On the stone wall of the Memorial Hall of the Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre of the Japanese Army Invading China, "300,000 Victims" are engraved in Chinese, British, Japanese and other languages, which shows the world the crimes of the Japanese invaders and also reminds the Chinese people of the humiliation and pain they have suffered. However, in the eighty years since the catastrophe, people have repeatedly questioned whether the number of victims has reached 300,000 for various "reasons", especially the Japanese right-wing forces, who have put forward the conclusions of 200,000, 100,000, 50,000, 30,000 or even 3,000 and 47 people through so-called "accurate examination". It is true that the dissipation of the number of victims will not affect the characterization of the criminal acts of the Japanese army; however, the fundamental intention of this act of questioning is to try to prove the "imprecise" and "unobjectivity" of the factual determination by the "imprecise" and "unobjectivity" of the number of people, and then to define the Nanjing Massacre from objective facts as the "victim memory" subjectively constructed by the victims, thus denying the existence of the facts of the massacre. Therefore, the defense of the number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre is not only related to historical facts, but also to national dignity. In fact, the 300,000 victims should refer to the lower limit on the number of holocaust victims, most directly based on the judgments of military tribunals for the trial of war criminals after the war.
Massacres are an important element of post-war trials
After the end of the Second World War, the International Tribunal for the Organization of the Victorious Powers and the Tribunal for the Victim States tried war crimes in accordance with the provisions of international legal regulations and agreements on the punishment of war criminals. Class A war criminals are brought before international tribunals, such as the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as the "Tokyo Tribunal"),;
The Tokyo Court is composed of 11 judges appointed by 11 countries, including China, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. Chinese judge Mei Ruxuan represented the Chinese side in the trial and served as the head of the Chinese delegation to the Tokyo Tribunal. The court began on April 29, 1946, indicted 28 Japanese Class A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo, and announced its verdict on November 12, 1948, a period of two years and six months. In November 1945, China established a war criminals handling committee in Chongqing, and successively set up 10 military tribunals in Nanjing, Shanghai, Beiping, Taiyuan and other cities to try Japanese Class B and Class C war criminals. Among them, the military tribunal involved in the trial of the Crimes of the Nanjing Massacre was the "Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals by the General Headquarters of the Chinese Army" established in Nanjing in February 1946, which scholars generally refer to as the "Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals in Nanjing, China", referred to as the "Nanjing Tribunal".
Since the Nanjing Massacre was a very prominent event in the fascist atrocities during World War II, the Tokyo court took the case particularly seriously. According to Mei Ruxuan's recollection, they "spent almost three weeks listening to the oral testimony of Chinese and foreign witnesses (more than ten) from China and witnessed first-hand, as well as the confrontation between the prosecutor and the defendant's lawyer, accepting more than a hundred written testimonies and relevant documents, and interrogating Matsui Ishimoto."
There were two main cases in the Nanjing court trial on the Nanjing Massacre: First, the case of Gu Shoufu, commander of the Sixth Division of the Japanese Army, which was filed on January 9, 1947, and was compiled as "Trial Character No. 1", which was tried by 5 judges and 2 procurators by Shi Meiyu, Song Shutong, Li Yuanqing, Ge Shaotang, and Ye Zaizeng, and the verdict was pronounced on March 10, 1947.
In the defense of Nanjing, Gu Shoufu led his troops to first break through the Zhonghua Gate in Nanjing, instructed and instigated his subordinates to kill innocents indiscriminately, and was one of the main culprits who directly carried out the massacre of the soldiers and civilians in Nanjing. In February 1946, at the request of the Chinese government, allied forces in Japan arrested Gu Shoufu on behalf of a suspected war criminal. On August 1 of the same year, Gu Shoufu was taken to China for trial along with 12 Class B war criminals. The second was the japanese lieutenants Toshiaki Xiangjing, Takeshi Noda, and Tanaka Junji. Xiang Jing and Noda were second lieutenant officers of the Japanese 16th Division, and the two met to engage in a killing match with 100 people on the way to attack Nanjing. When they arrived at the Purple Mountain in Nanjing, XiangJing killed 106 people and Noda killed 105 people, and it was impossible to tell who killed 100 people first, so he took 150 people as the new target and continued to slash and kill the city of Nanjing. Another Japanese officer, Junkichi Tanaka, once carried a saber called "Sukehiro" and killed more than 300 Chinese. The case was filed on September 20, 1947, and was numbered as "Trial Character No. 13", and the verdict was pronounced on December 18 of the same year.
The facts of the massacre and the number of people killed are well documented
The Tokyo court's conviction of Matsui Ishigen legally confirmed the facts of the Nanjing Massacre, and the Nanjing court's judgment in the above two cases provided a direct basis for determining the number of victims of the massacre.
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Nanjing Municipal Government, the Nanjing Municipal Provisional Senate, and the Capital District Court set up the "Nanjing Enemy Crime Investigation Committee" and the "Nanjing Massacre Enemy Crime Investigation Committee" to conduct a special investigation into the Nanjing Massacre case and provide a large amount of evidence for the Tokyo Trial and the Nanjing Trial. The Nanjing Municipal Provisional Senate submitted to the Nanjing Court a total of 2,784 investigation conclusions, of which about one-third of the Zhonghuamen area was committed, and more than 100,000 people were killed.
According to the "Judgment of The War Criminal Gu Shoufu" collected by the Second Historical Archive of China, a total of 28 cases of collective massacres and 858 cases of scattered massacres were recorded in the Gu Shoufu case, and 886 cases of innocent soldiers and civilians being brutally killed by the Japanese army have been verified. Among them, there were 378 cases in the Zhonghuamen area alone, accounting for 43% of the scattered massacres. On March 10, the Nanjing court rendered a judgment in the Gu Shoufu case, which clearly pointed out: "The most tragic period of the Zha massacre was from December 12 to the 21st of the same month, that is, during the period during which Gu Shoufu's troops were stationed in (southern) Beijing." Counting at the Zhonghua Gate Flower Temple, Pagoda Bridge, Shiguanyin, Xiaguancao Shoe Gorge, etc., I was captured by soldiers and civilians who were collectively shot by the Japanese army with machine guns and burned corpses, including 190,000 people, including Shan Yaoting. In addition, there were scattered massacres, and their bodies were buried by charitable institutions more than 150,000 people. The total number of victims reached more than 300,000. ”
The verdict in the case of Toshiaki Xiangjing and Takeshi Noda also mentions that more than 300,000 people were killed: more than 190,000 captured soldiers and civilians were collectively killed and destroyed, and more than 150,000 people were buried by scattered mutilations through charitable groups.
The number of victims is more than 300,000
It is worth noting that according to the above judgment, the Nanjing court not only ruled that the number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre was "more than 300,000" or "more than 300,000", but also clearly pointed out that the "figure of more than 300,000 people" consisted of "collective massacres of 190,000 people" and "scattered massacres of more than 150,000 people". Taking into account the objective conditions of the battlefield and the difficulty of determining the facts, the judge did not simply add 190,000 and 150,000, but left a certain amount of room, that is, "300,000" is both an approximation and an exact number. The so-called approximation refers to more than 300,000 victims. The so-called exact number refers to no less than 300,000 victims, or "300,000" is the lower limit of the number. In addition, the auxiliary information mentioned in the judgment, such as the time, place, perpetrator, victim, and means of victimization of more than 300,000 people, also confirmed the accuracy of the determination results.
The Tokyo court's verdict on the Nanjing Massacre, although it did not directly identify the number of victims as 300,000, pointed out that "the Japanese army only did not count a large number of burned bodies in the river in the first six weeks after the occupation of Nanjing, that is, it slaughtered more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners." How many "more than 200,000 people" are? The court did not make a definitive decision, but this open-ended conclusion at least suggests that the Tokyo court also found that 200,000 was only the lower limit, not the upper limit, of the number of victims. Most notably, this conclusion of "more than 200,000 people" has not yet been taken into account in the "mass dumping of rivers and burning corpses".
In summary, it is entirely possible to draw such a conclusion: for the number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre, the Nanjing court directly judged more than 300,000, and although the Tokyo court ruled that "more than 200,000 people", considering that "a large number of bodies burned by the river" were not counted, it can be said that the number of victims identified by the two courts is basically similar.
In addition, the 300,000 victims were only one of the crimes committed by the Japanese army in Nanjing, not the only crime. During the six-week atrocity, in addition to the slaughter of innocent soldiers and civilians, the crimes of plundering, rape, burning and destruction launched by the Japanese army inside and outside Nanjing were also part of the massacre. The Tokyo court's verdict states that the Japanese army "committed about 20,000 rapes in the city of Nanjing in the month following the occupation ... This kind of arson continued for six weeks after a few days, as if according to a predetermined plan. As a result, about a third of the city was destroyed. The Nanjing court also clearly ruled in its judgment: "During the operation, the defendants slaughtered prisoners and non-combatants by arsonists by brutal means, and committed atrocities such as rape, robbery, and destruction of property, which violated the provisions of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare and the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War in Time of War, and should constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity." ”
Therefore, for the identification and exposure of the crimes of the Nanjing Massacre of the Japanese Army, the "300,000 victims" is not only the bottom limit for the number of victims, but also the bottom limit for judging the atrocities committed by the aggressors and defending the historical dignity of the nation, which brooks no questioning or challenge in any form.
Source: China Social Science Network WeChat public account