page_title: Nanjing Massacre
section_title: Killing of prisoners of war
hierarchical_section_title: Nanjing Massacre / The massacre / Killing of prisoners of war
caption_attribution_description: English: A correspondent for Asahi Newspaper reported that on December 13 and 14, 1937, the Morozumi Unit (the 65th Infantry Regiment of the Yamada Detachment in the 13th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army) took prisoners of 14,777 Chinese soldiers in the vicinity of the artillery fort of Wulong Mountain and Mufu Mountain that lay between the northern border of Nanjing city wall and the south bank of the Yangtze River. This photo shows part of the captives accommodated by Japanese troops near Mufu Mountain. However, there had been no further follow-up report since then and for decades. In the late 1980s, Ono Kenji investigated the incident by interviewing 200 or so war veterans and gathering 24 wartime diaries and other historical materials. Ono's research made it clear that the 15,000 captives and additional 2,000 to 3,000 prisoners taken after the 14th were all massacred by military order. [1] 日本語: 日本の部隊に収容された中国人捕虜の一部 （昭和12年12月16日） 中文: 据日本《朝日新闻》特派员上野报道，1937年12月13日至14日，日本陆军第13师团山田支队（即步兵第65联队、两角部队）在南京北郊长江南岸的乌龙山炮台和幕府山炮台一带俘虏放下武器的中国军人约14777人。照片所示即部分被俘华军被集中在幕府山附近一处营房准备加以屠杀
context_page_description: The Nanjing Massacre was a massacre that happened in Nanjing, China, in December of 1937 and January of 1938. It was part of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which was the part of World War II between China and Japan. At the time, Japan was trying to take over China and Nanjing was the Chinese capital. The Japanese Army reached Nanjing on 13 December 1937 and began killing thousands upon thousands of men and boys and raping thousands upon thousands of women and girls.
  Some Japanese claim the fighting in Nanjing was the same or not much worse than fighting in other places and in other wars. That is simply untrue. There is a lot of evidence from the Chinese, from outsiders who were there, from outsiders who have studied it, and from the Japanese themselves that things were much worse. There were many, many war crimes: soldiers without weapons were killed; people who were not soldiers were killed; many were tortured, mutilated, or killed in very cruel ways; many were raped or forced to work and treated like things. We have the orders from the soldier's leaders telling them to do these kinds of things and not to follow rules against them.
context_section_description: Starting in 1931, an international law called the Third Geneva Convention said it was illegal to treat prisoners of war in certain ways.  It said these prisoners had rights – for example, the right to have a trial before being executed.  However, in August 1937, Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, had decided that neither he nor the army would not follow any international laws about how Chinese prisoners of war had to be treated.
  Right after the IJA took over Nanjing, they started searching for ex-Chinese soldiers.  They took thousands of young men as prisoners.  Some of these men were never soldiers; the IJA just assumed they were.  Without any trials, the IJA took many of these young men to the Yangtze River and killed them with machine guns.
  According to confessions made by former IJA soldiers, on December 13 and 14, 1937, a unit of IJA soldiers had taken 14,777 Chinese prisoners of war.  In the next few days, they took another 2,000–3,000 prisoners.  In two days, the IJA massacred every one of these prisoners of war—over 15,000 people.  In their confessions, the former IJA soldiers said their military leaders had ordered them to do this.
  Over the six weeks of the massacre, the IJA killed a total of about 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war.p. 1015
caption: 15,000 Chinese soldiers captured near Nanjing.  All were massacred
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