[.ca] The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (ISBN 0375701974)

From Amazon.com:
In November 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army took Nanking (Nanjing), the capital of China and home to 1.3 million people, and began an orgy of murder, rape, and looting. By the time discipline was restored two months later, hundreds of thousands of Chinese were dead, with hundreds of thousands more homeless, starving, and traumatized. The Rape of Nanking, as it is commonly known, still causes international controversy, as Japanese politicians refuse to apologize unequivocally to China and school textbooks continue to misrepresent the events. Like Oskar Schindler of Schindler's List, John Rabe was an enterprising and fundamentally decent German businessman caught up in war. Head of the Nanjing branch of Siemens, the German electronics firm, he had lived and worked in China for almost 30 years. Rather than flee from the threatened city, he stayed to organize a safety zone as refuge of last resort for Chinese civilians. The Good Man of Nanking is his firsthand description of the terrible events and his ultimate success in saving perhaps a quarter of a million lives. The diary format provides a forum for the extraordinary power and immediacy of John Rabe's words, including his gallows humor, placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese soldiers begin their massacres. Rabe's trials were not over when he returned to wartime Germany; diary entries that he wrote during the occupation of Berlin by the Soviet army form a fascinating coda to this book. --John Stevenson

Japnese Nationalism never died:
Unbelievable. I thought the Japanese people where peace loving pacifists now. I was wrong. The hate coming against this book is mindboggling considering it's a journal and not a political manifesto. Those who criticize this diary are revealing themselves. Racist and Nationalistic fanatics as in times of old. The mistake of leaving Hirohito in power has born it's fruit.

the truth:
Dont listen to those who say this book doesn't prove anything about the Rape of Nanking. They have their own agendas and refuse to listen to logic about what really happened. REad the book for yourself to make your opinion.

Rabe was the agent for the Chinese Nationalist Party:
Rabe was awarded by the Chinese Nationalist Party for his contribution to this forged holocaust in Nanking.

Rabe acctually revealed no massacre witnessed.:
It is hard to believe that some people really think this book is an evidence of the "Nanking Massacre". Have they really read this book carefully, they should have reached a different conclusion. I gave 3stars to this book because I think John Rabe wrote this diary quite honestly..... maybe too honest to propagate the Japanese Army's "atrocities". Essencially, there are no massacre actually witnessed by those "objective" westerners. They admited that all the atrocities they sited in the Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone was second-hand hearsay except a few first-hand ones. They admitted that only few killngs they really witnessed were "lawful executions". They witnessed no civilian killings. They did, however, use confusing words when they discribed the "atrocities". When the city gates were captured on 12 Dec. they saw the Chinese soldiers took their uniforms off and wore civilian clothes to disguise as civilians then hid themselves in the Safety Zone. The Committee insisted to call those plain-clothes snipers "civilians". Breaching all of the requirements as a lawful conbatant in the Hague Code concerning War on Land, these snipers should be regarded as war criminals, not civilians. The Committee must have known the inconsistensy of their theory. According to the Documents, they clearly stated that "when \othe Japanese\c troops entered the city \oon 12 Dec\c, \othey\c had nearly all the civilian population gathered in a Zone in the city". And that number was 200,000, which never dropped after that day but even increased to 250,000 in a few weeks. This means, the Committee was in the recognition that the civilian population in Nanking was intact throughout the Japanese occupation and the security of the city was restored by the Japanese Army so the returning of the people, who fled away before the capture of the city, began soon. If you still think that Nanking Massacre was witnessed by those westerners after reading this book, you had better ask yourself if you are really not biased. After all, the words of the Chancellor of the German embassy, Scharffenberg, was right. He told the German Embassy in Hankow, "...one can clealy see that the Chinese, once left to depend solely on the Japanese, immediately fraternize. And as for all these \oJapanese Army's\c excesses, one hears only one side of it." That should be regarded as real objective observation.

New York Times, Dec. 9, 1937 by Hallett Abend, February 28:
Foreign military observers remaining in Nanking are amazed by the extent of the Chinese destruction of everything within the zones they still control. Most of this destruction is said to be purposeless, serving no military use for the advantage of the Chinese or to the disadvantage of the Japanese except to force invaders to use tents instead of billeting in buildings........ "Not since the armies of Genghis Khan turned the sites of once-populous cities of China into grazing lands has there been any such systematic destruction as that going on in the lower Yangtze area at the hands of the Chinese themselves," a neutral military observer told the writer. "Japanese aerial bombings and artillery fire have been destructive in comparatively narrow ranges, mostly military objectives, but all such damages combined will not equal one-tenth the destruction achieved by the Chinese armies. From the way the Chinese are behaving you would think they did not expect to recover any semblance of control in this part of China in the next century. You would think they were laying waste land belonging to some bitter foe. "It is incredible that they are adopting this 'scorched earth' policy against forces which must certainly be only temporary invaders and are not going to attempt to colonize Chinese soil. What is being destroyed represents the savings of thrifty generations of hard-working Chinese. "Those who advocate the policy of frenzied destruction of towns, cities and country side do not pause to think that they are utterly wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of accumulated wealth and that this property, if not destroyed, could have been taxed by the Chinese Government at no distant future, thereby helping the nation to refinance its rehabilitation. This rich area, which had been one of the most thickly populated in the world, will need vast sums to rebuild what is vanishing in flames." The only acceptable explanation seems to involve the ancient Oriental idea of "saving face," the Chinese believing they enchance their prestige if their retreat leaves only a barren wilderness of smoking ruins for the invaders to occupy. This policy ignores the welfare of millions of Chinese who have fled from this fighting zone. How the millions of refugees are to be fed and housed through the Winter is a serious problem because their own government cannot do anything for their relief.