The Other Holocaust : Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731, Unit 100, Unit 516
The Other Holocaust :
Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731, Unit 100, Unit 516
Angry at the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing during WWII,
German diplomat George Rosen sent Magee's film to Nazi government and
requested film be shown to Hitler to prove that Japanese army
was a "Violent Killing Machine".
At a time when Japan is seeking the ultimate seal of legitimacy for
its current resurgence of Militarism : a permanent seat on the UN Security
Council, Japan with a history of aggression, crimes against Humanity, with
NO signs of remorse, is NOT worthy of occupying a seat on the UN Security Council !
History has called us into action
Please add your voice to the international call to stop Japan becoming a
permanent member on the U.N. Security Council. Just a click, you can
review and send the letter to
U.N. Secretary General
U.S. President
From history, Militarism is State-Terrorism !
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Unit 731, 100 - Inhuman Biological Warfare
This Biological Warfare is definitely the worst case of systematic
biological massacre against Humanity committed by a country in our Human History.
"The fellow knew that it was over
for him, and so he didn't struggle." recalled the old former medical assistant of
a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II, "But when I picked up the scalpel that's when
he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and
his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was
screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped."
The former medical assistant who insisted on anonymity, explained the
reason for the vivisection. The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with
the plague as part of a research project.
Imperial Japan's biological killing fields are a lost chapter of history
that the full horror of which is only
recently been exposed and understood in all its enormity.
Japan set up Headquarters of Unit 731 in Ping Fan near Harbin and Unit 100 in ChangChun, and Mukden, now called SunYang, in China
to develop plague bombs for use in WWII. The base was disguised as
Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit. After infecting him, the researchers
decided to cut him open alive, tear him apart, organ by organ, to see
what the disease does to a man's inside.
Often no anesthetic was used, he said, out of concern that it might have an
effect on the results.
From July 1993 to Dec. 1994, the "Unit 731 Exhibition" toured Japan and presented at 61 locations over the course of one and half year. It had sent shockwaves throughout Japan. Hal Gold had collected many testimonies in his book
"Unit 731: Testimony; Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation and the Post-War Cover-Up". One of the testimonies was provided by an aged former Japanese doctor Kurumizawa Masakuni.
The Chinese woman victim had regained her consciousness while being vivisected.
" She opened her eyes. "
" And then ? "
" She hollered. "
" What did she say ? "
Kurumizawa could not answer, then began weeping feebly and murmured,
" I don't want to think about it again. "
The interviewee apologized, waited a few seconds, and tried again for an answer.
He gave it though sobs.
" She said, " It's all right to kill me, but please spare my child's life. "
The research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II : a vast
project to develop weapons of biological warfare including following deadly diseases :
bubonic plague, anthrax (including inhalation, skin and gastrointestinal types), smallpox, typhoid, paratyphoid A and B, tularemia, cholera, epidemic hemorrhagic fever, syphilis, aerosols, botulism, brucellosis, dysentery, tetanus, glanders, tuberculosis, yellow fever, typhus, tularemia, gas gangrene, scarlet fever, songo, diphtheria, brysipelas, selmonella, venereal diseases, infectious jaundice, undulant fever, epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, tick encephalitis, plant diseases for crop destruction and a dozen other pathogens.
Unit 731 & Unit 100 were comprised of over 3,000 researchers and technicians.
It was a gigantic research center focused on biological weapons -
the world's most technically advanced at the time, used human
as the guinea pigs, known as marutas (logs). The Japanese told the locals that the facilities were lumber mills.
More than 10,000 Chinese, Korean and Russian PoWs were slaughtered in
these biological experiments.
The vivisection was routinely used for practicing various kinds of surgery says Dr. Ken Yuasa, a former Japanese doctor working in China during the War. First an appendectomy, then an amputation of an arm and finally a tracheotomy. When they finished practicing, they
killed the victim with an injection.
Medical researchers also locked up diseased prisoners with healthy ones, to see how readily various ailments would spread. The doctors put others inside a pressure chamber to see how
much the body can withstand before the eyes pop from their sockets.
To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms,
periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated, the doctors would repeat the process on the victim's upper arm to the shoulder.
After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only
a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens
experiments.
Victims were burned with flamethrowers, blown up with shrapnel, bombarded
with lethal doses of X-ray, spun to death in centriguges, injected with
animal blood, air bubbles, exposure to syphilis, surgical removal of stomachs
with the esophagus then attached to the intestines, amputation of arms and
reattachment on the opposite side, gassed to death in chambers .......
The doctors experimented on children and babies, even three-day-old baby
measuring the temperature with a needle stuck inside the infant's
middle finger to keep it straight to prevent the baby's hand clenching into a fist.
Victims were often taken to a proving ground called Anda, where they were tied to stakes and bombarded with test weapons
to see how effective the new technologies were. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infected
fleas to see how many people would die.
White-coated Japanese medics claiming to be from a government
epidemic-prevention unit would arrive at villages unannounced, saying that
they were there to implement hygiene measures or to administer vaccinations.
After they left, the village would become sick.
The Japanese army regularly conducted "Field Tests".
Planes dropped plague-infected fleas over Ningbo in eastern China
and over Changde in north-central China. Japanese troops also dropped cholera and
typhoid cultures in water reservoirs, wells and ponds.
Cottony material and feathers coated with anthrax bacteria were used to
spread the disease in an airborne manner, as such fibers had been found to
be effective in keeping the bacteria alive long enough to reach the intended
human victims.
Witnesses recall watching Japanese airplanes dropping a mixture of wheat,
millet, soy beans, rice, cotton fibers, paper and fabric cuttings, aerial spraying pathogens over the cities . They all had been coated with the biological organism or with fleas and brought the germs to people.
Japanese distributed infected food, cakes, drink, clothes and even children's
candies to locals.
The same mass infections were being repeated all over China.
"Glanders was a disease first found in horses, and it could attack
human beings," said Furmanski. Human beings' legs are most affected by the disease. "Only one out of 20 people with the disease could survive.
Medical records showed that glanders had long been wiped out in
1906, but new cases suddently broke out in the 1940s during WWII in China."
Even today, one hard-hit village in Zhejiang still bears the nickname
"Rotten-Leg Village" because so many older residents are scarred by glanders
from the 1942 attacks. Their flesh are still rotten
and have not been healed since they were attacked - they have been
suffering for almost 60 years now.
Sheldon H. Harris, a historian at California State University
and author of the book,
"Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American
Cover-up" stressed that
"My calculation, which is very conservative, and based on incomplete
sources as the major archives are still closed, is that 10,000 to 12,000
human beings were exterminated in lab experiments".
"Field Tests" were carried out all over China and Manchuria.
An in-depth study by Chinese and Japanese scholars have shown that at least 270,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed by Japanese germ warfare between 1933 - 1945.
Scholars also believe that the toll from Japanese-seeded cholera epidemics in the southern province of Yunnan alone may reach the staggering figure of 200,000 killed.
As the war was ending, Japanese purposely released all the plague-infected animals. The Northeastern China immediately became a disaster area and caused outbreaks of plague that killed at least another
30,000 people from 1946 - 1948.
These crimes are more than parallel to the coeval work of Joseph Mengele and the Nazi doctors.
Japanese military scientists killed 12 times the number of civilians as did the Nazis Angel of Death, Dr Josef Mengele.
The research was kept secret after the war in part because the
U.S. granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to the Japanese doctors in exchange for their data and helped covering up the human experiment
- An act utterly ignoring internattional laws and against Humanity.
U.S. itself in 1943 also set up a major Biological
Warfare program at Camp Detrick, now Fort Detrick, in Frederic, MD.
Instead of putting the ringleaders on trial,
U.S. gave them stipends to gain some advantages in the mass destruction
Biological Weapon.
On Aug. 13, 1985, British Independent Televison broadcast a documentary "Unit 731 - Did the Emperor Know ? ". It was producted by Peter Williams and David Wallace after years research, hinted broadly that Emperor Hirohito was aware of the human experiments. There was also an interview with retired Lt. Col. Murray Sanders, the first US investigator into Uint 731. Sanders claimed that Gen. Douglas MacArthur authorized him to make a deal with the Japanese if they cooperated with US Biological Warfare scientists.
The producers even sent a copy of the documentary film to the Japanese officials in London.
William and Wallace also published the book "Unit 731: The Japanese Army's Secret of Secrets". For some reason, a chapter was omitted from the American edition. The chapter was titled "Korean War". They examined
evidences from the International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and supported the theory of US-Japanese culpability of using Unit 731's techniques in Korea War.
The same controversial conclusion was also reached by Professor Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, author of their 1998 book "The United States and Biological Warfare", that "United States had an operational biological weapons system, and that it was employed in the Korean War."
NGO
The Sunshine Project has
discovered that even today US is still actively developing Biological and
Chemical Weapon.
A case will be taken to UN.
Takai Matsumura, Japanese historian and economist at Tokyo's Keio
University, said germ warfare experiments were also conducted in at least 10 other cities in China, including Hailar (unit 2646/unit 80), Harbin (unit 731), ChangChun (unit 100), SunYang (unit 100), Beijing (unit 1855), Nanjing (Tama unit 1644), Shanghai and Guangzhou (Nami unit 8604), as well as Singapore (Oka unit 9420), Burma, Rangoon, Bangkok, possibly in Manila, East Indies.
There were 26 known Japan's killing laboratories in China.
U.S. silence on this issue has allowed the Japanese Government to
maintain the fiction that there is not enough evidence to prove that the
Chinese are telling the truth. When Japanese journalists and academics have
stumbled over crucial validating evidence in government archives, the
material has been confiscated and re-classified.
When neither the Japanese Government nor the U.S. was prepared to
admit to either the crimes or cover-up, a small group of conscientious
Japanese human rights activists, doctors, lawyers and former soldiers formed
an unprecedented alliance with the Chinese.
Senior Japanese lawyers are acting for the Chinese, among them
Tsuchiya Koken, the former president of the Japanese Lawyers Association.
Few old Japanese soldiers who worked on
the biological warfare programme have also come forward to give evidence.
Their stance exposes themselves to abuse at home and
accusations from ultra-nationalists that they are traitors.
"The brutality my parents generation committed in the name of war
has to be resolved and addressed by my generation." said Keichiro
Ichinose, one of the lawyers.
In June 1996, they formed the Association to Reveal the Historical Fact of Germ Warfare by the Japanese Armed Forces.
In 1997, 108 survivors and family members, including Wu Shi-Gen, filed a
lawsuit against the Japanese Government demanding apology and 10 million yen
compensation per victim of biological weapons and acts of brutality
carried out by Japan's notorious Unit 731 and Unit 164.
The thousands of victims included 2,100 civilians, whose personal details
have been verified in China.
In October 1940, Japanese warplanes that had passed over Wu Shi-Gen's
village in Quzhou, southern China, but the bombs dropped did not explode.
From them poured a mixture of rice and wheat covered with fleas.
Few days later, many villagers were struck down by sickness.
His nine year old brother had bubonic plague.
It is an agonising disease
glands swell to the size of grapefruit, limbs fill with fluid and whole areas of flesh turn deep purple. Eventually, victims
die screaming. The plague killed his two-year-old sister, too.
Ms. Wang Xuan is called by some as "The Joan of Arc of China". She used to live in rural village called Yiwu on China's east
coast. She shows visitors the Tragedy Pavilion which lists 1,500 plague victims,
and describes how Unit 731 dropped plague-infected fleas from aircraft
and killed 20 villagers a day at one point in 1942. She then
leads visitors through the gray-brick Buddhist temple where the Japanese
performed autopsies to gauge the impact of their biological tests.
Ms. Wang has assembled 180 Chinese victims and is now suing Japan, charging
that Japan had spread bubonic plague and other diseases in China during WWII.
Eisuke Matsui, Japanese Professor of radiology at Gifu University school
of Medicine, said he was compelled to uncover Japan's germ warfare in order
to educate the young generation of Japan.
However, Toshimi Mizobuchi, a 76 year old real estate manager living outside the Japanese city of Kobe. He makes no secret of his years as a training officer with Unit 731. He also participated in July 1945, in training kamikaze pilots for Operation Cherry Blossoms, a military plan to use five submarines, each carrying few small
aircraft to the California coast where they would attack San Diego with "plague bombs" full of infected fleas.
"They were logs to me," said Mizobuchi, "Logs were not considered to be human. They were either spies or conspirators." As such, he said, "they were already dead. So now they die a second time. We just executed a death sentence." He said reunion for the several hundred surviving veterans of Unit 731 was held almost every year. He is organizing this year's reunion.
As the war was ending, Japan waited and intended to use plague germs if American had landed on Okinawa. Ironically, Okinawans themselves never knew the plan until Jan. 1994 when the Unit 731 Exhibition opened there. Ito Kageaki recalled, "Okinawa could be thrown away if Japan could gain some military advantage." One local said, "This makes the sacrifices in the Okinawa battle even more pitiful."
Back in China, "After 60 years, we are still finding positive antibodies of bubonic
plague in rats, dogs, cats and other animals. Every year a certain number of
healthy people develop typhoid. Japan's germ warfare has left behind
problems that still threaten our lives." said Qiu, a Chinese doctor.
Fears of another outbreak still haunt the Chinese cities.
Unit 516 - Inhuman Chemical Warfare
This Chemical Warfare is definitely the worst case of systematic
chemical massacre against Humanity committed by a country in our Human History.
Japan refused to acknowledge formally that chemical weapon
were used, despite the discovery of huge quantity left behind.
Only in November 1995, after US declassified documents pertaining to
the weapons, did the Japanese government admit that it had used "lethal
gases". according to a report in 2001 by the International
Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
During the final weeks of WWII, Japanese lmperial Army truckloaded
thousands of Chemical Weapons, including mustard gas
and another lethal toxin and dumped them into the Nen River, northeast China.
The dumping was part of a secret campaign to erase
evidence of Japan's Chemical War against China.
Only recently the Japanese government begun to admit to
their work on these weapons of mass destruction by Unit 516, Japan's
top-secret Chemical Weapons research facility in Qiqihar, China.
On Aug. 12, 1945 former soldier Masaji Takahashi, now a 77-year-old retired barber, supervised
the disposal of chemicals in the Nen, River. The order, recalled
Takahashi in 1998, "was to throw them from the bridge." into Nen River.
In 1929, in defiance of the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons,
Japan seceretly began building a production facility so secret that its
location, Okunoshima Island in Takehara, Hiroshima Prefecture, was erased
from unclassified Japanese maps.
Dubbed "Island of Great Hardships".
The facility had 6,000 workers and produced toxins 1,200 tons annually for 7.5 million weapons.
Gases were also injected into shells and bomb casings at the Sone
Armory in Fukuoka Prefecture; and the navy's chemical weapons plant was
located in Samukawa, Kanagawa Prefecture.
Yoshiaki Yoshimi, professor of modern and contemporary Japanese history
at Chuo University, based on the incomplete declassified U.S. Army documents
at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and a six-volume intelligence
report on Japanese chemical warfare, compiled by the General Headquarters of
the U.S. Army Forces Pacific in May 1946, he has estimated Japan had produced
1,646,326 units of chemical weapons from 1938 through 1943.
In 1931 the "Hardships" spread to China. Japan invaded Manchuria, a
resource-rich industrial region, and established Unit 516 staffed with 3,000 personnel in Qiqihar
to develop and test a modern chemical arsenal. The facility perfected a
variety of chemical weapons, from deadly smoke "candles" to chemical grenades,
mortars and heavy artillery - all manufactured with Okunoshima's poisons.
Japanese troops used these chemical weapons almost from the day they started
full invasion in China 1937. They launched 375 separate chemical attacks in a
four-month campaign to conquer Wuhan.
Benjamin C. Garrett, one of the world's leading experts in Chemical Weapons, has visited China. He has found 6 types of gases the Japanese used in Chemical Weapons against Chinese:
1.
Phosgene
2.
Hydrogen Cyanide
3.
Bromobenzyl Cyanide and Chloroacetophenon
4.
Diphenyl-cyanoarsine and Diphenylchloroarsine
5.
Arsenic Trichloride
6.
Sulfur Mustard and Lewisite
It was estimated that Japan, during its 14 years invasion in China,
had used chemical weapons in more than 2,000 battles
and caused great casualties.
After the war, China began gathering abandoned chemical weapons and burying
them in remote Dunhua County. In Haerbaling, Jilin province, there are 2 large pits,
interred a vast stockpile of munitions: 670,000 artillery and mortar shells,
smoke canisters, huge drums of chemicals.
It is now Asia's most dangerous dump. The
two massive pits contain more than half a million munitions shells.
Experts warned that an accidental explosion in Dunhua would kill
everything, even grass, within a 200 kilometer radius.
Chemical ordnance in varying amounts has been found in at least a dozen other provinces (Jilin, Sangdon, Hebei, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangsu etc.), Chinese officials say.
It has been estimated that 700,000 - 2,000,000
Chemical Bombs most of them loaded with mustard gas and many of them corroded
and leaking, are still scattered in China.
Japan has an obligation to remove these weapons within 10 years, under the
terms of the Convention for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which
came into effect in April 1997.
OPCW reaffirmed in May 2000 that it held Japan
responsible for destroying all these abandoned deadly chemical weapons.
The chemical warheads have continued to injure and kill, harming as many
as 2,000 Chinese and damaging the environment. The rotten chemicals leaked
from these munitions are continuing to pollute people's
health, rivers and underground waters.
China is now home to the world's largest chemical weapons
cleanup campaign for 700,000 - 2,000,000 chemical warheads.
"This is something that has been done before, but not on that scale,"
said Abu Talib, a chemical weapons expert from Mitretek Systems in Falls Church,
Va. in U.S., "Most of the chemical weapons around the world, you're talking
hundreds and thousands -- not such a huge pile."
Whether such a monumental task can be completed by 2007, the deadline
imposed by the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, remains to be seen.
Japan also setup Opium Monopoly Bureau in China during war, used
opiates to weaken Chinese resistance, and deliberately fostered drug
addiction in the occupied areas of China.
To encourage addiction and further enslave the people, Japanese routinely used narcotics as payment for the labor. Heroin cigarettes were offered to children as young as ten. History professor Minser Searle Bates concluded that in Nanjing alone about 50,000 people, 1/8 of the city population were using heroin.
The huge profit from the additive drug was used to finance
Japanese war machine with the creation of millions of Chinese drug addicts.
Nanjing Massacre - Inhuman Civilian Massacre
The Nanjing Massacre is one of the worst cases of systematic massacre
of civilian against Humanity committed by a country in our modern History.
After losing the
2 infamous Opium War to Britain (For details, click
Hong Kong - From Opium War to 1997
and Beyond) in 1841 and 1856, the Opium drug caused a disastrous
outflow of China's wealth.
China, a rich country greatly admired by
Marco Polo, quickly became a poor country and started to disintegrate.
By the early of this century, China was long since carved into leased
colonial chunks belonging to Britain, France, U.S., Russia, Germany,
other European countries, and then came the Japan.
Foreign powers introduced a whole century of humiliation and many
humiliating Unequal Treaties (more than 1,100 treaties) onto China. China had
become a semi-colony country.
China was not freed from this Unequal Treaty
System and the addictive Opium drug until 1943.
The Meiji Restoration had successfully changed Japan from a feudal state
to a modern state. Unfortunately, it also transformed Japan from a previous Western colonial
victim to a Eastern colonial aggressor.
First, the Tenno government forcibly carried
out the so-called "Ryukyu Disposal"
and made it a colonial dependency
under the name "Okinawa Prefecture".
The War of JiaWu began in July 1894 between China and Japan to assert
influences over Korea.
The War of JiaWu ended with
signing the Treaty of MaKwan (Shimonoseki) on April 17, 1895. Defeated,
China was forced to pay a phenomenal huge indemnity 231 million taels of
silver in 1895, cession of Taiwan,
the Pescadores and Liaotung peninsula etc .....
After annexation of Korea and with the phenomenal huge Chinese money, Japan's economic took off
immediately and was soon ready for the WWII.
Most American think of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the beginning
of WWII. But in fact, a brutal war was already raging in China for years, and nowhere
was it more brutal than in Nanking (Nanjing), China.
Sept. 18, 1931, Japan created the "Manchurian Incident"
and resumed its invasion and occupied much of the Northeastern part
of China.
Feb. 18, 1932, Japan declared Manchuria was to be independent from
China as "Manchukuo" and set up a puppet state in the name of Puyi who
was the last emperor of China.
July 7, 1937, when China was still engaging in its own Civil War,
Japan fabricated the "China Incident - Marco
Polo Bridge Incident" and launched its full scale invasion into China.
Japan claimed that it would take only 3 months for
them to conquer the whole China. Yet, not only they had to spend 3 months
just to capture Shanghai city, but also suffered great casualties.
Dec. 13,
1937, Nanjing, the capital of China during the war, finally fell to the
Japanese.
Feeling humiliated for not capturing China within the 3 months,
Japanese military force immediately systematically started murdering
civilian in the Chinese capital under the "Kill all, Loot all, Burn all"
military policy.
It was a well planned, full scale revenge designed to intimidate
and crush the spirit of China. Japanese soldier began an orgy of cruelty
seldom, if ever, matched in Human History.
Japanese soldiers under the direct command of Prince
Asaka Yasuhiko, the uncle of Japanese Emperor Hirohito, looted all
the precious Chinese gold and silver national treasures, ancient artifacts, jade, rugs, porcelain artwork, painting, antiques and books in the former Chinese capital, for transport to Japan.
In the next 6 to 8 weeks, Japan committed the infamous "Nanjing Datusha" or "Nanjing Massacre", or "Rape of Nanjing".
The brutalities included shooting, stabbing, cutting open the abdomen,
excavating the heart, decapitation, drowning, punching the body
and eye with an awl. Thousands of civilians were buried or burn alive, or used
as targets for bayonet practice, shot in large groups and thrown into
Yangtze River.
"Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs and the
roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were
practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying
people to their waists and watching them torn apart by dogs."
"Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice
off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their
daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched."
"The manner in which these victims met their death was extremely cruel and diverse, so ghastly in fact that it made Auschwitz gas chamber appear humane."
Japanese invented games of rape and torture, turned murder into
sport.
Soldiers competed in "Bushido" - KILLING CONTEST and sent the number
of murders back to Nichi-Nichi Shimbun national newspaper in Japan to publish.
"I have never been to hell, but there is a hell, it was in this city," reporter
for the Tokyo Times told the killing in Nanjing.
"At one time, after
Nanking was captured, more than 30,000 Chinese were driven to the foot of
the city wall. Machine guns then swept the crowd and grenades were thrown
from atop the wall. The 30,000 people were all killed, most of them were
women, children, and elderly." reported Tokyo Asahi Shimbun
correspondent Yoshio Moriyama on December 14, 1937.
"Those in the second row were forced to dump the severed bodies into the
river before they themselves were beheaded," The Japanese military correspondent,
Yukio Omata, wrote, "The killing went on non-stop from morning until
night ........".
Masatake Okumiya, now 89 was a former Imperial navy pilot.
After having taken part in the Dec. 12 bombing and sinking of the
USS Panay in the Yangtze River, Okumiya traveled in a chauffeur
driven car for several days with an interpreter and a bodyguard to
search for downed Japanese aircraft and the bodies and
belongings of pilots killed during air raids over the city.
"I believe that no other people went around inside and outside the
walled city, combing the area like me at that time," Okumiya said.
He remembers a scene at Lake Xuanwu on Dec. 25. "There I saw numerous bodies
in the lake and on its shore. They were so many that I could not count
them. They were both young and old, and both men and women," Okumiya told
The Japan Times. "The Chinese were bound with their hands behind their backs.
About 20 soldiers were beheading the Chinese with their Japanese swords, the
beheading task successively taken over by other groups of
soldiers. The Chinese were forced to sit on the square so their
heads would drop into the river..... The execution was like assembly line
work. Some people say that in Nanjing, there were no organized or systematic killings
by the Japanese army. But what I saw was nothing other than
organized and systematic killings."
A December 15, 1937 entry to the diary of a Japanese soldier in the 23rd
Regiment of the 18th Division, published in Tokyo Asahi Shimbun on
August 4, 1984: "When we were bored, we
had some fun killing Chinese. Buried them alive, or push them into a fire,
or beat them toWhen we were bored, we
had some fun killing Chinese. Buried them alive, or push them into a fire,
or beat them to death with clubs, or kill them by other cruel means."
"Once you've killed your second or third, you stop thinking about it,''
Yasuji Kaneko describes how he grew numb to slaughter after bayonet drills
using live Chinese prisoners tied to stakes.
"It was ultimately about competition," another interviewed veteran
describes throwing babies onto camp fires just for laughs,
"how many you killed becomes a standard of achievement."
Former Japanese sergeant major, Masayo Enomoto, says he became so inured
to murder that he thought nothing of chopping up a rape victim, cooking her
flesh and serving it to his hungry troops.
"Some Japanese soldiers who were hungry had killed the 16 years old
Chinese boy and eaten some of his meat and sold the rest to the merchant,
and we bought it from that merchant," Shinzaburo Horie said.
The 79 year old former Japanese soldier trembled as he
excavated his war memories. "I can't forget the fact that I ate a human
being," "We should absolutely apologize to China and Korea," Horie
said without hesitation. "Absolutely."
"Soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water," Nagatomi said with deepest remorse. He is a doctor in Japan and has built a shrine of remorse in his waiting room.
"They gang-raped women from the ages of 12 to 80 and then killed them when they could no longer satisfy sexual requirements. I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil."
Teruichi Ukita, now 71 years old served in China in the Japanese kenpeitai,
the dreaded military police, said in a tremulous voice, "It was
when I had two daughters myself, I started to realize what I had done."
He was captured by Russians at the end of the war and sent to
Siberia. It was when he saw fellow Japanese being killed, he said,
that he belatedly realized the universal value of human life.
"Watching Chinese being killed, I had no emotions," Ukita
said. "It was like a game. But when I saw Japanese being executed
in Siberia for stealing things, I got so angry and emotional."
Witnessed the atrocities,
Reverend John Magee used his camera and recorded
the Massacre in a 16mm film. It is believed to be the
only documentary about this infamous massacre. He was an Episcopal pastor
in charge of the so-called Nanjing International
Safety Zone created when Japanese army captured Nanjing in 1937.
Angry at the Japanese atrocities, German diplomat Mr. George Rosen
sent a copy of Magee's film to the Nazi government.
He also included a long report which claimed that the whole Japanese army was
a "Violent Killing Machine". In it, he requested that the film be
shown to Hitler.
Chinese and Japanese scholars were aware of the film but were unable to locate it. Japanese
then said that since there was no proof, the Nanjing Massacre never occurred.
When the German Archive at Botsdam was opened
in 1990 after collapsing of the Berlin Wall, the Rosen report surfaced.
After a long search, the four rolls of the film and the diaries
were finally found in Yale University Library and in the house of Mr. David Magee, Reverend Magee's son.
According to Magee's dairy, he could only record a very small part of what he witnessed since he was too busy to save lives.
John H. Rabe, top representative of Siemens company, was also the chairman of International Safety Zone ( 2.5 square mile ), recorded this unspeakable Japanese atrocities in his 2,117 pages Diary of War.
Like Oskar Schindler, the German
industrialist who protected Jews, Mr. Rabe and few other western foreigners
risked their life and helped to save 250,000 Chinese refugees
from being killed. Chinese called him "The living Budda of Nanking".
When the people of Nanjing learned that he was near starvation in postwar
Berlin, they immediately collected equivalent US $2,000 in 1948 and the
city mayor of
Nanking even flew to Switzerland to deliver money and food to Mr. Rabe.
They kept sending food every month until China fell to communists in 1949.
As the leader of local Nazi Party and Safety Zone Chairman in Nanjing,
Rabe wrote a letter to Hitler about the Japanese War Crimes and asked
Hitler to persuade Japan to stop the atrocities.
On Dec. 12, 1996, Ursula Reinhardt, his
granddaughter from Berlin, showed the 8 volumes of diary the very first time
to the public in New York. It was the
Sunnyvale writer Iris Chang author of
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