nanking massacre death toll

Table of Content Show Japan's invasion of Chinese . He further argued that he had directed his army division commanders to discipline their troops for criminal acts, and was not responsible for their failure to carry out his directives. 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. George A. Fitch, Lewis S. C. Smythe, and James McCallum filed affidavits with their diaries and letters. The Japanese government had previously agreed not to attack parts of the city that did not contain Chinese military forces, and the members of the Committee managed to persuade the Chinese government to move their troops out of the area. 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. Nanking Massacre death toll. The incident occurred near the Kuling Ssu, a noted temple on the border of the Refugee zone". [51] This definition, though considerably larger than the IMTFE's, keeps the massacre contained to "Nanking" without including cities on the outskirts of Shanghai like Suzhou and Wuxi which Honda does include. [69] She found that Chinese historians favor estimates between 40,000 and 150,000 and that they "speculated that reducing the official Chinese estimate of victims would pave the way for greater reconciliation between Japan and China". [12][63][64] Bob Wakabayashi concludes from this that estimates over 200,000 are not credible. The tribunal determined that more than 200,000 people were killed in Nanjing. He was promoted to the rank of general in August 1939, though he held no further military commands. It was the Japanese Army going nuts. All three men were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. John Rabe boarded the U.S. gunboat Panay on December 9 and sent two telegrams, one to Chiang Kai-shek by way of the American ambassador in Hankow, and one to the Japanese military authority in Shanghai. . More conservative estimates say that the massacre started on December 14, when the troops entered the Safety Zone, and that it lasted for six weeks. In 1947 at the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal, the verdict of Lieutenant General Tani Hisao , the commander of the 6th Division quoted the figure of more . The death toll of 300,000 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. 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. (1939), Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone (reprinted in, Kajimoto, Masato "Mistranslations in Honda Katsuichi's the Nanjing Massacre". In 1948, the case of the Nanjing massacre was considered by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which handed down two death sentences. Outside of . [21], The first academic accounts of the Nanking Massacre included as massacre victims all Chinese who were killed by the Japanese Army in and around Nanking, including Chinese soldiers who were killed in action. The Rape of Nanjing, or the Nanjing Massacre, was the 1937 sacking of Nanjing by invading Japanese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A vocational college teacher was fired after a video of her questioning the true death toll of the Nanjing Massacre surfaced online, triggering a wave of backlash on social media platforms over the statement. Dec 17, 2021 2-min read. "[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? They were bored, angry, frustrated, tired. One mosque was found destroyed and others found to be "filled with dead bodies." [147], On June 19, 2007, a group of around 100 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers again denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication, arguing that there was no evidence to prove the allegations of mass killings by Japanese soldiers. Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), p. 193. We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night and many by day. New York Times (New York), January 9, 1938; accessed March 12, 2016. The General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo initially decided not to expand the war due to the high casualties incurred and the low morale of the troops. 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. ", "Case 15 There are about 540 refugees crowded in No. According to Xinhua News Agency, it is the most complete record to date. [1] "[T]here was no burning until the Japanese troops had been in the city five or six days. War crimes during the Internal conflict in Peru: 61,007 [see notes] 19471218: pp. In regards to the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese authorities deliberately concealed wartime records, eluding confiscation from American authorities. By the time they had arrived at Zijin Mountain, Noda had killed 105 people while Mukai had killed 106 people. On trial with them was Gunkichi Tanaka, a captain from the 6th Division who personally killed over 300 Chinese POWs and civilians with his sword during the massacre. The visitor is left to assume they did. The argument in favor of this made by Katsuichi Honda in 1984 was seen by some scholars involved in the debate on the massacre as a "partial admission of defeat" by Honda. The civilian government of Nanjing fled, leaving the city under the de facto control of German citizen John Rabe, who had founded the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. ", "Case 10 On the night of December 15th, a number of Japanese soldiers entered the University of Nanjing buildings at Tao Yuen and raped 30 women on the spot, some by six men. The results of the survey were published in the association's magazine, Kaiko, in 1985 along with an admission and apology that read, "Whatever the severity of war or special circumstances of war psychology, we just lose words faced with this mass illegal killing. The massacre finally wound down in early 1938. Only after firmly establishing 'historical particularities' can one clearly define Japans responsibility. [173][174][175], "During this period, when the Japanese Army occupied Nanjing it killed a large number of Chinese and carried out looting, arson and assaults. Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. Robert Sabella, Fei Fei Li and David Liu, eds. 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 . [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. In a press release to foreign reporters, Tang Shengzhi announced the city would not surrender and would fight to the death. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. Rabe says that the ambassador also "sent us a separate confidential telegram telling us that he has been officially informed by the Foreign Ministry in Hankow that our understanding that General Tang agreed to a three-day armistice and the withdrawal of his troops from Nanjing is mistaken, and moreover that Chiang Kai-shek has announced that he is not in a position to accept such an offer." "[70][71], Ralph L. Phillips, a missionary, testified to the U.S. State Assembly Investigating Committee, that he was "forced to watch while the Japs disembowled a Chinese soldier" and "roasted his heart and liver and ate them. The compound is located in a neutral zone in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, which is the reason why a group of prostitutes also end up there. Historians who define the Nanjing Massacre as having started from the time that the Japanese Army entered Jiangsu province push the beginning of the massacre to around mid-November to early December (Suzhou fell on November 19), and extended the end of the massacre to late March 1938. After the establishment of the weixin zhengfu (the collaborating government) in 1938, order was gradually restored in Nanjing and atrocities by Japanese troops lessened considerably. [13], Perhaps the most notorious atrocity was a killing contest between two Japanese officers as reported in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun and the English-language Japan Advertiser. [169] In the 2010 Japan-China Joint History Research Committee meeting, scholars from the Japanese side set the maximum possible number of civilian victims at 200,000, with estimates of around 40,000 or 20,000. It was worse. THE NANKING MASSACRE - Page 4: Defining the victims. Wealthy families were the first to flee, leaving Nanjing in automobiles, followed by the evacuation of the middle class and then the poor, while only the destitute lowest class such as the ethnic Tanka boat people remained behind. [12][26][60] The figure was originally based on the verdict of the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal which added the burial records of 155,300 bodies with 72,291 destroyed corpses to arrive at a total of 279,586, though there was an apparent adding mistake in this calculation. Friday December 17 2021, 10.25am, The Times. [21], Then in 1997 Kasahara formulated a definition between the two. [1] Hence, depending on the timeframe and the geographic scope, an empirically verifiable, scholarly valid victimization range is from over 40,000 to under 200,000.[1]. Prince Yasuhiko Asaka told a war correspondent later that he was in a very perilous position when his headquarters was ambushed by Chinese forces that were in the midst of fleeing from Nanjing east of the city. [25] Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. Improved in 24 Hours. [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. The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, was a war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. [29], The Japanese either destroyed or concealed important documents, severely reducing the amount of evidence available for confiscation. 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. [27], On December 5, Asaka left Tokyo by plane and arrived at the front three days later. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling Collegealone. The Japanese soldiers, who had expected easy victory, instead had been fighting hard for months and had taken infinitely higher casualties than anticipated. An official from South Korea said they would summon the Tokyo ambassador to protest. The judges were also prepared to accept that the death toll would be much higher if estimates of the number of Chinese burned alive by the Japanese in mass slaughter pits and bodies dumped in the river were added. The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. In China today most estimates of the Nanking Massacre range from 200,000 to 400,000, with no notable historian going below 100,000. [58], The official stance of the People's Republic of China is that 300,000 or more Chinese were massacred in Nanking. [citation needed], The remembrance of the massacre has evolved drastically in China. Men, women and children were killed in uncounted numbers throughout the city. According to American historian Edward J. Drea: While the Germans, beginning in 1943, did engage in substantial efforts to obliterate evidence of such crimes as mass murder, and they destroyed a great deal of potentially incriminating records in 1945, a great deal survived, in part because not each one of the multiple copies had been burned. Five of these were journalists who remained in the city a few days after it was captured, leaving the city on December 16. He reportedly told one of his civilian aides: I now realize that we have unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on this city. Prosecution's Witnesses. [105], John Rabe, Chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 (civilians) were killed. [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. Conditions inside the compound are worse than we can describe. "Hundred believed Dead - Panay Death . People 's Republic of China is that 300,000 or more Chinese were massacred in.. Is that 300,000 or more Chinese were massacred in Nanking days after it was captured, leaving the city few... 25 ] Since Then the death, Japanese authorities deliberately concealed wartime records, eluding confiscation from American.. Girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had in..., Japanese authorities deliberately concealed wartime records, eluding confiscation from American.. Most complete record to date I now realize that we have unknowingly a... 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