John Rabe
German businessman (1882–1950)
John Heinrich Detlef Rabe (23 November 1882 – 5 January 1950) was a German diplomat and businessman best known for his efforts to stop Japanese war crimes and protect Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre. The Nanking Safety Zone, which he helped to establish, sheltered approximately 250,000 Chinese people from Imperial Japanese Army atrocities. A member of the Nazi Party, Rabe had been sent to China as an official representative of Nazi Germany in the European-U.S. diplomatic quarter in Nanjing, the Republic of China's capital. He served as senior chief of the diplomatic mission at the time of Japanese conquest.
Early life and career
Rabe was born in Hamburg on 23 November 1882. His father died while he was very young. He pursued a career in business and worked for a British company in Mozambique from 1903 to 1906.
In 1908, he left Hamburg via Trans-Siberian Railway bound for Beijing, Great Qing and there he married Dora Caroline Schubert on 25 October 1909. They later had a daughter Margaret and a son named Otto.
Between 1910 and 1938 he worked for the Siemens China Corporation in Mukden, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and later Nanjing.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Rabe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.