Film on German hero in China seen stirring debate

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN (Reuters) - The director of a new film about an unsung German engineer who helped save 200,000 Chinese in Nanjing from Japanese troops said he hoped it would spark debate and help Japan come to terms with its past.

Florian Gallenberger, whose film "John Rabe" is based on a true story of the courage of a Siemens executive during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, told Reuters his film could also, belatedly, shed light on Rabe's long-overlooked heroism.

"We're fully aware the film could be explosive in Japan," said Gallenberger, whose native Germany has also faced sometimes turbulent reflection on its Nazi past in the wake of films on the Holocaust and Hitler decades later.

"It's an extremely controversial subject in Japan and there are fears there could be severe repercussions. I hope the film won't be silenced in Japan. I'd very much hope this film could help get an opening-up of discussion going in Japan."

Rabe was an electrical equipment executive in Nanjing, then the national capital of China.

The six-week wave of killing by Japanese soldiers after Nanjing fell was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan's invasion of China. Chinese accounts say 300,000 were killed.

But some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars deny a massacre took place. It remains a heated political issue in Japan. An allied tribunal put the death toll at about 142,000.

For China, how Japan remembers the "Rape of Nanking" -- as the city was then called in English -- has become a test of how contrite its neighbor is about its occupation of much of the country from the 1930s up to 1945.