1. Nanking Massacre 80th Anniversary Commemoration “From the Eyes and Words of Eye Witnesses” Don M. Tow Monmouth County Library HQ December 6, 2017

2. Brief History Background
First Sino-Japanese War:
Fought over the control of Korea
Japan won
Compensation from China to Japan
Ceded the island of Taiwan and the Penghu Islands
Paid Japan 340,000,000 taels of silver (each tael weighs about 1.3 ounces)
About 1/3 of China’s annual revenue (one estimate)
Or about 2.5 of Japan’s annual revenue (another estimate)
Second Sino-Japanese War:
Started on 9/18/1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria
Full war started on 7/7/1937 when Japan crossed the Marco Polo Bridge and invaded Beijing
Nanking Massacre: started on 12/13/1937

3. Nanking Massacre The Japanese army entered Nanking on 12/13/1937
Engaged in one of the worst atrocities in history
Lasted approximately 6 weeks to the end of January 1938
About 300,000 Chinese (including civilians, women and children) were killed
About 20,000 women and girls were raped
Group of foreigners established the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone
Comprised of American, German, British, and Danish citizens
Chaired by German John Rabe, who worked for Siemens Corporation and a member of the Nazi Party
Sheltered and saved about 250,000 Chinese from being slaughtered and thousands of Chinese women and girls from being raped

4. Nanking Massacre (cont.)
The events were witnessed and recorded by many eye witnesses, including Americans, Germans, British, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, and others
Documented in diaries, films, and oral interviews
Starting in 2014 China has designated Dec. 13 as the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims
Recently Canada’s provincial Ontario legislature just passed Motion 66 to proclaim every Dec.13 as “The Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day”
Japanese government’s position:
Denies its magnitude
A natural consequence of war
Claims that it is a creation of the Chinese

5. Tonight’s Program
Let the words and eyes of eyewitnesses tell us what happened during the Nanking Massacre
Direct quotes from:
Dr. Robert Wilson – American
Minnie Vautrin – American
Tsen Shui-Fang – Chinese
John Rabe – German
Deguchi Gonjiro – Japanese
Sawamura Jiro – Japanese
Tanaka Jiro – Japanese
Tokuda Ichitaro – Japanese
Yang Mingzhen – Chinese
Qiu Xiuying – Chinese
Chu-Yeh Chang – Chinese
Reverend John Magee - American
Personal movie from Reverend John Magee - American

6. International Safety Zone in Nanking

7. Dr. Robert Wilson - American Surgeon
12/18/1937: “Today marks the 6th day of modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape. Murder by the wholesale and rape by the thousands of cases. There seems to be no stop to the ferocity, lust and atavism of the brutes.”
12/15/1937: “The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief.”
1/3/1937: “She was one of the five women whom the Japanese soldiers had taken to one of their medical units – to wash their clothes by day, to be raped by night. Two of them were forced to satisfy from 15 to 20 men and the prettiest one as many as 40 each night. This one who came to us had been called off by three soldiers into an isolated place where they attempted to cut off her head. The muscles of the neck had been cut but they failed to sever the spinal cord. She feigned death but dragged herself to the hospital – another of the many to bear witness to the brutality of soldiers.”
12/19/1937: “All the food is being stolen from the poor people and they are in a state of terror-stricken, hysterical panic. When will it stop!”
12/30/1937: “The only consolation is that it can’t be worse. They can’t kill as many people as there aren’t any more to kill.”

8. Minnie Vautrin – American Missionary & Acting President of Ginling College in Nanking
12/19/1937: “Again this morning wild-eyed women and girls came screaming in at the gate – the night had been one of horror. Many kneeled and implored to be taken in – and we let them in but we do not know where they will sleep tonight.”
“Later the morning was spent going from one end of the campus to the other trying to get one group of soldiers after another one. Went up to South Hill three times I think, then to the back campus and then was frantically called to the old faculty house where I was told two soldiers had gone upstairs. There, in room 538, I found one standing at the door, and one inside already raping a poor girl.”
12/23/1937: “Last night from sixty to hundred men, mostly young, were taken in trucks to the little valley south of the Ginling Temple, shot by machine gun fire, later put into a house and the whole set on fire. I have been suspecting that many of the fires we see at night are to cover up either looting or killing.”
“Most residences have been looted unless a foreigner is present in them and that has been impossible when people are so busy.”
“It is raining today. All people who have been sleeping on verandahs will have to squeeze inside somehow. The good weather of past weeks has been a great blessing.”

9. Minnie Vautrin – cont.
12/21/1937: “We have absolutely no contact with the outside world – knew nothing of what is happening and can send out no messages. While watching at the gate tonight, the gateman said that each day seemed like a year, and life had lost all meaning – which is true. And the sad thing is we see no future. The once energetic, hopeful capital is now almost an empty shell – pitiful, heartrending.”
12/22/1937: “The Japanese Embassy wanted the electric light plant repaired so that lights could be turned on. Mr. Rabe therefore got fifty employees together and took them down to the plant. This afternoon forty-three were shot by soldiers saying they were the employees of the Chinese government.”
12/18/1937: “The only thing that had saved the Chinese people from utter destruction was the fact that there were a handful of foreigners in Nanking. What would it be like if there were no check on this terrible devastation and cruelty.”

10. Tsen Shui-Fang – Chinese, Minnie Vautrin’s Assistant and a Trained Nurse
12/13/1937: “Tonight, many refugees came to the college as the Japanese soldiers drove them out of their own homes, because the soldiers wanted to sleep there. Most of these refugees came empty-handed; the soldiers had taken their bedding. They were scared to death. This happened in the Safety Zone. People presumed that the Japanese soldiers would not enter into the Safety Zone. I feel so sad. Nanking has not had peace since four months ago and fell only after three days’ fighting. It is really pathetic. I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. Today, two more poor babies were born. Their mothers are suffering too and all sleep on the ground.”
12/14/1937: “Many more refugees came to the college today. All fled to here from the Safety Zone because the Japanese soldiers came to their homes to demand money and to rape. Quite a few people were bayoneted to death on the streets. The situation in the Saftey Zone is terrible like this and it is even worse outside the Zone. Nobody dares to go out of the Safety Zone. Most of the dead were young men. … Ginling has four or five thousand refugees.”
12/17/1937: “This kind of slavery life is very difficult to endure. If I were not struggling for the survival of our Chinese race, I would commit suicide. … Each night, outside, every place is burning. A lot of people in Xiaguan died. … When thinking about the Chinese people, I cannot help but feel heartbroken.”

11. Tsen Shui-Fang – cont.
1/3/1938: “The roads around Xiaguan were impassable, covered with dead bodies. People had to walk over the bodies.”
1/4/1938: “The Japanese soldiers go to private residences to sleep, dragging husbands out. If husbands refuse to leave, they are shot to death. If wives refuse to obey the Japanese soldiers’ sexual demands, they are shot too.”

12. John Rabe – German Engineer & Head of the International Safety Zone
12/28/1937: “Fires are still being set, everywhere, over and over. You feel like a seriously ill patient fearfully watching the hour hand inch forward. All the refugees are afraid of the New Year, because they expect the Japanese soldiers to get drunk and then commit more atrocities.”
12/28/1938: “The reports we are hearing from all sides today are so hair-raising that I can hardly bring myself to put them to paper. Before registration began at some of the schools where refugees are camped out, the Japanese first demanded that any former Chinese soldiers in the crowd step forward voluntarily. They were given promises of protection. They were merely to be put into labor crews. At that, a good number of refugees stepped forward. In one case, about 50 people. They were led off at once. As we learned from one of the survivors, they were taken to a vacant house, robbed of all valuables and clothes, and when completely naked, tied up together in groups of five. Then the Japanese built a large bonfire in the courtyard, led the groups out one by one, bayoneted the men and tossed them still alive on the fire. Ten of these men were able to slip free of their ropes, leap over the courtyard wall, and vanish into the crowd, who gladly found clothes for them.”

13. John Rabe – cont.
12/171937: “Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. When I appear they give the excuse that they saw two Chinese soldiers climb over the wall. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. In one of the houses in the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped, and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital... Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling Girls' College alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers.”
12/14/1937: “It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. These people had been presumably fleeing and were shot from behind. The Japanese march through the city in groups of ten to twenty soldiers and loot the shops ... I watched with my own eyes as they looted the café of our German baker Herr Kiessling. Hempel's hotel was broken into as well, as almost every shop on Chung Shang and Taiping Road.”

14. John Rabe – cont.
12/25/1937: “… and I can lie down to rest, though still in my boots and spurs, as always, for I have to be ready to throw out intruders at a moment’s notice.”
12/26/1937: “It’s getting more and more difficult to feed the 200,000 people in our Zone.”
After 2/28/1938 in a Report to Hitler:  “They would continue by raping the women and girls and killing anything and anyone that offered any resistance, attempted to run away from them or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were girls under the age of 8 and women over the age of 70 who were raped and then, in the most brutal way possible, knocked down and beat up. We found corpses of women on beer glasses and others who had been lanced by bamboo shoots. I saw the victims with my own eyes – I talked to some of them right before their deaths and had their bodies brought to the morgue at the Kulou hospital so that I could be personally convinced that all of these reports had touched on the truth.”

15. Japanese Soldiers – In Recorded Interviews by Tamaki Matsuoka
Deguchi Gonjiro (23 years old): “The day that Nanjing fell, there were mountains of dead bodies piled up outside the walls of the city.  I felt something soft beneath my feet.  Lighting a match to see what I was stepping on, I realized that the entire surface under my feet was like a carpet of dead bodies.  There were dead bodies everywhere.  I don’t know which unit was responsible, but they had all been killed by bayonets.  There were women and children, but no soldiers.”
Sawamura Jiro (24): “They (Chinese prisoners) were all made to run along the pier and they were all shot and killed from behind, while we told each other, ‘what an awful thing we are doing.’  The Chinese that had been shot jumped (or fell) into the river, so there was no need to clean up afterwards either.  The river would carry them away.”

16. Japanese Soldiers – cont.
Tanaka Jiro (29): “We dragged all of them (Chinese prisoners) out of the freight train hangar and made them sit down facing the shore.  They sat down in knee-deep mud.  When the command was given, they were sprayed with bullets at point blank range from machine guns that had been hidden in nearby trenches.  They fell down, one by one, like dominoes.  Blood-soaked, smoking pieces of flesh and clothing flew up into the air.  Light machine guns that had been set up on the wharf took care of the several dozen or so of them who had jumped into the river.  The muddy waters were soaked red with blood.  What a miserable scene!  Will such a wretched scene ever be seen again in this world?”
Tokuda Ichitaro (23): “At Xiaguan (the district in Nanking that is next to the Yangtze River), I saw a large number of bodies floating on the Yangtze River.  Corpses were continuously being tossed into the river until the water was full of them.  While transporting the corpses, we noticed that there were so many corpses on the road that automobiles could not drive through.  Basically, it was a road made of dead bodies.”

17. Chinese Victims and Survivors
Yang Mingzhen (楊明貞) - born 1930: “The next day was the fifteenth. Japanese soldiers came back again that afternoon while my mother and I were lying on the kitchen floor. My father was so weak that he was just lying there. A Japanese soldier came up to my father, opened his eyes with his fingers and thrust a knife into his mouth. My father was conscious, but unable to move. Seeing my father in this state, the Japanese soldier cried out in Chinese, “Si le! Si le! (You’re dead! You’re dead!” Then he came up to my mother and pulled her trousers down. As he wiped the soot from my mother’s face, she bit his hand. Livid, the Japanese soldier hit my mother’s face again and again and then raped her. After that, he started taunting her, twisting the barrel of his gun around inside of her vagina. Sobbing, my mother pleaded with him again and again to stop. There was lots of blood flowing from the lower half of my mother’s body. The other Japanese soldier pulled my trousers down and started taunting me, prying open my still-firm vagina with his fingers. At any rate, they were prepubescent genitals, the genitals of a six or seven-year-old. I screamed out in pain. Disregarding my screams, the Japanese soldier forcibly raped me. He was a beast. The two of them took turns raping my mother and I. Blood flowed in torrents, and it was so painful that I couldn’t even walk afterwards. As my mother had collapsed, I took care of my own wound, pressing a cloth against my genitals.”
“In addition to the damage I suffered personally, I also witnessed many other Chinese being killed by Japanese soldiers. There were dead bodies all over town. Japanese soldiers would rape any woman they caught sight of, kill any man they found. What on earth makes them think they can say that the Nanking Massacre never happened?”

18. Chinese Victims and Survivors (cont.)
Qiu Xiuying (仇秀英) – born 1930: “One morning, filled with curiosity, I ventured outside with my older brother and four other children. There were lots of dead bodies lying around Yijiang Gate. Even the area inside the gate itself was piled high with bodies. A mass grave had been dug near the gate and bodies thrown in willy-nilly. It was a truly horrific sight, with bodies piled up all the way to the grass along the edges of the hole. Inside the gate, bodies were piled up to a height of more than one meter and there were more bodies at Zhongshan Wharf. It was so terrifying that I couldn’t look at the bodies.”

19. Chinese Victims and Survivors (cont.)
Chang Chu-Yeh (章楚業) – born 1923: “That night, five Japanese soldiers charged into our house, forced my father and me out, and then raped my mother, my 80 year old great-grandmother, and my 11-year-old sister. By the time I got back into my house, my great-grandmother had already died and was lying in a pool of blood from this violent abuse and unbearable suffering.”
“Later, crossing the Yangtze River on a small boat back to Nanking, we saw many dead bodies bloated like balloons floating around us, and the smell of the corpses from the upstream Ba-Gua-Zhou Island made me feel like puking. These bodies were often the result of killing practices and competitions among the Japanese troops, and many of the bodies were without their heads as decapitation was one of the Japanese’s favorite execution methods.　 The walls of the city moat were covered with blood drops and bullet holes.”
“In spite of the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers against my family, I am not seeking any revenge, and do not hold any animosity against the Japanese people. The fact that I have become a Christian has helped me to forgive the Japanese. I tell my three children and nine grandchildren that they must not hate, but they must never forget this part of history. I don’t want this kind of things to happen again to anyone else in the future.”

20. Reverend John Magee – American Missionary
12/17/1937: “The horrors of the last week is beyond anything I have ever experienced. I never dream of the Japanese soldiers as such savages. It has been a week of murder and rape, worse than I can imagine, but it has happened for a long time. They not only killed every person they can find, but also vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages. Many of them were shot down like the hunting of rabbits jn the streets. There are dead bodies all over the city. I myself saw hundreds of dead bodies.”

21. Personal Movie - Reverend John Magee
John Magee’s Testament – filmed in Dec. 1937:
26.5 minutes
Chairman of the International Red Cross in Nanking
Shot several hundred minutes of film with his 16mm camera
Smuggled out of China
Shown to members of the U.S. government, and sent to the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin
Legation Secretary of the German Embassy in China wrote to Foreign Ministry recommending to buy this film
Officiated at the funeral of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, and also served as chaplain to President Harry S. Truman
His son David Magee in 2001 donated his father’s film to the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall

22. VOICES OF THE AUDIO FILES (order of appearance)
Dr. Robert Wilson: Scott Masters
Minnie Vautrin: Lisa Wiater
Tsen Shui-Fang: Sue Elfenbein
John Rabe: Bill Hegerich
Deguchi Gonjiro: Eric Tow
Sawamura Jiro: Henry Hom
Tanaka Jiro: Chung-shu Yang
Tokuda Ichitaro: Charles Wang
Yang Mingzhen: Anne Cheung
Qiu Xiuying: Shirley Yang
Chang Chu-Yeh: Joe Cheung
Reverend John Magee: Jim Raevis