Original subtitles

On December the 13th, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army attacked and occupied

Nanjing, the capital city of the Republic of China.

It became one of the most notorious events of the 20th century, the Rape of

Nanjing. They committed horrific atrocities there. Many thousands of

deaths, rapes of many, many women, looting, pillaging, burning.

An army out of control, creating an absolutely devastating scene.

Most foreigners had fled, but a small group remained in a heroic effort to

the people of the city.

The actions of the 27 foreign nationals who stayed behind

absolutely shine out. They saved thousands of lives.

In a final estimate, this mix of missionaries and businessmen succeeded

rescuing over 250 ,000 people.

New discoveries are revealing what happened amidst the horror.

I went upstairs to the attic, and there was a suitcase there that I had never

seen before.

It was locked. I had to pry it open, and I encountered a big stack of these

letters.

The letters, films and photographs taken by the foreigners provide shocking

eyewitness accounts of the atrocities.

Never shall I forget that scene. The people kneeling at the side of the road,

the dried leaves rattling, the moaning of the wind, the cry of women being let

out.

Killing began immediately by Japanese soldiers, each one seeming to have the

power of life or death.

This is their story.

Nanjing. Today, a major city in eastern China nestled in the Yangtze River

Delta, with a population of over 8 million people.

In the 1930s, Nanjing was the thriving capital city of China.

As far back as the 3rd century, it had been the capital of some of China's most

powerful dynasties.

and was the largest city in the world at several points.

The city still boasts an incredible array of imperial palaces, temples, and

vast city walls today.

Nanjing has been a major Chinese centrist civilization for a very long

Nanjing actually means southern capital.

When Chiang Kai -shek established the new Republic of China in 1927, He once

again made Nanjing its power base.

When the Nazis came to power, they had massive plans for renewing the nation,

reconstructing the nation, and part of that strategy involved literally

rebuilding cities like Nanjing, building harbours on the coast and building

railways, and a lot of things they couldn't necessarily afford, but very

important to them was to build...

Nanjing as a modern capital.

Nanjing was going to be transformed into a sort of wonderful, modern metropolis,

much like Paris or Berlin or St. Petersburg or Washington. It was going

that kind of city.

It was going to be a great symbol of this new, modern, nationalistic China

yes, was connected to the past, but also was looking towards a very modern

future.

So Nanjing was both a symbolic capital in terms of its historic legacy, but it

was also symbolic of what the nationalists intended to do for all of

Often termed the Nanjing Decade, the following ten years marked a period of

modernisation.

It's a period of peace, and during that period of peace they had quite a...

A good deal of opportunity to actually construct and modernize, and a lot of

this with actually improving things like legal reforms, but also things in terms

of engineering projects.

At that time, you see Nanjing really as the nexus of an attempt to try and

create a modern, more industrialized China that would operate on an equal

with other powers around the world.

It was also a period when China was opening up to foreign trade and

China had an open -door policy which allowed the nationals of major foreign

powers to live and work in its cities.

Professor Robert Bicker's photographs illustrate the era.

The life of foreigners was quite comfortable. You were able to enjoy a

lifestyle, possibly a class above your station.

I like this photograph because this man...

sitting on a houseboat with a couple of pals, listening to records on a portable

gramophone player.

This is the sort of easy good life of the privileged

foreign resident in China before 1937.

The relaxed atmosphere drew foreigners to live and work across the country.

If you look at the residence and business directories which are published

in China by foreign publishers, you'll find the full range of

possible occupations. Policemen, piano tuners, law firms, and there are people

just chancing their luck. There are people in jail.

One particularly active group of foreigners were missionaries.

By the 19th century, there were thousands of Protestant missionaries

towns and cities across China.

Missionaries were on the first ships which came in. Missionaries had been

waiting and planning for China.

Here was...

in Protestant terms, especially a dark part of the world in which there was

urgent business to be done.

One such missionary resident in Nanjing at the time was American priest John

McGee.

McGee was born in Pittsburgh in 1884 at the center of the American Industrial

Revolution.

His family were wealthy local merchants with political influence.

Their name is still remembered around Pittsburgh today.

Not interested in the business heritage of his family, McGee enrolled in

theological college.

After graduating, he joined the Episcopal Church and was sent to China.

In 1912, he made his way to Nanjing.

Stationed in the poor Chinese suburb of Shaguan, he saturated himself in Chinese

culture and language.

He very much learned everything cultural he could learn in order to be able to

communicate in some way with the Chinese people around him.

He also wanted to work among the poor, and that's one reason we find him in

Shargwan.

A world away from the affluence of Pittsburgh, where his home church kept

records of his time as a missionary.

After five years of hard work in the China mission field, the Reverend John

McGee returned to his native city for a well -earned furlough.

The parish was overjoyed to have him occupy the pulpit on Sunday, March 10th,

and speak of his work at Nanking.

Calvary parishioners had placed $15 ,000, this is in 1918, in his hands to

purchase land and build a chapel, hostel, school, and house.

for Chinese clergymen at his mission.

McGee's school was the predecessor of today's Nanjing No. 12 Senior High

Along with the money, McGee's church in Pittsburgh also gave him a camera, a

16mm Bell & Howell, with which he could record his work and life in Nanjing.

One of the friends he filmed with the camera was fellow missionary Minnie

Vautrin, a skills teacher who had dedicated herself to Chinese education.

Vautrin was born in the small town of Sacor, Illinois, in 1886.

Her mother died when she was six, leaving young Minnie to assume household

duties and care for her younger sibling.

In 1912, she graduated from the University of Illinois and joined the

Christian Missionary Society, where she was sent to China as a teacher.

At the age of 33, Vautrin accepted a post as the acting president of Nanjing

Jinling Women's College.

Founded in 1913, it was the first institution to offer a complete

female students.

Under Vautrin's leadership, the college expanded considerably, building nine new

buildings, each in the imperial classical style.

Minnie also became actively involved in the local community.

She often visited neighbors around the campus, helping them open up a local

welfare society and create a housekeeping school.

Vautrin and the other missionaries enjoyed a window of comparative

and calm.

Sadly, it was not to last.

As the Nanjing decade drew to a close, the actions of one country in particular

caused increasing worry japan like western powers japan already

held some territory in china during world war one they attempted to expand

position by acquiring former german territories in the northeast under the

supreme leadership of emperor hirohito

What I have here is a copy of the 21 demands issued by Japan to China,

demanding that Japan keeps the province of Shenzhou, which had been a German

colonial possession in China. And this creates quite a lot of problems between

China and Japan, because obviously the territory was in China itself.

But when the Western powers finally intervened, they denied Japan's demands

handed sovereignty of Shandong province back to China.

It left a sort of double resentment.

On the one hand, the Chinese felt outraged.

On the other hand, the Japanese felt that they had been betrayed by the

powers.

Japan felt frozen out and threatened by Western dominance in the region.

The Empire of Japan was anxious to assert itself as the leading power in

A wave of ultra -nationalism and militarism swept the country.

Japan had modernized quickly from the late 19th century, but by the 1920s,

of that modernization had begun to take a rather dark path.

The army and navy became much more dominant in the politics of the time,

becoming increasingly obsessed with expanding Japan's empire elsewhere in

On September 18, 1931, the Imperial Army of Japan took action and invaded.

They seized a vast area of northeast China, roughly the size of France and

Germany combined.

The Chinese army resisted, but quickly fell into retreat.

The puppet state of Manchukuo was established, and Puyi, the last emperor

China, was resurrected as its figurehead.

Japanese politicians, both civilian and military, made it clear that they

intended to press further onto Chinese territory.

And in the next few years, we see a slow but sure annexation.

unofficial but very real, of large parts of northern China, until by 1937, most

of northern China was Chinese in name, but Japanese in terms of control of much

of the important territory.

Then, on the 7th of July 1937, an incident occurred at the Marco Polo

just outside Beijing that set the two sides rolling into full -scale war.

A Japanese soldier failed to appear for a roll call, and the Japanese commander,

as a result, went to the Chinese barrack and demanded to search the premises for

this missing soldier, saying that the Chinese actually abducted one of their

soldiers. The Chinese refused, unsurprisingly, and it led to firing of

between both sides.

It quickly grew out of control.

And the Chinese leadership under Chiang Kai -shek decided, we have now been

pushed too far, now we need to act.

Chiang Kai -shek believed that he cannot let this stand, and that this is an

opportunity to regain control over North China.

One or two single shots in a rather obscure place led very quickly to a

continental war.

If Chiang Kai -shek surrendered, it would be seen as an act of cowardice and

would also hand over strategically important territory to Japan for a

and make China more vulnerable.

So he drew the line.

What followed was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the entire war.

Chiang Kai -shek decided to stage the greatest...

symbolic and real act of resistance around Shanghai.

In 1930s China, Shanghai was probably the most important city.

Shanghai was its finance capital, its industrial capital.

Here was the greatest concentration of foreign interest in China, including

press, diplomat.

So there, in the full view of the world, China would

resist Japanese aggression and fight.

On August the 13th, the Japanese invaded.

Chiang Kai -shek threw into that battle his finest, mostly German -trained,

modernized military units, and they fought extremely well.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers fought against the Japanese.

There were trenches that were dug in the street.

They had to fight for meters of land, for horrible bloodletting.

The battle really only ends when the Japanese encircle Shanghai, and then it

seems that all the nationalist forces have the danger of becoming trapped.

By November, they had been outflanked and completely destroyed.

Chiang Kai -shek lost most of his modern armies in that one battle.

The Japanese commanders had their eye on an even bigger prize, the capital,

Nanjing.

Panic ensued. Many of the residents fled.

Amongst them, the majority of foreign missionaries and businessmen.

By early mid -November 1937, it becomes very apparent what's going to happen.

Foreigners are starting to evacuate from Nanjing.

But still believing in the humanity of the Japanese, some foreigners tried to

persuade their colleagues not to leave.

Louis Strong Casey Smythe, an American professor with the University of

wrote in a letter to a friend, A week before their entry, I preached to our

retreating university group and gently blamed them for leaving, and urged them

to have faith in the goodness and humanity of the Japanese.

But hundreds of thousands of Chinese had nowhere to run, and stayed to await

their fate.

And along with them, defying strong advice from their embassies, was a small

group of foreigners.

Dedicated to the people they had lived amongst for so long, they chose to stay.

They didn't have to wait long.

The air raids on Nanjing were now building in intensity.

Bombing is a new weapon of war.

And everybody...

is hugely afraid of this.

The horror of war becomes real.

Priest John McGee captured the initial attacks on film.

Many of the wounded were taken to the Drum Tower Hospital.

The original block still stands today, dwarfed by its modern enlargement.

With money and support from missionary societies, in 1937 the hospital could

afford to have foreign doctors on its staff.

Robert Wilson, an American doctor, took up the post of chief surgeon in January

1936.

Born in 1906 to missionary parents, Wilson had grown up on the streets of

Nanjing.

Dr Wilson is born in Nanjing. I mean, he comes from the China foreign community.

By the 1930s and 40s, you've had some families who've been there for two or

three decades.

So their feeling for China is not an acquired one. They've grown up in China

amongst Chinese.

After qualifying from Harvard Medical School, He returned to Nanjing in 1935.

Fluent in the local dialect, he often surprised his patients by addressing

in their own language.

Being one of the only foreign surgeons in the city, Wilson was kept busy.

When they wanted him at night, obviously we had no telephones, there was

nothing, and the orderly from the hospital would come over to the house at

night.

Somebody came in and needed attention, and he'd throw pebbles up at the bedroom

window, and he'd say, Waysan, Waysan Kaidao, Waysan Kaidao. He'd wake us up

throwing these pebbles up at the bedroom window.

In the summer of 1937, Wilson's first child, Elizabeth, was born in the

hospital, the fourth generation of the Wilson family to be born in China.

In the days that followed, the bombing intensified.

And they'd come over at night. It was always one or two o 'clock in the

and I'd have to grab Elizabeth, and Dad and I would run down the base.

And that went on and on and on.

Original footage shows Dr. Wilson helping victims of the bombings.

On August the 20th, he wrote in his diary,

This morning we found that about 12 people had been killed and a number

A young girl about 18 or 19 had seen a bomb falling and crouched with her back

to the explosion.

Her buttocks were literally ripped off.

One man with a fractured leg and internal injuries died during the night.

I was operating a foot amputation while the alarm rang again, yet we had to

continue.

With the situation declining,

Marjorie took their baby daughter back to America. Robert Wilson was left alone

to face an ever -increasing workload.

And then, the situation got even worse.

During one terrible air raid, the Japanese ignored the visible Red Cross

placed on the roof of the Central Hospital and the Ministry of Health, and

bombed them both.

In a letter to his wife, Wilson wrote,

Never have I been so appalled as by the sight at Central Hospital.

I've never felt more shocked.

One Japanese plane dived down on the hospital and let loose two 1 ,000 -pound

bombs intended for the main building.

The hospital would have been wiped out if the bombs had hit the right target.

Central Hospital was compelled to shut down after the air raid, and all wounded

were transferred to the Drum Tower Hospital.

For surgeons like Wilson, the burden was even heavier.

With the situation so dire, many of the Chinese doctors and nurses had no choice

but to leave the city.

But a small, courageous team chose to stay.

Thanks to them, the Drum Tower Hospital was able to continue and quickly became

the only functioning hospital in Nanjing.

And Robert Wilson was the only surgeon.

Zhou Jimu was a Chinese military doctor in the city.

With

so

many wounded, Wilson began to collect the bullets and shrapnel that he removed

from their bodies.

On December the 9th, he wrote in a letter to his family,

My little shrapnel and bullet collection is increasing daily, and I will be able

to open a respectable museum before the war is over.

The Japanese army were now just days from the city.

Terrified.

On the 20th of November, Chiang Kai -shek's nationalist government was

announce the relocation of the capital.

The government moved to Chongqing, basically into the western interior.

Chongqing, essentially, is at the very end of the river, so it's much harder to

get and has to go through the mountains. So in that way, they'll be out of reach

of Japan.

Many of the foreign embassies issued their final notices of evacuation to

few remaining citizens.

Minnie Vautrin received such a notice, asking her to confirm her intentions.

One, leave now.

Two, hope to leave soon.

Three, leave under no circumstances.

She ticked the third option.

She wrote in her diary,

I feel that my 18 years in Jinling enable me to carry certain

which it is my duty to carry on. Men are not asked to leave their ships when

they are in danger, and women are not asked to leave their children.

The reason people stayed was a sense of duty to their parishioners, to their

colleagues, to their students.

And in the end, only 27 foreign nationals are in the city when the

enter it.

In the absence of a government, the remaining foreigners took matters into

own hands.

Civilian lives had been saved in Shanghai by the creation of a

safety zone that Japanese troops didn't attack.

Their only hope was to create a similar zone in Nanjing.

On the 22nd of November, Vautrin, McGee, Wilson and their colleagues set up the

International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone.

Each member was given a specific role.

John McGee was head of the Committee for the Red Cross.

Minnie Vautrin was in charge of women and children.

And Dr. Wilson dealt with medical emergencies.

Faced with imminent war,

The committee debated the best way for them to try and protect residents.

They came up with an extraordinary idea.

They elected a German, John Rabe, as their chairman.

By the 1930s, Germany and Japan had signed the Anti -Comintern Pact and were

allies.

Crucially, John Rabe was a Nazi party member, and the committee believed that

a Nazi, he would have the most influence over the advancing Japanese.

The man who had the most chance to be helpful in this situation was Johann

Because he was German, no doubt it was largely a strategic position.

But other than Rabe, who could possibly have played that role?

Born in Hamburg in 1882, his father was a sailor who entertained the young raba

with stories of his adventures in the far east raba grew up enchanted by

of a magical orient and at age 26 arrived in china

initially he worked in beijing for the german firm

siemens after a number of years siemens relocated him to nanjing to

expand the business

and he moved into this house at No.

1 Shaofen Bridge.

To deter airstrikes, Raba raised a 6 by 3 meter Nazi flag in the courtyard.

The committee quickly decided upon the boundaries of the safety zone, a 3 .86

square kilometer area that now forms part of downtown Nanjing, including

colleges, hospitals, and embassies.

In December, the committee moved into headquarters at No.

5 Ninghai Road.

With the little time that they had, the committee prepared well.

To facilitate the protection of residents, they organized a housing

and built 25 refugee camps.

On December 8, the committee officially announced the opening of the safety zone

to all Nanjing residents and encouraged them to take refuge there.

We believe if both China and Japan could keep to their promise, those who stay

in this area would be much safer than those who stay in other areas.

So please, come to us, Nanjing citizens.

Thousands of terrified residents flooded into the safety zone.

Flags with the internationally recognized symbol of the Red Cross

territory.

The foreigners on the safety zone committee had no reason not to expect

they would have some success.

There was no reason to expect that there would be any loss of

Japanese military control.

Why should they expect anything to go really seriously wrong?

One of the refugee camps was Jinling Women's College, where Minnie Votrin was

charge.

Records of her time there are kept by Martha Smalley at Yale University.

She opened up the campus so that particularly women and children could

they would use the buildings of the campus in order to protect the women and

children.

The campus still stands today.

hardly changed from when it was home to 10 ,000 refugees.

Ruiyi Wang was just 13 when he took refuge at Jingling.

For the citizens of Nanjing, time was running out.

The Japanese army was drawing closer.

Its commander decides that there's a real opportunity to go for the Jakila.

Originally, there's no plan for the Japanese to go straight to Nanjing.

They were to take Shanghai and stop there.

But in the Japanese army, the local commanders are taught to take the

initiative and to do so aggressively, exploit any opportunity they have

to get a victory.

And they advance very quickly, very rapidly towards Nanjing.

But their journey wasn't easy.

Along the way, they haven't been provided supplies that they needed, so

ways you see a dehumanization process going on, in which they started looting,

killing, in which to feed themselves.

Well, they were force -marched by their commanders to the gates of Nanjing.

The Japanese troops are, of course, exhausted.

They don't have any winter clothing, they don't have any blankets.

They're often without food, so they have to live off the land.

And so when they arrive at Nanjing, many of these soldiers are exhausted and

hungry. And on the Japanese side, discipline has gone missing.

The troops amassed outside the city and Nanjing was surrounded on three sides.

On the afternoon of December the 10th, General Iwane Matsui ordered his forces

to attack.

Minnie Vautrin wrote in her diary, As I write these notes at 8 .30 this evening,

there is heavy artillery fire pounding away in the southwest section of the

city. The window panes are shaking.

Refugees continue to come in.

Under such fierce attack, the Nationalist Army tried to retreat.

But a lack of clear leadership or coordination resulted in chaos.

When the order came to withdraw, the forces in Nanjing fled.

It was a rout.

The foreign observers, who were generally quite cynical about Chinese

pointed out that they hadn't even had time to loot. They were so busy running

away.

Even the leader of the Chinese army itself, General Tang Xiongzhe, escaped.

Quietly, without making any great show of it, he found himself slipping.

out of a gate at the side of the city and embarking on a boat up the Yangtze

River.

The city was left defenceless. On 13th December, Nanjing fell.

The triumphant Japanese army swarmed into the city in a blaze.

Nanjing was an open city. It was not being seriously defended by troops, and

Japanese were able to march in.

Essentially to a city which now had a very significant civilian population,

where there was little government and little military control.

The whole city becomes terribly, violently, horrifically chaotic.

What followed was nothing less than a bloodbath.

As civilians fled in their thousands, the lack of a Chinese military

in no way discouraged the Japanese killing spree.

Matsumura Yoshiharu was a Japanese machine gunner.

There appeared to be almost no attempts by senior Japanese officers to control

the behaviour of their men. And for that reason, for weeks following the

occupation of Nanjing, the city itself essentially became a killing ground.

There were dead and dying everywhere.

Mitani Shou was a Japanese naval soldier.

There were people who lived in the area called Toshiori,

and they were

killed.

According to the size of the hill, there were three mountains, four mountains,

and five mountains. There were various methods.

In his diary, Raba, chairman of the safety zone, commented,

These

people had been presumably fleeing

and were shot from behind.

An estimated 12 ,000 non -combatant Chinese men, women, and children met

deaths in the first few days of the occupation.

Missionary priest John McGee wrote to his wife, I had heard a few things

beforehand, but I thought they were mere rumors.

Now the reality proves to be worse.

The first thing the foreign observers start to realize is that the Japanese

troops have entered the city are...

As head of the Red Cross, McGee had to leave the safety zone to rescue the

wounded from around the city.

Doing so, he encountered the horror of the Japanese army for the first time.

Along came a squad of Japanese soldiers, some of whom were like wild beasts.

I was helping a poor fellow who was coming along most painfully, but a

grabbed him from me and began to jerk his wounded arms terribly and tied his

hands together.

We met an officer at the gate as we were trying to go back who seemed beside

himself with rage.

I never saw such a person before.

His talk sounded like the barking of a dog, and the looks he gave me would have

burned me up if I were inflammable.

Thousands of Chinese soldiers who had thrown down their weapons sought refuge

the safety zone.

The committee tried desperately to negotiate with the Japanese.

On the 14th of December, Chairman John Raba met with a Japanese commander.

and handed over a letter asking for reassurance that Japanese soldiers would

respect the rules of the safety zone.

They received an encouraging response, telling them to trust in the

attitude of the Japanese army to care for the disarmed Chinese soldiers.

Relieved, the committee members persuaded the Chinese soldiers that if

up their guns, Their lives would be spared by the Japanese.

They were wrong.

With no blueprint for the keeping of prisoners, General Matsui ordered the

opposite.

They had to somehow take control over vast numbers of soldiers, and they had

prisoner of war camps, they couldn't feed them.

And so the orders went out, the orders went out, don't take prison.

When the city fell,

Masui ordered Japanese troops to kill Chinese POWs.

Word came that from just one of the safety zone camps, 1 ,300 men had been

away and executed.

And in fact, any Chinese man who is caught is deemed a soldier, it seems.

So large groups of men are taken to convenient spots by the river or large

or large ditches.

are machine -gunned or bayoneted, and we know that this happens to thousands and

thousands of men.

McGee wrote to his wife,

I never dreamed that the Japanese soldiers were such savages.

It has been a week of murder and rape, worse, I imagine, than has happened for

very long time.

They not only killed every prisoner they could find,

but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages.

Many people were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets.

There are dead bodies all over the city.

We have a sense that people were essentially hiding, hunkering down in

of an army that was simply out of control.

The killing continued to the elderly, women and children.

At Jinling College refugee camp, waves of civilians arrived, desperate for

shelter. Vautrin wrote, Wednesday, December 15th. From 8 .30 this morning

6 this evening, I have stood at the front gate while refugees poured in.

is terror in the faces of many women.

This was not her life work to be a keeper of refugees. She was really a

professor, is what she was.

But under this very unusual circumstances, she was the one who took

and was willing to stay there, even though she knew that her own life would

probably be in danger.

Conditions continued to decline at Jinling College Camp as the numbers

from 3 ,000...

to ten thousand and across the safety zone the camps were bursting

um everyday life in the safety zone was very

difficult actually people were stacked up like sardines in there it was pretty

grim um this was an area that was designed to contain a hundred thousand

refugees

but it ended up containing 250 ,000 of the civilian population.

So the infrastructure wasn't there, there's difficulties of feeding them.

And of course when you have hundreds and thousands of desperate refugees crammed

into a very small place, one of the first things that goes is sanitation.

So the stench of war was a very literal statement in the eyes and the noses of

many people living there at the time.

George Fitch, another missionary.

was chosen as the administrative director of the Nanjing Safety Zone.

Before the war, he ran the Nanjing YMCA and was an experienced manager.

Fitch was tasked with providing food for the refugees.

With an ever -growing number, the job became increasingly difficult to

To get the necessary food shipped in, it was impossible because the Yangtze

River was blocked, the railroads were down.

Where are you going to get it from?

Fitch wrote in his diary,

Even if we had food enough for three months, how are they going to live? They

cannot continue much longer in their present terribly crowded condition.

Disease and pestilence must soon follow if they do.

But his son recalled that he was the best man for the job.

He was the most businesslike of the foreigners who had decided to stay. Most

them were college professors.

or medical doctors, not executives.

But running a big institution like the YMCA, he knew how to buy

and sell and run a budget and so forth. So it probably was a logical

person to pick for the job.

The resourceful Fitch repeatedly risked his own life by borrowing cars from the

U .S. Embassy.

to smuggle rice and flour into the safety zone.

At the Jingling College camp, Vautrin used the meager rations to set up a

porridge factory, which provided the majority of the meals.

When I first came to Weixiang, I used to make two congee for the refugees every

day. The congee didn't have a lot of rice, but it had a lot of beans. I think

had a lot of red beans.

It smelled quite good.

Most of Orchard's time was spent patrolling the campus and driving out

Japanese soldiers who had sneaked in looking for girls.

Japanese soldiers often came to the camp on the false pretense of looking for

Chinese soldiers.

As the only foreigner on site, it was up to Vortrin to drive them away.

Saturday, December 18th. It seems that my days are spent running from one place

on the campus to another, saying, American school, see a Gakuin. In most

instances, it is sufficient to induce the soldiers to leave, but in some

cases... They are defiant and look at me with dagger in their eyes and sometimes

a dagger in their hand.

But there were times when even her best efforts were not enough to persuade the

Japanese to leave empty -handed.

Never shall I forget that scene. The people kneeling at the side of the road,

Mary, Mrs. Sen, and I standing.

The dried leaves rattling, the moaning of the wind, the cry of women being let

out.

Japanese soldiers came over the wall or through the gate and attacked women and

children in a way that they were unable to prevent.

And yes, of course, this was a tremendous strain on her because she

as though she was in charge of that area and obviously wanted to protect

everyone who was there, but she was not always able to do that.

The safety zone becomes a target.

A target for Japanese soldiers in organized groups to come and find

women, take them away to rape them, and they are often killed afterwards.

The Japanese army roamed freely throughout the city, looting and burning

chose.

Terrified of the soldiers, The people of Nanjing sought shelter wherever they

could.

Popular havens were the homes of some of the committee members.

John Raba's house lay outside the safety zone and was swamped with the

desperate.

His assistant, Han Shanglin, helped receive them.

Han Xianglin counted 602 people in a yard measuring just 500 square meters.

As the days marched on, the brazen intrusions by Japanese soldiers

Almost anyone, in any location, became a target.

John Raba made detailed notes in his diaries.

December 18th. Just yesterday in the daytime, the Japanese soldiers raped

several women in the hall of a seminary.

December 22nd.

We found that many civilians were shot to death in the ponds, with hands tied

weighed down by stones around their necks.

December 24th. I came to a basement where they had put bodies.

A man's eyes were burned out. His head was all scorched.

Obviously Japanese soldiers had poured petrol on him.

The invasion of Nanjing and the atrocities that occurred in its

stand with some of the worst crimes of the 20th century.

And yet we dare not imagine what could have happened if the foreigners had not

been there at all.

Without their heroic efforts, it could have been even worse.

They clearly saved thousands of lives.

They saved many women from being abducted, raped and killed.

I shudder to think how.

The city and its people would have been treated if there had been no foreign

observers there at all and no safety zone.

They were undoubtedly brave, compassionate, and they did

much good.

Instead of fleeing, they stayed behind to help their Chinese comrades, to help

save their lives, to feed them, and above all, to bear witness to the

that they had seen committed against them.

Despite repeated incursions by the Japanese and their disregard for the

boundaries of the safety zone, the work of the committee in providing food and

shelter to Nanjing residents did help protect around 250 ,000 refugees, an

astonishing number with such limited help or resources.

But not everybody found refuge in the safety zone.

For those left outside its borders, a far harsher reality existed.

Men, women and children were totally defenseless.

Murder and rape occurred on a colossal scale.

But exhausted and almost overcome, the foreigners could do little more.

They realized their only hope was to alert the rest of the world and ask for

help.

They had to get the story out.

In the next episode, we'll explore their extraordinary efforts to smuggle the

evidence away from the city.

And their incredible determination to raise international awareness.

And we'll investigate their fate when the war ends.

How years later, they still played a crucial role in bringing the Japanese to

justice.

On December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army attacked and occupied

the capital city of the Republic of China.

It became one of the most notorious events of the 20th century, the Rape of

Nanjing. They committed horrific atrocities there, many thousands of

deaths, rapes of many, many women, looting, pillaging, burning, an

army out of control, creating...

An absolutely devastating scene.

Most foreigners had fled, but a small group remained in a heroic effort to

the people of the city.

The actions of the 27 foreign nationals who stayed behind

absolutely shine out. They saved thousands of lives.

The foreigners documented everything.

They wrote diaries, letters, and articles, and took photographs and films

recorded in detail countless acts of atrocity.

And crucially, they got the story out.

At huge personal risk, they smuggled evidence out of the city.

It's just hard to believe how brave some of these people were, and for me

especially, my father.

Because he took this terrible chance. If he'd been discovered, he certainly

would have been executed.

And they took it to the highest powers possible.

Killing began immediately by Japanese soldiers, each one seeming to have the

power of life or death.

This is their story.

In September 2015, the Wilson family travels thousands of miles from America

Nanjing in eastern China.

They've come to investigate a family secret.

The truth about their father, Dr. Robert Wilson.

The Wilsons have come to their father's old house.

Elizabeth was born in Nanjing in the summer of 1937.

But with war imminent, her mother took her back to America soon after.

Her father stayed on.

My baby will be six months old in a few days, and I have only seen her for

seven weeks of that time.

Their parents' letters and diaries show the hardships they endured.

We are both unhappy, and Bob just lives and dreams for the time when we can be

together again.

Dr. Robert Wilson had been one of the few foreigners remaining in Nanjing when

the Japanese invaded.

He'd witnessed terrible atrocities.

But after returning home to America, He never mentioned it again.

My father never talked about it. My mother didn't talk about it.

It was only after he died that his children discovered what his life in

had really been like.

After he had died and my mother decided to sell the house and moved, I went

upstairs to the attic and there was a suitcase there that I had never seen

before.

And it was locked. I had to pry it open.

And I encountered a big stack of these letters.

He'd written hundreds of letters, and they contained the shocking reality of

life in Nanjing.

Today marks the sixth day of the modern Dante's Inferno, written in huge letters

with blood and rape.

I've never felt more shocked.

One Japanese plane dived down on the hospital and let loose two 1 ,000 -pound

bombs intended for the main building.

The hospital would have been wiped out if the bombs had hit the right target.

But the letters were just the beginning.

At the hospital where he worked, an even bigger surprise awaited.

Their father is revered as a hero.

Despite the danger, he'd chosen to remain in Nanjing.

And during the worst of the massacre, he was the only surgeon in the entire

city. He'd saved thousands of lives.

At the Drum Tower Hospital where he worked, the Wilsons watch real films of

their father caring for victims.

The true horror of the era is revealed.

In 1937, China was trapped in all -out war with Japan.

The city of Nanjing was on its knees.

Houses, schools and hospitals had all been blown to pieces and dead bodies lay

strewn across the streets.

It was devastating and sad to know that my father had to

go through that and see that.

And, I mean, be there for so long, a year and a half of just 24

hours a day.

Whilst most foreign businessmen and missionaries had evacuated, a small

stayed in a heroic effort to help the people.

They believed their status as Westerners would give them power to protect

civilians from the Japanese soldiers.

Foreigners... generally tended to assume that they had a thought of immunity

from China's battles, whoever was fighting.

They had great confidence in their passports or the apparent colour of

skin.

The remaining foreigners set up a safety zone in the centre of the city to offer

a safe haven for civilians.

And they kept detailed records of the crimes that they witnessed.

The Westerners kept meticulous news, meticulous diaries, wrote extensive

to their missions, to different embassies, as a method of documenting

atrocities. And I think it is because there were so many foreigners there that

we have this vast amount of evidence about Japanese brutality.

One man in particular...

American miner Searle Bates made it his duty to collate evidence.

As a Nanjing University history professor, he wrote copious notes

happened and kept copies of many of the letters and diaries of fellow committee

members.

When the Japanese attacked Nanjing, American missionary priest John McGee,

of the Safety Zone committee members, started to film the horrifying scenes he

saw around him.

Risking his life, he secretly filmed Chinese women kneeling before Japanese

soldiers as they begged for the lives of their sons and husbands.

But their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Thousands of men were taken by the Japanese army, bound with ropes, and

to the bank of the Yangtze River or to various ponds, where they were murdered

with machine guns, bayonets, rifles, and even hand grenades.

McGee wrote in a letter home, The horror of the last week is beyond anything I

have ever experienced.

It's clearly a war crime by any standard you could possibly even think of.

Troops are killing, looting, raping, murdering, all that is part of it. And

get these, in some ways, I think these are the most horrific instances, whether

it's sort of competitive head -chopping going on.

Another letter described corpses left lying in piles.

They were all obviously civilians, hands bound behind backs, one with the top of

his head cut completely off.

Were they used for labor practice?

What happened to them that made it possible for

them to slaughter other human beings?

Using the young soldiers to behead victims.

Where the victims are tied, their hands are tied, so they're not able to fight

back. But the powerful sense of power

that comes from being able to dominate another human being, even to kill

another human being, is something that has to be learned.

You can't just walk out and start killing people.

People who are forced to do that break down.

So soldiers have to be taught to be violent.

And that's one of the things that was going on with this massacre.

The Japanese army was a conscript army.

These were mostly rural men, farmers, in uniform. They were treated

abysmally by their officers within a quite violent military culture.

They were also imbued with widespread racism towards Chinese as well.

They had no reason to think that their treatment of Chinese would be censured

their officers, and it wasn't.

One of the issues with discipline was that these were...

essentially men who were a second or third reservist who didn't actually want

be there and they weren't very particularly well trained. They had no

police around to kind of discipline them and they would run amok.

Disarmed soldiers and civilian men were not the only targets.

Around the city, Japanese army sought out women and girls and raped them.

The rapes that took place in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of

do stand as one of the worst cases that we know of, of an occupying army

committing atrocities against a civilian population.

But in this particular case, there was a purpose that served a racial end, you

might say. It was part of a wider propaganda effort by Japan to show the

that they were inferior and would have to submit.

Teramoto Juhei took part in gang rape.

If you put one egg in it, it becomes six eggs.

If you put six eggs in it, it becomes six eggs. If you put one egg in it, it

becomes six eggs.

If you put one egg in it, it becomes

six

eggs.

Tamaki Matsuoka is a Japanese historian and activist who challenges Japanese

perceptions of the war.

In order to interview victims of the Nanjing Massacre, she traveled over 90

times between the two countries.

In 1988, she met Jiang Shouying, who 60 years on still relived the horror.

The committee responsible for the Nanjing safety zone wrote almost daily

complaint letters to the Japanese embassy.

December 16th. In our agricultural economics compound, more than 30 women

raped last night by soldiers who came repeatedly and in large numbers.

December 17th. Last night, soldiers repeatedly came to our library building

its great crowd of refugees demanding money, watches, and women at the point

the bayonet.

Throughout the city last night, soldiers raped several women.

December 18th, University Middle School.

One frightened child killed by a bayonet, another critically wounded and

to die. Eight women raped.

Neither the Japanese embassy nor the leader of the army, General Matsui, did

anything to stop the misery.

Using rape with young soldiers, encouraging them to rape women,

is a way of training them to be violent.

That's fairly safe.

They're not in war with someone pointing a gun at them and they're shooting

back. This is someone whom they have subdued, knocked out, being held down or

tied down, so they can learn to be violent.

and be rewarded for that violence by their superiors in a fairly safe

way.

In a final estimate, 20 ,000 women and girls were raped during the first month

of the occupation alone.

China is a developed country, so they were aware that breaking the

law was not a problem at all,

so they had a very large -scale violence against women and women's rights.

I think that the most recent case of violence against women

in the world was the case of the Nanjing Massacre.

Jingling College was a safety zone refugee camp for women and children.

The missionary teacher in charge was Minnie Vautrin.

She wrote about the rape victims seeking shelter there.

Friday, December 17th. A stream of weary, wild -eyed women was coming in.

They said that night had been one of horror, that again and again their homes

had been visited by soldiers.

Twelve -year -old girls, up to 60 -year -old women were raped, husbands forced

to leave bedrooms, and pregnant wife at point of bayonet.

At Jinling College, Vautrin provided shelter to over 10 ,000 women and

many of them rape victims who had fled their homes to seek protection in the

safety zone.

But many more never made it there at all.

And for them, the situation was even worse.

The reports that we have of civilian life in the rest of Nanjing, outside the

safety zone, are absolutely horrific.

Cases of soldiers entering houses, raping women, killing civilians.

People were essentially hiding, hunkering down in the face of an army

simply out of control.

Their houses were being burned.

Their children were being raped.

There was no food, there was no order.

Soldiers were completely uncontrolled.

I don't think I can actually imagine the kinds of horror, what it would do to

anybody.

Outside the city walls.

Unarmed farmers and peasants were murdered in their thousands.

Life itself seemed almost impossible.

But a tiny oasis of hope existed in the grounds of a cement factory just 12

miles from the city.

Jiangnan Cement Mill was run by the 26 -year -old Danish adventurer, Bernard

Arpsenberg.

Sindberg had arrived in China a few years earlier, and in 1937 found himself

the heart of the Battle of Shanghai.

He was quickly employed by a British journalist for the Telegraph newspaper

named Philip Pembroke Stevens, and together they covered the battle.

But tragedy struck when they got mixed up in gunfire, and Stevens was killed.

After the death of his friend, rather than return home, Sindberg made an even

more daring move.

He took a job at Stone's Throw from Nanjing.

He was employed to safeguard the Jiangnan cement mill from the fighting

paid £100 a month for his trouble.

His letter of acceptance still survives.

I hereby agree to proceed voluntarily to work the Jiangnan Cement Works near

Nanjing and to stay there during the period of hostilities entirely at my own

risk without having any claims whatever on F .L. Smith & Co.

or any other party in case I should be wounded, disabled, or killed.

Reasonable hospital expenses accepted.

Also working at the cement mill was German Karl Gunther.

The pair quickly turned it into a refugee camp offering shelter to factory

workers and farmers from the surrounding area.

Original film shows the camp crowded with refugees.

Thinberg and Gunther draped large Danish and German flags all over the camp to

protect it from Japanese air raids.

In a letter printed in a Danish newspaper, he wrote,

I asked people to help paint a 1 ,350 square inch Danish flag on the roof of

facility so that it could be clearly seen from the air.

I guess this must be the largest Danish flag ever.

Thinberg and Gunther attempted to care for as many of the local wounded as they

could in their makeshift hospital.

But when seriously injured refugees arrived at the camp, Finneberg would

them through Japanese territory to the Drum Tower Hospital, each time putting

his own life at risk.

Delivered into the hands of Dr. Wilson, the lucky few would survive.

But as the only surgeon in the city, even he was beginning to crack under the

pressure.

On the first day of the attack on the city, he performed 11 operations, but

four days later, the figure had jumped to 150 awaiting surgery.

Wilson was often woken in the night to ward off Japanese soldiers who had

sneaked into the hospital looking for women.

He wrote in his diary,

Three soldiers entered the hospital compound by the rear door and tramped up

down the hospital corridors.

This was at approximately 8 p .m.

At 9 .15, my attention was called to the fact that a Japanese soldier was in the

nurse's dormitory.

I went there with a lantern and found one soldier in a room with six nurses.

He was partially dressed, and I found that he had been in bed with three of

nurses before I arrived.

All the nurses in the building were terrified beyond description.

Dr. Wilson could barely cope and resorted to hormone injections to get

the day.

John McGee filmed some of the worst cases arriving at the hospital.

This included 19 -year -old pregnant Li Shouying.

Dr. Wilson wrote about her injuries.

A young girl of 19 who was six and a half months pregnant was foolish enough

resist rape by two Japanese soldiers.

She received 18 cuts about the face, several on the legs, and a deep gash of

abdomen.

Many years later, Li Shouying remembered the struggle.

McGee's films record other crimes.

Eleven members of this family, both young and old, were raped and killed by

Japanese soldiers.

Two children survived as they hid under an old sheet.

This stretcher bearer was machine gunned.

A bullet passed through his shoulder.

There were many failed beheadings.

In a letter to his wife, McGee wrote, I have visited Japan a number of times.

It is a beautiful country, and I thought the people charming.

How to reconcile the Japan that I have seen and the savagery that I have seen

here is a problem that I have not solved yet.

In an effort to keep news of the massacre from getting out, the Japanese

strict controls.

Journalism, film and photography were forbidden.

When the Japanese army took over, all the kind of reporting apparatus broke

because no government officials were around, no journalists around. The only

journalists that were around were Japanese journalists and they're not

report really on the atrocity.

News of the massacre might not be received well by civilians in Japan.

So when reports of the occupation emerged in Tokyo, it was characterized

peaceful liberation of the city.

Japanese film crews were even sent to Nanjing to make propaganda films

supporting the myth.

We are not fighting against these people. We are in fact warriors who

them. People's happy laughter can be heard everywhere.

The atmosphere of rejuvenation is much in the air of Nanjiang City.

But the reality couldn't have been more different.

James McCallum, an American missionary in Nanjing, saw the crew at work.

Some newspapermen came to the entrance of a concentration camp and distributed

cakes and apples and handed out a few coins to the refugees.

And a moving picture was taken of this kind act.

At the same time, a bunch of soldiers climbed over the back wall of the

and raped a dozen or so of the women.

There were no pictures taken out back.

Priest John McGee was also caught out by a Japanese reporter.

The reporter visited his church and took photos of his congregation.

McGee believed it was a chance to alert the Japanese people to the horrors

committed by their troops.

But when the story was published, it carried the title, Smiling Nanjing, and

photos of his congregation were captioned, Bathed in the Sunshine of

As 1937 drew to a close, the morale of the Safety Zone Committee reached a new

low.

In a letter to his wife, Wilson wrote, This year ends with deep depression and

no hope at all for the coming new year for us.

The only comforting thing is that the situation cannot get any worse.

They have got to stop killing at some time.

Maybe when there's just nobody for them to kill.

The members of the Nanjing Safety Zone Committee knew they had to act.

They had to alert the world.

They hatched an ambitious plan to smuggle McGee's films out of Nanjing.

George Fitch, the administrative director of the Safety Zone, quickly

the right man for the job.

The son of missionaries, Fitch was born in China in 1883.

He grew up in the eastern city of Suzhou.

He spent his childhood in the leafy lanes surrounding his father's church at

Yangyu Lane.

Despite a brief spell at theological college in America, Fitch resumed

in China in 1909.

In 1936, he moved to Nanjing, where he lived at 7 Baotai Street.

and took up a post at the YMCA.

When the safety zone was set up, Fitch was elected as the administrative

director in charge of the procurement of food and medicine.

Occasionally, he was allowed to travel on Japanese military trains to and fro

between Nanjing and Shanghai.

On the morning of January 24, 1938,

Fitch took McGee's film and headed for the train station.

But the Japanese guard, suspicious of all foreigners, stopped him.

They searched his luggage.

Finding nothing, they let him board.

They had made a fatal mistake.

They didn't do a body search.

My father took about eight.

rolls of undeveloped film, sewed them into the lining of his great

coat, and then boarded a Japanese troop train to Shanghai.

In the international settlement in Shanghai, Fitch had finally reached

He immediately went to the Eastman Kodak Company and made four copies of McGee's

films, which he packaged up and sent to America.

It's just hard to believe how brave some of these people were, and for me

especially, my father, because he took this terrible chance. If he'd been

discovered, he certainly would have been executed.

He also sent his personal diaries, a haunting account of the massacre that

taken place.

The account was published in the Reader's Digest in July 1938.

I climbed over mountains of dead on December 13th to see smoking ruins along

that wide and formerly impressive avenue of which all China had been proud.

Charred bodies were everywhere.

It was the first step in bringing to light the rape of Nanjing.

His son John Fitch has tirelessly researched his family's story,

his mother also worked to promote the cause.

Fitch's wife Geraldine typed up the letters that she received from him and

them to various magazines and newspapers to help raise awareness.

Can you help me with this?

She made use of every contact she could to get the story out.

From Shanghai, George Fitch returned to America and started a drive to alert the

country to the terrifying situation in China.

He had many, many requests from civic organizations, from

various churches, YMCA, and so forth.

to come and lecture and talk about what was happening over there, and in most

cases, I believe, to show this horrible film.

For months, Fitch crisscrossed his way around the country, giving speeches and

showing McGee's films.

One of his primary aims was to convince the government to stop selling war

materials to Japan.

In Washington, D .C., Fitch screens the films to the Foreign Affairs Committee,

the Office of War Information, and scores of journalists.

He even visited the White House to try and persuade President Roosevelt.

In a letter to the President, he wrote, Please picture to yourself a hundred of

America's fairest cities and hundreds more of her towns and villages laid

by enemy bombers.

and countless thousands of her civilians, women and children, as well

slaughtered in cold blood.

Please add to that the consciousness that a country you had considered a

was continuing to supply the enemy with most of the materials she required to

carry out this destruction and murder.

I think he felt that our government would somehow use its influence to stop

the massacre.

And in particular, trying to influence our government into not

supplying the Japanese with raw material, which was,

of course, they used then in the war machine.

Allies in World War I, America had continued to trade with Japan during the

1930s.

Because there is no declaration of war, and of course also because America goes

through the Depression, which is still a terrible reality at this time, about

1937, America continues to trade with Japan.

And one thing it doesn't do, which probably would have had an immediate

is stop the oil supply to Japan.

Desperate not to be drawn into another war, Officials believed that if they

stopped trading with Japan, they might attract Japanese aggression on

themselves.

But as news of the Nanjing massacre and Japanese expansionism spread, the mood

began to change.

From the late 1930s to the early 1940s, the United States became increasingly

alarmed at Japanese behavior in Asia.

As they saw Japanese encroachment increasing, they became...

more and more worried that this would lead to a destruction of American

interests in East Asia.

The government felt it had to act.

Embargoes were announced that ultimately prevented the sale of aircraft and

other war materials to Japan.

The idea was that the Japanese essentially would be both economically

from carrying out further aggression, but also morally would be shamed in the

eyes of the world and forced to retreat.

It was an enormous achievement.

But the effort and the memories of the massacre eventually took their toll on

Fitch.

After a relentless lecture tour, his health began to suffer.

I can remember even as a boy, his going out in the evening to give

a talk at some nearby town, and he had an episode

of amnesia.

He suddenly couldn't remember where he lived or where

he was.

He was maybe so fatigued by not only the talks, but also by the memories of the

atrocities in Nanjing that he actually couldn't speak at one point.

By the spring of 1938, the front line of the Sino -Japanese War had moved away

from Nanjing.

The occupying Japanese powers set up their own puppet administration in

and deemed it the reorganized national government of the Republic of China.

The new government instilled more control over the city and their troops.

Atrocities by Japanese soldiers finally lessened.

Things started to calm down.

embassies started opening back up again. And this was because, in some ways, the

frontline troops who took over Nanjing moved on. So much more disciplined,

regular troops were coming in.

In a more stable Nanjing, the work of the Safety Zone Committee drew to a

and other members of the committee began to leave.

John Raba, chairman of the Safety Zone, returned to Germany.

He took with him his diaries and personal records of the massacre.

Like Fitch, he was determined to get help for Nanjing.

Germany was now allied with Japan, but he wouldn't let that stand in his way.

Back in Berlin, he went to see the German Defence Ministry and Foreign

In June 1938,

He took his effort to the highest power in the land.

He hoped Hitler would persuade the Japanese to stop the atrocities in

His suggestion wasn't kindly received.

A few days later, two Gestapo arrived at his front door.

He was arrested and marched away.

After a tense period in custody, he was released, but his journals and films

were confiscated.

and he was forbidden to make any more presentations on Nanjing.

Raba, and the victims he was fighting for, were silenced.

From Nanjing, priest John McGee returned home to be reunited with his family in

Pittsburgh.

Dr. Wilson joined the U .S. Army.

Building on his knowledge of battlefield injuries in Nanjing, he led a medical

team for the duration of the war.

Sindberg emigrated from Denmark to America and became the captain of a U

naval ship. He saw out the war in the Pacific.

Minnie Vautrin also made plans to leave, but before doing so one more incredible

event occurred.

She was given a medal.

Today it is kept at Illinois State Museum.

This is the Order of the Jade that was awarded to Minnie Vautrin for her

in protecting 10 ,000 women and children during the rape of Nan King.

The highest honor possible for a civilian, she was awarded it in secret

representatives of the nationalist government.

Minnie was the first ever woman to get it.

Eventually, all members of the Nanjing Safety Committee were awarded the medals

as a symbol of gratitude.

The foreigners who stayed were brave men and women. It was potentially very

dangerous for them to stay and we know this also from their accounts of how

were treated at the time.

They are justly revered in Nanjing for what they did.

On May 14, 1940, Vautrin boarded a liner and left China after 28 years.

In Asia, Japan continued to wage war.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the American Pacific Fleet in

Harbor.

The Americans finally entered the war.

It took another four years of bloody global warfare to defeat the Japanese,

cost of millions of lives.

But finally, on the 15th of August 1945,

the Japanese surrendered.

The following year, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was

convened, to try Japanese leaders for war crimes.

Commonly known as the Tokyo trials, they were largely modeled on the Nuremberg

trials in Germany.

At the hearings, the panel of judges drew on the photos, letters, diaries and

films created by the safety committee as evidence.

For China to make its case internationally,

These sources are hugely important.

They're important because these are foreign sources, and therefore no

is allowed to doubt the truth about this. No foreigner, no Japanese, no one.

is really happening.

The minor Searle -Bates papers, now kept at the Yale University Divinity

Library, were relied upon heavily.

Bates and other members of the committee, including George Fitch and

Wilson, traveled to Tokyo to give their testimony.

And the court was shown McGee's film.

When McGee took the stand, he described the horror he had seen.

What was the action of the Japanese soldiers?

towards the civilian Chinese men.

The killing began immediately in several ways, often by

individual Japanese soldiers or up to 30 soldiers together going

about, each one seeming to have the power of life or death.

One woman told me that her husband's hands were tied in front of her.

and he was thrown into a pond, and they stayed there and wouldn't let her rescue

him. He was drowned before her faith.

After a six -month trial, the court gave its final judgment.

Seven of the 28 defendants were sentenced to death.

Amongst them, General Iwane Matsui, the commander -in -chief of the Japanese

army at Nanjing.

The evidence provided by the Nanjing Safety Committee was key in convicting

Its stark proof is impossible to deny.

One of the most important things that the Safety Zone Committee did was to

behind their own records of what happened.

It provided a form of witness, and that third -party testimony is one of the

most important sets of evidence that we have.

in reconstructing and understanding what had happened in Nanjing and why.

The records are still important today, not, I think, simply to draw simplistic

moral tales about black and white and good and bad. There are plenty of moral

tales to be drawn from that material.

But to understand something more about the dynamics of war, about how

normal people can find themselves caught up in desperate situations.

I think the documents are important in that we remember and that there is a

record and that it shouldn't be forgotten and that the war, the Second

War, wasn't one that encompassed Europe. It's not suffering just within Europe,

but it's actually a much more global war that much of East Asia suffered and in

quite horrific ways.

The documents, the eyewitness accounts have to be preserved, restored, studied

exactly so that the record is there and can't be

denied.

If we don't understand that, then we really have no way to prevent it

again.

The achievement of the foreigners who remained in Nanjing in saving so many

lives and documenting the truth will never be forgotten.

The memorial to the massacre in Nanjing remembers those who died, but also

honours those who helped others to live.

For John Raba, after the end of World War II,

Conditions deteriorated in a defeated Germany.

Twelve hours of daily manual labor in the Siemens factory brought him just

meager rations of soup and bread.

Life was hard.

But all was not lost.

In an astonishing twist of fate, he was saved by some of the very people he had

helped in Nanjing.

When news of his poverty reached the city, Their reaction was swift.

They raised $2 ,000 and also sent a monthly food package.

Raba passed away just a few years later.

But his story didn't end there.

In 1996, the New York Times published excerpts of his diaries from Nanjing.

Famed as the Good Nazi, he finally received the recognition he deserved.

For Minnie Vautrin, there was no such fairy tale.

On arrival back in America, her life took a turn for the worse.

Haunted by all she had witnessed, she sunk into a deep depression.

She was so overwhelmed by the pressure and anxiety that she had experienced,

and her grief, I think, too.

Seeing so many people for whom she had tried to protect suffering, that grief

was very deeply rooted in her, and she was not really able to recover from

In a letter to a friend she wrote

No matter how hard I try not to think about it, my spirit seems to be marching

towards collapse.

She always felt, like, guilty because she didn't think she did enough, you

and because of all the people that died over there during that period of time.

But, you know, I think that she was quite a woman.

Just one year after leaving China, she took her own life by turning on her gas

oven.

In her suicide note, Vautrin wrote, I have deeply loved and respected the

of missions in Jinling College.

Had I ten perfect lives, I would give them all to the kingdom building.

But, alas, I have failed and injured the cause with the one life that has been

mine. My remorse and regrets are deep.

and genuine.

Sindberg retired to California, but the memories of Nanjing were never far away.

His brother remembers their first discussion.

It got late in the evening and he just kept talking.

I frankly at the time thought that this was just crazy, this was just nonsense.

How could anybody have a life like that? He showed me pictures and

his stories about mutilations and

rapes and murders and so on there were just unbelievable.

I found out, no, this was for real.

George Fitch returns to China for the duration of the war and helped

American aid.

As soon as he could, he went back.

That was just part of his DNA, that he was destined

to help other people.

After the war, Dr. Wilson ran a hospital in California.

He never spoke about the massacre again.

Their journey of discovery has led his children to the Nanjing Massacre

Hall.

He didn't share with us because it was so horrendous.

But now we know why he didn't share with us. Because it was too horrible.

After a while, I don't think he wanted to remember.

Not a lot of people can say that they had a hero of a

father as I did.

It's sad tears, but it's proud tears,

and they just come.

For the youth, it is important to learn their history and all, to see the

memorial and see what has gone on in the past and how man can be so cruel to his

other fellow humans. And we need to learn how not to go there again.