Men, women and children were killed in uncounted numbers throughout the city. Some Chinese soldiers stripped civilians of their clothing in a desperate attempt to blend in, and many others were shot by the Chinese supervisory unit as they tried to flee.[21]. I watched with my own eyes as they looted the caf of our German baker Herr Kiessling. On December 11, Rabe found that Chinese soldiers were still residing in areas of the Safety Zone, meaning that it became an intended target for Japanese attacks despite the majority being innocent civilians. More conservative estimates say that the massacre started on December 14, when the troops entered the Safety Zone, and that it lasted for six weeks. The massacre camp generally supports the Tokyo War Crimes Trials figure of "upwards of 100,000" deaths; skeptics claim 15,000 to 50,000, while others venture only up to 10,000. [citation needed], To many Japanese scholars, post-war estimations were distorted by "victor's justice", when Japan was condemned as the sole aggressor. On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. Documents on the Rape of Nanking, p. 254. [20], Today many mainstream historians concur that this estimate is exaggerated. A People's Liberation Army honor guard bearing large funeral wreaths marched slowly past a memorial showing the figure 300,000, China's official death toll in the events of December 1937, as . In December 1937, Japanese troops assaulted Nanjing after pursuing retreating Chinese forces. [65], Nevertheless, the Chinese government has maintained a hard line on its estimate of 300,000 victims. Shortly after the surrender of Japan, the primary officers in charge of the Japanese troops at Nanjing were put on trial. [63], Pregnant women were targeted for murder, as their stomachs were often bayoneted, sometimes after rape. [35], In addition, the total civilian population of Nanking in December 1937 and the size of the Chinese garrison defending the city are used as a basis for calculating the death toll, though the matter is complicated due to greatly varying estimates for both of these numbers. The Nanjing Massacre (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Nnjng Dtsh, Japanese: , romanized: Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino . . In the museum adjacent to the shrine, a panel informs visitors that there was no massacre in Nanjing, but that Chinese soldiers in plain clothes were "dealt with severely". After being stripped and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest and then had a bottle thrust into her vagina. The massacre began the same day, with Japanese troops running entirely unchecked. [17], In 2005, a Tokyo district judge dismissed a suit by the families of the lieutenants, stating that "the lieutenants admitted the fact that they raced to kill 100 people" and that the story cannot be proven to be clearly false. Between the declaration of a ceasefire on August 15, 1945, and the arrival of American troops in Japan on August 28, "the Japanese military and civil authorities systematically destroyed military, naval, and ", "Case 14 On December 16, seven girls (ages ranged from 16 to 21) were taken away from the Military College. The extent of the atrocities is hotly debated, with numbers ranging from Japanese ultra-nationalist claims of several hundred, to the Chinese claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000. Some Chinese men were sodomized and forced to perform "repulsive sex acts". [177] Indeed, there is only one sentence that refers to this event: "they [the Japanese troops] occupied that city in December. Between the announcement of a ceasefire on August 15, 1945, and the arrival of small advance parties of American troops in Japan on August 28, Japanese military and civil authorities systematically destroyed military, naval, and government archives, much of which was from the period 19421945. [99][100] An estimate death toll of 300,000 has also been cited. Rabe says that the ambassador also "sent us a separate confidential telegram telling us that he has been officially informed by the Foreign Ministry in Hankow that our understanding that General Tang agreed to a three-day armistice and the withdrawal of his troops from Nanjing is mistaken, and moreover that Chiang Kai-shek has announced that he is not in a position to accept such an offer." Chinese soldiers were summarily executed in violation of the laws of war. The American ambassador in Hankow replied that although he supported Rabe's proposal for a ceasefire, Chiang did not. Although Koizumi denied that he was trying to glorify war or historical Japanese militarism, the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused Koizumi of "wrecking the political foundations of China-Japan relations". [127], On October 9, 2015, Documents of the Nanjing Massacre have been listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. He was promoted to the rank of general in August 1939, though he held no further military commands. When I think of the feelings and sentiments of many of my Chinese friends who have fled from Nanjing and of the future of the two countries, I cannot but feel depressed. [136] According to him, "of the two, however, the Great Massacre School is clearly the more sophisticated, counting among its members a large number of academics who bring a great deal of authority to their findings. The Japanese army leadership assigned sections of the safety zone to some units to separate alleged plain-clothed soldiers from the civilians. A lesser debate rests on who among the dead to be included as "massacre victims". Nanjing Massacre, conventional Nanking Massacre, also called Rape of Nanjing, (December 1937-January 1938), mass killing and ravaging of Chinese citizens and capitulated soldiers by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army after its seizure of Nanjing, China, on December 13, 1937, during the Sino-Japanese War that preceded World War II. During the post-war period, China . The debate on the death toll has gone on for many decades to the point where some historians have begun to question its usefulness on the grounds that excessive quibbling over the precise death toll has distracted from the study of other more important facets of the massacre. Perhaps all Chinese, regardless of sex or age, seemed marked out as victims. [50] In their view Honda, who had previously put forward the idea that more than 100,000 people were murdered in the city of Nanking alone, was failing to prove his argument and therefore sought to extend the boundaries of the massacre until a larger figure for the death toll could be achieved. Death toll of the Nanking Massacre. Dec 17, 2021 2-min read. Anger over the events at Nanking . I am really, therefore, quite happy that I, at least, should have ended this way, in the sense that it may serve to urge self-reflection on many more members of the military of that time. This district encompassed not only the city of Nanking proper, occupied by the Japanese from December 13, but also the six rural counties surrounding it, namely Jiangning, Lishui, Jurong, Jiangpu, Luhe, and Gaochun. [49] Though many still support the IMTFE's geographic scope for the massacre, in 1984 the journalist Katsuichi Honda became the first individual to voice disapproval of this definition. Iwanami Shinsho, Fujiwara Akira (editor). The Truth about the Nanjing Massacre. The subject is the notorious Japanese occupation of Nanjing, China, in 1937. The battle was bloody as both sides faced attrition in urban hand-to-hand combat. Killings were most intense in the first five days from December 13 and remained moderately intense until December 31, 1937, according to the Japanese military records. "Convergence or Divergence? Numerological arguments about the death count and distinctions of comparative atrocities do not address this point. Myth: The Nanjing Massacre has always been important to China. Tang Junshan, survivor and witness to one of the Japanese army's systematic mass killings, testified:[64]. The Nanjing massacre has also been described as one of the most barbaric episodes in the history of World War II although it officially began on September 1, 1939. . [14] The source of this information was Miner Searle Bates, an American resident in Nanking who had used the burial records of the Red Swastika Society in his calculations. [66], The Hui people, a minority Chinese group, the majority of them Muslim, suffered as well during the massacre. I offer my sympathy, with deep emotion, to a million innocent people. The report consists of eight volumes and was released to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the massacre. Wilson, Dr. Robert O. Please give us help. The death toll, and indeed the events in Nanjing in general, are subject to much discussion, with death toll estimates ranging from 30,000 to 300,000. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who [had] five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. The following is an excerpt: In other words, on the 13th when your troops entered the city, we had nearly all the civilian population gathered in a Zone in which there had been very little destruction by stray shells and no looting by Chinese soldiers even in full retreat. All 27 Occidentals in the city at that time and our Chinese population were totally surprised by the reign of robbery, raping and killing initiated by your soldiers on the 14th. Hata discounts estimates of the death toll which range into the hundreds of thousands on the basis that, according to Smythe, Nanking's civilian population was only between 200,000 and 250,000. '"[55], For about three weeks since December 13, 1937,[1] the Imperial Japanese Army entered the Nanking Safety Zone to search for former Chinese soldiers hidden among refugees. [19] The same month a representative of the Nationalist Government of China claimed that the Japanese had killed 20,000 civilians during the Nanking Massacre. Moreover, many troops of captured Chinese soldiers were led out of the city and down to the Yangtze, where they were summarily executed. Improved in 24 Hours. ", "Case 16 A Chinese girl named Loh, who, with her mother and brother, was living in one of the Refugee Centers in the Refugee Zone, was shot through the head and killed by a Japanese soldier. That's how they get their nationalism and pride, that Japan never made any mistake to other countries during the WW, instead, they're a victim of the US, they nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soldiers pillaged from the poor and the wealthy alike. The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass rape and murder committed by the Japanese troops against the residents of Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Historical revisionists and nationalists in Japan have been accused of minimizing or denying the massacre. On December 13, 2014, China held its first, Askew, David. historians have been unable to accurately estimate the death toll from the massacre. [56], According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, estimates made at a later date indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. Iris Chang, author of the Rape of Nanjing (book), wrote one of the most comprehensive accounts of Japanese war atrocities in China. The Nanking Safety Zone was demarcated through the use of Red Cross Flags.[25]. Never I have heard or read such brutality. 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