From the BBC:
On Christmas Eve in 1937, German businessman John Rabe visited the mortuary in China’s then capital, Nanjing.
John Rabe remains a hero in China but his story is little known elsewhere
He later described in his diary the charred body of a civilian man whose eyes had been gouged out, and a boy of perhaps seven, whose corpse was punctured with bayonet wounds.
“I wanted to see these atrocities with my own eyes, so that I can speak as an eyewitness later,” he wrote. “A man cannot be silent about this kind of cruelty!”
The Second Sino-Japanese War was raging.
Japanese troops had stormed the capital, carrying out mass executions and raping tens of thousands of local women and girls, in a six-week orgy of violence that became known as the Rape of Nanjing.
Risking his life, Rabe remained in China and, along with a handful of Westerners, set up a “safety zone” in Nanjing that is thought to have prevented the massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during one of the bloodiest episodes of the Japanese invasion.
We just covered the Nanjing Massacre in my class, going over the documents and the different narratives,