John Rabe is an unlikely hero. He was a member of the Nazi party and the German electronics giant Siemens’ man in China during the tense buildup to the Second World War.

But based in Nanking in 1937, Rabe also helped to save about 250,000 Chinese from the clutches of Japan’s vicious military machine as Tokyo stepped up its drive into China.

"Ten years ago it was not possible to conceive that there was such a 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 is in each of us," said Tukur.

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 diaries, Munich-born director Florian Gallenberger’s movie John Rabe comes amid a mini-boom in movies about Hitler’s Germany.

This includes British director Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, about a teenager living in 1950s Germany who has a passionate affair with an older woman he later discovers was a Nazi concentration guard, and Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, which tells of a plot to assassinate Hitler.

The events surrounding Rabe’s story and his efforts to protect the people of a country that he had developed a deep affection for date back to 1937, two years before Hitler’s troops marched into Poland igniting the Second World War.

Rabe helped to bring Chinese civilians to safety and to escape the horrors of what is known as the rape of Nanking by helping to set up and take over the running of a special security zone.

Rabe is also assisted by a German Jewish diplomat called Georg Rosen, who is played by leading German actor Daniel Bruhl.

A convincing portrayal of Rabe’s life, 37-year-old Gallenberger’s movie is also another sign of German filmmakers’ attempting to regain control of their nation’s history and wrestle it away from the movie industry in Hollywood and London.