Morbid Fact Du Jour For April 8, 2011
Today’s Bestial Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In November 1937, after their successful invasion of Shanghai, the Japanese launched a massive attack on Nanking, the newly established capital of the Republic of China. When the city fell on December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers began an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history. An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped. 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. 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 get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of a “bestial machinery”. Tens of thousands of young men were rounded up and herded to the outer areas of the city, where they were mowed down by machine guns, used for bayonet practice, or soaked with gasoline and burned alive. For months the streets of the city were heaped with corpses and reeked with the stench of rotting human flesh. Years later experts at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East estimated that more than 260,000 noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking in late 1937 and early 1938, though some experts have placed the figure at well over 350,000. The death toll of Nanking – one Chinese city alone – exceeds the number of civilian casualties of some European countries for the entire war. (Great Britain lost a total of 61,000 civilians, France lost 108,000, Belgium 101,000, and the Netherlands 242,000.)
Culled from: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
i just watched a movie, ‘john rabe’, about this very thing.
The author of this book, Iris Chang, committed suicide. Writing this must have been horrific. I’m currently reading “Finding Iris Chang,” a book by her friend, Chicago author Paula Kamen, which explores possible reasons for Chang’s suicide. Her despair was…well, apparently overwhelming. Very, very sad.
Although its been called for gotten, may books have been written on thsi subject and its more widely known than most things the Japanese did. Who, by the way, refuse to put it into their history books.
Another intersting fact about Nazis-in Romainia the treatments of Jews by Romainians actually prompted the Nazis to protect Jews.
I’m still trying to work out how the Nazis protected Jews, how they decided that some other group’s treatment of them was too barbaric. I smell a PR angle on their part.
The Japanese would like very much for Nanking to be forgotten, but no such luck. I predict it will be a while yet before everybody old enough to remember that time is dead and they finally are forced to take that part of the past out and look hard at it.
@Stella Mayfair I’m fascinated by Iris Chang’s suicide too, and the influence that researching these atrocities must have had on her. I have to read that book one of these days.
@Aimee I find it difficult to reconcile the modern Japanese – who are a people that I greatly admire and have a huge amount of respect for (shark fin soup and whale-hunting aside) – with the WWII Japanese soldiers who were among the most savage people in history. But the book Flyboys does a good job in explaining how the Japanese soldiers were indoctrinated from birth and physically tortured to break down any sensitivity they might have during their military training. It just goes to show that any people can be made into heartless killing machines given the right circumstances.
They certainly are a proud people, and pride can generate a lot of very powerful stuff, both good and bad. It’s pretty complex and goes back way farther than just the Flyboys era.
What I’m most impressed by with the Japanese is how they react to things like the earthquake and tsunami. No looting, no rioting. Not anything at all like what we saw with Hurricane Katrina and Andrew and the like.