nanking massacre death toll
As per Sina, Oberver.com verified that Twitter froze the . I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. [47][48], The International Military Tribunal for the Far East stated that the massacre took place in the parts of Nanking captured on December 13, 1937, and after and lasted until early February 1938. Rabe commented on how efforts to remove these Chinese troops failed and Japanese soldiers began to lob grenades into the refugee zone.[10]. 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. . Table of Content Show Japan's invasion of Chinese . Yet, in China, this figure has come to symbolize the justice, legality, and authority of the post-war trials condemning Japan as the aggressor.[113]. This rejection of the committee's ceasefire plan, in Rabe's mind, sealed the fate of the city. [28], Prince Asaka issued an order to "kill all captives," thus providing official sanction for the crimes which took place during and after the battle. Matsui returned to retirement, but Prince Asaka remained on the Supreme War Council until the end of the war in August 1945. [note 1] The massacre was one of the worst atrocities committed during World War II.[6]. Matsui was convicted by a majority of the judges at the Tokyo tribunal who ruled that he bore ultimate responsibility for the "orgy of crime" at Nanjing because, "He did nothing, or nothing effective, to abate these horrors. In response, Shichihei Yamamoto[140] and Akira Suzuki[141] wrote two controversial yet influential articles[clarification needed] which sparked the Japanese Negationist movement. [176], Another history textbook prepared by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which had been approved by the government in 2001, attempts to whitewash Japan's war record during the 1930s and early 1940s. [21], After the end of the war between China and Japan in 1945, these estimates were in turn supplanted by the findings of two war crime trials, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal. especially offenses against prisoners of war.[91]. I told them that after all our efforts to enhance the Imperial prestige, everything had been lost in one moment through the brutalities of the soldiers. Many remember the atrocities that occurred to the Jews in the Holocaust, but few remember what is called, "The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," where 300,000 people were murdered, and 20,000 women were raped (Rivera 2). [67], Soon after the fall of the city, Japanese troops made a thorough search for Chinese soldiers and summarily arrested thousands of young Chinese men. Files. [135], Mei Xiao-ao, the son of Mei Ju-ao, a Chinese justice who was present at the Tokyo war crime tribunal, published an essay claiming that in the early 1960s, Mei's father, inspired by the recent publication of a Japanese study on the destruction caused by the atomic bombs, tried calling for greater study of the massacre by Chinese historians of the time, but his ideas received a cold reception; he was reportedly accused of "stirring up national hatred and revenge" against the Japanese, and some others felt that writing about "the Chinese defeat and misery in Nanjing amounted to hidden praise for the strength of the Japanese troops. The soldiers then bayoneted another sister of between 78, who was also in the room. Photo in the album taken in Nanjing by Itou Kaneo of the Kisarazu Air Unit of the Imperial Japanese Navy, A picture of a dead child. Eighteen others received lesser sentences. The Japanese soldiers, who had expected easy victory, instead had been fighting hard for months and had taken infinitely higher casualties than anticipated. For example, Edgar Snow stated in his 1941 book, The Battle for Asia, that 42,000 were massacred in Nanking and 300,000 in total between Nanking and Shanghai, figures which were apparently based on these estimates. [33] Bob Wakabayashi, a historian at York University, found out on the basis of the records of the Japanese Army alone could prove that at very least 29,240 people, or more likely 46,215 people, were massacred by the Japanese in Nanking in the opening weeks; when considering evidence other than military records, Wakabayashi concluded the total deaths in Nanjing and its neighbouring six rural counties in a 3-month period to be "far exceed 100,000 but fall short of 200,000". After a while we would say something like, "It's my day to take a bath," and we took turns raping them. [3][94][92][95] However, the most credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 cases of rape. What happened within the city limits was even more humiliating for humanity. U.S. news correspondents F. Tillman Durdin and Archibald Steele reported seeing corpses of massacred Chinese soldiers forming mounds six feet high at the Nanjing Yijiang gate in the north. [94], According to the verdict of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal on 10 March 1947, there are "more than 190,000 mass slaughtered civilians and Chinese soldiers killed by machine gun by the Japanese army, whose corpses have been burned to destroy proof. The massacre finally wound down in early 1938. [21], However, when Shokun! Hopefully when you being unarmed yourself tried to protect an unarmed crowd from a bunch of inhuman robbers you could speak truth every time and stay alive which I am . Notably, the novelist Hotta Yoshie[ja] wrote a novel, Time (Jikan) in 1953, portraying the massacre from the point of view of a Chinese intellectual watching it happen. [159][160], The Massacre is sometimes compared to other disasters in China, which include the Great Chinese famine (195961)[161][162][163] and the Cultural Revolution. In light of the 40,000 corpses which Hata believes were buried in and around Nanking, he estimates the total death toll at between 38,000 and 42,000 POWs and civilians. [184] This report formed part of a 55-volume series about the massacre, the Collection of Historical Materials of Nanjing Massacre (). "[120], Matsui asserted that he had never ordered the execution of Chinese POWs. By the time they had arrived at Zijin Mountain, Noda had killed 105 people while Mukai had killed 106 people. Quite the same Wikipedia. [88], In early 1980s, after interviewing Chinese survivors and reviewing Japanese records, Japanese journalist Honda Katsuichi claimed that the Nanjing Massacre was not an isolated case, and that Japanese atrocities against the Chinese were common throughout the Lower Yangtze River since the battle of Shanghai. The safety zone, an area of 3.85 square kilometres, was packed with the remaining population of Nanjing. Until 1982, mentioning of the massacre was suppressed in China because ideologically the communists would rather promote the "martyrs of class struggles" than wartime victims, especially when there were no communist heroes or any communists at all in Nanjing when the massacre happened. [98] Tomio Hora supports the information found in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which estimates a death toll of at least 200,000. Myth: The Nanjing Massacre has always been important to China. [31] His more specific range of figures is roughly 160,000 to 170,000. The visitor is left to assume they did. In December 2007, newly declassified U.S. government archive documents revealed that a telegraph by the U.S. ambassador to Germany in Berlin sent one day after the Japanese army occupied Nanjing, stated that he heard the Japanese ambassador in Germany boasting that the Japanese army had killed 500,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. In one of the houses in the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped, and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. The soldiers of . Five of these were journalists who remained in the city a few days after it was captured, leaving the city on December 16. 200,000 (consensus), estimates range from 40,000 to over 300,000. Therefore, according to journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, writing in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun of December 13, they decided to begin another contest to kill 150 people.[40]. [85] Approximately 70 percent of the Japanese army's wartime records were destroyed. Targets within and outside of the city wallssuch as military barracks, private homes, the Chinese Ministry of Communication, forests and even entire villageswere completely burnt down, at an estimated value of US$2030 million (1937). . [18][33] Though Ikuhiko Hata has also used Japanese military records to calculate the death toll of the massacre, he does not account for exaggeration as Itakura did. The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. During the chaos following the attack of the city, some were killed in the Safety Zone, but the crimes that occurred in the rest of the city were far greater by all accounts. 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]. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 382384. [63], Pregnant women were targeted for murder, as their stomachs were often bayoneted, sometimes after rape. At dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. [26][36] For instance, Tokushi Kasahara claims that Nanking's population in 1937 included 400,000 to 500,000 civilians and 150,000 soldiers,[37] whereas David Askew believes it was 200,000 to 250,000 civilians and 73,790 to 81,500 soldiers. On 10 February 1938, Legation Secretary of the German Embassy, Rosen, wrote to his Foreign Ministry about a film made in December by Reverend John Magee to recommend its purchase. General Matsui was indicted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for "deliberately and recklessly" ignoring his legal duty "to take adequate steps to secure the observance and prevent breaches" of the Hague Convention. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000. 1938, The Rape of Nanjing Nanjing Massacre documentary, BBC News: Nanjing remembers massacre victims, Online Documentary: The Nanjing Atrocities, English translation of a classified Chinese document on the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanjing, Kirk Denton, "Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums", Nanjing Massacre history site: History, Photos and Articles, 'No massacre in Nanjing,' Japanese lawmakers say, "Denying Genocide: The Evolution of the Denial of the Holocaust and the Nanjing Massacre,", War and reconciliation: a tale of two countries, Review of Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, The Ghosts of Nanjing: Mogollon Connection Special Series by Jesse Horn, The Nanjing Massacre Project: A Digital Archive of Documents & Photographs from American Missionaries Who Witnessed the Rape of Nanjing From the Special Collections of the Yale Divinity School Library, The Nanjing Incident: Recent Research and Trends, Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland, Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office, Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, German preWorld War II industrial co-operation, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nanjing_Massacre&oldid=1130624126, Articles with dead external links from August 2017, All articles with bare URLs for citations, Articles with bare URLs for citations from December 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing simplified Chinese-language text, Articles containing traditional Chinese-language text, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Instances of Lang-ja using second unnamed parameter, Articles containing Chinese-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2021, Articles needing additional references from June 2016, All articles needing additional references, Articles containing potentially dated statements from December 2016, All articles containing potentially dated statements, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from June 2016, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2015, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Fifteen of the remaining 22 foreigners formed a committee, called the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone in the western quarter of the city. [18], Another early estimate was that of China's state-run Central News Agency, which reported in February 1938 that the Japanese had slaughtered 60,000 to 70,000 POWs in Nanking. This resulted in widespread looting and burglary.[73]. The lack of resistance from Chinese troops and civilians in Nanjing meant that the Japanese soldiers were free to divide up the city's valuables as they saw fit. [133], Associate Professor David Askew of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University said that in Japan, a unified Japanese view of the massacre doesn't exist because of the internal debates and contentions surrounding the massacre, and that the different views can be categorized into mutually exclusive groups. [89] His claims have been corroborated with the diaries of other Japanese combatants and medics who fought in China. As those who are related to the prewar military, we simply apologize deeply to the people of China. Japanese troops pursued the retreating Chinese army units, primarily in the Xiakuan area to the north of the city walls and around the Zijin Mountain in the east. "Hundred believed Dead - Panay Death . The Japanese awaited an answer to their demand for surrender but no response was received from the Chinese by the deadline on December 10. Perhaps all Chinese, regardless of sex or age, seemed marked out as victims. Two days later, in his report to The New York Times, Durdin stated that the alleys and streets were filled with the dead, amongst them women and children. Due to multiple factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. It would be all right if we only raped them. Added in 24 Hours. Japan Advertiser, 7 December 1937 (an American-owned and edited English-language daily paper in Tokyo), harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKingston2008 (. [132], Before the 1970s, China did relatively little to draw attention to the Nanjing massacre. [T]here is no obvious explanation for this grim event, nor can one be found. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanking on December 13, 1937, the precise number remains unknown. Groups of Chinese civilians were formed, bound with their hands behind their backs, and marched outside the walls of the city where they were killed in groups by machine gun fire and with bayonets. 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. [18][23] However, the prosecution at these trials made little effort to verify the accuracy of their death toll estimates and a considerable amount of dubious and now discredited data was accepted by both tribunals. These estimates are borne out by the figures of burial societies and other organizations, which testify to over 155,000 buried bodies. [citation needed], Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}3203N 11846E / 32.050N 118.767E / 32.050; 118.767, A Japanese soldier pictured with the corpses of Chinese civilians by the, Japanese war crimes on the march to Nanjing, Retreating Chinese Troops' Scorched-Earth Policy, Extrajudicial killing of Chinese prisoners of war, Nanking Safety Zone and the role of foreigners, Apology and condolences by the Prime Minister and Emperor of Japan, Denials of the massacre by public officials in Japan, 1. The soldiers killed her with a revolver. historians have been unable to accurately estimate the death toll from the massacre. [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. "[72], "In the first days of the occupation the soldiers [] took a great deal of bedding, cooking utensils and food from the refugees. Whether Asaka ordered the Rape, or simply stood by as it happened, is disputed, but he took no action to stop the carnage. The Chinese scholars of the committee maintained that at least 300,000 were killed. Chinese teacher sacked for questioning death toll in Nanjing massacre. They accused Beijing of using the alleged incident as a "political advertisement". From this gunboat, Rabe sent two telegrams. [108][109], According to documents in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, at least 300,000 Chinese were killed. On 17 December, chairman John Rabe wrote a complaint to Kiyoshi Fukui, second secretary of the Japanese Embassy. [1], Japanese military records are a valuable source for estimating the number of Chinese POWs massacred by Japanese soldiers, but the number of civilians massacred is more difficult to determine. Now, in the winter, the season gives time to reflect. Rape! 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. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot. [18] However, in a 1942 speech Chiang Kai-shek raised that figure to "over 200,000 civilians". That same afternoon, two small Japanese Navy fleets arrived on both sides of the Yangtze River. "[91], Chinese soldiers and POWs as massacre victims, F. Tillman Durdin, "Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking,", David Askew, "Part of the Numbers Issue: Demography and Civilian Victims," in, Ikuhiko Hata, "The Nanking Atrocities: Fact and Fable,", Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "The Messiness of Historical Reality," in, Daqing Yang, "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity As History,", Tokushi Kasahara, "," in, Tokushi Kasahara, "Massacres outside Nanking City," in, David Askew, "The Nanjing Incident: An Examination of the Civilian Population,", David Askew, "Defending Nanking: An Examination of the Capital Garrison Forces,", Daqing Yang, "Convergence or Divergence? The situation was different in Japan. The total death toll of the Nanking Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. Tokyo Nichi Nichi, 13 December 1937 article on the killing contest. What many people don't know is that the emperor had largely lost control of the army and Japan, which was a flourishing democracy before was taken over by the military (basically) following . [9], On December 12, under heavy artillery fire and aerial bombardment, General Tang Sheng-chi ordered his men to retreat. The grandfather grasped the body of his wife and was killed. [112][170] The range of the death toll estimated by Japanese historians is from tens of thousands to 200,000. [60] On 13 December 1937, John Rabe wrote in his diary: It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. The slaughter of civilians is appalling. [citation needed], The government of Japan believes it can not be denied that the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts by the Japanese army occurred. A mass grave from the Nanjing Massacre. A 42-part ROC documentary produced in 1995, entitled "An Inch of Blood For An Inch of Land . Minnie Vautrin was a Christian missionary who established Ginling Girls College in Nanking, which was within the established Safety Zone. Official war journals and diaries were also published by Kaikosha, an organization of retired Japanese military veterans. [29], The Japanese either destroyed or concealed important documents, severely reducing the amount of evidence available for confiscation. The "Great Massacre School" group supports the validity of the findings at the Tokyo Trials, and concludes that there were at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 rape cases; whereas "The Illusion School" group rejects tribunal findings as "victor's justice". There are no official numbers for the death toll . The death toll reckoned at the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal, is the official estimate engraved on the stone wall at the entrance of the "Memorial Hall for Compatriot Victims of the Japanese Military's Nanking Massacre" in Nanjing. According to one Japanese journalist embedded with Imperial forces at the time:[12]. Since the late-1960s when the first academic works on the Nanking Massacre were produced, estimating the approximate death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of scholarly debate. [12][23][24], The first historian to make an academic estimate of the death toll of the Nanking Massacre was Tomio Hora in his 1967 book Kindai Senshi no Nazo ("Riddles of Modern War History"), who argued in favor of 200,000. [68], In 2006, Kaz Ross, a historian with the University of Tasmania, anonymously interviewed a number of university researchers in the city of Nanking to learn their private views on the death toll of the Nanking 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. [74], The Japanese troops did respect the Zone to an extent; until the Japanese occupation, no shells entered that part of the city except a few stray shots. Title. Didi Tang, Beijing. Other Japanese combatants and medics who fought in China offenses against prisoners of.... The fate of the death toll of the worst atrocities committed during World war.. Women were targeted for murder, as their stomachs were often bayoneted, sometimes rape! Of the Japanese Embassy claims have been corroborated with the diaries of Japanese. In nanking massacre death toll ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000 those who are related to the Nanjing massacre aerial,. 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