Rabe the Nazi, Fitch the Missionary: World War II’s Most Unlikely Partnership And what it taught me about conscience
I still remember sitting in the archives at Yale Divinity School, reading through George Fitch's diary, when I first fully understood what I was looking at.
Here was the head of the YMCA in Nanking — a lifelong Christian missionary, the son of missionaries, a man whose entire identity was built around faith and service — working side by side with the local leader of the Nazi Party.
Not reluctantly. Not at arm's length. Working together. Every day. Building something that would save roughly 200,000 lives.
I sat back from that diary and thought: this is the story.
Two Men Who Should Have Had Nothing in Common
George Ashmore Fitch had spent his entire adult life in service to the YMCA — the Young Men's Christian Association. In 1937 Nanking, that wasn't just a gym membership. The YMCA was one of the most active community organizations in the city, running social programs, literacy initiatives, and civic services deep in the Chinese community. Fitch was fluent in Mandarin. He had Chinese friends, Chinese colleagues, Chinese neighbors. His faith was not abstract — it showed up every day in the work.
John Rabe was a German businessman who had lived in China for nearly three decades, working for Siemens. He was also the head of the Nazi Party chapter in Nanking.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
These two men weren't just ideological opposites. In the social and civic landscape of Nanking's foreign community, the YMCA and the Nazi Party organization were competitor institutions — each one vying for influence, community standing, and the loyalty of the people around them. Fitch and Rabe weren't strangers who happened to meet in a crisis. They knew each other. They had been operating in the same city, in overlapping worlds, representing organizations with very different visions of what community and human dignity meant.
Then December 13, 1937 arrived. And Japanese forces entered Nanking.
I'll be honest — when I first read Fitch's diary, I got the sense that he wasn't entirely sure what to make of Rabe. Here was a man whose party stood for everything Fitch's faith opposed. A Nazi. The head of the Nazi chapter in the same city where Fitch had spent years building a community rooted in Christian service. It's hard to imagine Fitch didn't have questions — about Rabe's motives, his character, whether he could be trusted when things got truly desperate. And yet there they were, thrust together by circumstances neither one had chosen, responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives. Whatever Fitch's reservations were, he set them aside. The work was bigger than his doubts.
What Changed Everything
The Japanese assault was overwhelming and catastrophic. Within days it became clear that what was happening wasn't just military occupation — it was systematic mass violence against civilians on a scale that defied comprehension. Killing. Rape. Looting. Executions in the streets.
A small group of Westerners — missionaries, businesspeople, professors — realized that their foreign passports gave them a thin but real protection that Chinese civilians didn't have. Japanese soldiers were less likely to commit atrocities directly in front of Western witnesses.
The question was whether to use that protection or flee.
Fitch stayed. Rabe stayed. And almost immediately, they recognized something they hadn't fully seen before: they needed each other.
The Armband and the Language
The partnership worked for very practical reasons — and those practical reasons are what make it so fascinating.
Rabe had something no one else in that small group of Westerners possessed: a Nazi armband. As the leader of the Nazi Party in Nanking, he carried documentation and insignia that Japanese military officers actually respected. Germany and Japan were allies. When Rabe stepped in front of a Japanese soldier to stop an atrocity, that armband carried diplomatic weight that a missionary's Bible simply didn't.
Fitch had something Rabe couldn't match: deep roots in the Chinese community and fluency in Mandarin. He could communicate directly with the hundreds of thousands of civilians flooding into their Safety Zone. He understood their fears, their customs, their needs. He could negotiate, document, and advocate in ways that required genuine cultural trust built over decades. And his influence in Nanking extended beyond the Chinese community — Fitch had cultivated a working relationship with the Japanese embassy as well. He was known. He was respected. When he walked into a room to make a demand, people on all sides understood who they were dealing with.
Neither man could do what needed to be done alone.
When the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was formed, the members voted. They chose Rabe as chairman and Fitch as secretary. Think about that for a moment — a room full of Western missionaries, professors, and businesspeople looked at their situation and deliberately elected a Nazi Party leader and a YMCA director to run it together. Not by accident. Not by default. By vote. Because they understood that what was coming required both of them.
Together they became the two central pillars of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone — a roughly two-and-a-half square mile neutral area where Chinese civilians could seek refuge from the violence outside its borders.
What Ideology Looks Like When People Are Dying
I've thought about this partnership a great deal, because it sits at the moral center of Nanking Safety Zone.
Rabe is one of history's genuinely complicated figures. He was a true believer in National Socialism. He wrote admiringly of Hitler in his diary even while documenting Japanese atrocities with outrage. He is not a character who can be easily redeemed or neatly explained. And yet — he stayed. He used every tool at his disposal, including that armband, to protect Chinese civilians. He personally shielded people with his own body on more than one occasion.
What does that mean? I'm not sure it means ideology is irrelevant. But I think it means that conscience can operate even when ideology says it shouldn't. That something in Rabe — something human, something that predated and outlasted his politics — refused to let him watch people be slaughtered and do nothing.
Fitch, by contrast, was exactly who his faith said he should be. His Christianity wasn't decoration — it was the engine of everything he did during those weeks. But here's what struck me most in that Yale archive: Fitch never once questioned whether working with Rabe was the right call. There was no recorded hand-wringing about the moral optics of partnering with a Nazi. People were dying. Rabe had the armband. You work with what saves lives.
That kind of clear-eyed moral pragmatism, coming from a man of deep Christian faith, is something I find genuinely inspiring.
Writing the Alliance
When I began writing Nanking Safety Zone, I knew this partnership had to be the dramatic spine of the story. Not just because it's historically true, but because it asks the reader something uncomfortable:
Can you do the right thing for the wrong reasons? Can the wrong person do the right thing? And does it matter — when the alternative is 200,000 people dying?
I didn't want to write Rabe as a villain or a secret hero. I wanted to write him as what he was: a flawed, complicated human being who made a choice that cost him something, at a moment when most people would have gotten on a boat and left.
And I wanted to write Fitch as something more than a saint. Saints are easy to admire and hard to relate to. Fitch was a man — exhausted, furious, sometimes hopeless — who kept showing up because his faith gave him no other option.
Together, they are the reason the Nanking Safety Zone existed. Together, they are the reason this story needed to be told.
Mitch Irion is the author of Nanking Safety Zone, a historical fiction novel based on the events of the 1937 Japanese assault on Nanking. The novel draws on primary source research from Yale Divinity School's archives, including George Fitch's original wartime diary. Learn more at nankingsafetyzone.com.
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