nanking massacre death toll

[5] Instead they threw away their uniforms and weapons and hid among the city's civilian population. [25] Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. [26][27] However, emotional arguments and political interference in the debate have tended to hinder the construction of an academic consensus on the number of people killed in the atrocity. Nanking Massacre death toll. The debate on the death toll has gone on for many decades to the point where some historians have begun to question its usefulness on the grounds that excessive quibbling over the precise death toll has distracted from the study of other more important facets of the massacre. Anger over the events at Nanking . The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. [180][181][182], Dockworkers in Australia were horrified by the massacre and refused to load pig iron onto ships heading for Japan, leading to the Dalfram Dispute of 1938. Some of the lowest estimates have counted only 10,000 deaths,[2] while the government of China maintains that approximately 300,000 people were killed. . According to reports, Japanese troops torched newly built government buildings as well as the homes of many civilians. In July 1937 war broke out in northern China between China and Japan, and by August the fighting had spread to the city of Shanghai. [33] Bob Wakabayashi, a historian at York University, found out on the basis of the records of the Japanese Army alone could prove that at very least 29,240 people, or more likely 46,215 people, were massacred by the Japanese in Nanking in the opening weeks; when considering evidence other than military records, Wakabayashi concluded the total deaths in Nanjing and its neighbouring six rural counties in a 3-month period to be "far exceed 100,000 but fall short of 200,000". [108][109], According to documents in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, at least 300,000 Chinese were killed. Chinese teacher sacked for questioning death toll in Nanjing massacre. 83 and 85 on Canton Road. More than 30 women and girls have been raped. [citation needed], The remembrance of the massacre has evolved drastically in China. [42] For instance, after routing the Chinese in Nanking, Japanese soldiers fired upon and killed a large number of Chinese soldiers who were attempting to escape the battlefield by swimming across the Yangtze River. Some Chinese soldiers stripped civilians of their clothing in a desperate attempt to blend in, and many others were shot by the Chinese supervisory unit as they tried to flee.[21]. [12] Furthermore, this estimate includes an accusation that the Japanese Army murdered 57,418 Chinese POWs at Mufushan, though the latest research indicates that between 4,000 and 20,000 were massacred,[61][62] and it also includes the 112,266 corpses allegedly buried by the Chongshantang, though today many historians agree that the Chongshantang's records were at least exaggerated if not entirely fabricated. [56] By this definition the "Nanking Massacre" can symbolically be said to have lasted from 1931 to 1945, extended over the whole of China, and included ten million victims. [177] Indeed, there is only one sentence that refers to this event: "they [the Japanese troops] occupied that city in December. He met with division commanders, lieutenant-generals Kesago Nakajima and Heisuke Yanagawa, who informed him that the Japanese troops had almost completely surrounded 300,000 Chinese troops in the vicinity of Nanjing and that preliminary negotiations suggested that the Chinese were ready to surrender. Chang also states that not all rape victims were women. [19] The historicity of the event remains disputed in Japan. This definition was supported by Hora and other early scholars. Documents on the Rape of Nanking, p. 254. "[47] Here are two excerpts from his letters of 15 and 18 December 1937 to his family:[48]. But, as noted, no one actually counted the dead. One mosque was found destroyed and others found to be "filled with dead bodies." The Truth about the Nanjing Massacre. Five returned. The following day, on December 10, Rabe got his answer from the Generalissimo. [63], Pregnant women were targeted for murder, as their stomachs were often bayoneted, sometimes after rape. [143], He offered his apology to all survivors and to the relatives and friends of the victims. Minnie Vautrin was a Christian missionary who established Ginling Girls College in Nanking, which was within the established Safety Zone. The number 300,000 is displayed prominently at memorials and is the higher end of commonly accepted estimates. According to Navy veteran Sho Mitani, "The Army used a trumpet sound that meant 'Kill all Chinese who run away'. While the books' take on Nanjing is stilted and feels like the product of a committee, in various versions they acknowledge the deaths of thousands of Chinese including women and children, as well as looting, arson and assaults by Japanese soldiers. [61] [1], Japanese military records are a valuable source for estimating the number of Chinese POWs massacred by Japanese soldiers, but the number of civilians massacred is more difficult to determine. Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 112. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside. On 10 February 1938, Legation Secretary of the German Embassy, Rosen, wrote to his Foreign Ministry about a film made in December by Reverend John Magee to recommend its purchase. Some right-wing Japanese politicians have downplayed the death toll or denied outright that the Nanking atrocity happened. I shouldn't say all right. The extent of the atrocities is hotly debated, with numbers ranging from Japanese ultra-nationalist claims of several hundred, to the Chinese claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000. Nanjing Death Toll Graph. The Japanese army leadership assigned sections of the safety zone to some units to separate alleged plain-clothed soldiers from the civilians. Rape! What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers. At trial, Matsui went out of his way to protect Prince Asaka by shifting blame to lower-ranking division commanders. I watched with my own eyes as they looted the caf of our German baker Herr Kiessling. [9], On December 12, under heavy artillery fire and aerial bombardment, General Tang Sheng-chi ordered his men to retreat. After a while we would say something like, "It's my day to take a bath," and we took turns raping them. English Articles. I told them that after all our efforts to enhance the Imperial prestige, everything had been lost in one moment through the brutalities of the soldiers. [21][66] Within China scholars focus on defending the official figures and in the past the government has imposed censorship on historians who have suggested alternative numbers. From Judgment of the International Military Tribunal, On November 12, 1948, Matsui and Hirota, along with five other convicted Class-A war criminals, were sentenced to death by hanging. [18] However, in a 1942 speech Chiang Kai-shek raised that figure to "over 200,000 civilians". [citation needed], The government of Japan believes it can not be denied that the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts by the Japanese army occurred. Beginning, I believe, on the 19th or 20th of December, burning was carried on regularly for six weeks. The Nanjing massacre has also been described as one of the most barbaric episodes in the history of World War II although it officially began on September 1, 1939. . [39], In 1937, the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and its sister newspaper, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, covered a contest between two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda of the Japanese 16th Division. Two days later he defended his remarks, saying, "Even since I was a national Diet representative, I have said [repeatedly] there was no [Nanjing] massacre that resulted in murders of several hundred thousands of people. [135], Mei Xiao-ao, the son of Mei Ju-ao, a Chinese justice who was present at the Tokyo war crime tribunal, published an essay claiming that in the early 1960s, Mei's father, inspired by the recent publication of a Japanese study on the destruction caused by the atomic bombs, tried calling for greater study of the massacre by Chinese historians of the time, but his ideas received a cold reception; he was reportedly accused of "stirring up national hatred and revenge" against the Japanese, and some others felt that writing about "the Chinese defeat and misery in Nanjing amounted to hidden praise for the strength of the Japanese troops. The Nanjing Massacre (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Nnjng Dtsh, Japanese: , romanized: Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino . [40], However, the expansion of the definition of the Nanking Massacre to include areas outside of Nanking has not been without controversy. The Chinese scholars of the committee maintained that at least 300,000 were killed. [24], German businessman John Rabe was elected as its leader, in part because of his status as a member of the Nazi Party and the existence of the German-Japanese bilateral Anti-Comintern Pact. Other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried. The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (then spelled Nanking), then the capital of the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. Hiroshi Yoshida concludes "more than 200,000" in his book. [30] Others assert that lieutenant colonel Isamu Ch, Asaka's aide-de-camp, sent this order under the Prince's sign-manual without the Prince's knowledge or assent. [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. . . [70], By the year 2000 very little research had been done by Western scholars concerning the death toll of the Nanking Massacre, and instead most Western sources simply repeated the early death toll estimates, including those proposed in the 1930s and 1940s by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East, which put the toll at 100,000 or more, and by Miner Searle Bates, who said roughly 40,000. The Battle of Nanking ended on December 13, when the divisions of the Japanese Army entered the walled city of Nanjing. She said that the people of China "don't believe that an unequivocal and sincere apology has ever been made by Japan to China" and that a written apology from Japan would send a better message to the international community. Durdin stated "[i]t should be said that certain Japanese units exercised restraint and that certain Japanese officers tempered power with generosity and commission," but continued "the conduct of the Japanese army as a whole in Nanjing was a blot on the reputation of their country". After being stripped and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest and then had a bottle thrust into her vagina. [7] At the same time soldiers of the Japanese Army also committed random acts of murder against civilians, and engaged in rape, arson, and looting. [121], Kki Hirota, Prime Minister of Japan at an earlier stage of the war, and a diplomat during the atrocities at Nanjing, was convicted of participating in "the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy" (count 1), waging "a war of aggression and a war in violation of international laws, treaties, agreements and assurances against the Republic of China" (count 27) and count 55. In one estimate the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal put the death toll at more than 300,000, though the Tribunal also recorded other estimates including one of 430,000. [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. War crimes during the Internal conflict in Peru: 61,007 [see notes] . We thus have a total of more than 300,000 victims. [31] Nevertheless, even if Ch took the initiative, Asaka was nominally the officer in charge and gave no orders to stop the carnage. [134] Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao claims Mao never made any comment either contemporaneously or later in his life about the massacre, but did frequently remark with enduring bitterness about a political struggle between himself and Wang Ming which also occurred in December 1937. On the other hand, they fail to include corpses that were destroyed rather than buried and thus underestimate the death toll. During the post-war period, China . The mass murder at the Yangtze river was just one of the tragedies of the Nanking Massacre. [139] The publication of these articles triggered a vehement response from Japanese right-wingers regarding the Japanese treatment of the war crimes. It was the Japanese Army going nuts. Ono Kenji, "Massacre Near Mufushan," in The Nanking Atrocity, 193738: Complicating the Picture, ed. ", "Case 15 There are about 540 refugees crowded in No. [73], According to Canadian scholar David Bruce MacDonald, the higher range of estimates of over 100,000 victims are more likely to be accurate,[74] whereas by contrast the Irish historian LM Cullen argues that the lower range of estimates, which put the death toll in tens of thousands, "are probably the most credible. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The death toll has been actively contested among scholars since the 1980s, with typical estimates ranging from 40,000 to over 300,000. Fail to include corpses that were destroyed rather than buried and thus underestimate the toll. The other hand, they fail to include corpses that were destroyed than! ] the publication of these articles triggered a vehement response from Japanese right-wingers regarding the number of victims buried the... 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