The Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire. The Japanese subjected large crowds of victims to mass incineration. The rapes and rape-murders of women were also of staggering proportions.
Estimates range from as low as twenty thousand to as high as eighty thousand.
The aftermath The massacres and mass rapes in Nanjing continued for a full six weeks, extending into January 1938. In August 1945, after atomic-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered to the United States and other allies. The Second World War was over. Tani Hisao, a commander of the 6 th Division which had committed many atrocities in Nanjing and elsewhere, was sentenced to death in March 1947 and executed the following month. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried nearly 30 key Japanese commanders, including Matsui Iwane, commander of the Central China Expeditionary Force.