The Nanjing Massacre, when hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians and soldiers were killed by Japanese forces in and around China’s former capital. Seventy years ago, on December 13, the Imperial Japanese Army began the capture of Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. In December 1937, during this war, the Japanese army invaded Nanjing, China and began a campaign of massacres.
Full-scale hostilities between the two countries did not erupt until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, when the Japanese army attacked the important entry point to Beijing, China. On December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Nanjing, and the next six weeks went down in history as the Nanjing Massacre. Eyewitnesses from that period state that within six weeks of the fall of Nanjing, Japanese troops carried out a massacre.
Unlike the executions of prisoners of war ordered by the Japanese division commanders, most of the atrocities against civilians in Nanking were committed by undisciplined soldiers. After World War II, when Japanese soldiers and officials were tried and executed for war crimes, courts found that at least 200,000 people had been killed in the Nanjing rapes. Instead of denying the allegations, the veterans interviewed confirmed that the massacre took place and publicly described and acknowledged their role in the atrocity.
Some Japanese historians continue to claim that the Nanjing Massacre is Chinese Communist Party propaganda, although most Japanese now accept that the atrocities did take place. The true nature of the massacre has been disputed and exploited for propaganda purposes by Japanese historical revisionists, apologists, and nationalists. The extent of the atrocities is debated, and the numbers range from the Chinese Communist Party’s current claim of a death toll of 300,000 civilians to the Japanese military’s claim at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that the casualties were military. in nature and that there were no organized massacres or atrocities against civilians. Historians agree that the Japanese military indiscriminately killed many civilians in the city of Nanjing and that they should be counted among those killed in the massacre.
According to the verdict of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal on March 10, 1947, the Japanese army killed “more than 190,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers with machine guns, whose corpses were burned to destroy evidence. In Nanjing, the war began. The Criminal Tribunal sentenced and hanged three lieutenants of the Japanese army for beheading hundreds of Chinese prisoners of war, the Nanjing Tribunal also tried and executed the Japanese general who commanded the troops in Nanjing.
Similar disasters have occurred in the lower Yangtze River and other cities in eastern China, but what happened in Nanjing has become a symbol of the inhumanity of Japanese aggression and the painful narrative of Chinese victims. Nanjing, the capital of Kuomintang China at the time, was in ruins, and it took decades for the city and its people to recover from the brutal attack. The army ransacked and burned the surrounding towns and cities, destroying more than a third of the buildings.
When the Japanese army surrounded Nanjing on December 12, they detained tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and about 200,000 civilians in the city. Over the next few weeks, Japanese soldiers carried out Matsui’s orders, carrying out numerous mass executions and tens of thousands of rapes. On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops occupied Nanjing, then the Chinese capital, and within two months killed as many as 300,000 civilians and many unarmed Chinese soldiers.
Some of the worst happened within six weeks of the Japanese raid on the Chinese capital of Nanjing (now known as Nanjing) in December 1937. The rapes and murders that soon engulfed Nanjing began before the Japanese army even reached the city walls. . In just six weeks during which the Japanese perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre, beginning on December 13, 1937, between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women were brutally raped and sexually harassed by the invading soldiers.
In late 1937, over a period of six weeks, the Japanese army brutally massacred hundreds of thousands of people, including soldiers and civilians, in the Chinese city of Nanjing. After the bloody victory of the Anti-Japanese War in Shanghai, the Japanese turned their attention to Nanjing. Often referred to as the “Nanjing Rat”, it refers to the many murders and rapes committed by the Japanese during the original occupation of Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese War. These horrific events are known as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing, because between 20,000 and 80,000 women were sexually assaulted.
The Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Nanjing Massacre (December 1937-January 1938), was the massacre and destruction of Chinese citizens and surrendering soldiers by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army after the occupation of Nanjing in China on December 13, 1937. Sino-Japanese War, before World War II. The Nanjing Massacre or Nanjing Rape (original Roman Pinyin for Nanjing) was an accidental mass murder, rape, robbery and arson incident in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. The Battle of Nanjing during the Anti-Japanese War. In the ensuing massacre, 20,000 Chinese men of military age were killed and about 20,000 rapes were committed; overall, the total death toll in and around Nanjing was about 200,000, according to the International Military Tribunal.
But as reports of atrocities grew in other parts of China, observers were quick to shelve the specifics of Nanjing in late 1937 to a different, more general conclusion. Although Chiang faced a flurry of attacks from other historians and the publisher responsible for translating his book into Japanese, the debate over what happened in Nanking between December 1937 and January 1938 raged even before publication. his book. This book awakened Westerners to the truth about the horrific massacre of Chinese soldiers and civilians by the Japanese army before World War II.