The Nanjing Massacre
Two officers raced to behead 100 men with swords. A newspaper ran the score like a baseball box.
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Picture Nanjing as a battle. A defending army meets an invading one, the defenders lose, and what follows is the massacre.
That is not what happened.
Days before Japanese troops reached the walls, the general commanding the city, Tang Shengzhi, swore publicly to hold Nanjing to the last man.
Then he crossed the Yangtze himself and left his own soldiers behind, with no orders and no way out.
Tens of thousands of them stripped off their uniforms and hid inside the walls, among two hundred thousand civilians who had nowhere else to go.
There was no army left to defeat. What the Japanese army spent the next six weeks doing was hunting for one, checkpoint by checkpoint.
Scene 1The checkpoints
Inside the walls, Japanese units ran what they called mopping up operations, searching house by house for the soldiers who had disappeared into the crowd.
At checkpoints across the city, men were pulled aside and their hands were checked. A rifle leaves a callus on the skin. A callus was a death sentence.
Those men were marched in columns to the riverbank, to ponds outside the walls, to open ground, and shot or bayoneted in groups of hundreds and thousands.
Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, a member of the imperial family holding field command over the operation, was linked to an order to kill all captives.
Scene 2A newspaper kept score
Before the city had even fallen, a Japanese newspaper, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, began reporting a contest between two junior officers.
Second Lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda were racing to be first to kill one hundred people with a sword.
The paper ran the tally like a sports score. Eighty nine to seventy eight. Then one hundred and six to one hundred and five. It printed their photographs.
Both men survived the war. Both were tried by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal and executed by firing squad on the twenty eighth of January, nineteen forty eight.
John Rabe had run the Nanjing office of a German company for three decades and was the local head of the Nazi Party. In late November he had organized a safety zone for civilians. This is his diary, three days after the city fell.
· Diary of John Rabe, published as The Good Man of Nanking · December 17, 1937
“Last night up to one thousand women and girls are said to have been raped, about one hundred girls at Ginling College alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot.”
The Tokyo tribunal later put the number of rapes in the first month at twenty thousand. Some historians, counting differently, reach eighty thousand. It happened in daylight, on the street, in front of families.
Scene 3The gate
At Ginling College, the American missionary Minnie Vautrin turned soldiers away at the gate for weeks and sheltered close to ten thousand women and girls inside the campus.
Every night she wrote down what she had not been able to stop.
Minnie Vautrin wrote this entry on the sixteenth of December, four days after the city fell.
· Diary of Minnie Vautrin, Ginling College · December 16, 1937
“There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from the language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night.”
She wrote that with soldiers still working the gate outside her own window. She kept writing, and kept turning them away, for the rest of the six weeks.
Scene 4The tribunals
Two tribunals eventually judged what had happened here. The Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, run by the Republic of China, tried the men who had been on the ground, and produced the number three hundred thousand.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, sitting in Tokyo, reached higher up the chain of command. It found that burial societies alone had counted more than one hundred and fifty five thousand bodies, and put the total over two hundred thousand.
It convicted General Iwane Matsui, commander of the Central China Area Army, not for giving the order, but for failing to stop it. He was hanged on the twenty third of December, nineteen forty eight.
Prince Asaka, the imperial family member linked to the kill all captives order, was protected by the immunity General Douglas MacArthur extended to the imperial house. He was never charged.
Five accounts
Five accounts of the same six weeks, and one of them has to be introduced carefully first.
These are not five positions on whether this happened. Mainstream historians on every side of it, Chinese, Japanese, and international, agree that Japanese forces carried out mass killing and mass rape at Nanjing. One of the five accounts here quotes the position that denies it. That is not a competing history. It is presented as what was argued at the time, and as evidence of the argument, nothing more.
vanquishedChinese National Memory
Chinese National Memory
The first account is the one carved in stone. In Nanjing the number is not treated as disputed. It is three hundred thousand, cut in ten foot characters into the black wall of the memorial hall, built on an excavated mass grave and opened in nineteen eighty five.
That figure comes from the nineteen forty seven tribunal, combined with burial society records and survivor testimony, and it sits inside a larger accounting. China counted roughly fourteen million dead across the whole war with Japan. Nanjing is that war's symbolic center: the capital sacked, surrendered soldiers shot at the riverbank, women violated in front of their families.
The writer Iris Chang, whose grandparents had escaped the city, brought this account to an audience in the West that had never heard it.
“The Nanking massacre would be the forgotten Holocaust of World War II.”
When she died in two thousand four, she was mourned in China as a national heroine. A statue of her now stands at the memorial hall.
Read the full account
Narrative
In Chinese memory the number is not in dispute. It is 300,000, and it is carved in ten-foot characters on the black stone wall of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, built on an excavated killing ground and mass grave at Jiangdongmen and opened on August 15, 1985, the fortieth anniversary of Japan's surrender. The figure comes from the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal of 1947, which combined burial-society records, mass-grave excavations, and survivor testimony. To question it, in the official Chinese view, is to insult the dead.
The Chinese narrative locates Nanjing inside the larger War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945), in which China counted roughly 14 million dead and 80 to 100 million refugees. Nanjing is the symbolic center of that suffering: the capital sacked, the surrendered soldiers slaughtered at the riverbank, the women violated in front of their families. December 13 was designated a National Memorial Day by the National People's Congress in 2014, raising the commemoration to the level of state ritual, attended by the paramount leader.
Chinese scholarship has documented the atrocity in exhaustive detail. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial and archives at Nanjing University have collected survivor testimonies, burial records from the Red Swastika Society, and the diaries and films of the foreign witnesses. Historians such as Sun Zhaiwei have defended the 300,000 figure by extending the geographic and temporal scope to the six counties surrounding the city and the full period from December 1937 to March 1938, counting disarmed soldiers and civilians together as victims of unlawful killing.
The publication of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking in 1997 was received in China and the Chinese diaspora as an act of justice, a breaking of Western silence. Chang, whose grandparents had escaped Nanjing, framed the massacre as "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II." When she died by suicide in 2004, she was mourned in China as a national heroine; a statue of her stands at the memorial hall. For this perspective, the recurring enemy is not only the Japanese army of 1937 but the ongoing Japanese refusal to fully acknowledge it: every textbook revision in Tokyo, every prime ministerial visit to Yasukuni Shrine, is felt in Nanjing as the murder committed a second time, in memory.
Arguments
- The death toll is 300,000, established by the 1947 Nanjing tribunal from burial records, excavations, and testimony
- Nanjing is the symbolic center of a war that killed roughly 14 million Chinese
- Disarmed soldiers massacred after surrender are lawful victims, not combat casualties
- Japanese denial and textbook revision constitute an ongoing second injury to the dead
Sources
- The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
- The Nanjing Massacre and Historical Memory in East Asia
- Records of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal
bystanderWestern Witnesses and the Safety Zone
Western Witnesses and the Safety Zone
The second account belongs to the roughly two dozen foreigners who chose to stay when the diplomats left.
They organized a demilitarized safety zone around the embassy quarter and the university, and packed it with somewhere between two hundred thousand and two hundred fifty thousand Chinese civilians.
Their chairman was John Rabe, the Nazi Party's local head in the city, who flew a swastika flag over his own property and wrote directly to Hitler asking him to intervene, gambling that Japanese soldiers might hesitate in front of an ally's flag.
“You simply cannot conceive of the misery.”
His diary was lost for half a century and resurfaced in nineteen ninety six. Minnie Vautrin's diary stands beside it, along with a surgeon's letters describing mutilation wounds, and sixteen millimeter film smuggled out of the city sewn into a coat lining. None of it was written by the Chinese state, and all of it says what the survivors say.
Read the full account
Narrative
A small group of foreigners, roughly two dozen, chose to stay in Nanjing after the diplomats and most other Westerners evacuated. They were German, American, and British businessmen, doctors, and missionaries. In late November 1937 they organized the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone, a demilitarized district of about 3.86 square kilometers around the embassy quarter and the university. Into it they packed an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Chinese civilians.
The committee's chairman was John Rabe, a German businessman who had run the Nanjing office of Siemens for three decades and was the local head of the Nazi Party. He used what he had. He flew a swastika flag over his property, wrote directly to Adolf Hitler appealing for intervention, and physically placed his body between Japanese soldiers and Chinese women, calculating that a soldier of Japan's Axis partner might hesitate to shoot a Nazi. The paradox was total: a member of Hitler's party became, in Nanjing, one of the great rescuers of the twentieth century, credited with saving hundreds of thousands. His report to Berlin was suppressed; the Gestapo detained him on his return.
The witnesses documented what they saw with the instruments of their professions. Minnie Vautrin, dean at Ginling College, kept a daily diary and turned the campus into a refuge for around 10,000 women. Robert O. Wilson, the only trained surgeon who remained, operated on mutilation and bayonet cases and recorded them in letters home. John Magee, an Episcopal minister, filmed 16mm footage of the wounded that George Fitch smuggled out of the city sewn into the lining of his coat. The Australian journalist Harold Timperley compiled the committee's protest letters and testimony into What War Means (1938), the first book-length account to reach the outside world.
These sources are the reason the massacre cannot be dismissed as Chinese propaganda: they were written by third-country nationals, in real time, several of them citizens of Japan's ally. Rabe's diary, lost for half a century, resurfaced in 1996 and was published as The Good Man of Nanking. The witnesses were not neutral in sympathy, but they were external to the Chinese state, and their private letters, hospital logs, burial counts, and film footage form the evidentiary spine that every serious historian, Chinese and Japanese alike, still works from.
Arguments
- Third-country witnesses documented the atrocity in real time, independent of the Chinese state
- The Safety Zone sheltered an estimated 200,000-250,000 civilians
- A Nazi Party member, John Rabe, became one of the era's great rescuers
- Diaries, hospital records, burial counts, and smuggled film form the core evidentiary base
Sources
- The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe
- What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China
- American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin
- Documents on the Rape of Nanking
academicJapanese Historiography and Memory
Japanese Historiography and Memory
The third account is not one voice. Japanese scholarship on Nanjing has split for decades into three schools, and mainstream historians occupy two of them.
The historian Tokushi Kasahara counts the six counties around the city through March of nineteen thirty eight and reaches one hundred sixty to one hundred seventy thousand dead. Ikuhiko Hata counts only the walled city through early February and reaches roughly forty thousand, thirty thousand disarmed soldiers and ten thousand civilians. Both call what happened a massacre and a war crime. They disagree about how wide to draw the map, not about whether it happened.
The third position denies it happened at all. In nineteen ninety the Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, said this to an American magazine.
“People say that the Japanese made a holocaust there, but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It is a lie.”
Mainstream Japanese historians, Hata included, reject that position outright. Textbook screening softened or removed the massacre for decades regardless, so that by the two thousands most Japanese textbooks named an incident at Nanjing with no death toll attached.
Read the full account
Narrative
There is no single Japanese view. Japanese scholarship on Nanjing has divided for decades into three broad camps, and the space between them is where the number 300,000 collides with the number 10,000.
The "Great Massacre School," associated with the journalist Katsuichi Honda and the historian Tokushi Kasahara, affirms a large-scale atrocity. Kasahara, drawing the geographic boundary around the six surrounding counties and the temporal boundary through March 1938, counts 160,000 to 170,000 dead, including both civilians and executed prisoners of war. Honda, who interviewed Chinese survivors in the 1970s, titled his book a confrontation with "Japan's national shame." This camp treats the massacre as established fact and Japanese responsibility as settled.
The centrist or "middle" school is represented by Ikuhiko Hata, who counts only the walled city and the narrower period to early February 1938, arriving at roughly 40,000 dead, about 30,000 disarmed soldiers and 10,000 civilians. Hata calls himself middle-of-the-road and is frequently miscast in the press as a denier; he is not. He affirms that a massacre occurred and that it was a war crime, but disputes the scope and the 300,000 figure on evidentiary grounds, arguing that the higher counts rest on inflated burial records, including Chongshantang figures that historians now regard as unreliable.
The "Illusion School" denies that a massacre worthy of the name occurred at all. Tanaka Masaaki titled a book "The Fabrication of the Nanking Massacre"; Shudo Higashinakano argued the killings were lawful executions of guerrillas out of uniform. This position is not confined to fringe authors. In 1990 the Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara told Playboy: "People say that the Japanese made a holocaust there, but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It is a lie." Denial in this form is a nationalist political project, not a scholarly finding, and it is the position that mainstream Japanese historians, including Hata, reject. When Higashinakano attacked the survivor Xia Shuqin as a fabrication, a Japanese court found against him.
The distinctively Japanese context is the memory of Japan as war victim. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the millions of Japanese war dead crowd the national memory, leaving little room for the memory of Japan as perpetrator. Textbook screening by the Ministry of Education, challenged in Saburo Ienaga's lawsuits from 1965 to 1997, repeatedly softened or removed the massacre; by the 2000s most Japanese textbooks acknowledged an "incident" at Nanjing without a death toll. The result is a society where the event is neither wholly denied nor fully confronted, and where the argument over one number stands in for the larger unfinished reckoning with the war.
Arguments
- Mainstream Japanese scholarship affirms the massacre; the dispute is over scope and number, not existence
- Kasahara counts 160,000-170,000; Hata counts roughly 40,000 in the walled city
- The Illusion School's denial is a nationalist political project, rejected by Japanese historians
- Japan's self-image as atomic-bomb victim crowds out its memory as perpetrator
Sources
- The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography
- The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture
- The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame
- The Making of the "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States
vanquishedSurvivor Testimony
Survivor Testimony
The fourth account is one household. On the thirteenth of December, nineteen thirty seven, Japanese soldiers entered the home of an eight year old girl named Xia Shuqin and killed her parents, her grandparents, and four of her sisters. Seven of the nine people in that house died.
She survived by hiding under a quilt with her four year old sister. The two children stayed alone with the bodies for fourteen days before neighbors found them.
In two thousand a Japanese author called her account a fabrication. She sued him in Tokyo.
“Seven of my family were killed in front of me. How can they say it did not happen?”
The district court ruled for her in two thousand seven. The Supreme Court of Japan upheld it in two thousand nine. A woman had to win a court case to prove that her own family had been killed.
Read the full account
Narrative
Xia Shuqin was eight years old. On December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers entered her home in Nanjing and killed her parents, her grandparents, and four of her sisters. Seven of the nine people in the house died. She survived by hiding under a quilt with her four-year-old sister, and the two children stayed alone with the bodies for 14 days before neighbors found them. She has told this story for the rest of her life. In 2000 a Japanese author called her account a fabrication and denied she was ever the "little girl" in the witness records. She sued him in Tokyo, and in 2007 the district court ruled in her favor, awarding her 4 million yen; the Supreme Court of Japan upheld the verdict in 2009.
Survivor accounts converge on the same episodes the foreign witnesses recorded from the other side of the same streets. Men of military age were pulled from checkpoints in the Safety Zone, their hands checked for the calluses of a rifle, and marched in columns to the Yangtze riverbank, to Caoxiexia, to Mufushan, where they were shot in batches and pushed into the water. Women describe being taken from refugee shelters at night, the phrase "huaguniang," young girl, shouted by soldiers going door to door. Vautrin recorded the trucks calling out for girls; the survivors were inside them.
The testimony carries detail that no aggregate figure preserves. A survivor remembers the specific neighbor who pointed out where the men were hiding. Another remembers being bayoneted and left for dead among a pile of bodies, and the particular effort of not breathing. The Nanjing memorial has collected thousands of these accounts, and as the last survivors die, born before 1930, the institution has recorded oral histories and cast survivors' footprints in bronze to hold the testimony after the witnesses are gone.
For survivors, the postwar arguments over scope and number are an abstraction laid over a concrete horror. Whether Nanjing's dead numbered 40,000 or 300,000 does not change what happened in one house on Xinlukou where seven of nine people were killed. The demand of this perspective is not primarily statistical. It is recognition: that a specific soldier killed a specific family, that the survivor is not lying, and that the denial of her account is a second violence committed within living memory.
Arguments
- Individual testimony preserves detail that aggregate death tolls erase
- Survivor Xia Shuqin proved her account in a Japanese court against a denialist
- Foreign witness records and Chinese survivor accounts corroborate the same events
- Denial of testimony inflicts a second injury on living survivors
Sources
- Oral history testimonies, Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre
- Nanjing 1937: Memory and Healing
- Xia Shuqin v. Higashinakano (defamation judgment)
academicThe Legal Record and Command Responsibility
The Legal Record and Command Responsibility
The fifth account is the law's, and the law reached two different numbers because it looked from two different heights.
The Nanjing tribunal, working from the ground up, produced three hundred thousand. The Tokyo tribunal, working from the top of the chain of command down, produced over two hundred thousand, and convicted General Matsui for what he failed to do rather than what he ordered.
The same tribunal that hanged Matsui left Prince Asaka untouched, because the occupation authorities had already decided to protect the imperial family to keep the peace. A general who failed to stop the killing was executed. A prince linked to ordering it went free.
Neither tribunal could settle the number, because neither tribunal was asking the same question.
Read the full account
Narrative
Two tribunals judged Nanjing, and they reached the atrocity from opposite directions. The Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, convened by the Republic of China in 1946, tried the men who had been on the ground. General Hisao Tani, commander of the 6th Division, was convicted and executed in 1947. Second Lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, the officers of the newspaper killing contest, were convicted and shot on January 28, 1948. This tribunal produced the 300,000 figure that the People's Republic later inherited.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo (1946-1948) reached higher up the chain. It found that "over 200,000" civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in the first six weeks, and that roughly 20,000 women were raped in the first month. Its central legal innovation at Nanjing was command responsibility. General Iwane Matsui, commander of the Central China Area Army, was not accused of ordering the massacre; he was convicted because, as the tribunal wrote, he "had the power, as he had the duty, to control his troops and to protect the unfortunate citizens of Nanking," and "did nothing, or nothing effective, to abate these horrors." He was hanged on December 23, 1948. The doctrine that a commander is criminally liable for atrocities he fails to prevent became a permanent feature of international law.
The tribunals also reveal the limits of victors' justice. Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, the imperial family member in field command during the massacre, and the figure linked to a "kill all captives" order, was never charged. General MacArthur had decided to shield Emperor Hirohito and the imperial house to stabilize the occupation. A prince who may have issued the order walked free while the general who failed to stop it was hanged. The Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, in his dissent, rejected the entire Tokyo proceeding as the justice of the conquerors, though he did not deny that atrocities at Nanjing had occurred; he found the evidence of them credible and disturbing.
The legal record fixed certain facts beyond serious dispute: that mass unlawful killings and mass rape occurred, that they were extensive, and that Japanese commanders bore responsibility. It could not fix the number, because the tribunals themselves used different scopes and different methods, and it could not deliver full accountability, because the highest responsible figures were protected by the politics of the occupation. Every later argument about Nanjing, scholarly and diplomatic, operates in the space the tribunals left open: the atrocity proven, the total contested, the deepest responsibility never judged.
Arguments
- Two tribunals judged Nanjing at different levels and produced different death tolls
- Matsui was convicted on command responsibility for failing to stop the atrocity
- Prince Asaka, shielded by imperial immunity, was never charged despite his field command
- The tribunals proved the atrocity but could not settle the number or reach the highest responsibility
Sources
- The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East)
- Victors' Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
- Memory on Trial: Constructing and Contesting the Rape of Nanking at the IMTFE
The turn
What each account leaves out.
The Chinese account fixes a number that historians still disagree on, and treats disagreement with that number as an insult to the dead, which forecloses the argument rather than winning it.
From the record
The scholarly basis for lower geographic and temporal scopesInstrumental use of the massacre in Chinese domestic and foreign policyThe Nationalist garrison's own decision to abandon its soldiersWestern Witnesses and the Safety Zone
The witnesses' account is the evidence every historian relies on, and it was gathered by two dozen foreigners who could shelter a quarter of the city and could not stop what happened to the rest of it.
From the record
The limits of what two dozen foreigners could preventChinese agency and Chinese-led relief within the zoneThe postwar politicization of the witnesses' accountsJapanese Historiography and Memory
The Japanese academic account is honest about its own divisions, and still names a denial position without quite explaining who in Japan still holds it, or why the textbooks kept softening anyway.
From the record
The lived experience of the Chinese victims behind the statisticsHow scope disputes function politically to shrink the atrocityThe state's role in shaping textbook memory over decadesThe survivor's account is the truest record of what one family lost, and by its own logic the number of families does not matter, which is also why the number of families is exactly what the other four accounts keep arguing about.
From the record
Broader military and diplomatic context of the 1937 campaignStatistical and evidentiary debates over aggregate scopeThe Japanese scholarly distinction between campsThe Legal Record and Command Responsibility
And the legal record proved the killing and hanged one general for it, then let the man who may have ordered it live until nineteen eighty one, because punishing him was judged less useful than keeping an emperor on his throne.
From the record
The emotional and human reality behind the legal categoriesThe Chinese national investment in the tribunal's 300,000 figureThe lived aftermath for survivors and perpetrators alike
Close
The Nanjing memorial has begun casting the footprints of survivors in bronze, one by one, as the last of them die.
They were born before nineteen thirty. Most of them are gone now.
The bronze is there so that after the last footprint is cast, someone can still stand where they stood.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1937December 13, 1937 - early…
- Killed
- 40-300Kdisputed
- Displaced
- An estimated 20,000 to 80,000 women and…
- Place
- China
Key figures
- Iwane MatsuiCommander of the Central China Area Army; convicted at Tokyo on command responsibility and hanged December 23, 19481878 to 1948
- Prince Yasuhiko AsakaImperial family member and field commander at Nanjing; linked to a "kill all captives" order; granted immunity, never tried1887 to 1981
- Hisao TaniCommander of the 6th Division; tried by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal and executed in 19471882 to 1947
- John RabeGerman businessman and Nazi Party member who chaired the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone1882 to 1950
- Minnie VautrinAmerican missionary who sheltered roughly 10,000 women and girls at Ginling College; died by suicide in 19411886 to 1941
- Tang ShengzhiNationalist general who vowed to defend Nanjing to the death, then fled across the Yangtze, leaving his garrison stranded1889 to 1970
- Xia ShuqinSurvivor who lost seven family members at age eight; won a defamation suit against a Japanese denialist author (2007, upheld 2009)1929 to ?
- Iris ChangChinese-American author of The Rape of Nanking (1997), which forced the massacre into Western memory1968 to 2004
Primary sources
· Judgment of the Tribunal · November 1948
“Estimates made at a later date indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. That these estimates are not exaggerated is borne out by the fact that burial societies and other organizations counted more than 155,000 bodies which they buried.”
· Diary of John Rabe, published as The Good Man of Nanking · December 17, 1937
“Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling College alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot.”
· Diary of Minnie Vautrin, Ginling College · December 16, 1937
“There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from the language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night.”
· Diary of John Rabe, published as The Good Man of Nanking · December 1937
“When the gates to my garden are opened to let my car leave the grounds where I have already taken in over a hundred of the poorest refugees, women and children on the street outside kneel and bang their heads against the ground, pleading to be allowed to camp on my garden grounds. You simply cannot conceive of the misery.”
Threads
- The Chinese Civil War and the Founding of the People's RepublicThe Japanese invasion that froze the civil war in 1937 also gutted the Nationalist army in its capital. Chiang's best divisions bled at Shanghai and Nanjing while the Communists rebuilt in the rural interior
- The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki66,000 dead in 8.5 seconds. Seven of eight five-star American generals said it wasn’t necessary.
- The HolocaustIBM sold the machines that sorted people by ancestry. The trains ran on time.