Nanjing Massacre

Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China, fell to the Japanese army on December 13, 1937, after the battle of Shanghai and a rapid advance up the Yangtze. For about six weeks the occupying troops killed large numbers of Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, committed widespread sexual violence, and looted and burned parts of the city. It is known as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanking.¹²

The atrocity occurred inside the Second Sino-Japanese War, which grew from Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937. Chinese forces had defended Shanghai for three months, and many Japanese units arrived in Nanjing angry, stretched and poorly supplied, with officers who permitted or ordered the killing of captives. Chiang Kai-shek's government had moved its seat inland to Chongqing, leaving a rump of defenders and a city full of refugees.¹²

A small group of foreign residents, including the German businessman John Rabe, the American missionary Minnie Vautrin and doctor Robert Wilson, set up the Nanjing Safety Zone, which sheltered some 200,000 to 250,000 civilians. Their diaries, letters and films, together with Japanese soldiers' accounts, are central evidence. After the war a Tokyo tribunal held that more than 200,000 were killed, and a Chinese tribunal in Nanjing, which executed officers including Tani Hisao in 1947, cited about 300,000. General Matsui Iwane was hanged in 1948 as the commander. Historians continue to disagree over the numbers, and the memory of the massacre still shapes relations between China and Japan.¹²³⁴