page_title: Nanjing Massacre
section_title: Extrajudicial killing of Chinese prisoners of war
hierarchical_section_title: Nanjing Massacre / Massacre / Extrajudicial killing of Chinese prisoners of war
caption_attribution_description: English: A young man who refused seeking women for beast soldiers is tied to be killed., (H.J.Timperley, "The Japanese Atrocities in China" , July 1938, p. 31) 中文（简体）‎: 青年拒绝为兽兵寻觅妇女, 被缚就戮 (田伯列编著《外人目睹中之日军暴行》中华民国二十七年七月初版, 第31页)
context_page_description: The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Imperial Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing, then the capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
  The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. During this period, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered disarmed combatants and Chinese civilians numbering an estimated 40,000 to over 300,000, and perpetrated widespread rape and looting.
  Since most Japanese military records on the killings were kept secret or destroyed shortly after the surrender of Japan in 1945, historians have been unable to accurately estimate the death toll of the massacre. In 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo estimated that over 200,000 Chinese were killed in the incident. China's official estimate is more than 300,000 dead based on the evaluation of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal in 1947. The death toll has been contested by scholars since the 1980s.
  The event remains a contentious political issue and an obstacle in Sino-Japanese relations.
context_section_description: On 5 August 1937, the Deputy Minister of Military of Japan notified Japanese Troops in Shanghai of the army's proposition to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners ("Riku Shi Mitsu No.198"). The directive also advised staff officers to no longer to use the term Prisoner of War.
  Soon after the fall of the city, Japanese troops made a thorough search for Chinese soldiers and summarily arrested thousands of young Chinese men. Many were taken to the Yangtze River, where they were machine-gunned to death. What was probably the single largest massacre of Chinese troops, the Straw String Gorge Massacre, occurred along the banks of the Yangtze River on December 18. For most of the morning, Japanese soldiers tied the POWs' hands together. At dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. Unable to escape, the POWs could only scream and thrash desperately. It took an hour for the sounds of death to stop and even longer for the Japanese to bayonet each individual. The majority of the bodies were dumped directly into the Yangtze River.
  The Japanese troops gathered 1,300 Chinese soldiers and civilians at Taiping Gate and murdered them. The victims were blown up with landmines, then doused with petrol and set on fire. The survivors were killed with bayonets.
  American news correspondents F. Tillman Durdin and Archibald Steele reported seeing corpses of massacred Chinese soldiers forming mounds six feet high at the Nanjing Yijiang gate in the north. Durdin, who worked for The New York Times, toured Nanjing before his departure from the city. He heard waves of machine-gun fire and witnessed the Japanese soldiers gun down some two hundred Chinese within ten minutes. He would later state that he had seen tank guns used on bound soldiers.
  Two days later, in his report to The New York Times, Durdin stated that the alleys and street were filled with the dead, amongst them women and children. Durdin stated "[i]t should be said that certain Japanese units exercised restraint and that certain Japanese officers tempered power with generosity and commission," but continued "the conduct of the Japanese army as a whole in Nanjing was a blot on the reputation of their country"."
  Ralph L. Phillips, a missionary, testified to the U.S. State Assembly Investigating Committee, that he was "forced to watch while the Japs disembowled a Chinese soldier" and "roasted his heart and liver and ate them."
caption: A Chinese POW about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer using a shin-guntō
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