Ho Feng-Shan was a Chinese diplomat who served as Consul-General in Vienna from 1938 to May 1940 and is another member of Yad Vashem’s ‘Righteous among the Nations’. He issued circa 3,000 visas to jews resident in Austria in order that they might leave for Shanghai and its jewish ghetto between June 1938 and May 1940. It is also known that he did this in opposition to the instructions of the Chinese ambassador in Berlin Che Jie. (1)
While there is little detailed information available at Ho Feng-Shan’s motives; he is widely believed to have been motivated by pity for the jewish refugees who were queueing in droves at his embassy for visas. (2) However, this is incorrect as Ho Feng-Shan was – like Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas, Lithuania – (3) working in concert with the policy of his government that he believed would be best served by offering sanctuary to jews from Austria in Shanghai. (4)
Indeed, the idea that Ho Feng-Shan ‘saved jews from the Holocaust’ is simply absurd, because it was only on 20th January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference was the ‘Holocaust’ outlined and decided upon according to the traditional narrative.
Therefore, Ho Feng-Shan couldn’t have been doing so between June 1938 and May 1940, but rather was simply following the policies of the Chinese government that he served in trying to enact a Chinese version of the Japanese Fugu plan. (5)
References
(1) https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/film/how-one-man-rescued-thousand-of-jews/06/03/
(2) Ibid.
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-chiune-sugihara
(4) Gao Bei, 2013, ‘Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy Toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 52-53
(5) On the Fugu plan see: Mary Swartz, Marvin Tokayer, 2004, [1979], ‘The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II’, 1st Edition, Gefen: Jerusalem