Autor/Autorin
On the eve of the Second World War, soldiers of the Japanese army carried out a massacre of civilians and prisoners of war after conquering the then capital of China, in which between 100,000 and 300,000 people were murdered. The mass murder, accompanied by countless rapes, was the cruel climax of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). An official admission of guilt by the Japanese side is still pending today.
After hasty but belated reforms failed to halt the decline of the Quing dynasty and a national revolutionary rallying movement led by the Western-oriented Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) gained the support of the army, the six-year-old Emperor Puyi was deposed at the end of 1911. China became a republic on 1 January 1912, but proved to be extremely unstable. In the same year, the army under Yuan Shikai (1859-1916) established a military dictatorship that suppressed all democratic endeavours, forced Sun Yat-sen into exile and banned the National People’s Party (Guomingdang, GMD) that he had founded.
Shikai’s death in 1916 left a power vacuum and China disintegrated into spheres of influence of regional rulers until Sun Yat-sen returned from exile in Japan at the beginning of the 1920s and, with the support of the Soviet Union, centralised the power structures and built up a powerful military force. Only Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), Sun Yat-sen’s companion and, after his death, political and military leader of the Guomingdang, was able to largely unite the regional power holders behind him and establish a new republic with Nanking as its capital.
The USSR did not limit its activities to supporting the GMD. Rather, it pushed for the establishment of a communist party, which was founded in Shanghai in 1921 (Communist Party of China, CCP). After initial co-operation between the GMD and the CCP, Chiang Kai-shek broke the alliance of convenience in 1927 and carried out a massacre of Shanghai communists with his followers. As a result of this massacre, the prelude to the Chinese civil war, the communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) retreated to the mountainous regions of south-east China and established the first model communist state there. Despite the growing threat from Japan, Chiang Kai-shek focussed his military activities on the internal Chinese conflict and was able to force the Communists to flee their south-eastern bases and retreat in 1934. Mao’s „Long March“ to the west and north began, in the course of which (over 12,000 kilometres) around 80,000 people lost their lives, while Mao Zedong was able to consolidate his claim to leadership of the party. After Mao’s victory in 1949, the „Long March“ was to be stylised for propaganda purposes as the founding myth of the People’s Republic and the heroic myth of the Chinese Communist Party[1].
In 1936, however, communist brigades succeeded in capturing Chiang Kai-shek and, in the face of the Japanese threat, persuaded him to sign a standstill agreement which, although not always honoured, lasted until the Japanese surrender.
The global economic crisis at the end of the 1920s also had a profound impact on the heavily export-orientated Japanese economy. The crisis strengthened ultra-national forces in Japanese politics and society that were pushing for territorial expansion. The focus of interest was on Manchuria, which was rich in raw materials, the markets of South-East Asia, which were still dominated by the European colonial powers, but also China, which had been weakened by the civil war. After the Japanese army’s failed attempt to occupy Manchuria during the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), Japanese troops succeeded in installing a puppet regime in 1931 and seizing Manchuria’s natural resources. Due to the civil war in China, they encountered no significant resistance.
The Japanese invasion of China began on 7 July 1937 and by the end of 1938 the Japanese troops had pushed the Guomingdang government onto the defensive and occupied China’s most important strategic and urban centres. With the Japanese air force’s attack on the US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor (1941) and Washington’s subsequent declaration of war on Tokyo, the Japanese wars of expansion in the Asia-Pacific region and the Second Sino-Japanese War were irreversibly intertwined with the Second World War.
Tokyo’s persistent ultra-national-aggressive, racist propaganda, which dehumanised the enemy, had an impact on the invading army’s conduct of the war. The massacre carried out by Japanese soldiers between 13 December 1937 and the end of January of the following year in Nanking, the capital of the Guomingdang government, is representative of Japanese war crimes in the Sino-Japanese War.
After several days of siege and massive bombardment by the Japanese armed forces, the Chinese city commander of Nanking ordered the surrender of the largely destroyed metropolis and the withdrawal of troops from the city. Panicked Chinese soldiers and civilians tried to escape across the Yangtze River. Numerous people lost their lives in this disorganised escape. Chiang Kai-shek provisionally moved the seat of the Guomingdang government to Wuhan in central China.
The exact course of events following the takeover of the city by the Japanese army has not been conclusively clarified and the number of victims is still disputed today. Serious estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 dead in the course of the massacres following the occupation of the city on 13 December, which were committed by Japanese soldiers in the following weeks until the end of January 1938. Eyewitnesses reported looting, arbitrary mass shootings and mass rape; around 20,000 women and girls are said to have been raped and murdered in the approximately six weeks of unrestrained violence[2].
A competition between two Japanese officers to see who would be the first to kill a hundred people with a sword caused a sensation. Japanese newspapers followed the competition with daily updates.[3] Prisoners of war and civilians were rounded up, blown up with mines and survivors were doused with petrol and burned. According to diary entries by Japanese officers, there was a general policy that no prisoners should be taken. In the days immediately following the occupation, the officers‘ accounts are primarily concerned with the question of how tens of thousands of prisoners of war could be murdered as efficiently as possible[4].
Before the occupation of Nanking, the city had a population of around 1.3 million. As the Japanese troops moved towards the capital of Guomingdang China, those who could afford it fled, including numerous foreign merchants, diplomats, journalists and representatives of company branches. Only a few foreigners remained in the threatened city, including John Rabe (1888-1950), who managed the Siemens China Company in Nanking. The Hamburg-born businessman had already been working in Africa when he moved to China in 1908. From 1908 to 1938 he worked for the Chinese subsidiary of the Siemens Group, and from 1931 he was managing director of the branch in Nanking. After the First World War, like all other Germans in China, he was sent to Germany for a short time, but returned to China after a few months. According to his own statement, he did not stay in Nanking to be „shot to death“ for assets or the „company“, but out of responsibility for the Chinese employees entrusted to his care, who had no opportunity to escape.
In view of the imminent takeover of the city by Japanese troops, the foreigners remaining in the city founded a committee to protect the civilian population with the aim of establishing a safety zone for civilians. Rabe was appointed chairman of the committee. Around 250,000 women, children and unarmed men found relative safety in the four square kilometre zone and escaped mass murder. At times, up to 650 people found shelter from the escalating violence in his private house and garden: „As I can no longer hear the moaning, I open both gates and let everything in. […]. About 30 people sleep in the office, three in the coal hole, eight women in the servants‘ closet and the rest […] outside, in the garden, on the pavement, in the courtyard!“[6]
Rabe was a member of the NSDAP and described himself as a National Socialist. He hoisted the swastika flag in his garden, which proved to be another protective factor in view of the Japanese government’s friendship with the National Socialists. Japan and Germany were already bound by the Anti-Comintern Pact at this time. His National Socialist stance was no obstacle to co-operation for the other committee members, including US missionaries. Rabe had a naïve idea of National Socialism and a romanticised, idealised image of Adolf Hitler. He saw him as a man of the people, a plain, simple man with a feeling for the suffering of others. His image of the National Socialist state was formed from a distance; he had not experienced the rise and seizure of power by the National Socialists in Germany, although he would have had access to independent sources of information in Nanking. American members of the committee found it difficult to reconcile his actions, which were based on the values of humanity, and his sincere character with his admiration for Hitler[7].
After Rabe was recalled to Germany in 1938, however, his idealised image was soon to crack. His public condemnation of the crimes in Nanking landed him in Gestapo custody. From then on, he was forbidden to give any further lectures on this subject. At Siemens, he was subsequently assigned only subordinate activities – even after 1945.
Rabe’s behaviour towards Japanese soldiers as a convinced National Socialist, based on a false image he had formed of the Nazi regime, actually contributed to saving human lives. It arose from a humane way of thinking, which Rabe stood up for due to his personality.
The reports of the atrocities contributed to the US decision to impose a trade embargo on Japan. This was probably a major reason for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
The first war crimes trials were held before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 under the direction of the National Chinese Government of Guomingdang. Thirteen tribunals were set up in various regions under the control of the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice. In March 1947, Lieutenant General Tani Hisao, the alleged perpetrator of the massacre, was sentenced to death. In 605 trials against 885 defendants, 149 death sentences and 83 prison sentences were handed down. A total of 350 defendants were acquitted. President Chiang Kai-shek personally confirmed the death sentences.
On 12 November 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo pronounced seven death sentences against high-ranking Japanese military officers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, conspiracy against world peace and murder. 18 accused Japanese officers were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Every twelve seconds, a drop of water falls from the ceiling of a room in the Nanking Memorial Hall, which was built in 1985, while a picture of a victim of the massacre is projected onto one of the walls. Based on 300,000 victims in six weeks, one person was murdered every twelve seconds in the course of the massacre.
47 years after the massacre, 36 years after the founding of the People’s Republic under Mao Zedong, the time was ripe for the creation of such a memorial site. Under Mao Zedong’s regime, the class struggle was at the centre of every social conflict, the promotion of a sense of national identity through the memory of a crime committed by an external enemy was just as undesirable as the memory of the fact that the weakening of Chiang Kai-shek’s National People’s Party by the Japanese invasion had at least contributed to the victory of the Communists. The founding myth of the People’s Republic included a purposeful, „inevitable“ triumph of the CCP; victims and suffering among the civilian population had no place in this narrative. Moreover, focussing on the Japanese atrocities would have at least raised the question of human rights violations on the part of the communists. In addition, the economic strength of Japan, which was soon integrated into the Western hemisphere after the Second World War, was a factor that Mao Zedong could not ignore.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the primacy of the class struggle receded into the background. This also opened up scope for a change in the historical discourse. The reforms under the leadership of Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) from 1979 onwards, during the course of which the Chinese economy was transformed into state-controlled capitalism and which led to a gradual opening of the country, were also linked to the party leadership’s intention to counter the opening up to the outside world with a new Chinese national feeling within the country. The memory of the crimes of Japanese imperialism now appeared to be a suitable building block for the creation of a cross-class identity for the Chinese people. The Second Sino-Japanese War was rediscovered as an identity-forming object of remembrance, and the commemoration of Japanese aggression was officially promoted through large-scale academic research projects, exhibitions and other highly publicised media. Since the mid-1990s, the Nanking Massacre and the national humiliation associated with it have become central themes of a newly emerging Chinese culture of remembrance.
In Japan, however, the Nanking Massacre has been the subject of controversy for decades. Serious historians in Japan do not deny the crime, which has been proven by numerous documents and unequivocal testimonies. Nevertheless, there are attempts by reactionary historians to heroise the ‚Greater Asian War‘ and to trivialise the massacre as an ‚event‘ in it.
In the culture of remembrance, the Japanese war crimes were long overshadowed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which promoted a one-sided narrative of victimisation and pushed an examination of their own crimes into the background. Research into the perpetrators hardly reaches beyond the academic level, a broad social discourse is lacking, just as Japan has still not officially recognised the massacre of those murdered and their relatives.
[1] As an introduction with further reading: Frederick S. Litten, „The Myth of the „Turning Point“ – Towards a New Understanding of the Long March „, in: Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 25, Munich 2001, pp. 3-44, e-document .
[2] Harold J. Timperley, What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China. A Documentary Record. London 1938, especially p. 174 ff. Timberley was China correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in the 1930s and was in Nanking when the Japanese troops occupied the city. He himself witnessed numerous atrocities and collected witness reports and documents in the weeks following the massacre, which are documented in the aforementioned work. See Robert P. Gray, Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanking . Vancouver 1996, especially chapter X, e-document , n.p.
[3 ]Cf. Uwe Makino, Nanking Massacre 1937/38. Japanese War Crimes between Denial and Exaggeration . Norderstedt 2007, p. 105 ff.
[4] S. Fujiwara Akira, The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview, in: The Asia-Pacific Journal, 5/2007, e-document , p. 9.
[5] Cf. Erwin Wickert, John Rabe und das Massaker von Nanking , in: Fritz Bauer Institut (ed.), Völkermord und Kriegsverbrechen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (= Jahrbuch 2004 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust), Frankfurt/M., New York 2004, pp. 245-268, here p. 249; now also Huang Huiying, John Rabe – Eine Biografie , Beijing 2014.
[6] Diary of John Rabe, entry from 12 December 1937, in: Erwin Wickert (ed.), John Rabe. The Good German of Nanking . Stuttgart 1997, p. 104 f.
[7] Cf. Rickert, John Rabe and the massacre , especially p. 247 ff.
S. Fujiwara Akira, „The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview“ , in : The Asia-Pacific Journal , 5 (2007).
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking. The Massacre in the Chinese Capital on the Eve of the Second World War. Munich 1999.
Yang Daqing, „The Challenges of the Nanking Massacre. Reflections on Historical Inquiry“, in: Joshua A. Fogel (ed.), The Nanking Massacre in History and Historiography. Berkeley 2000, pp. 133-179.
Robert P. Gray, Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanking. Vancouver 1996.
Huang Huiying, John Rabe – A Biography. Beijing 2014.
Honda Katsuichi, The Nanking Massacre. A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame. New York 1998
Kohlhammer, Siegfried, „Using the Past for the Benefit of the Present! The Nanking Massacre and the Chinese Politics of History“, in: Merkur 61 (2007), pp. 594-603.
Gerhard Krebs, „Nanking 1937/38. Or: On dealing with massacres“, in: Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens (2000-2001), No. 167-170, pp. 299-346.
Frederick S. Litten, „The Myth of the „Turning Point“ – Towards a New Understanding of the Long March“, in: Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 25 (2001).
Tim Maga, Judgment at Tokyo, The Japanese War Crimes Trials . Lexington 2001.
Uwe Makino, Nanking Massacre 1937/38: Japanese War Crimes between Denial and Exaggeration. Norderstedt 2007.
Richard H. Minear, Victor’s Justice: Tokyo War Crimes Trial . Princeton 2015.
Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial. Allied war crimes operations in the East. 1945-1951. Austin/London 1979.
Thomas Rabe: John Rabe – a biography . Heidelberg 2009.
Harold J. Timperley, What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China. A Documentary Record. London 1938.
Erwin Wickert (ed.), John Rabe. Der gute Deutsche von Nanking , Stuttgart 1997. (Rabe’s diaries) cf. also http://www.john-rabe.de/.
Ders., John Rabe und das Massaker von Nanking , in: Fritz Bauer Institut (ed.), Völkermord und Kriegsverbrechen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (= Jahrbuch 2004 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust), Frankfurt/M., New York 2004, pp. 245-268.
Ishida Yuji, „Das Massaker von Nanking und die japanische Öffentlichkeit“ , in : Christoph Cornelißen, Lutz Klinkhammer, Wolfgang Schwentker (eds.), Erinnerungskulturen. Germany, Italy and Japan since 1945. Frankfurt/M. 2003, pp. 233-242.