The Nanking: The Nanjing Massacre

The Nanking, or Nanjing, Massacre occurred in only six weeks from 1937-1938 and has been described the “forgotten Holocaust of World War II”. The Imperial Japanese Army slaughtered an estimated 40,000 – 340,000 Chinese, tortured countless others, and committed one of the greatest mass rapes in world history in Nanking, the then capital of China. The Japanese destroyed military records in an effort to keep the massacre from becoming known worldwide. This cover-up – sometimes called The Second Rape of Nanking, a term coined by Iris Chang – is ongoing and largely carried out by a small, vocal minority of the Japanese government. The Nanking Massacre and its subsequent cover-up has led many to call the massacre a genocide; others insist the atrocities

One American who was stuck in Nanking at the time of the massacre reported that since December 15, [1937], only the third day of the massacre, “cases of rape became very general, and there were about a thousand cases a day. After being raped, some women were killed in a bestial manner. The ages of the rape victims varied from ten to seventy years old.” Another correspondence, published in London’s The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, corroborated the previous account with additional anonymous accounts of the atrocities occurring in Nanking via “reports and letters sent by professors at the University of Nanking and by American missionaries to the Japanese Embassy and to the missionary headquarters. One University of Nanking faculty member had already “indicated that many women had been raped on campus and Japanese soldiers beat the night watchmen because they failed to have women ready for them.” The article titled, “Japan’s Reign of Terror in China: First Authentic Description,” goes on to quote a letters from missionaries that recount incidents of murder in