December 13, 1937: The Nanjing Massacre begins.
The fall of the Chinese city of Nanjing (former capital of the Republic of China) to the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War was followed by a six-week period of mass rape and murder known as the “Rape of Nanking”, beginning seventy-five years ago on this day. As the city fell, a handful of Westerners - businessmen, missionaries, doctors - quickly set up the Nanking Safety Zone, a demilitarized zone composed of several refugee camps designed to protect Chinese civilians from the city’s Japanese occupiers who, to some extent, did respect the boundaries of the zone. Although the safety zone was not entirely safe at all times, conditions outside it, in other parts of the city, were far worse, for that was where the brunt of the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers took place over the weeks following December 13, 1937.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women were raped over the course of six weeks; this number included not only young women but also the elderly, infants, and pregnant women alike, many of whom were killed indiscriminately afterward. Others had objects, ranging from bayonets to bamboo to bottles and canes, rammed into their vaginas, as seen in this photograph (warning: explicit image). One reverend present in Nanjing at the time wrote in his diary during the early days of the massacre:
I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day.
John Rabe, German businessman, Nazi party member, and elected leader of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, also reported the prevalence of such atrocities:
You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they’re shot. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality andbestiality of the Japanese soldiers.
Other accounts report actual contests between Japanese officers to see who could kill the most Chinese civilians. Corpses literally littered the streets of Nanjing for weeks and months after the massacre; one Christian missionary described how civilians “were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets”; Victims were bayoneted “like potatoes in a skewer”, in the words of one Japanese soldier. Death toll estimates differ greatly and remain highly disputed, although the Japanese war crimes tribunal estimated that over 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war had been killed during the six-week period in Nanjing. Iris Chang’s acclaimed (but controversial) novel The Rape of Nanking and the Chinese government assert that the death toll reached 300,000, while some Japanese researchers have made more conservative estimates, ranging from several thousand to 150,000. Others deny that such an event even occurred at all, although the IMTFE did ultimately hold Iwane Matsui responsible for what they described as an “orgy of crime”, sentencing him to death. General Hisao Tani was also sentenced to death by China’s own Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal for his involvement with the massacre.