The Rape of Nanking

Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1882, John Rabe was a businessman and the head of the Nazi Party in Nanking at the time of the massacre. Described by the author as “bald and bespectacled” (109), Rabe stayed behind in Nanking despite the advance of the Japanese army to protect his workers. He was instrumental in establishing the Nanking International Safety Zone, which accommodated anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000 refugees during the massacre. Not only did Rabe house dozens of women on his property to protect them from rapists, he also personally intervened in countless individual episodes of rape and murder, flashing his swastika armband to reflect his authority as a member of the ruling party of Germany, Japan’s de facto ally at that point in the war. Given the author’s estimate that virtually every resident who didn’t make it into the Safety Zone perished at the hands of the Japanese, she believes that 200,000-300,000 is also the number of lives Rabe and his colleagues on the Safety Zone Committee saved.

Rabe’s status as a Nazi makes him an uneasy hero in the author’s narrative. When she finally tracks down his diaries, she fears she will discover he was responsible for his own wartime atrocities upon returning to Berlin. Instead, Rabe ran afoul of Hitler and the Gestapo for spreading film reel footage of Japanese atrocities in Nanking. For his own protection, his employer Siemens sent him to Afghanistan to organize the emigration of German nationals from that region. When Rabe came back to Berlin at the height of the war in Europe, he returned to a bombed-out apartment. Rabe’s fortunes hardly improved with the end of World War II; as a former Nazi, he was barred from public life and most forms of employment. After numerous attempts and at great personal expense, Rabe finally only secured a coveted de-Nazification certification because of his humanitarian efforts in Nanking. Penniless, Rabe and his family were on the brink of indigence until 1948, when a group of Nanking survivors raised $2,000 for him, a considerable sum in that era. Two years later Rabe died of a stroke at age 67.

Azuma Shiro was a Japanese soldier who participated in the Rape of Nanking. Age 25 at the time of the massacre, Azuma personally committed a number of rapes and murders during the first weeks of the occupation, along with the rest of his platoon. He was among the very small number of Imperial Japanese soldiers to admit to war crimes during the Nanking massacre. In his earliest encounter with the Chinese after the fall of Nanking, he was struck by the ease with which Chinese soldiers were willing to surrender. This contempt and disgust for their perceived cowardice was shared by Azuma’s comrades, and it contributed to the Japanese army’s easy willingness to execute the new prisoners en masse.

In documentary footage viewed by the author, Azuma was shockingly candid about the rapes and murders committed with impunity by his platoon during the occupation. Equally candid was his 1987 memoir My Nanking Platoon, in which the author quotes him as writing, “Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman […] but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig” (49).

If Azuma is disturbingly direct in his remembrances of wartime atrocities, he is also strikingly eloquent in his explanations of how the Imperial hierarchy contributed to the barbarity in Nanking. In a letter to the author, he writes, “If my life was not important, an enemy’s life became inevitably much less important....This philosophy led us to look down on the enemy and eventually to the mass murder and ill treatment of the captives” (58).

Over the course of his life, Azuma visited China six times to help scholars there research Japanese wartime atrocities and to apologize for his role in those crimes. In 2006 he died of cancer at age 93.

Born in 1878, Matsui Iwane was the commander-in-chief of the Shanghai-Nanking region in the weeks leading up to the massacre. Shortly before the Battle of Nanking, Matsui was promoted to lead the entire Chinese theater of operations, leaving Prince Asaka Yasuhiko to take his place. As a result, Matsui was in Shanghai during the earliest and arguably worst stages of the massacre. According to the author, when Matsui arrived in Nanking for a ceremonial parade, he was deeply dismayed by the scourge of mass rapes and killings. Yet because Asaka was a member of the royal family, Matsui could do little to stop the bloodshed.

After the war, Matsui was one of only 28 Japanese officers and soldiers prosecuted during the Tokyo War Crimes trial. The author views his performance on the stand as evidence that he willingly accepted serving as a scapegoat for Emperor Hirotohito, Asaka, and the rest of the royal family, all of whom avoided prosecution as part of Japan’s surrender deal with the United States. Matsui was ultimately convicted of Class A war crimes and executed by hanging on December 23, 1948.

A 51-year-old American missionary and educator at Ginling College, Wilhelmina “Minnie” Vautrin was among the two dozen Americans and Europeans who stayed behind in Nanking to help survivors of the massacre. Described by the author as “the living goddess of Nanking” (129), Vautrin housed over 3,000 women and girls on Ginling’s small campus, working tirelessly to ensure they were clothed, fed, and safe from repeated incursions into the Safety Zone by Japanese soldiers. Unlike Rabe, Vautrin lacked the authority conferred by a swastika armband and was repeatedly slapped and threatened at gunpoint by Japanese soldiers.

Vautrin’s experiences in Nanking took a massive toll on her physical and mental health. In 1940 she suffered a nervous breakdown and was given electroshock treatment. The following year she committed suicide at age 54.