China has announced plans to honour 'the good Nazi', a German who helped to save hundreds of thousands of civilians from Japanese troops, in a move that is designed to draw more attention to Tokyo's second world war atrocities.
The Chinese authorities are drawing up plans for a museum dedicated to the memory of John Rabe, who defied the 'Rape of Nanking' - a six-week massacre during which an estimated 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese soldiers.
Honouring Rabe gives China the chance to draw international attention to Japan's wartime atrocities at a point when relations between the Asian giants are fraught. A card-carrying Nazi, Rabe was a China-based Siemens employee in 1937 when the Japanese stormed Nanking, or Nanjing as it is now known. His superiors ordered him to return home, but instead he sent his family back and established a 'safety zone' in the city where he offered shelter to terrified Chinese. Using his Nazi credentials, he and a small group of other foreigners kept the Japanese at bay, at considerable risk to themselves, and saved an estimated 250,000 lives.
Rabe wrote a 1,200-page diary that documented the killings and rapes in the city, information that was later used as evidence of war crimes.
The Japanese soldiers 'went about 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,' he wrote.
'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 beaten up. We found corpses of women on beer glasses and others who had been lanced by bamboo shoots.'