The International Committee For The Nanking Safety Zone
The International Committee was established in order to establish and manage the Nanking Safety Zone.
Many Westerners were living in the city at that time, conducting trade or on missionary trips. As the Japanese army began to approach Nanking, most of them fled the city. A small number of Western businessmen, journalists and missionaries, however, chose to remain behind. The missionaries were primarily Americans from the Episcopal, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches. To coordinate their efforts, the Westerners formed a committee, called the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone.
German businessman John Rabe was elected as its leader, partly because of his status as a member of the Nazi party and the existence of the German-Japanese bilateral Anti-Comintern Pact. Rabe and other refugees from foreign countries tried to protect the civilians from getting killed by the Japanese. The Japanese didn't recognize the Safety Zone, and hundreds of men and women were raped and killed. Due to Rabe's efforts some 250,000 people were protected during Nanking Massacre.
In February 1938 as violence by the Japanese Army abated, the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was reorganized as the Nanking International Relief Committee, which did humanitarian work in Nanking until at least 1941. There are no records of any activity by the Committee after 1941 and it is believed likely that it was forced to discontinue its operations after the United States entered World War II.
Read more about The International Committee For The Nanking Safety Zone: Establishment of The Nanking Safety Zone, Members, Activities, Role in Documenting The Nanking Massacre, Testimony Before The International Military Tribunal For The Far East, Historiography, Timeline, See Also, External Links, Sources
Famous quotes containing the words committee, safety and/or zone:
“Like other cities created overnight in the Outlet, Woodward acquired between noon and sunset of September 16, 1893, a population of five thousand; and that night a voluntary committee on law and order sent around the warning, “if you must shoot, shoot straight up!””
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“There was a continuous movement now, from Zone Five to Zone Four. And from Zone Four to Zone Three, and from us, up the pass. There was a lightness, a freshness, and an enquiry and a remaking and an inspiration where there had been only stagnation. And closed frontiers. For this is how we all see it now.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)