The Nanjing Massacre began
On this day · 13 December 1937
When Japan's army stormed China's capital, weeks of mass killing turned a fallen city into one of the war's gravest atrocities.
On December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army captured Nanjing, then the capital of China, after weeks of fierce fighting in the Second Sino-Japanese War. What followed was not the end of a battle but the start of an atrocity. Over roughly six weeks, Japanese soldiers carried out mass executions of surrendered troops and unarmed civilians, alongside widespread looting, arson, and sexual violence.
Estimates of the dead range from 100,000 to more than 300,000, a span that remains fiercely contested between historians and governments to this day. Tens of thousands of women and girls were raped, giving the events their grim alternate name, the Rape of Nanjing.
A small group of Western missionaries and businessmen formed the Nanking Safety Zone, a fragile refuge that sheltered tens of thousands as the city burned around them.
After the war, commanding general Matsui Iwane was convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and executed. The massacre endures as a flashpoint in Sino-Japanese relations.
Sources & references
3 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 3 independent sources.
