THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Rabe, John ___ 1882-1949 ___ German
___ merchant
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Rabe was born in Hamburg, Germany,
to a father who was a sailor. Rabe was apprenticed with a merchant and then
assigned to a post in Africa. In his mid-20s, he went to China and then,
from 1910, was employed by Siemens in its Beijing office. When the Second
Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the foreign community and much of the
Chinese population, including the government, were evacuated from Nanjing,
where Rabe was living. Although Siemens ordered him to leave too, he declined
(although his family did leave). With other foreign nationals, Rabe established
a temporary safety zone for Chinese refugees. Subsequently, he was made
head of an international committee to administer the zone. During what became
known as the Rape of Nanjing, the committee and its efforts managed to save
many lives, possibly hundreds of thousands. In 1938, Rabe travelled to Germany,
where he undertook a series of lectures, using photos and an amateur film,
on the extent of Japanese violence in China. At one point he was arrested
by the Gestapo, and only released (under censorship) after an intervention
by Siemens. He was posted to Afghanistan briefly. After the Second World
War, as a member of the Nazi party, he was obliged to go through denazification
procedures. He appears to have left Siemens employ in 1945, and, thereafter,
lived in poverty until his death. Rabe's detailed diaries (all 1,200 pages)
only surfaced in the 1990s, and their publication has shed new light on
the Nanjing story.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1937-1938 ___ military health historyeye
China Nazism
WEB TEXT LINKS
one
longish extract
about
the diary
about
the diary
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries
of John Rabe
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |