a compelling, authoritative, and succinct manner. Featuring inventive navigation aids, the ebook enables readers to instantly move forward or backward by month and date to different dated entries. Simple and elegant! Click here to purchase the ebook.