‘Good Nazi’ hailed as China’s Schindler
20 minutes clip of the movie, from china918.net:
Film on German hero in China seen stirring debate
Reuters - The director of a new film about an unsung German engineer who helped save 200,000 Chinese in Nanjing from Japanese troops said he hoped it would spark debate and help Japan come to terms with its past.
Tukur plays the title role in Gallenberger's "John Rabe"
Florian Gallenberger, whose film “John Rabe” is based on a true story of the courage of a Siemens executive during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, told Reuters his film could also, belatedly, shed light on Rabe’s long-overlooked heroism.
“We’re fully aware the film could be explosive in Japan,” said Gallenberger, whose native Germany has also faced sometimes turbulent reflection on its Nazi past in the wake of films on the Holocaust and Hitler decades later.
“It’s an extremely controversial subject in Japan and there are fears there could be severe repercussions. I hope the film won’t be silenced in Japan. I’d very much hope this film could help get an opening-up of discussion going in Japan.”
Rabe was an electrical equipment executive in Nanjing, then the national capital of China.
Who is John Rabe? John Rabe (November 23, 1882 – January 5, 1950) was a German businessman who used his Nazi party membership for humanitarian purposes. His Nanjing Safety Zone sheltered some 200,000 Chinese from slaughter during the Nanjing Massacre.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, Rabe pursued a career in business and went to Africa for several years. In 1908 he left for China, and between 1910 and 1938, he worked for the Siemens AG China Corporation in Shenyang (Mukden), Beijing (Peiping), Tianjin (Tientsin), Shanghai and later Nanjing (Nanking).
The six-week wave of killing by Japanese soldiers after Nanjing fell was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan’s invasion of China. Chinese accounts say 300,000 were killed.
But some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars deny a massacre took place. It remains a heated political issue in Japan. An allied tribunal put the death toll at about 142,000.
For China, how Japan remembers the “Rape of Nanking” — as the city was then called in English — has become a test of how contrite its neighbor is about its occupation of much of the country from the 1930s up to 1945.
SAFETY ZONE
In 1937, Rabe was head of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone and helped save Chinese lives by setting up the 7-sq-km zone where about 200,000 people were sheltered.
Rabe had worked in China for Siemens for 30 years and was about to return to the headquarters in Berlin when the invasion began. As Germany and Japan were allies, Rabe used his Nazi party membership and did all he could to protect the civilians.
Rabe was arrested by the Gestapo upon his return to Berlin in 1938 for collaborating with the Chinese. After World War Two, the Allies at first refused to de-Nazify him. He died in Berlin in 1950 in poverty and forgotten but remained a hero in China.
“I have to admit to my great shame that before starting this project I didn’t know anything about John Rabe either,” Gallenberger said after his film’s well-received world premiere at the Berlin film festival.
The German-Chinese co-production, in English and German, features Ulrich Tukur (“The Lives of Others”) in the title role and American actor Steve Buscemi as a U.S. doctor in the city.
Gallenberger, whose film cost about 18 million euros ($23 million) to make, said there have been other films made about Rabe in China. But because Rabe’s story was misused for propaganda purposes, the world never really took notice before.
Now, Gallenberger said, the world is ripe for the story of the man sometimes called “the Oskar Schindler of China,” a reference to the industrialist credited with saving 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.
“It’s taken more than 70 years for John Rabe to get the recognition he deserves,” he said.
“It was our duty to take a neutral view, not a Japanese nor a Chinese viewpoint, and I believe we’ve accomplished that.”
Movie About China’s Schindler Tells Story of Unlikely German Hero
DPA news agency – As a Nazi loyalist, Rabe was an unlikely World War II hero. John Rabe was a member of the Nazi party and the German electronics giant Siemens’ man in China during the build-up to WWII. But he also helped save about 250,000 Chinese from the clutches of Japan’s military machine.
“Ten years ago it was not possible to conceive that there was such thing as a good Nazi,” said Ulrich Tukur, who plays Rabe in a film about his life that had its world premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
“The Third Reich is indeed typical of the depths that humans can sink to and which are in each of us,” Tukur said in an interview with DPA news service.
But he went on to a say “that every part of the history is built by a never-ending number of pieces of a mosaic.”
A mini-boom
Director Florian Gallenberger
Based on Rabe’s published dairies, Munich-born director Florian Gallenberger’s movie “John Rabe” comes amid a mini-boom in movies about Hitler’s Germany.
This includes British director Stephen Daldry’s “The Reader,” about a teenager living in 1950s Germany who has a passionate affair with an older woman he later discovers was a Nazi concentration guard, and “Valkyrie,” starring Tom Cruise, which tells of a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Starring British-born Kate Winslet, “The Reader” was also screened at this year’s Berlinale.
But the events surrounding Rabe’s story and his efforts to protect the people of a country that he had developed a deep affection for date back to 1937, two years before Hitler’s troops marched into Poland igniting World War II.
The Good German of Nanking
Japanese troops march into a Chinese government building used as barracks after the capture and occupation of NankingBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The Japanese occupation of China during World War Two was marked by vicious brutality
The movie shows how Rabe helped Chinese civilians escape the horrors of what is known as the rape of Nanking by helping set up and take over the running of a special security zone.
But it also shows that Rabe ran into opposition in the local foreign community in Nanking, among them American physician Robert Wilson, played by US actor Steve Buscemi.
Dismissing Rabe as “the Nazi,” Wilson rejects at first the idea of the Siemens’ man taking charge of the security zone housing the Chinese. Wilson, however, later becomes Rabe’s deputy.
Rabe is also assisted by a German Jewish diplomat called Georg Rosen, who is played by leading German actor Daniel Bruhl.
As the Japanese move to tighten their grip on Nanking, Rabe comes up with the idea of hoisting a Nazi flag over the Siemens compound, where the Chinese citizens are held up so to keep the Japanese bombers at bay.
Low-key heroism
Remarkably, Gallenberger, 37, uses the elements of danger and horror as well humor to tell his story about Rabe’s calm and low-key heroism during a dramatic and fearful time in history.
Relations between China and Japan are still shaped by the brutality of the imperial Japan’s military’s barbarous crackdown on the Chinese population during 1937.
A convincing portrayal of Rabe’s life, Gallenberger’s movie is also another sign of German filmmakers attempting to regain control of their nation’s history and wrestle it away from the movie industry in Hollywood and London.
Moreover, the Nazi wartime movies that have emerged from Germany in recent years also demonstrate that German filmmakers have new stories to tell about the war.
“I have the feeling that the long shadow of National Socialism is being lifted,” said Tukur. “You notice that this country’s young directors see the culture and the people differently, also with more affection.”
