John Rabe

German Siemens businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe uses his position and a Nazi flag's protection to establish an international Safety Zone in Nanjing, sheltering roughly 200,000 Chinese civilians from the Japanese onslaught. The film follows his moral awakening and the bureaucratic and physical dangers he navigates.

John Rabe was the head of the Nanking Safety Zone International Committee during the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre, using his status as a German national to shield Chinese refugees. His diaries later became key documentary evidence of the massacre.

The film draws heavily on Rabe's own diaries and is broadly faithful to his documented actions, though it compresses events and characters for dramatic effect.

After the fall of Shanghai, Japanese forces advanced up the Yangtze and captured the Chinese capital, following it with weeks of mass killing and rape of civilians and disarmed soldiers.

Chinese defences collapsed on 12–13 December 1937. A small group of Western residents established the Nanjing Safety Zone, which sheltered a substantial part of the remaining civilian population. Estimates of the dead vary widely between Chinese, Japanese and Western scholarship.

Directed by Florian Gallenberger

Cast: Ulrich Tukur, Steve Buscemi, Daniel Brühl, Anne Consigny

Positioned at November 1937 – February 1938 within the Second Sino-Japanese War phase of the war, as part of the Nanjing Campaign. This is entry 6 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• Nanjing Massacre
• Nanking Safety Zone
• John Rabe
• humanitarian rescue

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  The Flowers of War

  December 1937

• 

  City of Life and Death

  December 1937 – January 1938

• 

  The Children of Huang Shi

  1937–1945

• 

  The Eight Hundred

  26 October – 1 November 1937

• 

  The King's Speech

  1925–1939

• 

  The Gathering Storm

  1934–May 1940