Handouts for Grades 11-12

Handout 2.2:
The Rape of Nanking and Other Atrocities

In 1928, the Chinese government moved the capital of China to Nanking. The city normally held about 250,000 people, but by the mid-1930s its population had swollen to more than one million. Many of them were refugees, fleeing from the Japanese armies that had invaded China in 1931.

On November 11, after securing control of Shanghai, the Japanese army advanced towards Nanking. In December 1937, Japanese troops invaded the city of Nanking. Much of the city was destroyed by bombing raids. The Japanese Imperial forces marched thousands of Chinese civilians into the countryside and murdered them; they raped women, and looted and burned people's homes. The large-scale massacre and gross mistreatment of Chinese people at Nanking became known as the Rape of Nanking. The following timeline highlights events related to the massacre.

12 Nov 1937 Japanese troops capture Shanghai after three months of fierce fighting. The march towards Nanking (now Nanking) begins and the "Three-all" policy ("Loot all, kill all, burn all") is used to terrorize civilians along the advancing route.
22 Nov 1937 The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone is organized by a group of foreigners to shelter Chinese refugees.
12 Dec 1937 Chinese soldiers are ordered to withdraw from Nanking
13 Dec 1937 Japanese troops capture Nanking
14 Dec 1937 The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone lodges the first protest letter against Japanese atrocities with the Japanese Embassy.
19 Feb 1938 The last of the 69 protest letters against Japanese atrocities is sent by the Safety Zone Committee to the Japanese Embassy and the Committee is renamed as the Nanking International Relief Committee.
   

Many eyewitness accounts of the Nanking Massacre were provided by Chinese civilian survivors and western nationals living in Nanking at the time. The number of Chinese killed in the massacre has been subject to much debate. The Encyclopedia Britannica (1999-2000 Britannica.com) states that estimates of the number of Chinese killed ranges from 100,000 to more than 300,000.

Several accounts of the Nanking Massacre come from the group of 25 foreigners (mostly American, but also some German, Danish, and Russian people) who had established a neutral area called the International Safety Zone to shelter the Chinese refugees whose lives had been threatened and homes destroyed by the invading Japanese soldiers. When Nanking fell, the Zone housed over 250,000 refugees. The committee members of the Zone found ways to provide these refugees with the basic needs of food, shelter, and medical care.



Miner Searle Bates

 Dr. Miner Searle Bates was a missionary and professor of history at the University of Nanking. He was also an organizing member of the Nanking International Safety Zone Committee.

Only two days after the fall of Nanking, Bates lodged his first protest letter to the Japanese Embassy and continued to do so throughout the massacre at Nanking. Following is the letter he wrote to the Japanese Embassy.

December 27, 1937
Beginning more than a week ago, we were promised by you that within a few days order would be restored by replacement of troops, resumption of regular discipline, increase of military police, and so forth. Yet shameful disorder continues, and we see no serious effort to stop it. Let me give a few examples from University property [the University of Nanking was within the Zone]....

Last night between eleven and twelve o'clock, a motor car with three Japanese military men came to the main University gate, claiming that they were sent by headquarters to inspect. They forcibly prevented our watchman from giving an alarm, and kept him with them while they found and raped three girls, one of whom is only eleven years old. One of the girls they took away with them.

Stray soldiers continue to seize men to work for them, causing much fear and unnecessary inconvenience. For example, a soldier insisted on taking a worker from the Hospital yesterday; and several of our own servants and watchmen have been taken.

Several of our residences are entered daily by soldiers looking for women, food, and other articles. Two houses within one hour this morning.

...Yesterday seven different times there came groups of three or four soldiers, taking clothes, food and money from those who have some left after previous lootings of the same type. They raped seven women, including a girl of twelve. In the night larger groups of twelve or fourteen soldiers came four times and raped twenty women.

The life of the whole people is filled with suffering and fear - all caused by soldiers. Your officers have promised them protection, but the soldiers every day injure hundreds of persons most seriously. A few policemen help certain places, and we are grateful for them. But that does not bring peace and order. Often it merely shifts the bad acts of the soldiers to nearby buildings where there are no policemen....

While I have been writing this letter, a soldier has forcibly taken a woman from one of our teachers' houses, and with his revolver refused to let an American enter. Is this order?

Many people now want to return to their homes, but they dare not because of rape, robbery, and seizure of men continuing every day and night. Only serious efforts to enforce orders, using many police and real punishments will be of any use. In several places the situation is a little better, but it is still disgraceful after two weeks of army terrorism. More than promises is now needed.

(Published in American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre, 1937-38, Edited by Martha Lund Smalley, Yale Divinity School Library, Occasional Publication No. 9, 1997, pp. 31-32.)


John Rabe

John Rabe was a German businessman and leader of the Nazi Party in Nanking. He saved so many lives during the Nanking Massacre that some refer to him as the "Oskar Schindler of China." When Rabe returned to Germany, he wrote to Adolf Hitler, telling him what he had witnessed in Nanking, and hoped that Hitler could prevent further atrocities by the Japanese military. Two days later, the Gestapo arrested him. Fortunately, he was released, but he was warned never to talk publicly or publish anything about the events taking place in Nanking. Following is an excerpt from the diary of John Rabe.

December 16, 1937
All the shelling and bombing we have thus far experienced are nothing in comparison to the terror that we are going through now. There is not a single shop outside our Zone that has not been looted, and now pillaging, rape, murder, and mayhem are occurring inside the Zone as well. There is not a vacant house, whether with or without a foreign flag, that has not been broken into and looted ...

No Chinese even dares set foot outside his house! When the gates to my garden are opened to let my car leave the grounds - where I have already taken in over a hundred of the poorest refugees - women and children on the street outside kneel and bang their heads against the ground, pleading to be allowed to camp on my garden grounds. You simply cannot conceive of the misery.

I've just heard that hundreds more disarmed Chinese soldiers have been led out of our Zone to be shot, including 50 of our police who are to be executed for letting soldiers in.

The road to Hsiakwan is nothing but a field of corpses strewn with the remains of military equipment... There are piles of corpses outside the gate ... It may be that the disarmed Chinese will be forced to do the job before they're killed. We Europeans are all paralyzed with horror. There are executions everywhere, some are being carried out with machine guns outside the barracks of the War Ministry.


(Published in The Good Man of Nanking. The Diaries of John Rabe, Edited by Erwin Wickert, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1998, p. 98-102.)

Sexual Slavery

An estimated 200,000 women from Korea, the Philippines, China, Burma, Indonesia and other Japanese occupied territories were forced by the Japanese military forces to work in brothels. The Japanese soldiers referred to them as "comfort women". Only about 30% of the women survived the war. Following is the story of a former "comfort woman" who is now living in North Korea.

Testimony of Kim Young-shil

"I am Kim Young-shil.. I was born on October 23, 1923 and was raised in Yang-gang-do, Bochon County.

It was 1941.One day I encountered a well-dressed man in western clothes. He asked me if I wanted to have a good job. Thinking that any job would be better than working as a maid, I accepted his offer and followed him to where there were already eight other girls ahead of me. They were all about 14 or 15 years old.

So we all got on a truck, and after about 30 minutes' ride, we arrived at a place where there were many Japanese soldiers. From there we were taken north near the border of China and Russia. There was a huge military camp, and many girls had already arrived before us. A soldier came up to me and put a name tag on my chest. It had a Japanese name "Eiko" written on it. He then told me, "From now on, you must not speak Korean. If you do, we will kill you. Now, your name is Eiko:"

The officer who took us to the camp wore a good-looking uniform with a three-star insignia. He came into my room that night. Scared, I jumped up. He sat down, laid his sword on the floor, and proceeded to take off his clothes. Why was he doing this? Where is my job? I started to cry. He shouted. "You obey my orders. I will kill you if you don't." He then held me down and raped me. I was a virgin until that moment.

From the following day on, I was forced to service sex to ten to 20 soldiers every day, and 40 to 50 on Sundays. We were exhausted, weakened, and some of us could not even eat meals. We were in the state of “half-dead.” Some girls became really sick and could not recover from the ordeal. The soldiers took them away. We did not know what happened to them but we never saw them again. A new batch of girls arrived to replace the missing ones, like we did.

There was a girl next to my cubicle. She was younger than I, and her Japanese name was Tokiko. One day an officer overheard her speaking to me and accused her of speaking Korean. He dragged her out to a field and ordered all of us to come out there. We all obeyed. He said, "This girl spoke Korean. So she must die. You will be killed if you do too. Now, watch how she dies." He drew his sword. Horrified, I closed my eyes and turned my face away. When I opened my eyes, I saw her severed head on the ground.

On Sundays we were made especially busy. Soldiers stood in line in front of our cubicles. …

I was totally exhausted. I could keep neither my sense of humiliation nor my dignity. I felt like a living corpse. When soldiers came to my room and did it to me one after another, it was done to a lifeless body. Again. And again. And again....”



(Excerpted from Comfort Women Speak edited by Sangmie Choi Schellstede, published by Holmes and Meier, pp. 48 -5 1)

Other Atrocities

Japan's government sponsored experiments into biological and chemical warfare. Under the leadership of Ishii Shiro, Unit 731 and other similar units performed tests on living humans. For example they injected victims with germs to see the effects and to test the effectiveness of vaccinations. They performed operations on living humans without the use of anaesthetic. To keep their activities secret, the victims of medical experiments were then killed. These units killed thousands of POWs and civilians, mainly from China. Germ-filled bombs produced by these units were dropped on Chinese cities. Chemical weapons were mass-produced in Japan and used widely. It is estimated that even today between 600,000 and 2,000,000 shells filled with poisonous chemicals remain buried in China.

Over 61,000 Allied POWs and 250,000 Asian civilians (mainly Chinese, Malay, Tamil and Burmese) were used as slave labourers to build the 415 kilometre-long Burma-Thailand Railway, the infamous "Death Railway.” It is estimated that half of the Asian labourers, and one-fifth of the Allied POWs, perished on the railroad.

Japanese private corporations also relied on slave labourers during the War. An example is Kajima Corporation, a well­ known Japanese company. In 1944, a group of 986 Chinese were taken to Japan and forced to work in Kajima's mining and construction site at Hanaoka in northeast Honshu. More than 400 of them died from torture, starvation, and the horrifying conditions of Kajima's slave camp.

After Japanese Imperial forces captured Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies) in March 1942, over 40,000 Dutch soldiers and 100,000 Dutch civilians, including women and children, were interned. As many as 14,000 Dutch civilians died in captivity.


back to top