On December 13, 1937, after occupying Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou and other places, the Japanese invading army captured Nanjing. In the city of Nanjing, the murderous Japanese invaders carried out a brutal and bloody massacre of Chinese people. This year marks the 76th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre. The photo below bears witness to the atrocities of the Japanese army on the land of China.
The Nanjing Massacre (Japanese: Nanjing Massacre, Nanjing Massacre) was a war crime and crime against humanity committed by Japanese militarism in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, such as mass murder, rape, arson, and robbery committed by Japanese militarism in the early days of the Japanese war of aggression against China. The climax of the Japanese atrocities lasted for six weeks, beginning with the capture of Nanjing on December 13, 1937, and it was not until February 1938 that order in Nanjing began to improve. According to the relevant judgments and investigations of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the Nanjing Military Tribunal after the end of the Second World War, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were killed by the Japanese army in the massacre, and the city of Nanjing was wantonly set on fire and looted by the Japanese army, resulting in the destruction of one-third of the city and countless property losses.
After the July 7 Incident in 1937, Japan launched a large-scale war of all-out aggression against China. From August 13 to November 12 of the same year, the Battle of Songhu was fought in and around Shanghai. At the beginning of the battle, the Japanese army could not attack Shanghai for a long time, but the Japanese army carried out the flank maneuver of the campaign, and landed at Quangongting and Jinshan Weijian in Hangzhou Bay on November 5, and the Chinese army fell into a situation of being attacked by the enemy on its stomach and back, and the battle situation took a sharp turn; on November 8, Chiang Kai-shek ordered a full-line retreat; on November 12, Shanghai was lost, and the Battle of Songhu ended.
In November 1937, after the National Revolutionary Army lost the Battle of Songhu and Shanghai was occupied by Japan, the Japanese army took advantage of the situation to attack Nanjing in three ways. The Chinese side thus began to prepare for the defense of the capital Nanjing, only more than 300 kilometers west of Shanghai, because the withdrawal order was too hasty, the handover of the defense fortifications in the rear was mistaken, and with the large-scale bombing of the Japanese bombers, the retreat evolved into a major rout. Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, was under direct threat from the Japanese army. Due to the extreme confusion of the retreat from Shanghai, the Chinese army failed to organize an effective resistance along the route from Shanghai to Nanjing. The Chinese general Tang Shengzhi defended Nanjing and took the initiative to command the defense of Nanjing, and on November 20, the Nationalist government announced that it would move the capital to Chongqing.
On November 9, 1937, All of Shanghai fell. At this time, the Nationalist government began to prepare for the defense of Nanjing, the capital of Shanghai, only more than 300 kilometers west of Shanghai. On December 1, the Japanese issued a combat order to attack Nanjing, and the defense of Nanjing began.
On December 2, 1937, the Jiangyin Defensive Line was lost to the main Chinese Navy's First Fleet and Second Fleet, which were all sunk in the Sino-Japanese Battle of Jiangyin, and as the only water barrier arching Gyeonggi by the Nationalist Government in Nanjing, they were lost.
On December 10, 1937, the Japanese army launched a general offensive, and on December 12, Tang Shengzhi issued a breakthrough and retreat order, and the resistance of the Chinese army collapsed.
On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army invaded and occupied the city of Nanjing, and under the command of Fascists such as Matsui Ishigen, commander of the Central China Front, and Tani Shoufu, commander of the 6th Division, the opponent's unarmed Nanjing people were slaughtered for six weeks.
After the Japanese army occupied Shanghai, it directly approached Nanjing. The Kuomintang army engaged in many fierce battles with the Japanese army on the outskirts of Nanjing, but failed to block the multi-way attack of the Japanese army. On December 13, 1937, Nanjing was occupied by the Japanese army in chaos. Under the command of Matsui Ishigen, commander of the Central China Front, the Japanese army did everything in the Nanjing area to burn and plunder.
On December 15, the Japanese army sent more than 2,000 Chinese military and police personnel to the hanzhong gate, strafed them with machine guns, and burned the corpses. On the same night, more than 9,000 citizens and soldiers were escorted by the Japanese to the naval torpedo battalion, and all but 9 people escaped were killed.
On the evening of the 16th, more than 5,000 Chinese soldiers and refugees were escorted by the Japanese army to the riverside of Zhongshan Wharf, where they were first shot dead with machine guns and thrown into the river. Only Bai Zengrong and Liang Tingfang were shot and injured and were swept downstream by the river and swam to the shore.
On the 17th, more than 3,000 soldiers, civilians and workers from the Nanjing power plant who were searched from all over the place were shot with machine guns from coal port to the Shangyuanmen River, and some of them were burned with firewood.
On the 18th, the Japanese army escaped from Nanjing, more than 57,000 refugees and captured soldiers detained under the shogunate mountain, tied up in lead wire, drove to the Shimonoseki Grass Shoe Gorge, first strafed with machine guns, repeatedly poked with bayonets, and finally poured kerosene, set fire, and threw the remains into the Yangtze River. Only Wu Changde was killed here and was not burned to death and was able to escape. The only outrageous person was the Japanese lieutenants Xiang Jing and Noda engaged in a "killing match" under the Purple Mountain. After they killed 106 and 105 Chinese respectively, "the game was going on again."
In the month after the Japanese army entered Nanjing, there were 20,000 rapes and gang rapes in the city, and both young girls and old women were not spared. Many women have been raped and then shot and destroyed. At the same time, the Japanese army burned down houses, from zhonghuamen to the inner bridge, from Taiping Road to Xinjiekou and the bustling area around the Confucius Temple, the fire continued for several days. About a third of the city's buildings and property were reduced to ashes. Countless homes, shops, offices, and warehouses were looted. "After the disaster, Nanjing was desolate."
In the "Judgment of the International Tribunal for the Far East", which was later published, it was written that "the Japanese soldiers came to insult the city like a group of indulged barbarians", and they "wandered the city alone or in groups of two or three people, killing, raping, robbing, and setting fires", and finally the bodies of the victims were scattered in the streets and alleys. "The water flowing by the river is red, and all the canals and ravines inside and outside the city are filled with corpses." The picture shows an 18-year-old woman who was robbed by the Japanese army for 38 days, raped 7-10 times a day, and then was released because she was infected with 3 kinds of sexually transmitted diseases.
On December 13, 1937, the Tokyo Nippon Shimbun (now the Mainichi Shimbun) reported on a "killing contest" between two Japanese officers. Two second lieutenant officers of the Nakajima Unit of the Japanese Sixteenth Division, Toshiaki Ikai and Takeshi Noda, encouraged by their commanders, agreed to a "killing contest" between them, agreeing that when they occupied Nanjing, who would kill 100 people first would be the winner. They killed 89 people from Jurong to Tangshan, 89 to Toshiaki Toshiaki, and Noda to take 78, all under 100, and the "competition" continued.
At noon on December 10, the two met at the foot of the Purple Mountain, and each other's sabers had been cut short of mouths. Noda killed 105 people and Xiang Inu killed 106 people. Because it was not certain who would reach the number of 100 people first, it was decided that this competition would not be won or lost, and it was re-competed who killed 150 Chinese. These atrocities have been reproduced in the newspapers and have been called "heroes of the imperial army". After Japan's surrender, the two war criminals were finally executed in Nanjing on the charge of jointly and continuously slaughtering prisoners and non-war personnel during the war, "actually human cockroach thieves and civilized public enemies".
According to the investigation of the Nanjing Military Tribunal in February 1946, there were 28 cases of collective massacres by the Japanese army, 190,000 people, and 858 cases of scattered massacres, 150,000 people. The Japanese army carried out a massacre in Nanjing for six weeks, and more than 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians were shot dead and buried alive.
During the Japanese occupation of Nanking, thousands of women were raped, day and night, and they raped women in front of the victims' families. Some women were raped several times by the Japanese army, and often women died of torture by the Japanese army. In addition, the Japanese army also forced incest. It is estimated that there may have been more than 20,000 rapes at that time.
While the Chinese nation experienced this catastrophe of blood and tears, Chinese cultural treasures were also plundered. According to the investigation, after the Japanese invaders occupied Nanjing, they sent 330 special agents, 367 soldiers, and 830 hard workers to spend a month from March 1938 to remove more than a dozen trucks of books and documents every day, snatching a total of 880,000 books and documents, exceeding the 850,000 volumes of the Ueno Imperial Library in Tokyo, japan's largest library at that time.
When sorting out the archives, the Second Historical Archive of China found that after the Nanjing Massacre, the Nationalist government publicly and strongly condemned it, and sent people to New York in the United States, London in the United Kingdom, and Tokyo in Japan from December 1937 to March 1938 to carry out all-round operations to expose the truth of the Nanjing Massacre of the Japanese army. Among them, the secret dispatch of personnel to Japan in the early spring of 1938 to expose the truth of the Nanjing Massacre was the only example of propaganda in the capital of an enemy country in World War II.
This not only revealed a buried historical fact to the world, but also forcefully refuted the fallacies of the Japanese right-wing forces that "the Nanjing Massacre was a lie made up by the Chinese", "at that time, the Chinese Nationalist government had never heard of the atrocities of the Japanese army in Nanjing".
According to Guo Biqiang, an associate researcher at the museum and deputy editor-in-chief of the Archives and Magazine of the Republic of China, when they were sorting out the archives of the Propaganda Department of the Kuomintang Central Committee, they found a secret letter from Dong Xianguang, deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Kuomintang Central Committee and director of the International Propaganda Department, to Chiang Kai-shek in April 1938, in which he said that the "International Propaganda Department" had sent four outsiders to Japan to widely deliver the English-Japanese propaganda materials that the International Propaganda Department had asked him to secretly carry. There are many documents describing the atrocities of the Japanese army by outsiders, and there are also 400 feet of films of the atrocities of the Japanese army taken by outsiders in Nanjing, and several performances by the personnel of the embassies in Tokyo and the enlightened Japanese gentry.
Guo Biqiang said that later, an English file of the "Report on the Trip of Three Foreign Friends to Japan" was found, and although it was not the same case file as "Dong Xianguang's Secret Submission to Chiang Kai-shek", the two were compared and the content was consistent. Through this case file, it was learned that the "International Propaganda Department" generally sent foreigners to carry out work because of the needs of its work, and this secret propaganda work in Japan was done by 4 foreigners, 3 of whom were Japanese, and because they were still during the Japanese massacre at that time, and this was another secret operation, they did not leave their names, identities, or even genders. Another foreigner, we found the answer in Feige's diary.
A. Fitch was born in 1883 in Suzhou, China. Before and after the fall of Nanjing, he worked in the Christian Nanjing Youth Association and was appointed as the director general of the Nanjing Safety Zone. In his Jan. 18 diary, he wrote that he sent a film of the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing by John Maggie to the Shanghai Kodak Company Chong Xian and produced four copies of them, which were then screened in a church in the American community of Shanghai. "The Commission of Inquiry (Miss. Morel Lester) happened to see a screening and she thought that if some Christian and political leaders in Japan could see the film, they would set out to stop hostilities... A few weeks later, she reported that she had screened a small group of Christian leaders in Tokyo. "From the perspective of time, Miss Leicester's righteous deeds are consistent with the three Japanese friends going to Japan, and should be the same action.
Guo Biqiang held that the discovery of these two case files shows that the Fact that the Kuomintang government of China sent personnel to Tokyo, Japan, to expose the truth about the Nanjing Massacre at that time was not only an act of exposing the truth in the capital of an enemy country, but also a close and most direct protest and appeal of the government and people of the victim country to the atrocities of the Japanese army.
According to statistics, the International Red Cross Society buried a total of 43,121 bodies inside and outside Nanjing, the Nanjing Red Cross Society buried 22,371 bodies, the charity Chongshan Hall buried 112,267 bodies, the charity Tongshan Hall buried more than 7,000 corpses, and Wang Shouren of the Ji'e Lane Mosque buried more than 400 Hui corpses in the name of the "Nanjing Islamic Church Burial Team". The five charities alone buried more than 185,000 bodies. In addition, Chinese civilians Rui Fangyuan and Zhang Hongru organized more than 30 refugees to bury more than 7,000 corpses; Hunan wood merchant ShengShi recruited workers to bury the remains of 28,730 victims in the Shangxinhe area.
In addition, the bodies were buried by the Japanese-backed puppet regime. For example, the pseudo-Xiaguan District Office buried 3,240 corpses in the xiaguan and Sanfenhe areas; the first district office buried 1,233 corpses in the southeast area of the city; the Nanjing Municipal Office ordered the pseudo-health bureau to collect 3,000 bones in the Linggu Temple outside Zhongshan Gate in January 1939, buried them in the east of the Linggu Temple, and set up a "Monument to the Orphaned Soul without a Master" to record the burial of the corpses. Before the fall of Nanjing, the Japanese army slaughtered civilians in Shanghai, Suzhou, Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi, Changzhou and other places. Some Japanese historians have suspected that the 300,000 civilians claimed by the Chinese side actually included the population of east China who were killed outside Nanjing. Chinese historians believe that if the number of people killed in eastern China had been counted, the total number could have been as high as one million.