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Aug. 18, 2015 - Skeptoid
18:03
Skeptoid #480: The Nazi of Nanking

This most unlikely of guardian angels saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Nazi Who Saved Nanking 00:10:11
The Nazis, as we all know, were, as a whole, among the worst class of people the human race has ever produced.
But we must never paint any group with too broad a brush, even the Nazis, as there were some even among them who represented humanity's very best.
Today's episode features one such individual who acted with great heroism and humanity, and in doing so, shattered a stereotype.
The Nazi of Nanking is coming up next on Skeptoid.
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The Nazi of Nanking It was 1937, and the world's most aggressive army was closing in on the last major city in the world's most populous country.
One might expect an event of such magnitude to escape distortion in history books, but Japan's conquest of Nanking in China turned out to challenge many expectations and stereotypes.
As many as 300,000 civilians were murdered in the Nanking massacre, and nearly as many more were saved by the most unlikely of angels, the local head of the Nazi Party.
In this story, one whose brutality makes it alien and unthinkable to us, can we find some relevant insight into ourselves and our tendency toward prejudice?
The story of the Nazi of Nanking begins at the intersection of the life of a German businessman and Japan's growing imperialism in Asia in the 1930s.
Whereas World War II began for Americans in 1941, for Asians it began a decade earlier when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931.
Their control spread and tightened until late 1937 when all the last major cities in China fell to the Japanese war machine.
The final bastion was the newly named capital of Nanking, now called Nanjing, with a population of 1 million.
Over several months of air raids, 500,000 evacuated, leaving 500,000 non-combatants still there when the city finally fell on December 13, 1937.
Over the next few months, half of these, and possibly more, were murdered by Japanese soldiers.
The other prong of our story, John Raba, was born in Germany in 1882 and moved to China at the age of 26 as a clerk for the German engineering firm Siemens.
Siemens provided much of the telephone and electrical infrastructure to Nanking.
In a career spanning decades, Raba was finally appointed managing director of the Nanking Office.
He was Siemens' top man in Nanking.
As the founder and administrator of a German school, he was the German expatriate community's top man.
And as a deputy group leader in Germany's National Socialist Party and ranking representative in Nanking, he was the Nazis' top man too.
And this is a good place to pause and reconsider a possible prejudice, that any given Nazi Party official was necessarily an evil man.
For a staunch Nazi, Raba was.
I believe not only in the correctness of our political system, said Raba, but as an organizer of the party, I am behind the system 100%.
He was a tireless advocate for his workers, German and Chinese alike.
During the massacre, a Japanese major tried to persuade Raba to leave Nanking for his own safety.
Raba answered, If I had spent 30 years in Japan and had been treated just as well by the Japanese people, you can be assured that in a time of emergency, such as the situation China faces now, I would not leave the side of the people in Japan.
And so these two prongs of our story met, primarily in a six-week period stretching into the first month of 1938.
Japanese troops swarmed the city and commenced an orgy of murder, rape, arson, and destruction unsurpassed in world history for its cruelty and sheer scope.
Unknown tens of thousands of women, as young as eight and as old as 80, were gang-raped to death.
Many of the estimated 300,000 murder victims were bayoneted, burned alive, and beheaded.
Pause to consider those numbers and to reflect.
What evidence could possibly prove a Holocaust of such magnitude?
The credit for that must go to the late author Iris Chang and ultimately to the tiny band of heroes her research brought to light.
Chang, a first-generation Chinese American, had heard of the Nanking massacre from her parents, but was surprised to discover almost nothing written about it.
She spent most of the 1990s researching and interviewing survivors and descendants for her 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking.
Among the many irreplaceable historical treasures rediscovered by her research were the diaries of John Raba and his fellow humanitarians in Nanking, comprising a collection now held at the Yale Divinity School Library.
Raba's diaries had been stored away and forgotten by his descendants until Chang's inquiries prompted their retrieval, and the sensation of a Nazi, an ally of Japan, fighting to save the innocent victims of the aggression swept the world.
As the Japanese army approached, only 22 foreigners had elected to stay in Nanking.
Inspired by the November establishment of a neutral zone in Shanghai that protected 450,000 civilians, some of them formed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone.
They petitioned Japan to allow the zone in a sliver of the city that included foreign-owned properties such as Ginling Women's Arts and Sciences College, the American Embassy, and Raba's own personal home, as well as Nanking University and Chinese government buildings.
Hopeful that Germany's alliance with Japan would give them leverage against the invaders, they elected Raba their head.
As the fall of Nanking became imminent, Raba cabled the head of the Nazi Party in China.
I respectfully ask National Group Leader Larman to send on the following telegram.
First, to the Führer.
Undersigned Deputy Group Leader Nanking, chairman of local international committee, asks his Fuhrer kindly to intercede with the Japanese government to grant permission for creation of a neutral zone for non-combatants, since imminent battle for Nanking otherwise endangers the lives of over 200,000 people.
Second, to General Consult Kriebel.
Urgently request support of my petition to the Führer for his intercession with the Japanese government concerning creation of a neutral zone for non-combatants, since dreadful bloodbath otherwise inevitable in imminent battle for Nanking.
Heil Hitler Raba received no response, and the committee ultimately established the safety zone on no authority but their own.
Japanese frequently entered to rape women or take people out for execution.
One day, 50 safety zone police were executed on suspicion of having allowed former Chinese soldiers to seek refuge inside.
The committee members risked their lives daily trying to stop rapes and murders.
One wrote, We're all surprised that none of us have been killed, and whether we all get out safely is yet a question.
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Documenting Atrocities on Film 00:05:35
Although Raba has received the lion's share of the credit and attention, the efforts of his fellow Western humanitarians were no less Herculean.
Among them, John McGee, an Episcopalian missionary and Red Cross Committee chairman.
He had a movie camera and took extensive films documenting the atrocities.
George Fitch, head of the Nanking YMCA, who also shot films and smuggled his and McGee's out of Nanking by sewing them into the lining of his coat during an escape worthy of any spy thriller.
He was able to get the film safely into Western hands.
Minnie Vautrine, called the living goddess of Nanking, a dean at Ginling College and the only faculty member who didn't flee.
For months, she single-handedly defended hundreds of girls at the college from the Japanese rape gangs, not always successfully.
One night, over 100 girls were raped inside the college, inside the safety zone.
Vautrin finally succumbed, suffering a nervous breakdown and taking her own life after returning to the United States.
Dr. Robert Wilson at Nanking University Hospital, the only surgeon in the city.
Throughout the massacre, he was brought hundreds of patients each day, many horribly maimed by bayonets and fire.
James McCollum of the United Christian Missionary Society, who appointed himself volunteer ambulance driver and had many hair-raising escapes.
Raba had only his Nazi armband for protection, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.
He was well known throughout Nanking and was often summoned during Japanese assaults on defenseless citizens.
On the Chinese New Year, the people presented him with a long red silk banner which said, You are the living Buddha for 100,000 people.
Iris Chang called him the Oscar Schindler of China.
So, what became of him?
When February 1938, Siemens had grown sufficiently uncomfortable with the political role Raba had assumed and recalled him to Berlin.
Raba assembled a public lecture and spoke at every opportunity to spread news of the atrocity and attempted to persuade Germany to intervene.
He put together documentation, including movie film, with the following letter to Hitler.
Mein Führer, the majority of my friends in China are of the opinion that you have not been provided a detailed report about the actual events in Nanking.
In sending you the enclosed copy of a lecture I have given, which however is not intended for the broader public, I am fulfilling a promise made to my friends in China that I would inform you about the sufferings of the Chinese populace.
My mission will have been fulfilled if you would be kind enough to let me know that the enclosed copy of my lecture was presented to you.
I've since been notified that I am to abstain from delivering other lectures of the sort or to show any pictures dealing with the subject.
I shall obey this order since it is not my intention to work against German policy and German government offices.
Let me assure you of my allegiance and honest devotion.
This time, he did get a response.
He was immediately arrested and questioned by the Gestapo, and the films were confiscated.
Hitler anticipated needing Japan to provide a second front to the Americans should they enter the war.
Adolf Hitler was not renowned as a great champion of underdog ethnic groups.
Raba sat out the rest of the war in Berlin and lost everything in the bombings and the Russian invasion.
He was arrested and interrogated by both the Russians and the British.
As a former Nazi Party member, he was unemployable and lived in the most dire poverty.
In 1946, he wrote, To supplement our diet, we ate acorn meal soup from acorns that Muti harvested last fall.
For days now, ever since our supply ran out, we've been eating nettles.
Eventually, the Chinese learned of his situation, and Nanking's mayor personally delivered large supplies of food to Raba.
China offered him free housing and a pension to return, but on the condition that he testify in war tribunals.
Raba wrote to his grandchildren, I didn't want to see any Japanese hang, although they deserved it.
There must be some atonement, some just punishment, but in my view, the judgment should be spoken only by their own nation.
John Raba died in 1950.
He never returned to China, and he never saw Japan acknowledge the massacre.
Until Iris Chang's research, the documentation provided by Raba and his compatriots was largely lost to the world, and Japan's erasure of the events from history went unchallenged.
Chang wrote, In contrast to Germany, where it is illegal for teachers to delete the Holocaust from their history curricula, the Japanese have for decades systematically purged references to the Nanking massacre from their textbooks.
In 1990, Ishihara Shintaro, a leading member of Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party, said, People say that the Japanese made a Holocaust there, but that is not true.
It is a story made up by the Chinese.
It has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie.
The separation of history from pseudo-history is one of the most important applications of scientific skepticism and critical thinking.
Why Skepticism Matters Today 00:02:13
Without it, We risk the trap warned of by Primo Levy in his words that greet visitors to Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
It happened, therefore it can happen again.
It is perhaps the same prejudice that allows a patriotic Japanese to doubt his country could ever engage in so terrible a massacre that prompts us to assume that any Nazi official must have had evil on his mind.
Challenge your assumptions and temper them with learning.
And remember the 300,000 victims of Nanking.
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