Nanjing Massacre

The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass rape and murder of Chinese civilians, noncombatants, and prisoners of war by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. It took place immediately after the Battle of Nanjing and retreat of the National Revolutionary Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

After the outbreak of the war in July 1937, the Japanese had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November. As the Japanese marched on Nanjing, they committed violent atrocities in a terror campaign, including killing contests and massacres of entire villages.

By early December, the Japanese Central China Area Army under the command of General Iwane Matsui reached the outskirts of the city. The Japanese had also planned to use mustard gas and incendiary bombs to annihilate the capital and its population should the fighting have grown too intense.

Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was installed as temporary commander in the campaign, and he issued an order to "kill all captives" before the city's capture. Iwane and Asaka took no action to stop the massacre after it began.

The massacre began on December 13 after Japanese troops entered the city after days of intense fighting and continued to rampage through it unchecked. Japanese soldiers murdered civilians, including children, women, and the elderly. Japanese units also summarily executed thousands of captured Chinese soldiers in violation of the laws of war, as well as male civilians falsely accused of being soldiers. They raped women and girls, their ages ranging from infants to the elderly, and destroyed one third of the city with arson. Rape victims were often murdered afterward. In addition to civilians, Japanese units indiscriminately murdered tens of thousands of Chinese POWs and men who looked of military age.

Many scholars support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed, while newer estimates adhere to a death toll between 100,000 and 200,000. Other estimates of the death toll vary from a low of 40,000 (confined just to the city itself) to a high of over 340,000 (encompassing the entire Shanghai-Nanjing region), and estimates of rapes range from 4,000 to over 80,000 (with estimates around 20,000 being most common). Other crimes included torture, looting, and arson. The massacre is considered one of the worst wartime atrocities in history.

Traditional historiography dates the massacre as unfolding over a period of six weeks beginning on December 13, 1937, following the city's capture, and as being spatially confined to within Nanjing and its immediate vicinity. However, the Nanjing Massacre was far from an isolated case, and fit into a pattern of Japanese atrocities along the Lower Yangtze River, with Japanese forces routinely committing massacres since the Battle of Shanghai. Furthermore, Japanese atrocities in the Nanjing area did not end in January 1938, but instead persisted in the region until late March 1938.

An International Committee of Westerners, including Nazi German citizen John Rabe, created the Nanking Safety Zone in an attempt to protect civilians. The Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives.

After the war, Matsui and several other commanders at Nanjing were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Some other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried only because by the time of the tribunals they had either already been killed or committed ritual suicide. Asaka was granted immunity as a member of the imperial family and never tried. The massacre remains a contentious topic in Sino-Japanese relations, as Japanese nationalists and historical revisionists, including top government officials, have either denied or minimized the massacre.