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Just How Bad Was It in Nanjing?

David McNeill, in the Independent (4-21-05):

... Japanese troops poured into the wartime capital city of Nanjing on 13 December 1937, after suffering heavy casualties in Shanghai. They then began a six-week orgy of medieval raping, killing and looting, carrying out what the United Human Rights Council called 'the single worst atrocity during the World War Two era in either the European or Pacific theatres of war'.

An American eyewitness, Minnie Vautrin, who kept a diary, wrote on 16 December 1937: 'There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today.' Witnesses said soldiers practised with bayonets on tied-up prisoners, burnt others alive and set dogs on children.

Pregnant women were raped and bayoneted, decapitated heads were put on spikes or waved around like trophies, hundreds of unarmed civilians were mown down with machine guns and dumped in rivers and open graves.

Tillman Durdin, the New York Times reporter who called the rape of Nanjing 'one of the great atrocities of modern times', described a car journey to the city's river front. 'The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch ... was of a group of smoking, chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops.'

The most famous witness was John Rabe " the so-called Good Man of Nanjing, an Oscar Schindler-type businessman who ran the local Nazi party but became leader of an international safety zone that reportedly saved 250,000 lives.

After weeks watching children and old women being repeatedly raped then murdered, often with extreme cruelty, he wrote in his diary that the suffering 'dumbfounded' him. Exactly how many were killed in Nanjing is one of the most bitterly contested statistics of the Second World War.

The best-known account, by the Chinese-American author Iris Chang, who committed suicide earlier this year and who said she 'felt rage' and suffered nightmares during her research, claims more than 300,000 Chinese died and at least 20,000 women were raped. Her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, was the target of a vitriolic campaign by neo-nationalists in Japan who said it was full of lies and exaggerations....