When studying the total number of Chinese soldiers and civilians slaughtered by the Japanese in the Nanjing Massacre, the burial method and number of corpses are also important evidence of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army. In general, the organizations that buried and disposed of the bodies during the Nanjing Massacre were: charitable groups, citizen groups, puppet regimes, and Japanese troops.
In the process of burying and disposing of corpses, it is inevitable to involve many factors such as manpower, time, funds, tools, etc., which will naturally form a batch of archives and word-of-mouth information. So far, in the study of the burial and disposal of the bodies of the compatriots who were killed, the academic community has been using the structure and model of the Nanjing branch of the Red Swastika Society, chongshantang, red cross and tongshantang, three citizens' burial teams in Shangxinhe, Chengnan and Huimin, and the first and second pseudo-district governments of Xiaguan.
Later, due to the discovery of a large number of new archival materials and the emergence of oral materials between China and Japan, the structure for studying the burial and disposal of corpses was changed and improved. Among the charities, four new branches of the Red Swastika Society Baguazhou Branch, the Funeral Bureau, the Shun'an Shantang and the Mingde Charity Hall were newly discovered; among the citizens' burial team, the villagers' burial team in the north was found; and the second and third districts were found in the puppet government. In addition, a large number of first-hand accounts of the direct disposal of corpses by Japanese troops have emerged. Today, I will look at a few oral materials and get a glimpse of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in those years.
Gao Ruiyu, a Shandong native who served as the head of the burial squad of the Red Swastika Society, led 99 people to bury the corpses in the areas of Yuhuatai, Shuiximenwai and Zhongshanmen City, from December 1937 to the autumn of 1938. In 1984, he lived in the Dragon King Temple in Nanjing's Baixia District, and was in his 80s. Gao Ruiyu recalled:
I grew up in Shandong since I was a child, I was a Zaozhuang native, before the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the warlords captured Zhuang Ding and went to Nanjing, before Nanjing fell, I was introduced by a friend to do things in the Nanjing branch of the Red Swastika Society. Before the Japanese soldiers entered the city, the Red Swastika Society specialized in charity, such as charity. After the Japanese army entered the city, the streets were full of corpses, all of which were killed compatriots. The Red Swastika Society organized the collection of corpses and buried them. At that time, there were two classes, one for collection and one for burial. I am the head of the burial squad, which has ninety-nine people. The burial site is mainly on the west side of the Yuhuatai, the gendarmerie playground. The roots of the city wall outside the Hanzhong Gate and the edge of the city outside the Zhongshan Gate have been buried. The buried body each wore a gown or vest, and some used an armband as a symbol because they were too late to do it. I was wearing a swastika on the front of my chest and back, and some hats had swastikas on them (I took pictures at the time and couldn't find them later). The words are red on a white background and the gowns are dark blue in color. The graves where the bodies were buried were very large, and there were thousands of people in a single grave, covered with reed mats and dirt, and there were thousands of people buried by my class. At that time, the buried corpses, some were full of corpses, there were also heads and legs, we used hooks to pull, thrown in the pit, a day buried how much is not necessarily, some times buried less, first the pit is picked up. I worked on the burial for several months until the fall of the following year. ("Gao Ruiyu Testimony", "Nanjing Massacre Historical Materials" edited by the Nanjing Massacre Historical Materials Editorial Committee, etc.)
In an interview with the writer Xu Zhigeng, he also said:
I buried the grave hill of Yuhuatai, and it is still there, and that place used to be called the gendarmerie playground. A thousand people in a grave hill, you calculate, a hundred and ten meters long, three meters deep, one person wide, ten people a stack, exactly a thousand people a pit. Our team buried a large grave, two small graves, and one small grave was filled with female corpses. Every morning when we went and came back in the evening, our team had four cars, many of the workers were recruited from Jiangbei, and the corpses were collected all over the city, and there were white cloth and red swastika flags on the cars, and red swastika flags were also planted when people were buried on the graveyards. We buried it for months. I'll take care of the burial. How much is buried every day, take notes with tap water, and come back to report to the accounting office. The accounting room is called Zhou Jianxuan, big man, fat, who is more than 90 years old if he is alive this year.... How was it buried? First dig the pit, the pit is set up with a springboard, pull the corpse cart, hook hook, reed sweep ten rows of stacks, row by row stacked past, piled on top of the soil. Sometimes Japanese monks come to chant and beat drums. The Japanese soldiers also came to help bury them, it was the sapper troops, there were not many people, they were bold, they came to make foreign money, the corpses were touched everywhere, watches, pens, gold rings, oceans, banknotes, all put into the pockets. (Xu Zhigeng's Nanjing Massacre)
Guan Kaifu, a Nanjing native who took refuge from The Five Villages of Xiaguan and took refuge in the Langya Road Primary School in the safety zone, said:
At that time, I was working as a cleaner and a servant in the World Red Swastika Society at No. 2 Ninghai Road... My job at the Red Character Society was to bury the bodies of Chinese compatriots killed by Japanese soldiers. We pulled a truck and a truck, some sent to the Zhonghua Gate, and some sent to Nanxiu Village (now in the courtyard of the Nanjing University Observatory) to be buried. Once, we collected more than 120 corpses in a pond in Dafang Lane. There were thousands of corpses buried in the "mass grave", the male buried in one pit, and the female buried in another. Some were killed by Japanese machine gun fire and then burned with gasoline. ("Guan Kaifu Testimony", collection of the Nanjing Massacre Compatriots Killed by the Japanese Invasion of China)
Xu Jinde, the driver who drove a truck to transport corpses for the Red Swastika Society, worked for more than half a year. His name, along with another Cantonese man, Zhou Yonghe, was recorded in the "Roster of Captains of the First Squadron of the Third Squadron of the Southeast Swastika Society of the World Red Swastika Society".
He still remembers the burial of the body in that year, and he said in an interview with the writer Xu Zhigeng:
My car can hold a dozen or twenty. At first it was fine, the weather was cold, and a dead body was rolled up one by one, tied in the middle of a rope or wire, and carried to the car. There are many dead people on the road, busy, pulling back and forth. Pull where? Yin-Yang Camp, Chaotian Palace, Pagoda Bridge, and Rujiang Gate are the most popular in this place, all of which are pulled. Cars drove everywhere, (and sometimes) pulled to the rain flower platform and flower temple to bury. In front of chaotian palace is the Qinhuai River, there are also many dead people in the river, the most tragic is a woman, quite young, naked soaked in the water, one arm cut off, where to urinate with a bayonet inserted, I saw the most miserable. The women's bodies were covered in shawls and their faces were plastered, and none of them were well dressed, and the good clothes were torn. Later, there were not many ash mats, two dead people, three dead people together, rolled up a bundle, thrown on the car, even if it was too late. The Japanese monk sometimes got out of the car, took a look, and banged the drum a few times. The mouth grunted and chanted. What it means, I can't figure it out. Later, it was warm, the body smelled so badly, I couldn't stand it, my wife made me a large mask with eighteen layers of gauze, she was a nurse in Gulou Hospital, she had gauze. That mask didn't work either, it stinked badly, the dead were rotten, and the one who collected the corpse had a hook, more than a foot long, thick fingers, and a crooked head. You don't know, as soon as you pull it, the meat falls down piece by piece. In the past, one rope was tied on the reed mat, and then two were tied, and finally three were tied, for fear of falling out. The pond was soaked like rotten fish, and it scattered at a hook. There were also small alleys, my car could not drive in, rotten, individual, dug a pit on the spot and buried it. At that time, there was a lot of open space in the city, so you could dig a pit anywhere and bury it. Say it and you don't believe it, at the end of the day, my car is full of maggots. Dead people rot, maggots, crawling everywhere. Even on the window glass, white and fat, twisting and turning, I have a lot on my body and clothes. The car flushed with water twice a day, and when it came home, the clothes first went outside the door to shake off the maggots. Miserable!