John Rabe (5 Stars)

Dancer's Top Films #77

I always say that you should be careful judging people by their religious or political affiliations. That's something I have to say to myself. For instance, if I meet someone who says that he voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election I immediately have a stereotyped picture of the person in my head. Based on this one piece of information I think that I know what the person is about. That's wrong. I should take time to talk to the person and get to know him better. That might modify my opinion about him.

John Rabe, who was the head of Siemens in Nanking in the 1930's, was a Nazi. Nazis are bad, aren't they? "Well", you might say, "some people were just party members without subscribing to Nazi policies". That didn't apply to John Rabe. He was head of the local Nazi Party in Nanjing, which was made up mostly of Siemens employees.

So he must have been a bad man? Wait! There's one more thing you need to know about him. He loved China and he loved the Chinese. That put him in a conflict of interests with the German government, which was Japan's ally at the time. When Japan attacked the city of Nanjing, committing countless terrible atrocities,  John Rabe wrote to Adolf Hitler personally, asking him to intervene. He received no reply to his letter, but when he returned to Germany in early 1938, he was arrested as a traitor.

What did he do in China that made him a traitor? He set up an International Safety Zone in Nanking, which saved the lives of more than 200,000 Chinese. Nevertheless, the Japanese still killed 300,000 civilians in Nanking, most of them within a single week in December 1937. After the war the generals responsible were executed as war criminals, but Japan is still in a state of denial. In the 1980's the generals were posthumously pardoned. Japanese historians now claim that no more than 200 civilians were killed. They ignore the proof shown in photos smuggled out of Nanjing.

The Japanese occupying forces acted with impunity. Captured Chinese soldiers were executed. Women were raped. There were competitions among the officers about who could behead the most prisoners with a sword. There were reports of these competitions in Japanese newspapers at the time, which must be an embarrassment for modern Japanese historians.

John Rabe was a hero. In Germany he's a forgotten hero. It's not usual to sing the praises of Nazis. In China he's still remembered, and children learn about him in school. He was the Good Nazi of Nanjing.

The film has been made with documentary precision. There's an international cast of German, Chinese, Japanese and American actors. I greatly praise the German director Florian Gallenberger for casting actors of the correct nationalities, so there's no mix up of the accents. Unfortunately, the film's original version with everyone speaking their own languages is only available on the German Blu-ray. All international versions are dubbed. Even the German DVD release has the Chinese and Japanese dialogue dubbed into German. I'm listing the different versions in the box below, but I can only recommend the German Blu-ray, even if you're an English speaker. It has English subtitles as well, so it's worth buying it as an import.

	Order from Amazon.com
	Order from Amazon.co.uk
	Order from Amazon.de