It was a striking sight. A blond-haired man waved a large red and white Danish flag among thousands of Chinese refugees ninety minutes from Nanjing. It was late 1937 and the Japanese army had just marched into Nanjing, without much resistance, and went on a spree of pillage, rape, and murder, the likes and scale of which had not been seen in the modern era.
Known now as the Rape of Nanking, estimates of 300,000 Chinese were murdered and anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 Chinese women and girls were raped over a period of six weeks from mid-December 1937 to late-January 1938. A number of foreigners—the German businessman John Rabe and American missionary and Ginling College president Minnie Vautrin among them—have been celebrated for saving lives during time, but Danish Bernhard Sindberg also saved thousands of Chinese lives and his story until now has been forgotten outside China. Peter Harmsen’s new book, Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing, shows that sometimes the most unlikely of people become the most heroic.

Sindberg was born in 1911 and grew to love the sea. As a teenager found work as a cabin boy on a Norwegian ship before joining the French Foreign Legion and later the Danish military. After being discharged from the latter, he found more work on ships and in 1934 a warrant was out for his arrest before he disembarked in Shanghai. He had gotten into a fight onboard and threatened crew members with a knife. He spent his first two weeks in Shanghai in jail.
The prison in Amoy Road, where Sindberg was locked up in between being interrogated by the consulate, was a building from the mid-19th century with room for about 60 inmates, mostly Russians and other nationalities from the old Tsarist Empire. Several of them were minor celebrities, including Latvian-born red-haired Katherine Hadley, a former cabaret dancer who had been jailed for life after killing an English captain during a row by lodging a knife deep in his neck.
Sindberg hadn’t killed anyone on the ship to Shanghai and his sentence was terminated with the condition that he leave China on his ship’s next trip out. But he would be back in Shanghai a year later in 1935. Thanks to the languages he picked up in the French Foreign Legion and on the different ships where he worked, he was able to find a job at Shanghai’s fabled Cathay Hotel as a receptionist. But he was fired after two months. A few more jobs resulted in the same quick termination.
He made a name for himself as the chauffeur and sometimes photographer of the British foreign correspondent Philip Pembroke Stephens, who had come to Shanghai to cover the war after Japan attacked Shanghai in August 1937. Harmsen quotes Sindberg from a letter the young Dane wrote to his family back home.
“It’s dangerous work, but I wouldn’t want to swap it for anything else. We work, eat and sleep to the sound of airplanes, bomb explosions and artillery thunder. On quiet days we can hear machine guns and rifles far away. After all, the entire northern part of the city, separated from the city center by a small stream, is a battlefield.”
Stephens was killed by artillery fire, although Sindberg had tried to warn him to get out of harm’s way. It was too late.
Sindberg’s work with Stephens did not go unnoticed and in late 1937 when the Danish engineering firm FL Smidth was looking for a representative to guard its new cement factory ninety minutes outside Nanjing, Sindberg’s name came up. When the battle of Shanghai concluded, Japan turned to Nanjing and set to take the capital city. Since Germany and Japan were becoming allies, the leadership of FL Smidth and their Chinese counterparts in the cement industry felt that it would be prudent to also have a German work alongside Sindberg. China-born Karl Gunther, also of a fiery demeanor, was chosen for the job. Soon both the Danish flag and the Nazi flag flew from the cement factory.
As the Japanese attacked Nanjing, killing, raping, and pillaging, Chinese in the area started to show up at the factory to escape and Sindberg showed great courage by sheltering them, both inside the factory and on its grounds. When the Japanese military would approach the factory compound, Sindberg would walk outside, waving his large Danish flag. Sometimes he would carry a rifle, but it was the imposing flag that would deter the Japanese from getting any closer.
Sindberg showed almost more courage by making regular trips to Nanjing to obtain food for the refugees, putting his life at stake each time he drove out of the compound. He had learned to document the war through photography from his work with Philip Pembroke Stephens, and would go on to also document the Nanjing atrocities with his camera.
Sindberg would save anywhere between 6000 and 10,000 Chinese men, women, and children. Karl Gunther, on the other hand, hardly lifted a finger. Tensions with Gunther—seen as an old China hand—would eventually cause Sindberg to lose yet another job and be pulled from the cement factory.
The story of Sindberg’s heroism is one that Harmsen compares at the end of his book to that of Oskar Schindler and stresses why they should be remembered and celebrated in history.
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