Nanking and the Road to World War II: Manchuria, Nazi Germany, Pearl Harbor and the Pattern of Massacre

USS Arizona sunk and burning at Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, four years less six days after the fall of Nanjing. Charcoal-style rendering by LKN Law of the US Navy photograph 80-G-19942 (Naval History and Heritage Command), public domain.

The Rape of Nanking · Chapter 10 of 10

Nanking and the Road to World War II

How six weeks in one city fit into a war that began in Manchuria in 1931, drew in Nazi Germany and the United States, and became the Second World War, and how often the same army did the same thing where no one was watching.

1894–1945Manchuria · Nanjing · Berlin · Washington · Pearl Harbor~35 min read

The massacre at Nanjing is usually told as a story with edges: a city falls on 13 December 1937, six weeks of killing, rape and burning follow, and a handful of Westerners save who they can. This chapter takes the edges away. It asks what the massacre was part of, how it connects to the war that the United States entered on 8 December 1941, what Nazi Germany had to do with it, and how often the Imperial Japanese Army did similar things in places where no foreigner kept a diary. The short answers are that Nanjing was one episode in a war Japan had been waging in China since 1931; that it did not by itself move American or German policy, but the war it stood for did both; and that it was neither the first nor the largest massacre of that war, only the best documented.

The chapter draws on the earlier chapters of this collection, especially Chapter 6 on Germany and Chapter 7 on the United States, and on the published sources listed at the end. Where figures are contested, as most death tolls in this war are, the text gives the range and says whose numbers they are. No graphic photographs are shown here; the drawings are charcoal-style renderings of archival photographs and are labelled as such.

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A war that began in 1931

For Americans the Second World War began on 7 December 1941, and for Europeans on 1 September 1939. For China it began earlier, and the Chinese date is not arbitrary. On the night of 18 September 1931 officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army, which guarded the Japanese-run South Manchuria Railway, set off a small explosion on the line near Mukden (Shenyang), blamed it on Chinese troops and used it as the pretext to occupy all of Manchuria. Tokyo had not ordered the operation and accepted it afterwards. In March 1932 the conquered territory was proclaimed the state of Manchukuo, with the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as its figurehead. When the League of Nations adopted the Lytton Commission’s report condemning the occupation in February 1933, Japan walked out of the League.

The fighting did not stop at the Great Wall. In January–March 1932 Japanese marines and army divisions fought the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army in Shanghai. In 1933 Japan took the province of Jehol (Rehe) and pressed into the plain around Beijing, and through 1935–36 it built a ring of puppet authorities and smuggling networks across North China. The war that historians date from the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge on 7 July 1937 was the moment this slow conquest became full-scale war. Chinese historiography now speaks of a fourteen-year war of resistance (1931–45); some Japanese historians use the term “Fifteen-Year War.” Many historians in the West date the start of the Second World War in Asia to July 1937.

The same pattern of violence was present from the start. On 16 September 1932, after Chinese Red Spear irregulars attacked the Japanese garrison at the coal city of Fushun, Japanese troops and police surrounded the nearby village of Pingdingshan, gathered its people and machine-gunned them. Japanese sources later put the dead at about 800; Chinese sources at 3,217. Five years before Nanjing, the method was already familiar: a guerrilla attack, collective punishment of a civilian population, and a death toll that would be argued over afterwards.

Why the world noticed Nanjing

Nanjing was not the first city Japan’s armies had sacked in 1937. The towns of the Yangtze delta between Shanghai and the capital, Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou and Zhenjiang among them, were looted and burned in November as two Japanese armies raced each other inland without orders from Tokyo (Chapter 1). What made Nanjing different was that it was the capital of the Republic of China, and that outsiders saw it happen.

Five foreign journalists stayed through the fall of the city and left on 15 and 16 December; Tillman Durdin’s report in the New York Times of 18 December described mass executions on the waterfront. Twenty-two Westerners, fourteen of them Americans and several of the others Germans, stayed to run the Safety Zone and wrote letters, diaries and protests that reached Shanghai, Washington and Berlin within weeks. John Magee filmed the wounded. German diplomats returned to the city on 9 January 1938 and reported in plain language. And on 12 December, a day before the city fell, Japanese naval aircraft sank the American gunboat Panay twenty-eight miles upriver, which put Nanjing on the front page of every American newspaper for reasons that had nothing to do with its people. No other atrocity of the war in China had an international audience like it.

The American road: from the Panay to Pearl Harbor

The connection between Nanjing and Pearl Harbor is real, but it is not the one usually assumed. The massacre did not cause the United States to act. The State Department filed no protest about the killing of Chinese civilians; it demanded and received an apology and $2,214,007.36 for the Panay. For almost three years afterwards American firms supplied most of the oil and scrap iron that Japan used in China (Chapter 7). What changed American policy was the war of which Nanjing was the emblem: its length, its toll on Chinese civilians, the bombing of Chinese cities, Japan’s alliance with Germany in 1940 and its advance into French Indochina in 1940–41. Step by step Washington moved from moral protest to economic war, and the last step, the oil embargo of 1941, left Japan to choose between leaving China and seizing the oil of Southeast Asia.

Seen this way, the Pacific War was fought over China. The negotiations of 1941 between Hull and Ambassador Nomura foundered on one point more than any other: the American demand that Japan withdraw from China, which the Japanese army, after four years of war and well over a hundred thousand of its own dead, would not accept. Nanjing did not set off that chain. But it was the moment at which the world learned what Japan’s war in China meant for the people of China, and the war it stood for was the issue on which the United States and Japan went to war.

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Nazi Germany: trainer, witness and ally

Germany’s part in the story is stranger than America’s, and it has nothing to do with the killing itself. There is no evidence that any German took part in the massacre. The Germans in Nanjing were among its witnesses and its rescuers. Germany’s involvement lay elsewhere: in the army that defended the city, in the reports its diplomats sent home, and in the choice its government made in the months that followed.

Before: the army Germany built

Through the late 1920s and 1930s German officers, at first private advisers and from 1934 a semi-official military mission, trained and reorganized Chiang Kai-shek’s army. General Hans von Seeckt, the former chief of the Reichswehr, led the mission in 1934–35; General Alexander von Falkenhausen succeeded him and stayed until 1938. China bought German rifles, artillery, helmets and fortification plans and paid largely in raw materials, notably tungsten, which Germany’s rearmament needed. By one common count the Germans trained about 80,000 men in eight divisions, the best of the Nationalist army. Chiang threw them into the Battle of Shanghai in August 1937 against Falkenhausen’s advice and lost about a third of them there. Survivors of those divisions, including the 88th and 36th, were among the defenders of Nanjing.

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During: the Nazi who chaired the Safety Zone

At the same time Germany was tied to Japan. The Anti-Comintern Pact of 25 November 1936 bound the two against the Soviet Union, and Italy joined it on 6 November 1937, as Japanese armies advanced on Nanjing. Berlin tried to keep both partners: from November 1937 to January 1938 its ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann, carried peace terms between Tokyo and Chiang Kai-shek. The mediation was still alive when Nanjing fell, and it ended when Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro announced on 16 January 1938 that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang’s government at all.

Inside the city, the chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was John Rabe, the Siemens representative and a member of the Nazi Party since 1934. He sheltered hundreds of Chinese in his own garden under a large swastika flag, which Japanese soldiers hesitated to violate, and used his party badge and armband to turn soldiers out of houses. The diplomats who returned to the German embassy on 9 January 1938, Georg Rosen, Paul Scharffenberg and Alwin Hürter, reported what they found to Berlin in terms as blunt as any written by Americans (Chapter 6). Rabe left Nanjing in February 1938, reached Berlin in April and gave lectures with photographs and Magee’s film. He then sent Hitler a written report and asked him to use his influence with Japan. The Gestapo detained and questioned him; he was released through the intervention of Siemens, allowed to keep his papers but not the film, and forbidden to speak or write about Nanjing again.

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After: Berlin chooses Tokyo

Berlin had the evidence. It chose Japan anyway. On 20 February 1938, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler announced that Germany would recognize Manchukuo, and the German embassy in Hankou hurried to tell the Chinese that the step was “in no way” aimed at them. Arms deliveries to China were stopped. In the spring the military mission was ordered home; Chiang Kai-shek resisted releasing the advisers from their contracts, and Falkenhausen and the remaining officers left Hankou in early July 1938, followed by Ambassador Trautmann. On 27 September 1940 Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin, and in July 1941 Germany recognized the collaborationist government that Wang Jingwei had set up in Nanjing, the very city whose fall its diplomats had described. Chongqing broke off relations.

That is the thread connecting Nanjing to the war in Europe. The massacre was not a German project and was not a precursor of the Holocaust in any planned sense; it was carried out by a different army, for different reasons, against a population it was trying to conquer rather than destroy. Iris Chang’s subtitle, “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” was a claim about scale and about forgetting, not an argument that the two were the same kind of crime (Chapter 9). But the two governments that would be tried at Nuremberg and Tokyo were allies, they chose each other with full knowledge of what the other’s armies did, and the alliance is what turned two regional wars into one world war.

What Nanjing was part of: an army without rules for prisoners

Several features of Japan’s war in China help explain why Nanjing happened and why it was repeated. The first was legal. Japan never declared war on China; the fighting was officially the “China Incident.” Japan had signed but not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, and in China its army treated captured Chinese soldiers as having no protected status at all. In the Nanjing campaign the killing of prisoners was not only the work of undisciplined soldiers: Japanese officers’ own diaries record orders that prisoners were not to be taken, and the largest mass executions, of tens of thousands of men on the Yangtze banks, required organization (Chapter 3).

The second was logistical. The armies that raced from Shanghai to Nanjing outran their supply lines and lived off the land, which meant seizing food from villages and, in practice, licensed looting. The third was the response to sexual violence. The mass rapes at Shanghai and Nanjing alarmed the high command chiefly because of the hostility and international criticism they caused, and the army’s answer was to expand a system of military brothels it had begun in Shanghai in 1932. From 1938 “comfort stations” spread across occupied China and later Southeast Asia. Estimates of the number of women held in them range from about 20,000 (Hata Ikuhiko) to about 200,000 (Yoshimi Yoshiaki), many of them Korean and Chinese, and many very young. The fourth was impunity. The commanders at Nanjing were rewarded and promoted, and almost no one was punished until after 1945.

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How often did this happen? The massacres no one photographed

Nanjing is the best-known massacre of Japan’s wars because it is the best documented, not because it was unique. In most of the places where the Imperial Japanese Army killed prisoners and civilians, there were no neutral foreigners, no film and no diaries that survived, and the dead were counted afterwards, if at all, by the side that had suffered them. The figures below are therefore ranges, and some are deeply contested. They are not all the same kind of number: some count civilians in a town, some prisoners on a march, some the deaths of a whole campaign. What they show together is a pattern that ran for half a century.

Behind the named massacres lies a much larger total that no one will ever count precisely. The war of 1937–45 killed somewhere between about 14 million Chinese (the figure used by the historian Rana Mitter) and 20 million or more, most of them civilians, through massacre, bombing, famine, flood, disease and the flight of tens of millions of refugees. The Chinese Nationalist government’s own records counted over 1.3 million of its soldiers killed. Many of the deaths happened in villages whose names appear in no Western book. That is the sense in which much of this history is unknown: not because nothing happened, but because no one was there to write it down in a language the outside world read.

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What Nanjing foreshadowed

To the Americans and Britons who became prisoners of Japan in 1942, Nanjing was a warning that had not been heeded. The same army that killed Chinese prisoners on the Yangtze in 1937 met the garrisons of Wake Island, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines in 1941–42. Some of the same units did. The 16th Division of Lt. Gen. Nakajima Kesago, whose diary recorded the policy of taking no prisoners at Nanjing, was sent to the Philippines in 1941, landed at Lamon Bay on Luzon on 24 December 1941 and fought there in the campaign that ended at Bataan and Corregidor; it was destroyed on Leyte in 1944–45, where only about 620 of its roughly 13,000 men survived. Of the more than 140,000 Western Allied prisoners held by Japan, about 27 per cent died in captivity, according to the historian Gavan Daws, against about 4 per cent of Western military prisoners held by the Germans.

For China, Nanjing was the beginning of eight years of occupation that most of the country experienced, in one form or another, as Nanjing writ large. For Japan’s other victims in Korea, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, it was a pattern they would come to know. That is why historians who study the war in Asia treat Nanjing less as an aberration than as an early, unusually well-witnessed case of how that army fought.

Why so few people know

If the facts were known in 1938, why did Nanjing fall so far out of memory that a 1997 book could be read as a revelation? The reasons are political on every side. In the West, the war in Europe and then the Pacific War overwhelmed what had happened in China before 1941; the Tokyo tribunal of 1946–48 heard the evidence, but its proceedings received a fraction of the attention given to Nuremberg. From 1947–48 the American occupation turned toward rebuilding Japan as a Cold War ally, and the United States quietly shielded the leaders of Unit 731 in exchange for their research. Neither Chinese government was a party to the San Francisco peace treaty of 1951. The Republic of China on Taiwan, dependent on American and Japanese goodwill, gave up its claim to reparations in the Treaty of Taipei of 1952; the People’s Republic renounced its claim when it normalized relations with Japan in 1972.

In China itself the Communist government had its own reasons for silence. Nanjing had been the Nationalists’ capital and the massacre took place in Nationalist territory, which fitted poorly with a history of the war in which the Communists were the main resisters; and in the 1950s and 1960s, historians have noted, Chinese hosts steered visiting Japanese delegations away from the massacre sites. The subject returned with the Japanese textbook controversy of 1982, when Chinese leaders publicly accused Tokyo of whitewashing the war. The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre opened in August 1985. In Japan, meanwhile, the massacre has been documented by Japanese historians and journalists and disputed by nationalist writers and politicians since the 1970s (Chapter 9).

What brought Nanjing back to Western readers was a combination of rediscovered evidence and one book. The Yale Divinity Library assembled the American missionaries’ letters; in 1996 Iris Chang traced John Rabe’s granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt, and Rabe’s diaries and his report to Hitler were made public; Chang’s The Rape of Nanking appeared in 1997 and became a bestseller. In 2014 China made 13 December a national memorial day, and in 2015 UNESCO added the Documents of Nanjing Massacre to its Memory of the World register. The witnesses are now almost gone. In October 2026 the Memorial Hall reported that the death of Guo Xiulan, aged 94, had left 20 registered survivors alive.

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Why it matters

The road from Nanjing to Pearl Harbor did not run in a straight line, and it is easy to tell it too neatly. The United States did not go to war to avenge Nanjing, and Germany did not abandon China because of it. But the massacre was the moment the outside world saw, through its own citizens’ eyes, what Japan’s war in China was; that war was the cause over which the United States and Japan fought; and Japan’s alliance with Hitler, sealed in full knowledge of what both armies did, is what made the war in the Pacific and the war in Europe one war. Nanjing belongs to the history of the Second World War not as a sideshow before it began, but as one of the places where it did begin.