George Fitch: carrying the film out

Members of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, the group of Western residents who ran a refuge of about 3.86 square kilometres for some 200,000–250,000 people. George Fitch of the YMCA was the zone’s director. Photo: Unknown photographer, Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre collection, PD China via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Rape of Nanking, 1937–1938

George Fitch: Carrying the Film Out

The YMCA man who ran the Safety Zone’s day-to-day work, wrote a diary of “complete anarchy,” and took the evidence to America.

George Ashmore Fitch was born in China, spoke Chinese fluently, and had worked for the Young Men’s Christian Association in China for almost 28 years when the Japanese reached Nanjing. He had moved to the capital only in September 1936, to run the Nanjing YMCA. When the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was formed in November 1937, he became its director, the man responsible for the camps, the food, the housing of refugees and the daily administration of a zone that held about a quarter of a million people.

Fitch kept a diary through the first weeks of the occupation, and it is one of the most direct of the American records. His larger contribution came in January 1938, when he obtained Japanese permission to travel to Shanghai and took with him, sewn into the lining of his overcoat, eight reels of the film that John Magee had shot of the victims. From Shanghai he went on to the United States, where he briefed the State Department and spent months showing the film to American audiences.

He was also, across a long life, a friend of the Korean independence movement, a fact that explains why his best-known portrait comes from the Republic of Korea’s veterans’ ministry. This page follows his life with the Nanjing years at its centre. The film itself is described on John Magee’s page, and the American response in Chapter 7.

A missionary’s son from Suzhou

Fitch was born in Suzhou (Soochow) on 23 January 1883, the fourth child of the Presbyterian missionaries George Field Fitch and Mary McLellan Fitch. He studied in the United States, graduating from the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1906 and from Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1909, and was ordained a Presbyterian minister that year. On Christmas Day 1909 he arrived in Shanghai to work for the YMCA, and he spent most of the next half-century with it in China.

In Shanghai he became involved with the Korean exiles who had set up a provisional government there after 1919. His biographers record that he helped them re-establish the Korean Red Cross, and that after the bombing at Hongkou Park in April 1932 he helped Kim Ku and other leaders of the Korean Provisional Government hide and escape. South Korea later gave him its Order of Cultural Merit (1952) and the Order of Merit for National Foundation (1968). In September 1936 the YMCA sent him to Nanjing as general secretary.

Director of the Safety Zone

The committee that Rabe chaired and Smythe served as secretary needed someone to run things, and Fitch, an experienced YMCA administrator, became director. The zone’s staff, largely Chinese, organized the camps in public buildings and university halls, the porridge kitchens that fed those who had nothing, the distribution of rice and coal, and a small zone police force. Fitch’s accounts, like the committee’s, give about 25 camps.

From 13 December the work changed. Japanese soldiers entered the zone looking for Chinese soldiers who had discarded their uniforms, for women and for loot. The committee members spent their days going from incident to incident, trying to stop what they could and recording what they could not. Fitch’s diary for these weeks is a record of that work. On 24 December he wrote that “Complete anarchy has reigned for ten days,” and called it “a hell I had never before envisaged.” His diary entries were taken out to Shanghai by the first Westerners allowed to leave, the Yale Divinity Library notes.

Complete anarchy has reigned for ten days.

— George A. Fitch, diary, 24 December 1937, as quoted from his Nanjing diary

Eight reels in a camel’s-hair coat

By January the committee’s letters to the Japanese embassy had not stopped the violence, and the outside world knew little of it beyond the first newspaper reports of mid-December. Magee’s film was the strongest evidence they had, and it had to leave the city. Fitch arranged to be summoned to Shanghai, which gave him a pass for a Japanese military train. In his own words he had the negatives “sewed into the lining of my camel’s-hair great coat.” Most accounts date his departure to January 1938, with 19, 20 and 23 January all given; he travelled with other Americans who were leaving the city.

Copies of the film were made. Fitch went on by way of Hong Kong and Guangzhou and took the Philippine Clipper across the Pacific, reaching San Francisco on 9 March 1938. On 17 March he was in Washington, giving the State Department a firsthand account. Then he began to travel.

Showing America

Through the spring and summer of 1938 Fitch toured the United States with the film, speaking in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere. The Yale biography records that he gave talks about the massacre across the country; the San Francisco Chronicle quoted him in June. On 16 May Life printed ten small stills from Magee’s footage. By the account of a 2023 study of the film, Fitch grew frustrated with how little the response amounted to. Americans were shocked; their government did not change course.

The context explains why. In October 1937 President Roosevelt had called for aggressors to be “quarantined,” and after the sinking of the gunboat Panay on 12 December the United States accepted Japan’s apology and an indemnity. Isolationist feeling was strong, and American trade with Japan, including oil and scrap metal for its war industries, continued. The first real restraints came only in July 1938, with the “moral embargo” on aircraft sales, and the decisive embargoes in 1940 and 1941.

1. September 1936Fitch moves to Nanjing as general secretary of the YMCA.
2. 22 November 1937The International Committee is formed; Fitch becomes director of the Safety Zone.
3. 24 December 1937His diary records ten days of “complete anarchy.”
4. January 1938He leaves for Shanghai on a Japanese military train with Magee’s negatives sewn into his coat.
5. 9 March 1938Arrives in San Francisco on the Philippine Clipper.
6. 17 March 1938Briefs the State Department in Washington.
7. Spring–summer 1938Tours the United States with the film.

The long afterlife

Fitch returned to China in 1939 and spent the war years and after with the YMCA and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; in 1944 he headed the YMCA in Lanzhou in the northwest. In July 1947 he went to Seoul to lead the YMCA in South Korea, and in 1951 to Taiwan. He retired in 1961 and published his memoir, My Eighty Years in China, in Taipei in 1967. He died in a nursing home in Pomona, California, on 21 January 1979, aged 95.

Whether Fitch gave evidence to the Tokyo tribunal is not settled by the sources checked for this page. Some biographical summaries say that he testified; others mention only that the film he carried was used. The tribunal did hear in person from Robert Wilson, Searle Bates and John Magee, and received written statements from others.