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Documents on the Rape of Nanking (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

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This book consists of four sets of documents on the Nanking atrocity which took place in 1937 - 1938.
The first set is a part of the official documents of the Nanking Safety Zone from December 14, 1937 to February 19, 1938 which was edited and published by Hsu Shuhsi in 1939.
These documents were also used in H.J.Timperley's "What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China" and found in Rabe's diaries that were published as "The Good Man of Nanking".
The Hsu Shuhsi's book was excerpted and submitted at Tokyo war crimes trial on August, 29, 1946.
These are evidently basic historical documents on the Nanking atrocity. However they can tell us what happened in and around the Safety Zone until Feb.19, 1938.

The second set of documents is a collection of family letters of Dr.Robert Wilson who served at Nanking University Hospital.
Some of his letters were appeared in Reader's Digest of October 1938.( "We Were in Nanking", p41-43)
He wrote in the letter of March 7,1938, "The Red Swastika Society has for the last month been feverishly burying bodies from all parts of the city outside the zone and from the surrounding countryside.A conservative estimate of the numbers of people slaughtered in cold blood is some what about 100,000, including of course thousand of soldiers that had thrown down their arms."(p254)

The third set is "Judgement of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East" and the fourth is "The Dissenting Opinion of Radhabional Pal".
Regarding the Nanking atrocity, Pal had prejudice against the testimonies of eyewitnesses, however
he accepted that "..., the evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetuated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population."(p278)

"Introduction" written by the editor Timothy Brook is quite helpful to understand these documents.
But, readers, please remember that the these documents will never give you complete view of the Nanking atrocity, as the witnesses mostly stayed in the wall city of Nanking during the tragedy.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who desires to read primary source accounts of the war crimes committed by units of the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking during 1937-38. The book is divided into 2 areas: The first section covers items of evidence, including correspondence to Japanese authorities in Nanking and numerous eyewitness accounts as transcribed by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. Heart-wrenching letters composed by Dr. Robert Wilson are also included in this section. The second, much-smaller part of the book details the majority opinion and findings of the International Military Tribunal in 1948. Finally, the rambling and unconvincing dissent by Justice Radhabinod Pal completes this interesting book. Many of the letters and accounts are no more than a page or two, so it can be easily read in small increments.

For those who seeking actual historical evidence after being awakened to this atrocity by Iris Chang's "Rape of Nanking", you will find it in this book. It is not exhaustive by any means, but does present the most notable accounts surrounding the Nanking massacres. Japanese ultra-nationalists have no credible rebuttal for what is fairly documented in this book and thus will say anything to dissuade you from reading it. That in itself is a ringing endorsement for the validity of "Documents on the Rape of Nanking", and the unblemished facts it provides for generations of readers.

For those interested in the events surrounding the Japanese invasion of China, this work is compelling collection of documents. There may be some interested in re-writing history ("What Really Happened in Nanking" being the most flagrant example--"They were happy we came!") and so be it. To those more inclined to study history, this is one of the best on the subject.

Beware of a person who sign "Hiromi". He (or she ?) has commented all the books on this subject and writes like a rith-wing extremist revisionnist.

The Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone is a first-class contemporary resource that lets you get the picture of what happened and not happened in Nanking in December 1937.
Members of The International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone were of anti-Japanese sentiment, but were honest enough to wrote things like that they were unable to separate civilian refugees to the soldiers in civilian clothes hiding in the Safety Zone (that is violation of the International law) although they make protests against Japanese Army assuming these plain-clothes soldiers as "civilians", so executing of those snipers should be illegal to their eyes.
Still, they admitted that [cases 210 to 219] are only the ones [they] have been able to get first hand reports of : (the first two are the cases overlooked in typing up previous reports.)(p118) You can get the picture now. The reports they are making and handing in to the Embassy of Japan were all hearsay. On top of that, most of them were "second-hand" hearsay!
Although they wrote them as if they were witnessed by them, you can see the difference between hearsay and genuinely witnessed event : for instance, case 185 (p78) says ;
"On the morning of January 9, Mr. Kroeger and Mr. Hatz saw a Japanese officer and soldier executing a poor man in civilian clothes....." This was the only one of two "killings" that were actually witnessed ,which was testified by Rev. John G. Magee in the Tokyo Trial. This one was "legitimate execution"(p78), and the other one was a case that a man in civilian clothes who was challenged by a sentry but run away then shot. This was not murder either.
If you are a little careful about these things, you can see everything like Dr. Wilson's letters to Rabe's diary consists of hearsay. Only things they saw were actions related to the battles and its aftermath for most of them the Chinese soldiers are respnsible, not Japanese (Kuomintang propaganda department was very much in action at that time).
Nevertheless, some people still think these documents are the eyewitness evidences of the "Rape of Nanking". I don't know how or why. Maybe for them, the truth of history doesn't matter. But to the Japanese, it matters a lot because we are still on trial for these horrible false accusations.

If you really need to know, you should read the following books:

What Really Happened in Nanking by Tanaka Masaaki

The Alleged "Nanking Massacre": Japan's rebuttal to China's forged claims by Tadao Takemoto, Yasuo Ohara

Nanking : Anatomy of an Atrocity by Masahiro Yamamoto