72nd Issue: John Rabe and E.J. Bellocq

Hello! I’m back again! Today I'll be talking about two very different men, both of whom I find interesting.

I’m starting out with a man named John Rabe. He was born in Hamburg in 1882 and was a businessman. He worked in China for Siemens before and during World War I and the time before World War II. He was a local head of the Nazi party in the areas where he lived in China – Nanjing, in 1938. There was a large expatriate community there, both traders/businessmen and missionaries. Most of them fled as the Japanese Army began to approach the city, but fifteen Americans and Europeans stayed behind. John Rabe, along with those fifteen people, created the Nanjing Safety Zone so they could provide food and shelter to those Chinese refugees who needed it. The zone was all of the foreign embassies and the university. The Japanese agreed not to attack those parts of the city. Before he fled, the mayor instructed all those Chinese who hadn’t fled to go to the Safety Zone. John Rabe also opened his properties to help 600+ refugees.

You can read about the Nanjing Massacre elsewhere. It was bad, is all I will say. Some think that 50,000 civilians were murdered, some think that it could be up to 300,000 civilians. John Rabe appealed to the Japanese to stop, using his credentials as a Nazi Party member, which only delayed them, and did not stop them, but sometimes that was enough to let people have time to escape.

In 1938, John Rabe left Nanjing, traveling to Berlin to show pictures and films of the Japanese atrocities, but he was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was released due to the intervention of the Siemens company, and he was allowed to keep the evidence he had gathered, but he was not allowed to disseminate it. He kept working with Siemens, and was posted in Afghanistan and then back to Berlin. After the war, John was arrested and then released by the Soviet and British armies after interrogation. He worked for Siemens still, but didn’t earn much money, and later lost his work permit due to being denounced for being a Nazi. He spent what he had left to try and regain permission to work, but ended up failing. He and his family lived in a tiny apartment, earning money by selling his Chinese art collection. His family ate just soup and dry bread most days.

In 1948, citizens of Nanjing learned of this, and sent money and food to John’s family, until the communist takeover. In 1950, John died of a stroke, and in 1997, his tombstone was moved from Berlin to Nanjing, where it stands in a place of honor to this day.

Next up is E. J. Bellocq. He was an American photographer from new Orleans around the early part of the 20^th Century. He was born into a wealthy French creaole family and mostly took pictures of landmarks, ships, and machines for local companies to earn a living, but his real passion was the personal photos he took of opium dens in Chinatown and the prostitutes of Storyville. He was known as a dandy in his youth but then in his older age he became known for eccentricity, his only interest being photography.

Storyville, by the way, was the red-light district where prostitution was tolerated and regulated, from 1897 to 1917. All of the photos E.J. took were portraits of women, some nude and some dressed, some posed and some not. Some of the faces were scraped out and the negatives damaged, which could have been done by E.J.’s brother, a priest, who inherited them after he died, or by E.J. himself.

When E.J. died in 1949, many of his photos were destroyed, but some were found after many years and in 1970 his prints were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. They were acclaimed for their beauty. You can read more about EJ here, and see the MOMA catalog of his prints here.