Nanjing, December 1937: The Fall of the Capital and the Massacre

Five months after the shots at the Marco Polo Bridge, the war reached China’s capital. Nanjing fell on 13 December 1937 after a four-day assault on its Ming walls and a retreat across the Yangtze that turned into a disaster. For the next six weeks Japanese troops killed prisoners and civilians, raped women and girls, and looted and burned the city, while a small group of foreigners ran a refugee zone in its center. This chapter tells how the capital was lost, what happened afterward, how the crimes were judged, and why the numbers are still argued over.

Why it mattered

Nanjing had been the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government since 1927. It held the ministries, the foreign embassies, the Central Military Academy and the tomb of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic, on the slope of Purple Mountain. Many in Tokyo expected that taking it would end the war, or at least bring Chiang to terms. It did neither. The government had already moved west, and the war went on for almost eight more years.

What the capture of Nanjing did bring was one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. In the weeks after 13 December 1937, Japanese soldiers killed Chinese prisoners of war by the thousands, killed civilians in the streets and in their homes, raped women and girls on a scale that shocked even the Japanese embassy, and looted and burned much of the city. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) later found that “approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation” and that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners were murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity in the first six weeks (IMTFE Judgment, ch. VIII).

Nanjing also became one of the most argued-over events of the war. Unusually, it was witnessed and recorded at the time by a group of Americans and Europeans who stayed in the city, kept diaries, wrote protests to the Japanese embassy, took photographs and shot film. Their records, the testimony of survivors, Japanese soldiers’ own diaries, and the postwar trials make the basic facts certain. How many people died is less certain, and the question has been a point of dispute between China and Japan, and within Japan, ever since. This chapter gives the figures and explains where they come from.

After Shanghai: the decision to defend the capital

The three-month battle for Shanghai, told in Chapter 6, cost Chiang the best of his German-trained divisions. When the Japanese 10th Army landed at Hangzhou Bay, at Jinshanwei on the coast south of Shanghai, on 5 November 1937, the Chinese line was outflanked. The withdrawal from Shanghai in mid-November became a rout. Suzhou fell on 19 November. The fortified lines the Chinese had built between Shanghai and Nanjing in the mid-1930s, sometimes called the “Chinese Hindenburg Line,” were abandoned with little fighting because the retreating troops were too disorganized to man them (Harmsen, Nanjing 1937).

Chiang now had to decide what to do about the capital. In mid-November he held a series of meetings with his senior commanders. Most of them, including Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi and the chief of staff He Yingqin, argued that Nanjing could not be held. The city lay in a bend of the Yangtze with the river behind it and hills in front of it, and the army that would have to defend it had just been beaten. Chiang’s German military adviser, Alexander von Falkenhausen, gave the same advice. Chiang himself believed that the capital and Sun Yat-sen’s tomb could not be given up without a fight, and that a stand there would help China’s case abroad, where the Brussels Conference was meeting in November to discuss the war (Taylor, The Generalissimo; van de Ven, China at War).

The one senior general who spoke for defending the city was Tang Shengzhi, a Hunanese commander who had fought both for and against Chiang in the 1920s and who held a high post on the Military Affairs Commission. He was in poor health. He volunteered to command the defense and promised to hold the city to the death. Chiang organized the Nanjing Garrison Force on 20 November, and Tang was formally named its commander on 25 November. His orders of 30 November were to “defend the established defense lines at any cost” (Battle of Nanking, citing Yamamoto and Taylor). Historians since have judged the decision a political one: the capital could not be given up without a fight, even if it could not be held for long (Mitter, Forgotten Ally; Harmsen, Nanjing 1937).

Tang’s troops were a patchwork. Some divisions, like Sun Yuanliang’s 88th, had been among the best in the army before Shanghai and were now shadows of themselves. Others came from the provinces. The Wikipedia summary of David Askew’s unit-by-unit study puts the force inside Nanjing at between 73,790 and 81,500 men, and a Chinese staff officer of the garrison, T’an Tao-p’ing, gave 81,000. Hata Ikuhiko estimates about 100,000 and Kasahara Tokushi about 150,000 (Battle of Nanking, citing Askew, Yamamoto, Hata and Kasahara). Thousands were raw recruits. About 16,000 young men and teenagers were pressed into service in and around the city, and the 16,000 to 18,000 fresh troops of the 2nd Army who came from Hankou were mostly new soldiers. Many had never fired a rifle.

The government leaves: Hankou and Chongqing

On the same day that Chiang created the Nanjing Garrison Force, 20 November 1937, the National Government announced that it would move the capital to Chongqing, in Sichuan, far up the Yangtze behind the Three Gorges. In practice most ministries and the military command went first to Hankou, one of the three cities that make up Wuhan, about 500 km upriver. Hankou served as the working wartime capital until it fell in October 1938, and only then did Chongqing take over in full (Mitter, Forgotten Ally; van de Ven, China at War). Wikipedia’s account of the battle names both cities, which reflects this two-step move.

The evacuation emptied the city. Before the war Nanjing had more than a million people. By December an estimated 500,000 to 750,000 had fled (Nanjing Massacre, Wikipedia summary), and most who could afford a boat ticket or a seat on a train had gone. Those who stayed were mostly the poor, the old, people from the surrounding countryside who had fled into the city, and the families of soldiers. Estimates of the civilians left in the city in December range from about 200,000, the working figure of the foreign committee that ran the refugee zone, to considerably more in later Chinese studies. Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, flew out before dawn on 7 December. The mayor and most of the city government left the same day.

The race from Shanghai

On the Japanese side, the march on Nanjing was pushed by the field commanders more than it was planned in Tokyo. On 7 November 1937 the Army General Staff formed the Central China Area Army under Gen. Matsui Iwane, who also kept command of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, and joined it to the newly landed 10th Army under Lt. Gen. Yanagawa Heisuke. The same day the deputy chief of staff, Tada Hayao, drew an “operation restriction line” through Suzhou and Jiaxing, west of which the armies were not to go. Tokyo wanted to end the Shanghai fighting, not start a new campaign (Battle of Nanking, citing Army General Staff records; Peattie, Drea and van de Ven, The Battle for China).

Matsui and Yanagawa wanted Nanjing. The 10th Army crossed the restriction line on its own, and the Shanghai Expeditionary Army followed. Tokyo gave way: Tada abolished the line on 24 November and approved the Nanjing operation a few days later, and on 1 December he flew to Shanghai to deliver the order, by which time the divisions were already well on their way (Battle of Nanking). On 2 December Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, an uncle by marriage of Emperor Hirohito, arrived to take over the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, so that Matsui, who was suffering from tuberculosis and malaria, could command the whole area army.

The armies advanced on several routes. The Shanghai Expeditionary Army pushed west along the Shanghai–Nanjing railway and the Yangtze through Wuxi, Changzhou and Zhenjiang, with the 16th Division under Lt. Gen. Nakajima Kesago and the 9th Division heading for the eastern side of the city and Purple Mountain, and the 13th Division’s Yamada Detachment moving along the river toward Mufushan. The 10th Army swung inland from Hangzhou Bay around the south side of Lake Tai, with Lt. Gen. Tani Hisao’s 6th Division and the 114th Division aimed at the southern gates, the 18th Division toward Wuhu upriver, and the Kunisaki Detachment crossing to the north bank to cut the escape route at Pukou. Japanese troops lived off the land on the march. Supply had not been planned for an advance this far, and foraging became looting, burning and killing in the towns along the way. Many historians date the start of the atrocities to this march, weeks before the army reached the capital (Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38; Harmsen, Nanjing 1937).

Two Japanese newspaper reports from this march later became notorious. The Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun ran a series about two second lieutenants of the 16th Division, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, who were said to be competing to be the first to kill 100 Chinese with their swords on the way to Nanjing. By the time they reached Purple Mountain the paper reported 106 for Mukai and 105 for Noda, and a new contest to 150. Whether the killings happened as reported, and whether the victims were soldiers in combat or prisoners, has been argued in Japan ever since; the historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi concluded that the story was largely invented to boost morale at home. The two officers were tried for it in Nanjing after the war and executed (Nanjing Massacre and Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, Wikipedia summaries; Wakabayashi, 2000).

The Safety Zone

As the government left, a few foreigners decided to stay. Most were American missionaries who taught at the University of Nanking and Ginling College or worked at the University Hospital; a few were German and other European businessmen. In November they modeled a plan on the refugee zone that a French Jesuit, Father Robert Jacquinot de Besange, had set up in Shanghai. They would mark off a neutral area in the western part of the city, free of soldiers and military installations, where civilians could shelter during the battle. On 22 November 1937 they formed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone and elected as chairman John Rabe, the head of the Siemens office in Nanjing (Nanking Safety Zone, Wikipedia summary; Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking).

Rabe was an unlikely leader. He had worked for Siemens in China since 1910, and he was a member of the Nazi Party, which he had joined in 1934. The committee chose him partly because a German, from a country friendly with Japan, might carry more weight with the Japanese army. Lewis S. C. Smythe, an American sociologist at the University of Nanking, was secretary. Other members included Miner Searle Bates, a historian at the same university; John Magee, an Episcopal missionary of the American Church Mission; the University Hospital’s Dr. C. S. Trimmer; Charles Riggs; W. Plumer Mills; and the German businessmen Eduard Sperling and Georg Schultze-Pantin. Four British members left before the city fell. George Fitch of the YMCA became the zone’s director, and Hang Liwu served as Chinese co-director. Minnie Vautrin of Ginling College and Dr. Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the University Hospital, were among the foreigners whose work made the zone function (International Committee, Wikipedia summary).

The zone covered about 3.86 square kilometers, roughly a square mile and a half, in the northwest-central part of the city, bounded by Zhongshan Road on the east, Hanzhong Road on the south, and Xikang Road on the west. Some accounts give about two square miles. It held the American university, Ginling College, the American embassy and several other embassies, and government buildings that the committee used as camps. The city government handed control of the area to the committee on 1 December, with stores of rice and flour and some police. The Chinese military was slow to clear its troops and guns out of the zone, and the Japanese never formally recognized it; their attitude toward it wavered between ambiguity and outright refusal (Nanking Safety Zone; Brook, ed., Documents on the Rape of Nanking).

By the time the city fell, the zone was crowded with refugees. The committee and later historians put the number at 200,000 to 250,000, many of them people from outside the walls whose houses the Chinese army had burned to clear fields of fire. The committee ran 25 or 26 camps in university buildings, schools and public halls; most refugees found their own space in houses and courtyards. Ginling College, designed for a few hundred students, was turned over to women and children, and at times held up to 10,000 (Minnie Vautrin, Wikipedia summary; McLean County Museum of History). Rabe sheltered more than 600 people in the garden of his own house on Xiaofenqiao, under a huge Nazi flag stretched out as a warning to Japanese aircraft and soldiers.

Committee members also tried to stop the battle. Before the final assault they tried to arrange a short truce under which the Chinese army would withdraw and the Japanese would march in without fighting for the city. Neither side accepted. On 12 December, as the defense was collapsing, Tang asked Rabe and Sperling to help arrange a cease-fire; by then it was too late (Battle of Nanking, citing Rabe’s diary).

The assault on the walls, 9–12 December

The Japanese reached the outer defenses on 5 and 6 December and fought through them in four or five days. The Chinese had planned two lines: an outer ring of positions in the hills ten to fifteen kilometers out, and the city wall itself. By 9 December the outer line had gone, and the Japanese were at the wall on the east and south. That evening, after the first clash at Zhongshan Gate on the east side, Matsui had a summons to surrender drafted. Japanese bombers scattered thousands of copies over the city. It invited Tang to send envoys to Zhongshan Gate on 10 December to negotiate a peaceful occupation. Matsui’s staff officers waited at the gate. Tang sent no reply, and at 1300 on 10 December Matsui ordered a general attack (Battle of Nanking; Harmsen, Nanjing 1937).

Four sectors decided the battle. East of the city, Nakajima’s 16th Division attacked Purple Mountain, the 448-meter ridge that overlooked the eastern wall and the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. It was held by the Training Brigade of the Central Military Academy under Gui Yongqing, among the best troops in the garrison, who fought for the peaks from trench to trench. Matsui had forbidden artillery fire on the southern slope to spare Sun’s tomb and the Ming Xiaoling, the tomb of the first Ming emperor. Once the Japanese took the second peak, their guns could fire straight down on the wall. On 12 December artillery brought down a large section of the wall at Zhongshan Gate (Battle of Nanking).

On the southeast, the 9th Division’s 36th Infantry Regiment reached Guanghua Gate. On the evening of 10 December its engineers blew a hole in the wall and a small force got a foothold inside the gate, where it was trapped for two days as the Chinese 87th Division and units of the 83rd Corps counterattacked. On the south, Tani’s 6th Division attacked Yuhuatai, the “Terrace of Raining Flowers,” a low plateau a kilometer or so outside Zhonghua Gate, held by the 88th Division. The fighting there was the hardest of the battle. By Japanese records the 6th Division lost about 2,240 men, 566 of them killed, before it overran the plateau around midday on 12 December. The 88th Division was all but destroyed (Battle of Nanking, citing Japanese records).

Zhonghua Gate, the great southern gate, was attacked from 11 December. About 300 Japanese got over the wall that day and were thrown back. On 12 December artillery and tanks broke the wall, and by nightfall the 6th and 114th Divisions held the gate. Farther west the 10th Army attacked Shuixi Gate with tanks. In the early hours of 13 December, at about 0400, men of the 36th Regiment climbed onto Guanghua Gate and raised their flag. By late morning all the major gates were in Japanese hands (Battle of Nanking).

12 December: retreat to the river

On 11 December Chiang telegraphed Tang authorizing him to abandon the city. Tang hesitated for a day. On the afternoon of 12 December, with Yuhuatai and Zhonghua Gate gone and the wall breached on the east, he called his commanders together. Just after 1700 he issued the plan: most units were to break out through the Japanese lines at 2300 that night and reassemble in Anhui province, and only a few were to cross the Yangtze. Tang himself crossed the river that evening and escaped through Pukou on the north bank, less than a day before the Kunisaki Detachment occupied it (Battle of Nanking). The order was poorly passed on. Some units, including the 87th Division, never received it, and many commanders simply left their men.

What followed was a disaster. Instead of breaking out to the south and east, tens of thousands of soldiers, and many civilians with them, headed north through the city toward the river, choking Zhongshan North Road. At Yijiang Gate only half the gateway was open. Song Xilian’s 36th Division, posted near the gate and the docks to stop unauthorized retreat, had not received Tang’s order and fired on the crowd. Hundreds died in the crush or under fire. Around 2100 a Chinese tank tried to force its way through and was destroyed by a grenade (Battle of Nanking, summarizing Harmsen and the contemporary reports). Abandoned uniforms, rifles and equipment piled up in the streets; the New York Times correspondent Tillman Durdin described the roads to the river littered with guns and vehicles.

At the river, there were few boats. Tang had sent many of the larger vessels upriver to Hankou, in part so that his troops could not easily flee, and much of the waterfront at Xiaguan was burning after Japanese bombardment. Soldiers fought over the junks and sampans that were left, overloaded them until some capsized, and tried to cross on doors, logs and planks. The Yangtze there is more than a kilometer wide, cold and fast in December. Japanese patrols and, from the morning of 13 December, Japanese warships coming up the river fired on men in the water. The 36th Division got about 3,000 to 4,000 men across, about half its strength. The 2nd Army under Xu Yuanquan, better organized, took off 11,851 men in about 20 private boats before the Japanese navy closed the river. The 87th Division reached the wharves late with about 3,000 men; about 300 survived (Battle of Nanking). The Cantonese troops of the 66th and 83rd Corps had better luck: they followed the order to break out to the east and some got through the Japanese lines.

Upriver the same day, Japanese naval aircraft bombed the American gunboat USS Panay, which had taken off the last American embassy staff and several journalists and was escorting three Standard Oil tankers about 45 km above the city. Panay sank at 1554 on 12 December. Two of her crew and an Italian journalist, Sandro Sandri, died, and dozens were wounded. The sinking, and the crisis it caused between Washington and Tokyo, are the subject of Chapter 8.

13 December: the city falls

Japanese troops entered Nanjing from the south and east on the morning of 13 December 1937. There was little organized resistance left. The Yamada Detachment took the Mufushan forts along the river to the north on 14 December. The Japanese reported 84,000 Chinese killed and 10,500 captured in the battle, figures that the historian Masahiro Yamamoto considers inflated; estimates of Chinese soldiers killed in the fighting itself, as distinct from those killed after capture, range widely (Battle of Nanking). Japanese records put their own losses in the battle for the city at 1,558 killed and 4,619 wounded, and about 26,000 killed and wounded in the advance on Nanjing as a whole.

Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers were trapped inside the walls or on the riverbank. Many threw away their uniforms, took civilian clothes from houses and shops, and tried to hide among the refugees in the Safety Zone. Others surrendered in large groups, sometimes after the Japanese promised to spare them. What the Japanese army did with these men began the massacre.

Five Western reporters were still in the city: Durdin of the New York Times, Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News, C. Yates McDaniel of the Associated Press and Arthur Menken of Paramount newsreels, with Leslie Smith of Reuters. Most of them left on 15 and 16 December aboard foreign gunboats, including the American Oahu, and their first dispatches, filed from the ships and from Shanghai, told the world of mass executions of prisoners and the killing of civilians. Durdin later estimated that about 33,000 had died in Nanjing, about 20,000 of them executed as prisoners (Battle of Nanking, summarizing Durdin’s reports).

The massacre: December 1937 to February 1938

The Japanese called the operations of the following days “mopping up” (sōtō). Units combed the city and the Safety Zone for soldiers in hiding. Any man with calluses on his hands, a mark from a helmet or a pack strap, or a soldier’s haircut could be taken. The IMTFE found that “more than 20,000 Chinese men of military age are known to have died in this fashion,” marched out of the city in groups and shot or bayoneted, many of them at the riverbank where the bodies could be pushed into the water (IMTFE Judgment). Prisoners who had surrendered in large numbers were killed in mass executions along the Yangtze at Xiaguan, at Mufushan, and at other sites north and west of the city. The Yamada Detachment reported capturing more than 14,000 men near Mufushan. Diaries of soldiers of its 65th Infantry Regiment, collected and published in Japan in 1996, describe the killing of most of them on the riverbank on the nights of 16 and 17 December (Ono, Fujiwara and Honda, eds., 1996; Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity).

The army’s own records show that the killing of prisoners was policy in some units, not only the act of soldiers out of control. Nakajima Kesago’s diary for 13 December, withheld for decades and published in Japan in the 1980s, recorded that his 16th Division was following a general policy of not taking prisoners and described units disposing of thousands of captured men (Nanjing Massacre and Historiography, Wikipedia summaries; Yoshida Yutaka). Prince Asaka’s headquarters is reported to have issued an order to “kill all captives.” Whether Asaka signed it, or whether his intelligence officer Chō Isamu issued it in his name without his knowledge, has never been settled, and the order itself has not been found; Ono Kenji’s study of the 65th Regiment’s records points to the prince’s headquarters (Prince Asaka, Wikipedia summary). What is certain is that no order to stop the killing came from Asaka.

Civilians were killed too, in great numbers and often for no reason that anyone could see: people shot in the streets, families killed in their homes, men killed for resisting the rape of their wives or daughters. Rape was the crime the foreign witnesses wrote about most. Soldiers went from house to house and into the Safety Zone camps, at night and in daylight, seizing women and girls. The IMTFE put the number at about 20,000 in the first month; other estimates range from a few thousand to 80,000 (IMTFE Judgment; Nanjing Massacre, Wikipedia summary). Rabe wrote in his diary on 17 December that up to 1,000 women and girls were said to have been raped the previous night, about 100 at Ginling College alone (Rabe diary, quoted by the McLean County Museum of History).

The city was also stripped. Soldiers took food, money, watches, bicycles, rickshaws and anything else of value, then often set fire to the buildings. The IMTFE found that “after looting shops and warehouses, the Japanese soldiers frequently set fire to them,” and that “approximately one-third of the city was thus destroyed” (IMTFE Judgment). Fires burned for weeks along Taiping Road and in the commercial streets south of the zone. Even foreign property was not spared; the American, British and German embassies and residences were broken into.

In their words

The Japanese have looted widely yesterday and today, have destroyed schools, have killed citizens, and raped women.

The foreigners of the Safety Zone could not stop this, but they could stand in the way of it. Vautrin stood at the gate of Ginling day and night to turn soldiers away. Bates was pushed down a flight of stairs by Japanese military police when he asked about a kidnapped student, and he and others were threatened at pistol point. Wilson, born in Nanjing to missionary parents, was for a time the only surgeon treating the wounded at the University Hospital. Rabe used his Nazi armband to drive soldiers out of houses. Smythe wrote 69 letters to the Japanese embassy between 14 December 1937 and 19 February 1938, listing specific cases of murder, rape and looting and asking for protection (Yale Divinity School Library, Smythe biography). The embassy’s diplomats were sympathetic but had no authority over the army. The committee’s reports were later published in Shanghai in 1939 as Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, edited by Hsu Shuhsi, and form the core of Timothy Brook’s Documents on the Rape of Nanking.

John Magee owned a 16 mm movie camera. Working at the risk of having it seized, he filmed the refugee camps, the wounded and burned in the University Hospital, and the destruction in the city. He could not film killings as they happened. George Fitch smuggled the reels out of the city to Shanghai early in 1938, and copies were shown in the United States that year; Fitch toured the country speaking about what he had seen. Two of the original reels, about 22 minutes of film, were given to the Yale Divinity School Library by Magee’s grandson and digitized in 2016 (Yale News, 22 January 2016). Magee’s son, John Gillespie Magee Jr., was the young pilot who wrote the poem “High Flight” in 1941.

On 17 December Matsui rode into Nanjing at the head of a victory parade, on a date he had insisted on in advance, and on 18 December he attended a memorial service for the Japanese dead at the city’s airfield with Asaka, Yanagawa and the Third Fleet commander, Vice Admiral Hasegawa Kiyoshi. Matsui, who had been ill in bed for much of the battle, was told of the outrages and is recorded as expressing dismay at what his troops had done (Iwane Matsui, Wikipedia summary). But the killing went on. Most of the assault divisions left the city by the end of December, and a smaller garrison remained. On 1 January 1938 the Japanese installed a Nanjing Self-Government Committee of local collaborators. Through December and January the army registered the population, and men picked out at registration as former soldiers were taken away. Many did not return.

By February the worst was over. On 18 February 1938 the International Committee renamed itself the Nanking International Relief Committee, which marked the end of the Safety Zone; the Japanese, who wanted the refugees back in their homes to show that order had returned, had been pressing the camps to close. The last camps closed in June. Rabe left Nanjing on 23 February 1938. In Tokyo, reports of the army’s conduct had reached the General Staff and the Foreign Ministry, and Matsui, Asaka and a number of senior officers were recalled. Matsui was told on 10 February that he would be relieved and sailed for Japan on 21 February (Iwane Matsui, Wikipedia summary). Isolated killings and rapes continued in the city and countryside into March.

Presidential citations · Republic of China, 2015

John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin

On 14 August 2015, President Ma Ying-jeou presented presidential citations, “A Tribute to Mr. John Rabe” and “A Tribute to Ms. Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin,” to Rabe’s grandson Thomas Rabe and Vautrin’s great-grandniece Cindy Vautrin in Taipei, for protecting Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre. The citations say that the Republic of China “will never forget their righteous deeds.” Vautrin had earlier been awarded a Chinese government decoration, given in English sources as the Emblem of the Blue Jade or the Order of the Brilliant Jade; sources differ on whether it was conferred in 1938 or after her death in 1941.

Office of the President release →

The trials: Tokyo and Nanjing

After Japan’s surrender, Nanjing was tried twice. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, sitting in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, heard the Nanjing evidence in the summer of 1946. Wilson, Bates and Magee testified in person; Bates was on the stand on 25 and 26 July 1946. Fitch, Smythe and others submitted affidavits, and the court received the Safety Zone documents and the testimony of Chinese survivors (International Committee and Miner Searle Bates, Wikipedia summaries). The judgment, delivered in November 1948, contained a section titled “The Rape of Nanking.” It found that the Japanese army’s “barbarous behaviour” there “cannot be excused,” that “rape, arson and murder continued to be committed on a large scale for at least six weeks after the city had been taken,” and that burial societies and other organizations “counted more than 155,000 bodies which they buried” (IMTFE Judgment, ch. VIII).

Matsui was charged on 38 counts and acquitted of 37. He was convicted on Count 55, failing in his duty to take adequate steps to secure observance of the laws of war at Nanjing. The court held that he knew what was happening and did nothing effective to stop it: “He must be held criminally responsible for his failure to discharge this duty.” He was sentenced to death on 12 November 1948 and hanged at Sugamo Prison just after midnight on 23 December 1948 (Iwane Matsui, Wikipedia summary). The former foreign minister Hirota Kōki was also convicted in part over Nanjing, for failing to insist in the cabinet that the atrocities be stopped. Prince Asaka, as a member of the imperial family, was given immunity by the occupation authorities. American investigators questioned him on 1 May 1946, but he was never charged. Nakajima Kesago had died of illness in October 1945.

China held its own trials. The Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, set up by the Nationalist government’s Ministry of National Defense in 1946, tried Tani Hisao, whose 6th Division had taken Zhonghua Gate and occupied the southern part of the city. Tani had been arrested in Japan in February 1946 and handed over to China in August. He was sentenced to death and shot at Yuhuatai, where his division had fought its way to the walls, on 26 April 1947 (Hisao Tani and Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, Wikipedia summaries). The tribunal found that more than 300,000 people had been killed at Nanjing, combining about 190,000 killed in group massacres with about 150,000 whose bodies were buried by charitable societies. In 1948 it also tried and executed Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, the officers of the “killing contest,” and Capt. Tanaka Gunkichi of the 6th Division. The two lieutenants denied the charges to the end, and the case against them rested largely on the wartime newspaper stories.

Timeline

Nanjing, November 1937 to December 1948

1. 5 Nov 1937Japanese 10th Army lands at Jinshanwei on Hangzhou Bay, outflanking the Chinese at Shanghai.
2. 7 Nov 1937Central China Area Army formed under Matsui; Tokyo draws a restriction line at Suzhou and Jiaxing.
3. 19 Nov 1937Suzhou falls.
4. 20 Nov 1937Government announces the move to Chongqing; Nanjing Garrison Force created.
5. 22 Nov 1937International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone formed; John Rabe chairman.
6. 24 Nov 1937Tokyo lifts the restriction line; Tang Shengzhi named garrison commander 25 November.
7. 1–2 Dec 1937Order to take Nanjing delivered in Shanghai; Prince Asaka takes over the Shanghai Expeditionary Army.
8. 7 Dec 1937Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling fly out of Nanjing.
9. 9 Dec 1937Surrender summons dropped over the city; no reply.
10. 10 Dec 1937General assault ordered at 1300; Guanghua Gate breached that evening.
11. 12 Dec 1937Yuhuatai and Zhonghua Gate fall; Tang orders the breakout just after 1700; chaos at Yijiang Gate and Xiaguan; USS Panay sunk upriver.
12. 13 Dec 1937Nanjing falls; mass killings of prisoners and civilians begin.
13. 15 Dec 1937Western reporters leave and file the first reports.
14. 16–17 Dec 1937Mass executions of prisoners at Mufushan; Matsui’s victory parade 17 December.
15. 1 Jan 1938Nanjing Self-Government Committee installed.
16. 18 Feb 1938Safety Zone committee becomes the Nanking International Relief Committee; Matsui sails for Japan 21 February; Rabe leaves 23 February.
17. 26 Apr 1947Tani Hisao executed at Yuhuatai after trial by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal.
18. 12 Nov 1948IMTFE sentences Matsui to death; he is hanged 23 December 1948.

People

Tang Shengzhi (1889–1970), a Hunanese general and former rival of Chiang, volunteered to hold Nanjing and promised to die with the city. He left it on the night of 12 December after ordering a breakout that collapsed into a stampede to the river. He never again held a major field command against Japan, and in 1949 he stayed on the mainland and served the new government.

Matsui Iwane (1878–1948) commanded the Shanghai Expeditionary Army from August 1937 and the Central China Area Army from 7 November. He pushed for the advance on Nanjing against Tokyo’s restraint and was ill during much of the battle. After his recall he built a temple at Atami with a statue of Kannon, the Buddhist figure of mercy, dedicated to the Japanese and Chinese war dead. He told his prison chaplain that “The Nanjing Incident was a terrible disgrace” (Iwane Matsui, Wikipedia summary). He was the only senior commander executed for Nanjing by the Tokyo tribunal.

Prince Asaka Yasuhiko (1887–1981), an uncle by marriage of Emperor Hirohito, commanded the Shanghai Expeditionary Army during the capture of the city and the first weeks of the massacre. He was never tried. After the war he lost his imperial status in 1947, converted to Catholicism in 1951, and spent much of his later life playing and designing golf courses. His Art Deco mansion in Tokyo is now the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum.

Nakajima Kesago (1881–1945) commanded the 16th Division, which attacked Purple Mountain and occupied much of the city, including the area around the Safety Zone. His diary is one of the key Japanese documents on the killing of prisoners. Tani Hisao (1882–1947) commanded the 6th Division, which took Yuhuatai and Zhonghua Gate; he was executed in Nanjing in 1947.

John Rabe (1882–1950), born in Hamburg, ran the Siemens office in Nanjing and chaired the International Committee. Back in Berlin in 1938 he lectured on what he had seen and sent a report to Hitler, which was never delivered; the Gestapo detained and questioned him, and Siemens secured his release on condition that he stop speaking about it. After the war he was cleared in denazification in June 1946 but lived in poverty, helped by food parcels from Nanjing. His diaries were published in 1996 and 1997 and in English in 1998 as The Good Man of Nanking. His tombstone was moved to Nanjing in 1997.

Minnie Vautrin (1886–1941), of Secor, Illinois, had come to China as a missionary of the Disciples of Christ and was a leader of Ginling College, where she had served as acting president. She kept the campus open to thousands of women and children through the occupation. Worn down by the strain, she returned to the United States in 1940 and took her own life in Indianapolis on 14 May 1941. Her diary is one of the most important records of the massacre.

Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the University Hospital (Drum Tower Hospital) and the son of missionaries in Nanjing, operated on the wounded for weeks with almost no help and testified at Tokyo. John G. Magee (1884–1953), an Episcopal priest from Pittsburgh and a Yale graduate, filmed the refugees and wounded and testified at Tokyo; he later served as Episcopal chaplain at Yale. Lewis S. C. Smythe, a University of Chicago-trained sociologist, was the committee’s secretary and directed the 1938 survey of war damage. Miner Searle Bates (1897–1978), a historian at the University of Nanking, confronted soldiers daily, protested to the Japanese embassy for three weeks, and testified at Tokyo and at the Chinese trials. George A. Fitch of the YMCA directed the zone and carried Magee’s film to the outside world.

Losses and uncertainty

No one counted the dead at Nanjing as they died, and the killers did not keep complete records. Every total is an estimate built from partial sources: burial records, the Safety Zone committee’s case files and a 1938 sample survey, Japanese unit reports and soldiers’ diaries, survivor testimony, and population figures before and after. The figures differ because the sources differ, and because those who use them define the massacre differently. Three questions explain most of the gap. Where: inside the city walls only, or the city and its six surrounding counties? When: the six weeks after 13 December, or from early December, when the Japanese reached the outskirts, to March 1938? Whom: civilians only, or also soldiers killed after capture or after they had stopped fighting, whom international law protected as prisoners?

By the numbers

How the estimates of the Nanjing dead compare

People killed, by source (upper figure where a range is given)

Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, 1947300,000+

IMTFE judgment, 1948200,000+

Kasahara Tokushi100,000–200,000

Bodies buried, per IMTFE155,000+

John Rabe, 1938 (in the city)50,000–60,000

Hata Ikuhiko38,000–42,000

Smythe survey (residents only)~33,500

The trial figures. The Chinese tribunal’s figure of more than 300,000, which the Chinese government endorses and which is carved at the entrance of the memorial hall, combined estimates of victims of mass killings with burial counts. The IMTFE’s “over 200,000” for Nanjing and its vicinity in the first six weeks rested mainly on the burial records of the Red Swastika Society, the charitable arm of a Chinese religious society, and the Chongshantang (Benevolent Hall), which together the court counted at more than 155,000 bodies. The Red Swastika Society’s records, about 43,000 burials, are generally accepted; the Chongshantang’s much larger total of more than 112,000 has been questioned by some Japanese historians, partly because its records were first presented after the war. Bodies thrown into the Yangtze were never buried and are in none of these counts.

The witnesses’ figures. The foreigners in the city gave lower numbers, but they saw only part of it, mostly the area in and near the Safety Zone. Rabe said in his 1938 lectures in Germany that “we Europeans put the number at about 50,000 to 60,000,” a figure his biographer Erwin Wickert considered too low. Smythe’s survey of March and April 1938, carried out by about 20 students interviewing a sample of one in 50 occupied houses in the city and a sample of rural families, counted about 2,400 civilians killed by soldiers’ violence in the city and 4,200 taken away and not returned, and 26,870 killed in four and a half rural counties (Smythe, War Damage in the Nanking Area; Yale Divinity School Library). By design the survey counted only families who were still there to be interviewed. It did not count soldiers or prisoners, families who had been wiped out, or the many who had not yet come back.

Japanese historians. Historians in Japan have long been divided into rough camps. The first postwar Japanese study of the event, by the Waseda historian Hora Tomio in 1967, accepted the scale of the tribunal findings. Kasahara Tokushi, using Japanese military records and Chinese sources, has concluded that the dead numbered “more than 100,000 and close to 200,000, or maybe more.” Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi has calculated 109,475 Chinese dead in December 1937 alone. Hata Ikuhiko, counting only prisoners and civilians unlawfully killed, has given about 38,000 to 42,000, and has called 300,000 a “symbolic figure.” A small group of deniers, the “illusion school” (maboroshi-ha), claims that few or no unlawful killings took place at all (Nanjing Massacre, Historiography and Denial, Wikipedia summaries).

The governments. In 2006 Japan and China set up a joint history research committee of scholars appointed by both governments. Its report, released in January 2010, agreed that the Japanese army had committed atrocities at Nanjing and that Japan had waged a war of aggression, but not on the numbers. The Chinese scholars cited the 1947 tribunal’s “more than 300,000”; the Japanese scholars cited “various estimates” ranging from 20,000 and 40,000 up to 200,000 (Taipei Times, 1 February 2010; Merkel-Hess and Wasserstrom, Foreign Policy, February 2010). The Japanese Foreign Ministry’s position is that it cannot be denied that, after the Japanese army entered Nanjing in 1937, the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts occurred, but that there are many theories about the actual number of victims and “it is difficult to determine which the correct number is” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, as quoted in the Wikipedia summary of Nanjing Massacre denial).

What historians conclude. Outside China, most scholars who have studied the sources regard the figure of 300,000 as too high for the city and its immediate surroundings, and the deniers’ figures as untenable. Many accept a figure in the range of tens of thousands to around 200,000, with the larger estimates usually including prisoners of war and the surrounding counties. All serious historians, Japanese, Chinese and Western, agree on the essentials: that Japanese troops killed very large numbers of prisoners and civilians at Nanjing, that rape was widespread, and that the killings were known to commanders who did not stop them. The argument over the total should not obscure what is not in doubt (Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography; Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity).

Questions readers ask

How many people were killed at Nanjing?

No exact count exists. The Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal (1947) found more than 300,000, the figure used by the Chinese government. The Tokyo tribunal (1948) found more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity in the first six weeks. Many historians in Japan and the West give figures between about 100,000 and 200,000; some, counting only unlawful killings of prisoners and civilians in a narrower area, give about 40,000. The differences come mainly from how the area, the time period and the victims are defined.

Why did Chiang Kai-shek try to defend a city he could not hold?

Mainly for political reasons. Nanjing was the capital and the site of Sun Yat-sen’s tomb, and Chiang believed that giving it up without a fight would damage his standing at home and China’s case abroad, where the Brussels Conference was meeting. Most of his generals and his German adviser told him the city could not be held. Tang Shengzhi volunteered to defend it, and the result was a short battle and a catastrophic retreat that left tens of thousands of soldiers trapped in the city.

Was the massacre ordered?

No single written order for the whole massacre has been found. But the killing of prisoners was carried out by organized units, and Japanese sources show that it was policy in some of them: Nakajima Kesago’s diary for 13 December records a general policy of not taking prisoners, and Prince Asaka’s headquarters is reported to have issued an order to kill all captives, though who issued it is disputed. The killing of civilians, the rapes and the looting were largely the work of soldiers whom their officers did not control or punish. The Tokyo tribunal held Matsui criminally responsible for failing to stop them.

What was the Nanking Safety Zone?

A refugee area of about 3.86 square kilometers in the western part of the city, set up by an International Committee of about 15 Americans and Europeans, chaired by the German businessman John Rabe, on 22 November 1937. The Japanese never formally recognized it, and soldiers entered it repeatedly to take men and women, but it sheltered 200,000 to 250,000 people and was safer than anywhere else in the city. Its members’ letters, diaries and film are among the main records of the massacre.

Why is it also called the Rape of Nanking?

“Rape” in the older sense of the violent seizure and plunder of a place, as well as for the mass sexual violence against women and girls. The Tokyo tribunal used the heading “The Rape of Nanking” in its 1948 judgment, and Iris Chang’s 1997 book of that title, though criticized by historians for errors, brought the event to a large Western readership. In Chinese it is usually called the Nanjing Datusha, the Nanjing Great Massacre; in Japan the neutral term is the Nankin Jiken, the Nanjing Incident.

Does Japan deny the massacre?

The Japanese government does not. Its official position is that the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts cannot be denied, while the number of victims is difficult to determine. Japanese historians did much of the research that established the facts, and in 1985 even the army officers’ association Kaikosha published veterans’ accounts that admitted atrocities. A vocal minority in Japan, including some politicians and writers, has denied or minimized the massacre, and school textbook treatment of it has been disputed for decades, most famously in the historian Ienaga Saburō’s lawsuits against the Ministry of Education from 1965 to 1997.

How it connects

The road to Nanjing ran from the bridge at Wanping. The local clash of 7 July 1937 (Chapter 3) became a war in North China in July (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5) and a national war at Shanghai in August (Chapter 6: Shanghai 1937). Shanghai’s three months of fighting broke the armies that would have had to defend Nanjing, and the armies that won it marched straight on to the capital.

On the day before Nanjing fell, Japanese aircraft sank USS Panay on the Yangtze above the city. That incident, Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech of 5 October, and the slow turn of American opinion against Japan that ended at Pearl Harbor are the subject of Chapter 8: America and the World; see also the Pearl Harbor collection. How Nanjing is remembered, in China and in Japan, and what the whole war cost, return in Chapter 9: The Bridge Today.

What happened afterward

China did not surrender. In January 1938 Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro announced that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang’s government, closing the door to a negotiated end. The war moved up the Yangtze and along the railways. In the spring of 1938 Chinese armies won a rare victory at Taierzhuang before losing Xuzhou; in June Chiang ordered the Yellow River dikes broken to slow the Japanese advance, at a terrible cost to Chinese civilians; and in October Wuhan fell. The government went on to Chongqing, which Japanese aircraft bombed repeatedly from 1938 to 1943.

Nanjing itself became the seat of Japan’s client governments in central China: the Reformed Government of the Republic of China from March 1938, and from March 1940 the “Reorganized National Government” of Wang Jingwei, a former rival of Chiang who had gone over to the Japanese. The city stayed under Japanese control until 1945. On 9 September 1945, in the auditorium of the Central Military Academy in Nanjing, Gen. He Yingqin accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces in China from Gen. Okamura Yasuji. The Nationalist government returned to the city in 1946, and lost it to the Communists in April 1949.

Remembering Nanjing took longer. In the early Cold War years neither the People’s Republic, which wanted Japanese trade and recognition, nor Japan, now an American ally, gave it much public attention. In Japan, the journalist Honda Katsuichi’s articles on wartime atrocities in China in the early 1970s and the textbook disputes of the 1980s brought it back into public debate. In China, research into burial records and survivor testimony in the 1980s preceded the opening of the memorial hall in 1985. Iris Chang’s 1997 book and the publication of Rabe’s diaries the same year made it widely known in the West.

Walking the ground today

Start at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders at Jiangdongmen in the southwest of the city, built on the site of a mass grave known as the “pit of ten thousand people.” It opened on 15 August 1985, designed by the architect Qi Kang, and has been enlarged since. A stone wall at the entrance carries the figure of 300,000 victims in several languages, and inside are exhibits, the excavated remains of part of the grave, and a wall of victims’ names. Admission is free, but visitors must register in advance. It is a short walk from Yunjinlu station on Metro Line 2. Since 2014, when China’s legislature made 13 December a National Memorial Day, the national commemoration has been held there each year, and air-raid sirens sound across the city.

The Ming city wall survives for about 25 km and can be walked in long sections. Zhonghua Gate, at the south end of Zhonghua Road, is open daily and is the best place to see what the 6th and 114th Divisions faced: the three courtyards, the vaulted troop chambers and the height of the walls the attackers had to break. A few kilometers south, Yuhuatai is now a large memorial park, mainly honoring Communist martyrs executed there by the Nationalists, but it is also the ground the 88th Division held and where Tani Hisao was shot in 1947. East of the city, Purple Mountain holds the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and the Ming Xiaoling, which Matsui ordered his gunners to spare.

In the old Safety Zone, the John Rabe House stands at Xiaofenqiao No. 1 on the Gulou campus of Nanjing University. Restored with German support, it opened on 31 October 2006 as the John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall. The campus of Ginling College, where Minnie Vautrin sheltered thousands of women and children, is now part of Nanjing Normal University, and its Chinese-style buildings of the 1920s still stand. Along the Yangtze north of the city, small memorial steles at places such as Yanziji and Caoxiexia mark the sites of mass executions, and the Lijixiang museum preserves a building used as a “comfort station” by the Japanese army.

Outside China, Rabe’s restored grave is in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Cemetery in Berlin, re-erected in 2013. Vautrin is buried in Shepherd, Michigan. The papers of Magee, Bates, Fitch, Smythe, Wilson, Vautrin and other missionaries are held by the Yale Divinity School Library, which has put many documents and Magee’s film online. The documents of the massacre held by Chinese archives were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2015. Check opening times and registration rules before visiting any of the Nanjing sites.

Sources and further reading

• International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Judgment (November 1948), ch. VIII, “Conventional War Crimes (Atrocities),” section “The Rape of Nanking,” HyperWar transcription.
• Timothy Brook, ed., Documents on the Rape of Nanking (University of Michigan Press, 1999), including the Safety Zone documents first edited by Hsu Shuhsi (1939) and extracts from the IMTFE record.
• John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, ed. Erwin Wickert (Knopf, 1998). Minnie Vautrin, diary, in Suping Lu, ed., Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937–38 (University of Illinois Press, 2008); diary entry of 15 December 1937 reproduced at Diaries of Note.
• Lewis S. C. Smythe, War Damage in the Nanking Area, December 1937 to March 1938 (Nanking International Relief Committee, 1938); summary of its figures at “Sumaisu hōkoku” (Japanese).
• Yale Divinity School Library, Nanking Massacre Project: Lewis S. C. Smythe; Yale News, “Donated film reels contain footage of Nanking Massacre” (22 January 2016).
• Peter Harmsen, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City (Casemate, 2015); Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; UK title China’s War with Japan 1937–1945); Hans van de Ven, China at War (Harvard University Press, 2018); Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo (Harvard University Press, 2009); Mark Peattie, Edward Drea and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China (Stanford University Press, 2011).
• Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture (Berghahn, 2007); Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Praeger, 2000); Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (University of California Press, 2000); Kasahara Tokushi, Nankin jiken (Iwanami, 1997); Hata Ikuhiko, Nankin jiken (Chūkō Shinsho, 1986; rev. 2007); Ono Kenji, Fujiwara Akira and Honda Katsuichi, eds., Nankin daigyakusatsu o kiroku shita kōgun heishitachi (Ōtsuki Shoten, 1996); Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (Basic Books, 1997).
• Wikipedia articles used as summaries of the specialist literature and checked against it where possible: Battle of Nanking, Nanjing Massacre, Nanking Safety Zone, International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre, Nanjing Massacre denial, Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and the biographies of Matsui Iwane, Prince Asaka, Tani Hisao, Nakajima Kesago, John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin and Miner Searle Bates.
• Joint history research: Taipei Times, report on the Japan–China joint history study (1 February 2010); Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Nanjing by the Numbers,” Foreign Policy (9 February 2010).
• Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan), presidential citations for John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin (14 August 2015); McLean County Museum of History, “Secor’s Minnie Vautrin, ‘Goddess of Mercy’”; Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Minnie Vautrin.
• The city wall: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “City Walls of the Ming and Qing Dynasties” (tentative list); Guinness World Records, “Longest ancient city wall”; Wikipedia, Zhonghua Gate and City Wall of Nanjing. Memorials: Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre; John Rabe House.

Photographs: Japanese press photographs of 1937 (Mainichi Shimbun and others) and a 1927 portrait from Liangyou, public domain; Minnie Vautrin portrait, public domain; modern photographs by Vmenkov (CC BY-SA 3.0), Rolfmueller (CC BY-SA 3.0) and Jakub Hałun (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. No photographs of victims are reproduced.