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On December 1, the international committee was authorized by the mayor of Nanjing to take over the
administration of the city once he and his staff evacuated.
The Japanese ground assault on Nanjing began on December 10, 1937, after the Chinese troops assigned
to defend the city refused to withdraw. When Nanjing fi nally fell on December 13, 1937, just hours after the
Chinese forces had fl ed, the Japanese began a bloodthirsty massacre that lasted for six weeks.
Rabe and other members of the International Committee met the Japanese as they entered the city and
attempted to explain the situation within the Safety Zone, asking that its boundaries be respected. However,
their appeal had limited effect.
“If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it,” Rabe wrote in his diary on that day.
“They (Japanese soldiers) smash open windows and doors and take whatever they like . . . . I watched with
my own eyes as they looted the café of our German baker Herr Kiessling . . . . Of the perhaps one thousand
disarmed soldiers that we had quartered at the Ministry of Justice, between 400 and 500 were driven from it
with their hands tied. We assume they were shot since we later heard several salvos of machine-gun fi re. These
events have left us frozen with horror.”
The Rape of Nanjing (in Chinese, Nanjing Datusha or Great Nanjing Massacre) resulted in the
indiscriminate murder of between 200,000-350,000 Chinese civilians and surrendered soldiers. It was the
worst single massacre of unarmed troops and civilians in the history of the 20th century.
Japanese troops looted and burned the city and surrounding towns, destroying more than a third of the
buildings. Chinese captives were tortured, burnt alive, buried alive, decapitated, bayoneted, and shot en masse.
Between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women and girls of all ages were raped. Thousands were murdered
after their ordeal. Thousands more were forced into sexual slavery. It was one of the worst ever recorded
single cases of mass rape.
About 250,000 Chinese found refuge in the safety zone, which quickly became a permanent rather than
a temporary facility. Among the refugees were Chinese soldiers who were unable to leave the city during the
general retreat. The Japanese demanded that they be handed over and forcibly entered the safety zone on
several occasions to apprehend suspects.
Rabe and his fellow zone administrators attempted to stop the atrocities occurring in the city while working
to ensure that the refugees within the safety zone were fed and nursed. They also petitioned international
governments to intervene and document the events for the world media.
Rabe used his Nazi credentials to prevent the atrocities wherever possible. He wrote repeatedly to Hitler
asking that something be done to stop the killing. Along with other members of the international committee
he recorded the actions of the Japanese troops and passed on reports to the Japanese embassy, which was also
lobbied to intervene. Rabe recorded his experiences in his diary:
Groups of three to ten marauding soldiers would begin by travelling through the city and
robbing whatever there was to steal. They would continue by 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. During their misdeeds, no
difference was made between adults and children. 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 beat up. We found corpses of women on beer glasses and others who had been
lanced by bamboo shoots. I saw the victims with my own eyes; I talked to some of them right
before their deaths and had their bodies brought to the morgue at Kulo Hospital so that I could
be personally convinced that all of these reports had touched on the truth.
You would have thought it impossible, but the raping of women even occurred right in the
middle of the women’s camp in our zone, which held between 5,000 and 10,000 women. We
few foreigners couldn’t be at all places all the time in order to protect against these atrocities.
One was powerless against these monsters who were armed to the teeth and who shot down
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