Movie About China's Schindler Tells Story of Unlikely German Hero

John Rabe was a member of the Nazi party and the German electronics giant Siemens' man in China during the build-up to WWII. But he also helped save about 250,000 Chinese from the clutches of Japan's military machine.

"Ten years ago it was not possible to conceive that there was such thing as a good Nazi," said Ulrich Tukur, who plays Rabe in a film about his life that had its world premiere at this year's Berlin Film Festival.

"The Third Reich is indeed typical of the depths that humans can sink to and which are in each of us," Tukur said in an interview with DPA news service.

But he went on to a say"that every part of the history is built by a never-ending number of pieces of a mosaic."

Based on Rabe's published dairies, Munich-born director Florian Gallenberger's movie"John Rabe" comes amid a mini-boom in movies about Hitler's Germany.