The Nanjing Massacre (Rape of Nanking)

The day the city opened its gates and closed its eyes

On a cold December morning in 1937, the gates of Nanjing — the capital of a wounded Republic — swung open not to triumph but to something far darker. Months of grinding combat around Shanghai had emptied the city of some of its leaders and many soldiers, but it could not empty the streets of people: refugees, shopkeepers, family members, and civil servants who either could not leave or refused to abandon homes they had known for generations.

When Imperial Japanese units entered Nanjing on December 13, they found a city swollen with fear and noise — the last pockets of resistance, panicked crowds, and the hush of officials gone. What followed was neither the swift security sweep that commanders sometimes ordered nor a routine occupation. In the hours and weeks after the entry, a pattern of violence unfolded: organized executions of prisoners, mass shootings of civilians, widespread sexual violence, deliberate looting and burning. The city did not simply fall to an army; it was transformed into a field where the normal rules of war were stripped away.

The march from Shanghai: exhaustion, revenge, and loose discipline

To understand how a capital could become this, you must go back to the mud of Shanghai. The Battle of Shanghai (August–November 1937) was brutal, costly, and demoralizing for both sides. Japanese units that moved west toward Nanjing had been bloodied in that conflict and carried into new operations fatigue, anger, and a hunger for payback. Their officers faced the hard task of maintaining control over soldiers who had seen friends die, towns razed, and civilians resisting.

China’s central government had not remained idle. Chiang Kai-shek ordered many administrative organs to withdraw, and much of the government did indeed evacuate. That abandonment left pockets of Nationalist troops to make last stands, and it left civilians with conflicting impulses: flee and risk being caught on the road, or stay and hope for mercy. Many stayed. Into that volatile mix stepped propaganda and long-standing hatred that intensified battlefield cruelty. In some units, discipline frayed; in others, orders and policies were unclear. The conditions were ripe for atrocity.

When the soldiers came in: the first days of carnage

On the morning of December 13, Japanese troops moved into Nanjing with the momentum of victory. Eyewitnesses — missionaries, diplomats, foreign businessmen — watched scenes they would later describe in painstaking detail. In neighborhoods, soldiers rounded up disarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians. There were summary executions: men corralled, made to strip, shot in groups, or buried in hastily dug pits. Corpses piled near riverbanks and along streets. The Yangtze, which had carried so much of the city’s life, became a dumping ground for bodies.

The violence was not uniform in pattern, but common features recurred in many witness accounts: groups of men taken from homes and shot; looters moving through battered shops; soldiers setting fires to force people out or to cover up their actions; and systematic rape — assaults that were not simply opportunistic but often repeated and brutal. The scale of sexual violence described by survivors and observers — “tens of thousands” appears consistently in many accounts — was enormous, even if exact counts are impossible.

Weeks that unraveled a city: looting, burning, and the Safety Zone

What stretched the event beyond a single night was the span of time: over the following two to six weeks, and in some areas for longer, atrocities continued. Fires blackened districts. Shops were emptied, belongings carried away. Streets were strewn with burned furniture, torn papers, and the silent shapes of the dead. Refugees moved from block to block, trying to find food and shelter.

Amid that collapse a fragile lifeline emerged. A group of foreign residents — diplomats, businessmen, missionaries — formed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. They walked the ruined avenues and designated hospitals, school buildings, and parks as sanctuaries. Men like John Rabe, a German businessman, and women like Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary and educator, converted university halls and temple courtyards into shelters. Their diaries and reports became vital records: inventories of starvation, lists of names, and blunt daily logs of what they saw and tried to stop.

The Safety Zone saved tens of thousands of lives. Committee members bargained with Japanese officers to recognize the area, posted signs marking hospitals and shelters, and organized food distribution and burials. Yet the Zone was not impermeable. Soldiers sometimes violated its boundaries; rapes and killings occurred nearby and, at times, within sight of its gates. The Safety Zone was a sheltering island in a sea of violence, not an impregnable fortress.

How many died: a count that refuses to settle

One of the lasting struggles over Nanjing is simply counting the dead. From the moment the smoke cleared, bodies were buried, rivers dredged, and records started — but the records were fragmentary. China’s memorials and official history commonly cite a figure near 300,000. Many historians, after examining local burial records, survivor testimony, Japanese unit logs, and postwar trial documents, place estimates in a broad range — roughly 100,000 to several hundred thousand.

Why such difference? Documents and witnesses are partial: some perpetrators destroyed records, many bodies were burned or submerged in the river, and the chaos of war makes a precise ledger impossible. Political stakes also shape numbers — memorials, national narratives, and diplomatic rows have all treated the counting of victims as a moral and political act. What does not change is the qualitative fact: mass killings occurred on a scale that left neighborhoods empty, families shattered, and survivors scarred for life. Sexual violence, too, defies neat numbers. Contemporary reports and later studies point to tens of thousands of women raped, though a precise tally cannot now be made.

The small, stubborn acts of care amid horror

It is important to hold those two threads together — the brutality and the rescue — because they defined how Nanjing was lived and later remembered. Inside the Safety Zone, nurses treated wounds, volunteers dug graves in frozen earth, and foreign residents negotiated with soldiers to keep hospitals open. The zone’s daily logs read like a litany of small, stubborn acts: a bowl of rice for a child; a stretcher carried across a street; a burial conducted with the dignity that the dead had been denied.

These testimonies became evidence. Rabe, Vautrin, the diplomats from several Western legations and consular offices, and some Chinese officials kept diaries and sent reports outward. Newspapers and cable networks that received these accounts sent them around the world. Photographs and film, taken where possible and smuggled out, made the horror harder to deny.

Trials, retribution, and the long reach of justice

After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the allied powers and Chinese authorities held tribunals for war crimes. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo tried high-level leaders and codified crimes against peace and war crimes. In China and other occupied territories, local tribunals prosecuted numerous officers and soldiers for atrocities, including acts carried out in and around Nanjing. Several Japanese military personnel were convicted and sentenced — some to death, others to imprisonment.

The trials were messy and incomplete. Some defendants were not tried; some evidence remained inaccessible; and questions about the chain of command — who knew what, and how much of the violence was authorized from above — remained contested. The legal record provided partial vindication and a formal accounting in some cases, but it did not close the conversation. For many survivors, the trials were cold justice against a vast warmth of absence and grief.

How memory became a battlefield between nations

Nanjing did not remain a matter only of legal record. It became a central symbol in Chinese national memory: a wound that shaped education, monuments, and commemorations. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, the lists of names, school curricula, and anniversary ceremonies transformed the site from a ruined city into a place of collective memory and instruction.

Across the East China Sea, memory took other shapes. In Japan the events have been subject to contested narratives: official apologies, instances of denial or minimization by some public figures, and vigorous debate in academia and the press. These divergent memories have made Nanjing not only an ethical and historical issue but a persistent diplomatic one. Disagreement over textbooks, museum exhibits, and political statements has kept the massacre in the headlines and on the diplomatic agenda for decades.

What historians still ask and what new work reveals

Scholars today largely agree on the core facts: that large-scale killings, mass rape, looting, and arson occurred after Nanjing’s capture. But they continue to debate specifics: precise casualty figures, the distribution of responsibility across units and commanders, and the mechanisms by which policy, indiscipline, and battlefield mentality combined to produce atrocity.

Recent decades have produced new work: access to previously closed Japanese unit records, forensic excavations of mass graves, digitization of foreign diaries, and cross-border scholarly collaboration. Those projects have fleshed out unit-level behavior and given us a more detailed picture of how the violence unfolded in particular neighborhoods. At the same time, forensic limitations and political sensitivities mean that some questions will likely remain unresolved.

A city that remembers and the lesson that lingers

In the end, Nanjing’s story is not only about numbers or trials. It is about the collapse of restraint and the fragile human choices that resist it. It is about people who, in the worst of times, formed a Safety Zone and tried to keep the rule of law alive in the face of chaos. It is about a place where ordinary cities’ routines — markets, schools, weddings — were interrupted by violence on a massive scale.

The Nanjing Massacre sits at the intersection of history and memory: an event recorded in diaries, newspapers, trial transcripts, and bones. It continues to teach the world about the dangers of dehumanization, the fragility of civilian protection in modern war, and the importance of bearing witness. The smoke has long since cleared from Nanjing’s streets, but the questions the city provoked — about responsibility, reconciliation, and the work of remembrance — remain unsettled and urgent.