John Rabe House

The John Rabe House is the preserved home of John Rabe, the German businessman who led the International Safety Zone during the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-1938. Rabe created the zone in defiance of the Japanese military occupation, sheltering hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in his compound and in a larger protected district that he administered with other foreigners.

The house has been restored and turned into a small memorial museum. It sits in the university district of Gulou, and a short exhibition covers Rabe's life, his diaries, and the International Safety Zone. The site is compact — an hour is enough — but it provides essential context for the larger Massacre Memorial Hall, and the intimate scale gives Rabe's personal story more immediacy than the monumental museum can.

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A story
John Rabe was a Nazi Party member and Siemens manager who, during the 1937 massacre, set up the Nanjing Safety Zone and used his Nazi armband as protection against Japanese soldiers — SS insignia had symbolic weight with Japan's Axis ally. His diaries, published decades after his death, are considered one of the key eyewitness accounts of the massacre. He saved an estimated 250,000 lives.

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