The Holocaust experienced by Jewish people during World War 2 remains one of the greatest tragedies in human history. The traditional estimate of the number of Jews murdered is six million people; recent research suggests the real number may be higher still. The murders of the Holocaust deserve the infamy and abhorrence they’ve received ever since 1945. I’ve had the opportunity to hear a pair of Holocaust survivors speak, and it was amazing.

For a century as supposedly enlightened as the 20^th century was, it witnessed an incredible number of mass killings due to war, greed, racism, and ideology. Any list would include the destruction of the Congolese by Belgian colonialists, the Armenian genocide of 1915, the forced starvation of the Ukraine by Joseph Stalin, the purge of Russian kulaks by Joseph Stalin, the Chinese famine of the Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, not to mention two world wars that combined killed roughly eighty million soldiers, civilians, and prisoners of war. I’m sure an astute reader could point out other deserving tragedies not mentioned already, like the deaths at the partition of India after its independence in 1947, the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, or what happened with the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, just to name a few more that come to mind.

Somehow, though, the event beginning on December 13, 1937, known as the Rape of Nanking (also written Nanjing), seems to have slipped under our historical radar. The word holocaust, used generically, means a complete or nearly complete destruction, often by fire. That is what happened to the Chinese city of Nanking beginning in December of 1937. The destruction of the city and its people by invading Japanese soldiers was part of the war between Japan and China known as the Second Sino-Japanese War. I’ll admit my headline for this blog is stretching things a bit by claiming it was during World War 2 (the war technically begins in 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland, but both nations fighting the Sino-Japanese War also fought in World War 2, and their war didn’t end until Japan’s defeat in 1945, so I hope the reader will roll with it) but the war between Japan and China lasted from 1937 until 1945.

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Bodies from the Holocaust at Nanking

The Holocaust at Nanking

The Rape of Nanking is an apt title. The word rape applies equally to the destruction and looting of the city and to the behavior of Japanese soldiers to the Chinese women unlucky enough to be unable to escape before Nanking fell to Japan in 1937. Casualty estimates vary, of course. Some claim 150,000-200,000 people killed in a handful of weeks following December 1937. Author Iris Chang, in her book The Rape of Nanking, puts the number at 300,000. Either way, it’s an incredible number of people for a period of time measured in weeks. (I read Chang’s book many years ago. Some of the images and accounts have stayed with me ever since, like the contest between two Japanese officers to see who could behead 100 Chinese first. They couldn’t decide who’d won, so they extended the contest to 150.)

Japanese newspaper covering the contest to behead 100 Chinese first. Note that the “score” is 106 to 105.

I don’t have much more analysis to offer here. The holocaust at Nanking in 1937 was the complete destruction of a city and its people. The callousness of war and feelings of racial superiority, always a deadly combination, fueled the destruction.

It’s also hard to say why this event doesn’t merit more mention. Although I teach about it in my history classes, I’ve seen textbooks skip it entirely. Maybe 300,000 people seems a small number compared to overall number of deaths in World War 2, although I daresay it isn’t a small number to the people and families who lived through it. There have been denials. The fact that the US government wanted to rehabilitate Japan quickly as a counterweight to communism in China and the Soviet Union after 1945 surely played a role in helping Americans overlook Japan’s past sins. There are probably other reasons, too, but these are among them.

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