John Rabe (November 23, 1982 – January 5, 1950) was a German businessman who used his Nazi membership to save some 200,000 Chinese from slaughter during the Nanjing Massacre. As the Japanese Army advanced on Nanjing, Rabe, along with other foreign nationals, organized the International Committee and drew up the Nanjing Safety Zone to provide Chinese refugees with food and shelter upon the impending Japanese slaughter. He explained his reasons thus: "..there is a question of morality here.. I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me." The zones were located in all of the foreign embassies and at Nanjing University. Rabe also opened up his properties to help 650 more refugees. The following massacre would kill hundreds of thousands of people, while Rabe and his zone administrators tried frantically to stop the atrocities. Although he tried to appeal to the Japanese by using his Nazi membership credentials, this had little effect.
In February of 1938 Rabe left Nanjing returned to Germany. He showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin and wrote to Hitler to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop any more inhumane violence. Instead, Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo and his letter to Hitler was never sent. Due to the intervention of Siemens AG which is the engineering company he worked for, he was released. He was allowed to keep evidence of the massacre, excluding the film, but was not allowed to lecture or write on the subject. Rabe would continue working for Siemens and he worked in the Berlin headquarters of the company until 1945.
After the war, Rabe was denounced for his Nazi Party membership and arrested by the Russians first and then by the British. However, investigations exonerated him of any wrongdoing. He was formally declared "de-Nazified" by the Allies in June 1946 but thereafter lived in poverty. His family was also starving at one point in time when he (Rabe) was partly supported by the monthly food and money parcels sent by the Chinese government for his actions during the Nanjing Massacre. On 5 January 1950 Rabe died of a stroke. In 1997 his tombstone was moved from Berlin to Nanjing where it received a place of honour at the massacre memorial site. In 2005 Rabes former residence in Nanjing was renovated and now accommodates the "John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall", which opened in 2006. Now this place is used as a training place for peace and reconciliation. It is irony that Rabe went through such a hardship after his return to Germany because of the same reason that he could save tens of thousands people from Japanese brutality during the war, being Nazi.
Rabe recorded Japanese barbarianism in his 2100 page journal in which 500 cases of brutality was recorded. When Irish Chang wrote a book, the rape of Nanking, she contacted Rabe's family to persuade them to bring Rabe's journal to the public.
Minnie Vautrin is another hero during this time. Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin (September 27, 1886 – May 16, 1941) was an American missionary renowned for saving the lives of many women at the Ginling Girls College in Nanking during the Nanjing Massacre. When the Japanese army invaded Nanking in December. Ginling Girls College became a haven of refuge, at times harboring up to 10,000 women in a college designed to support between 200 and 300. With only her wits and the use of an American flag, Vautrin was largely able to repel incursions into her college.
Minnie recounted the horrors of the war in her diary in 1937:
There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night—one of the girls was but 12 years old. Food, bedding and money have been taken from people. … I suspect every house in the city has been opened, again and yet again, and robbed. Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out "Jiu ming! Jiu ming!"—save our lives. The occasional shots that we hear out on the hills, or on the street, make us realize the sad fate of some man—very probably not a soldier.
She guarded school day and night so women couldn't get abducted by Japanese soldiers to be raped. The school was fairly big size as I walked around to be guarded by one person. In 1940, weary and stressed, Vautrin took a furlough again from her work. A few months later, haunted by the images she saw and feeling responsible for not being able to save more lives, Vautrin committed suicide by turning on the stove gas in her small apartment in Indianapolis. She is an another war victim who suffered such an emotional turmoils by doing the right thing in a wrong time.
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