Posted on 12/17/2005 5:37:00 PM PST by blam
Chinese memorial to 'the good Nazi' opens war wounds
By Peter Goff in Beijing
(Filed: 18/12/2005)
A plan by China to honour "the good Nazi", a German who helped to save hundreds of thousands of civilians from Japanese troops, has reopened a dispute with Tokyo over its lack of atonement for the Second World War.
The Chinese authorities are drawing up plans for a museum dedicated to the memory of John Rabe, who defied the "Rape of Nanking" - a six-week massacre during which an estimated 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese soldiers.
Honouring Mr Rabe gives China the chance to draw international attention to Japan's wartime atrocities at a point when relations between the two Asian giants are fraught.
A card-carrying Nazi, Rabe was a China-based Siemens employee in 1937 when the Japanese stormed Nanking, or Nanjing as it is now known. His superiors ordered him to return home, but instead he sent his family back and established a "safety zone" in the city where he offered shelter to terrified Chinese. Using his Nazi credentials, he and a small group of other foreigners kept the Japanese at bay, at considerable risk to themselves, and saved an estimated 250,000 lives.
Rabe wrote a 1,200-page diary that documented the killings and rapes in the city, information that was later used as evidence of war crimes.
The Japanese soldiers "went about raping the women and girls and killing everything and everyone that offered any resistance, attempted to run away from them, or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," he wrote. "There were girls under the age of eight and women over the age of 70 who were raped and then, in the most brutal way possible, knocked down and beaten up. We found corpses of women on beer glasses and others who had been lanced by bamboo shoots."
Chinese historians estimate that 80,000 girls and women were raped at the time.
"One was powerless against these monsters who were armed to the teeth and who shot down anyone who tried to defend themselves," Rabe wrote. "They only had respect for us foreigners - but nearly every one of us was close to being killed dozens of times. We asked ourselves mutually, 'How much longer can we maintain this bluff?' "
Beijing believes that Japan has never properly atoned for its atrocities. Chinese anger is further fuelled by repeated visits by the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours Japan's war dead including some "Class A" war criminals held responsible for the massacre in Nanjing.
Last week, China's premier, Wen Jiabao, cancelled a summit with Mr Koizumi because "Japan won't own up correctly to its history". The shrine visits "seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people", he said.
When the pair did finally meet at a signing ceremony of a regional meeting on Wednesday, Mr Wen snubbed the Japanese leader by ignoring his request to borrow his pen.
Several awkward seconds elapsed in front of television cameras before the request was loudly repeated and the Chinese premier pasted on a smile and handed over the implement.
There were mass protests in March outside the Japanese embassy and consulates in China after Japan published a history textbook that glossed over the wartime atrocities. Tensions between the neighbours are exacerbated by other thorny issues, including a territorial dispute over resource-rich islands in the East China Sea and Japan's desire to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. China also fears what it sees as a growing nationalistic militarism in Japan.
"Part of the reason to honour John Rabe now is a response to Japan's bad attitude," Jiang Liangqin, a historian at Nanjing University, said. "For example, they honour the war criminals and have never properly said sorry. Some Japanese even deny the massacre took place. We know that Japanese often look down on Chinese and don't believe what we say. Well here is a European who told exactly what happened. We want to bring the world's attention to that."
While the killings were going on, Rabe wrote to Hitler several times begging him to intervene but never got a response. He said later that being based in China meant he was unaware of his leader's heinous plans in Europe.
After the massacre Rabe lectured in wartime Germany about what he had seen and submitted footage of the atrocities to Hitler, but the Fuhrer did not want to hear about Japan's actions. Rabe was detained by the Gestapo for a short period, denounced by the Nazis and barred from giving lectures.
In post-war Germany he was again denounced - this time be being a Nazi Party member - and was arrested first by the Russians and then by the British, but was ultimately exonerated following an investigation. He and his family lived in abject poverty, surviving on occasional care packages posted to him by the grateful people of Nanjing. He died of a stroke in 1950 at the age of 68.
"The people of China will never forget the good German John Rabe, and the other foreigners who helped him," said Ma Guoliang, an 89-year-old woman whose parents were killed by the Japanese. "He saved so many people and yet at any time he could easily have been killed himself. He could have left, but he stayed with us. We called him the living Buddha of Nanking."
One is known by one's deeds.
"He and his family lived in abject poverty, surviving on occasional care packages posted to him by the grateful people of Nanjing"
How often that is the fate of those who would do good in this world.
Meanwhile, Arafat stores away billions in Switzerland and gets a Nobel peace price.
(This world loves its own, and judges by the wrong standards.)
Sounds pretty heroic to me.
The ironic thing is that over the next fifty years if japan had maintained control over China and we had not liberated China millions less Chinese people would have died via murder and famine and torture and China would be a lot wealthier and modern today.
I thin we should let Japan at em again.
Well who knew?, a good Nazi.
"The Japanese soldiers "went about raping the women and girls and killing everything and everyone that offered any resistance, attempted to run away from them, or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," he wrote."
The rape of maintaining was horrible, but the reason the Chinese are reviving its memory now is to stir up fears of a possible Japanese military invasion at this time. This is driven, not by any Japanese desire to invade Japan, but by the need for Chinese leadership to distract the Chinese people from the devastating poverty that many are experiencing as a result of the new changes in China.
The Chinese are driving the Japanese into a stronger military stand by doing things like sending Chinese subs into Japanese territorial water. As the Japanese military posture, gets stronger, the Chinese government will fan these fears in the Chinese people.
"The rape of maintaining was horrible,"
meant "the rape of Nanking was horrible"
The Chinese Communist Party is nothing if not expert at the use of the psychological sleight of hand in times of ideological crisis.
They were at their most belligerent in the 50s and 60s when they had a barefoot army with no force projection ability whatsoever. Now, they cry openly about their victimhood while they work around the clock to increase their supply of ballistic missiles and establish a blue water navy.
The idea is to distract the world's attention by inviting discussions on events that took place a lifetime ago. As soon as the Chinese relinquish their control of Tibet (where the actions of their soldiers were not appreciably more honorable than the Japanese in Nanjing, according to Tibetan sources) and apologize profusely for their unjust occupation of Eastern Turkestan and Southern Mongolia, then I will stand with them in their quest to acquire a sincere apology for the Japanese.
Thank you, a very interesting read. Herr Rabe was certainly a very complex man.
Therein lays the problem. There is no denying what the Japanese did was horrible. But Mao's Communists would go on to outdo the atrocities at Nanking en masse on a scale unimaginable. Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists, had they been able to maintain mainland China to this day, would've been the only political entity that could've, without incredulous hypocrisy, demand an accounting from the Japanese.
It has always been a source of irritation to me that we let the Japanese slide compared to the justice we sought from the Nazis. We have former prisoners of war that are still trying to get justice after being used for slave labor by the japanese in WWII. We should be ashamed of our actions toward this country who initially bombed us and started us on the road to WWII.
We hardly "liberated" China.
One of the reasons Truman decided to use the Atomic bomb was because fully 3/4 of the Japanese Army was stationed in China and it's enviorns, left completely unfought, and with relatively easy passage back to the Japanese main islands.
China's role in the Second World War is hugely misunderstood, particularly by the Chinese themselves. The Chinese Nationalists and Communists spent more time fighting each other than they did the Japanese (when they DID decide to fight), and many Chinese simply collaborated, taking a page from the French playbook.
China's great value was not as a fighting ally of the United States, but as a sponge soaking up Japanese troops and equipment that would have been used against us elsewhere.
The Chinese are making a bid for mastery of the Western Pacific, while at the same time, creating a new bogeyman: the Japanese Invader. It's not hard to do. The Japanese were beastly to the Chinese during the Sino-Japanese War of 1931-45.
This will have a deleterious effect. The Japanese signed a Naval Pact with the Americans in January. The key fact in the Pacific right now is that the U.S. Pacific Fleet and Combined Fleet will basically train to act as one unit, with an eye towards joint operations against the PLAN. Throw in the Royal Australian Navy and the Indian Navy as a possible wild card and I'd say you have the PLAN contained.
However, this doesn't alter the fact that there is an enormous need for a naval construction program here in the U.S..
Be Seeing You,
Chris
And the Chicoms own up correctly to their own??
Japan * ping * (kono risuto ni hairitai ka detai wo shirasete kudasai : let me know if you want on or off this list)
We have to be pragmatic, unfortunately. Because Communist China remains the 800-lb bad guy gorilla in the region, the Japanese are the de facto good guys now. Fortunately, it's not nearly as bad a choice when we were backing Saddam's Iraq against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran in the early '80s.
I am not defending Japan but does China teach about the communist attrocities or is this a one-way street with them? /retorical question
Construct all the ships you want, but where do you get the sailors for them afterwards? As it is now, we have naval superiority, and can achieve air superiority from carriers and land-based aviation around Taiwan right now.
Given help from the Japanese, South Koreans, Aussies and especially the Indians, the Chinese would never get so much as a fishing junk out on the open oceans anywhere around West or Southeast Asia, if hostilities erupted.
What we need is not new construction, although a few new DD(X)'s and some new attack subs would be especially welcome.
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