Two or three months ago, your cousin, Eric, asked if you'd watched the movie "John Rabe." You told him that you hadn't and he highly recommended it. Within a few days you had watched it streaming online. It was about a German manager for Seimens in 1937 China, the Oskar Schindler of the East, who tried to save civilians from the invading Japanese armies when they sacked the Chinese capital city of Nanking. The movie was compelling enough, and the story was new enough to you that you talked to some friends about it afterward. One of them (Jordan Lutz) asked if you had read a book by Iris Chang called "The Rape of Nanking" about the same story. When you told him that you'd never been able to bring yourself to buy a book with the giant word RAPE on the cover and then carry it around with you, especially with your two boys reading everything over your shoulder all the time, Jordan offered to let you borrow his copy of the book. You took him up on it.
And so began your reading of "The Rape of Nanking." The whole book is only a little over 200 pages long, but it affected you very powerfully. It almost sent you into a state of depression, but the few bright spots in it managed to keep you going, just when you thought you were going to have to stop reading it.
Chang uses the first chapter of the book to set the historical stage for the titular massacre. Contrary to popular American belief, World War II did not begin over the skies of Hawaii. For much of the world the war had been raging for years before then, and for the citizens of Asia the war started in 1931, not in December of 1941. Four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the forces of the Empire of Japan had captured Nanking, the capital of China. And for decades before that, Japan had sought to show itself the Imperial equal to the Western and American powers, defeating both Russia and China in several small wars and establishing itself as the presumptive dominant power in Asia. The Japanese government began to see China as a land that was theirs for the taking. Much as America had spent the previous two hundred years claiming all of North America as their birthright, so too did the Japanese begin to see their own prominence in mainland Asia and the ocean expanses of the South Pacific as their version of Manifest Destiny.
After an American Battle Fleet appearing in Tokyo Bay in 1853 provided a rude awakening from three hundred years of self-enforced isolation from the rest of the world, the Japanese government realized that it had a lot of catching up to do in this new and attractive Imperial game of expanding their national interests across the globe. They got to it as fast as they could, eager to make up for lost time. They aimed to emulate the European and North American models of gaining colonies and opening commerce at the barrel of a gun, quickly modernizing their military forces from horses and swords and archers to guns and airplanes and battleships. But more importantly, they began to militarize their population. By the mid 1930's, generations of Japanese citizens had been indoctrinated in the belief that their lives meant nothing unless they served the Emperor, and that the Japanese race was superior to all others in the world. The government of Japan corrupted the ancient Samurai Bushido code and twisted it into a tool to create a population of young men who were eager to sacrifice their own lives on the whim of their superiors in the name of service to their Emperor, a monarch who they viewed as a god.
By the summer of 1937 Japan had the full scale war they had been trying to provoke from the Chinese for years. Now was the moment for them to show their superiority on the battlefield and claim the vast riches of China as their own. But the first battle became a drawn out humiliation for the crack Japanese Marines in Shanghai. Like many other generals in many other wars in many other nations, Japan's military experts were proven wrong when they had predicted all of China would fall in a few short months. Instead the Chinese people, who were supposed to be inferior to the Japanese soldiers in every way, forced a battle for one city alone into a half a year humiliation for the Japanese government. However bravely the defenders fought, Shanghai did eventually fall in December of '37. And as the conquering Japanese army marched towards the Chinese capital of Nanking, they had vengeance on their minds. Dishonor was worse than death to the soldiers of the Nippon islands, and they were going to make the people who brought them such humiliating dishonor pay dearly for their temerity.
But the defenders who had fought so well in Shanghai virtually disappeared before the walls of Nanking, even though they far outnumbered the invaders. Nanking, the capital of China, defended by 90,000 troops, fell in just four days. The Chinese army abandoned the more than one million citizens of their own capital to the mercies of an enraged and unmerciful conqueror.
For the next six weeks or more, the unfortunate souls trapped behind Japanese lines were subjected to the most nightmarish treatment this side of Hell. Not since Atilla the Hun had humans been treated like this.
The atrocities started even before the ancient city fell. Contrary to the wishes of the commanding officer, who was being sent back to the home islands, the order went out amongst all Japanese soldiers to execute all 300,000 prisoners of war. Only our capacity to dehumanize our fellow humans could have allowed for this outrageoous war crime to happen. 300,000 executions! In a manner of days! The Japanese had no extermination camps, no means of mass murder, no weapons of mass destruction. All they had were bullets, swords, and the limits of human creativity to dole out death. Within days, the order to execute more than a quarter million men, men who had surrendered in good faith that they would be treated humanely, had been carried out. To this day, the bodies are still being uncovered in the countryside surrounding Nanking.
Once the armies of Japan entered the city proper, it only got worse. Much much worse. The are far worse things than death. The Chinese civilians who had not fled the city before the occupation were subjected to savagery beyond comprehension. Mass rape, mass torture, and sadistic cruelty were meted out in full view of the public. Unspeakable atrocities were carried out in broad daylight in the streets of one of the world's capital cities. Chang's descriptions eventually became almost mind-numbingly heartbreaking to you. The savagery was literally too horrific to fathom. Eventually, it was as if your mind went along just behind your eyes and erased the nightmarish mental images the words on the page were creating. As a defense mechanism, your mind was expunging the information as soon as you learned it.
More people were killed in the six weeks of terror in and around Nanking in late '37 early '38 than were killed by the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the Japanese were using only bullets, swords, and bayonets. About half the deaths occurred in mass executions, the rest were individual face to face murders. Some Japanese soldiers engaged in killing contest to see who could behead the most people in a day. Their exploits were printed in and cheered in Japanese news papers back home. And that wasn't even the worst of the atrocities.
Even after reading this book, you still have no idea how anyone could do the things the Japanese soldiers did to these people. Institutionalized racism, religious fanaticism, hierarchically structured society, and propaganda all played their parts in the Rape of Nanking, but these don't go all the way to explaining such wanton savagery. The only explanation you could come up with is that the Japanese soldiers had been convinced (or had convinced themselves) that the Chinese were not actually people. Or maybe it was their indoctrination that life itself was meaningless, holding no inherent value. This was the only explanation that could clarify for you how humanity could develop any society capable of this level of disregard for human dignity and with no shred of compassion.
And, as is always the case with rape, none of it was about sex. It was all about power. Japanese Army privates were considered to be far superior than even the highest ranking Chinese natives. And Japanese privates were considered almost worthless to their superiors. They were expendable. Their lives meant nothing. They had been dehumanized and brutalized themselves as a matter of their education, as an introduction to maturity. Suddenly, the oppressed lower caste members of Japanese society had become the oppressors. Suddenly they wielded power like nothing they had ever known before. These young men could do anything they could imagine in their darkest of hearts, with no threats of repercussions.
As violent as World War II could get, as awful as the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were, at least they had some goal in mind. Arguably those goals were misguided yes, but at least there was a point to the violence meted out to those millions of civilians by Allied bombers. They were trying to shorten the war. The goals of all of that destruction was to end the greater destruction caused by the war. The Rape of Nanking, on the other hand, had no point. No information was sought from the victims, no one was being questioned, no one was compelled to switch religions or political beliefs. There seemed to be no point to the unending torture. The violence escalated simply for its own sake. If you ever needed proof that violence only leads to more violence, this book did the trick.
One of the things we all find so disturbing about the Holocaust committed by the Nazis in Europe is that the instruments of our Western progress were complicit in massacring civilians. The very industrialized tools that were supposed to prove to ourselves how civilized we were had been used to show us how barbaric we could really be. In Nanking, conversely, the brutality was not industrialized. There were no gas chambers, no crematoriums or train schedules. The Rape of Nanking was personal. And somehow that makes it even more reprehensible.
Just when you were ready to abandon the book because you couldn't live in a world with such unbridled horror, you read about the people who set up the International Safety Zone. In the midst of some of the most terrible atrocities in the history of humankind, there arose beacons of hope and light. People willing to work as hard as they could to save as many people as possible from such hellish fates. In Nanking, as in every corner of the world, there were people who refused to stand by and watch evil unfold before them without doing something to combat the darkness. Just before the occupation, a small group of about twenty people, mostly Europeans and Americans, established the International Safety Zone in the heart of the capital. They chose as their leader a German named John Rabe as their president. Rabe used his political clout as the representative of Japan's ally to influence the behavior of the rampaging military and protect the people inside the Zone.
The work of the people who established the Zone was so successful that the results are staggering. If you were a Chinese citizens who was in the Zone during the Rape of Nanking, chances are that you survived the ordeal. If you were not in the Zone, chances are that you died. Roughly 300,000 Chinese citizens were killed during the occupation (maybe more). Roughly 300,000 Chinese citizens huddled, terrified and starving inside the borders of the International Safety Zone for the duration of the months long occupation and lived to tell the tale. Those who wandered (or were lured) outside the borders of the Zone, usually never made it back.
Eventually, John Rabe realized that he wasn't doing as much as he could to save the people of Nanking. He decided that huddling up and protecting the people in the Zone was not enough. He soon began to wander the streets of the capital looking for crimes to prevent, mounting rescue patrols in the city even after the sun was down. Wearing only his swastika arm band as his protection, he faced down armed marauding soldiers bent on inflicting cruelty and death on any civilians they could find. Oskar Schindler is famous today for saving about 1,200 Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. John Rabe, who is a relative unknown in our culture, saved over 300,000 Chinese civilians from almost certain death.
There are heroes in the world. John Rabe was one of them. You hope that you never live to see days like December 1937 in Nanking, March 1945 in Auschwitz, or April 1994 in Rwanda. But if you do live to see such dark days, you pray to God that you have it in you to be half as heroic as John Rabe.
The most fascinating part of Rabe's story is that this real life hero... was a damn Nazi! He wasn't just someone who got swept up in the mandatory Hitler Youth program or something forgivable like that. No. He was the highest ranking Nazi in the capital of China! He ranked so high in the Nazi hierarchy that the reports he sent back to the German government were addressed directly to Adolf Hitler himself. John Rabe was a Nazi, and he was also a hero.
Somehow, in reading this crushingly depressing story, you found hope. No matter how overpowering the darkness can seem, no matter how powerful the evil we seem to be able to unleash on one another, there is always hope. There will always be people who fight for what is right, who defend their fellow humans with every fiber of their beings.
John Rabe went on to live a failed life. He struggled to support his family after the war ended, and he relied on the kindness of those whom he had saved to provide shelter and food to his loved ones. He probably died prematurely because of his exertions maintaining the International Safety Zone, in fact many of the leaders of the Zone died prematurely as a result of their efforts in Nanking. But his life was not wasted. More than most, John Rabe proved that a life well lived is a worthy life, even if living it well ends it early... even if you are a filthy stinking Nazi.
As always, the truth resits simplicity.
On to the next book!
P.S. A little over one week after posting this review, the G8 (the eight wealthiest industrialized nations in the world) announced a historic 'deal' to begin dealing with rape as a weapon of war worldwide. They pledged money and other resources to educating people around the globe about prevention of war time rape and have agreed to begin to set a global standard for investigating incidents of rape throughout the world. Britain's foreign minister William Hague called the "horrific" use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war "one of the greatest and most persistent injustices in the world". Seventy five years after the atrocity known as "The Rape of Nanking" began we are just now committing ourselves as a human race to begin dealing with this issue. Maybe now that the world recognizes rape as a weapon of war, it will begin to become less and less frequent throughout the conflicts that we so often seem to have with our fellow humans. We can hope and pray that this will become a reality, and we can work to achieve this goal together as a people.
Articles here
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