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Diary of Nanjing Massacre witness to be made into film
1999-01-12
NANJING, China - The diary of John Rabe, a German living in China who witnessed the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese troops in December 1937, will be made into a film, organizers of the film project said Monday. Shooting for the film, to be directed by Xie Jin, will begin in September, with screenings in China and overseas slated for May 2000, the organizers said at a news conference. Xie, director of ''Hibiscus Town'' (1984) and ''The Opium War'' (1997), compared the atrocities committed by the Japanese military to the mass killings of Jews under the Nazis during World War II. ''This kind of tragic event should not be allowed to happen again in the next century,'' he said. The film is expected to spark fresh debate about the number of people who died in the massacre, which has been a bone of contention between China and Japan. China puts the death toll at 300,000. Japanese accounts vary from several thousand to 200,000 dead, while some Japanese politicians deny the massacre ever took place. Rabe, a German businessman who provided shelter for hundreds of Chinese refugees after the Imperial Japanese Army went on a six-week rampage until January 1938, places the number of dead in his 1,200-page diary at between 50,000 to 60,000. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal concluded that more than 140,000 people were killed during the Japanese military's rampage following the fall of Nanjing in late 1937, making it one of the worst atrocities committed by Japanese forces before and during World War II. Born in Hamburg in 1882, Rabe lived in China from 1908 to 1938, working for most of the time as a representative of Germany's electrical giant Siemens AG. He died in 1950 at age 67. His diaries were made public by Rabe's granddaughter in December 1996. Although a firm supporter of Adolf Hitler, he was chosen to head a group of German and American missionaries, doctors and professors who established a neutral zone in Nanjing in November 1937 that also served as a haven for Chinese refugees. His actions have earned him comparisons to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who protected Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II and whose life became the basis of the 1993 film ''Schindler's List'' by American director Steven Spielberg. [Kyodo]
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