Lessons from Nanking to Kosovo

THE YEAR 1997 MARKED the fiftieth anniversary of a cruel, but not particularly well-known massacre that has been repeated too often this century. Angry after a bitter struggle with the Chinese for Shanghai and made brutal by a harsh warrior discipline, the Japanese Army marched into Nanking and slaughtered 300,000 Chinese civilians in a matter of weeks. This total exceeds the combined deaths from the atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

While the German Nazis grimly exterminated millions with a single-minded and grinding efficiency, the Japanese Army seemed intent not only on murder, but murder that exacted the most humiliation and pain from its victims. Women were gang raped, mutilated, and murdered when no longer of use. Others were hung by their tongues to die. Groups of Chinese were murdered on muddy roadways so their bodies could provide traction for Japanese trucks.

In conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary, Iris Chang, an American of Chinese, descent published The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Chang meticulously reviews the evidence on the number of Chinese civilians killed in Nanking in 1937. However, the numbers are so large as to remain an abstraction. Is it really possible for human sympathy to be more outraged at 300,000 deaths as opposed to 200,000? The real power of Chang's book is the retelling of individual stories of despair and death.

Chang also finds courageous humanitarian acts standing in relief to the mass of inhumanity. In a small area surrounding international embassies, Westerners established an international "safe zone" providing partial haven to thousands of Chinese.

In a twist of irony that would have been difficult for even a clever writer to devise, one of the most heroic of these Western protectors was John Rabe, a German Nazi who had lived in China for decades. Rabe led the effort to create and maintain the safe zone. Unlike in Europe where the swastika was a sign of hatred and death, for a brief period in Nanking in 1937 the same symbol shielded Rabe and the Chinese under his protection from the Japanese, erstwhile German allies. For his role, Chang suggests that Rabe is the Oskar Schindler of Nanking

After leaving Nanking and returning to Germany, Rabe tried to bring the events of Nanking to the attention of the German government, but was silenced by German authorities. After the war, Rabe was under suspicion by Allies for his previous membership in the Nazi Party. It is only recently, that outside of Nanking, Rabe's heroism has been recognized.

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