Walking Through the Dead: A Visit to Nanjing and the Reality of the 1937 Massacre

 

WARNING: GRAPHIC HISTORY

The following article discusses rape, mass murder, and extreme wartime violence. Reader discretion is strongly advised.



Walking Through the Dead: A Visit to Nanjing and the Reality of the 1937 Massacre

After entering a large museum in one of the world’s oldest cities Nanking, now called Nanjing my 18-year-old daughter Sophia and I stepped onto a glass walkway suspended above the earth. Beneath our feet lay an ancient path, preserved ten feet below ground. Soft lights illuminated the soil while the surrounding hall remained dark, silent, and heavy.

On the black walls to our right hung photographs taken in December 1937. They were not artistic recreations. They were real images captured by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers themselves. Babies murdered. Prisoners beheaded. Bodies piled along the banks of the Yangtze River. Heads severed and displayed as trophies.

This was not rumor.
This was documentation.

The photographs formed a brutal record of what history calls the Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking.

A Mass Grave Beneath Our Feet

At the center of the hall stood a large rectangular structure bordered by low walls. Visitors leaned over the edge in silence. Some clasped their hands in prayer. Others whispered words of anger and disbelief. The air felt thick, vibrating with grief and suppressed rage.

Sophia, tall with blond hair and blue eyes, stood out among the mostly local Han Chinese visitors. She looked over the wall first. When she turned back to me, her eyes were wide and filled with sadness.

Below us lay a mass grave.

Skulls were cracked by blunt force or punctured by bullets. Some heads lay several feet away from their bodies. Many skeletons bore clear signs of execution. This crime scene, we would later learn, was not even the largest in the museum.

A Cemetery the Size of a City

In another building, hundreds more bodies were preserved in place: elderly women, children, and prisoners of war. The remains showed unmistakable signs of death by gunfire, bayonets, swords, and clubs. We were walking over what was essentially a massive, unplanned cemetery created not by disease or famine, but by systematic killing.

Glass cases lined the walls, filled with soil mixed with human remains earth that had absorbed flesh, blood, and bone.

I had visited Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and memorials across Europe. Those sites display evidence of genocide. But here, the victims themselves were still present, staring upward through empty eye sockets, silently demanding to be remembered.

Ideology Behind the Violence

How could soldiers from a modern, educated nation commit such acts?

Before and during World War II, Japanese ultranationalist ideology taught that the Yamato race was superior and that non-Japanese, especially Chinese, were subhuman. Civilians and prisoners were referred to as gaijin or animals, undeserving of mercy.

Former soldier Uno Shintarō later admitted,

“We never really considered the Chinese human.”

George Orwell observed that Japanese racial ideology was, in some ways, even more extreme than Nazi racial theory. Journalist and former POW James Young wrote in 1940 that Japanese forces not only duplicated Nazi brutality, but exceeded it during their campaign in China.

Collapse of Nanjing’s Defense

By mid-December 1937, the Chinese defense of Nanjing had collapsed. Of roughly 150,000 Chinese troops stationed there:

About 10,000 were killed in battle

Approximately 90,000 surrendered

Roughly 47,000 escaped westward

Leadership failed catastrophically. General Tang Shengzhi abandoned the city under orders from Chiang Kai-shek, who himself had already fled. The remaining soldiers were left without coordination or clear command.

When the Japanese entered the city, they captured tens of thousands of prisoners of war.

What followed was not imprisonment.

It was extermination.

Execution of Prisoners of War

Japanese journalist Yukio Omata described mass executions along the Yangtze River:

“Those in the first row were beheaded. Those in the second were forced to throw the bodies into the river before being killed themselves. When the soldiers grew tired, they used machine guns. No one reached the other shore.”

Historians estimate that 80,000–90,000 POWs were murdered in this way. General Iwane Matsui, commander of Japanese forces in Nanjing, later admitted he did not consider killing prisoners a violation of international law.

Rape as a Weapon of War



While POWs were being slaughtered, rape was occurring everywhere.

Former soldier Shirō Azuma later described gang rapes in horrifying detail, admitting that women were raped and then killed so they could not testify.

Girls under ten years old were assaulted and murdered. Women were cut open. Pregnant victims were bayoneted. Many were taken to military camps and never seen again.

Australian journalist Harold Timperley called the Japanese soldiers “lust-mad.”

Rape was not random.
It was systematic terror.

Atrocities Beyond Nanjing



The violence did not stop at the city limits. Similar massacres occurred in Suzhou, Wuxi, Wuhu, Mufushan, and other towns along the march from Shanghai to Nanjing. Entire regions were stripped bare. Civilians called the Japanese army Huang-chün  “an army of locusts.”

Historian James Scott concluded that such widespread and consistent brutality could only have occurred with orders from above, implicating high command and political leadership.

The Safety Zone and the Lives Saved

The killing would have been even worse without the International Safety Zone, organized by foreign expatriates. Ironically, its leader was John Rabe, a Nazi Party member who appealed directly to Adolf Hitler for help stopping Japanese atrocities.

The Safety Zone saved approximately 200,000 Chinese civilians. Outside its borders, slaughter continued.

A Crime Against Humanity



By early 1938, Nanjing lay in ruins. Japan had secured a major port and delivered a devastating psychological blow to China. For the next eight years, the region endured continued occupation, violence, and terror.

Today, the Nanjing Massacre stands as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century. For China, it holds the same weight that Auschwitz holds for Jews.

Walking through that museum, surrounded by bones and silence, one truth was unmistakable:

History is not dead.
It is buried, sometimes just beneath our feet.

References & Sources

Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking

Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China

Brian Victoria, Zen at War

George Orwell, wartime essays

James Young, Our Enemy, Japan (1940)

Yale University East Asia Studies

Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre

International Military Tribunal for the Far East records

Credit:
Researched and rewritten for WO History & Local Gists
Based on eyewitness testimony, museum archives, court records, and academic historical scholarship.

He was only 31 years old when his journey ended on the steep, unforgiving ridges of New Guinea.

When I Held My Uncle’s Hand After Death: What I Saw Changed How I Understand Life and God

https://wohistorynlocalgists.blogspot.com/2026/01/medieval-poison-wives-legend-france%20.html

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