The Good Man of Nanking
First edition cover of The Good Man of Nanking
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| Author | John Rabe |
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| Translator | John E. Woods |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Nanking Massacre |
| Genre | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Knopf Publishing Group |
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Publication date
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November 1998 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 384 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 38595490 |
| 951.04/2 21 | |
| LC Class | DS796.N2 R3313 1998 |
The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe is a collection of the personal journals of John Rabe, a German businessman who lived in Nanjing at the time of the Nanking Massacre in 1937–1938. The book contains the diaries that Rabe kept during the Nanking Massacre, writing from his personal experience and observation of the events that took place. It also excerpts Rabe's experience in immediate post-war Berlin, then occupied by Soviet troops. Rabe's diaries were made known and quoted by author Iris Chang during the research for her book, The Rape of Nanking; they were subsequently translated from German to English by John E. Woods and published in the United States in 1998.
In his diary kept during the aggression to the city and its occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army, John Rabe wrote many comments about Japanese atrocities. For example, on 13 December 1937, he wrote:
"It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. These people had presumably been fleeing and were shot from behind. The Japanese march through the city in groups of ten to twenty soldiers and loot the shops (...) I watched with my own eyes as they looted the café of our German baker Herr Kiessling. Hempel's hotel was broken into as well, as almost every shop on Chung Shang and Taiping Road."
For 17 December:
"Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. When I appear they give the excuse that they saw two Chinese soldiers climb over the wall. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. In one of the houses in the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped, and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital. (...) Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling Girls' College alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers."
While, on the next day of the fall of Nanking, Rabe handed a letter of thanks to the Japanese army commander concerning that the people in the Safety Zone could stay without one fire and were all safe. The following is a part of his letter of thanks.
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