The Rape of Nanking

While the author devotes much of the book to explaining how the Nanking perpetrators could behave with such viciousness and barbarity, these reasons don’t seem sufficient once she details the worst incidents of the massacre. As the Japanese soldiers perpetuate a campaign of rape, murder, and mutilation, there doesn’t seem to be any humanity reflected in these young men. Interpretations rooted in ancient honor codes and anti-Chinese propaganda fall flat in the face of the actual slaughter, which is beyond human comprehension. Yet the fact of the massacre remains, so these interpretations must suffice.

Not surprisingly, missionaries could find nothing to compare the slaughter to except hell itself. Even the jaded man of science, Dr. Wilson, could see no other antecedent to the Nanking massacre, writing in a letter, “Today marks the 6th day of modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape” (126). Indeed, much of what the author describes feels more like the work of supernatural demons than human beings. It’s a notion echoed earlier by one Japanese soldier who told the author, “There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil” (60).

Yet while one expects a demon to lack humanity, seeing this behavior in human beings is disturbing. Perhaps most upsetting of all is the extent to which the barbarity was a source of entertainment and even humor for many of its participants. According to the author, “Perhaps one of the most brutal forms of Japanese entertainment was the impalement of vaginas” (94). She proceeds to list a litany of incidents that caused Japanese perpetrators and observers to keel over laughing. Equally humorous to the Japanese soldiers was the castration of Buddhist monks who refused to break their vows of celibacy. While every incident of violence in Nanking is deplorable, the fact that so many Japanese soldiers took such pleasure in the cruelty makes the massacre even more upsetting.

Given Chang’s repeated characterization of the Nanking massacre as a “holocaust,” it is worth examining the nature of Japanese war crimes in the context of Nazi war crimes. When wartime Nazi atrocities are invoked, images of ghettos and concentration camps tend to dominate any conversation about Germany’s misdeeds during World War II, and with good reason. Thus, despite the unspeakable brutality of both countries’ war crimes, Nazi war crimes are seen largely as a consequence of centralized anti-Semitic policies of extermination, carried out clinically by bureaucrats, the SS, and secret police, rather than by members of the German Wehrmacht soldiers caught up in the feverish violence of war. The Nanking massacre—though seemingly sanctioned either tacitly or explicitly by political and military leaders—seems more a spontaneous burst of sickeningly violent aggression rather than the result of a carefully organized extermination plot. In a review of The Rape of Nanking in The Atlantic magazine, American historian David M. Kennedy takes this view:

Thus despite Chang’s shocking description of the events in Nanjing, she gives the reader little reason to conclude that what happened there should be compared to the systematic killing of the Holocaust, an episode that was surely the loathsome spawn of Hitler’s purposeful policy—not an incident of war or the mere excrescence of individual cruelty or the result of a poorly disciplined army run amok. (Kennedy, David M. “The Horror.” The Atlantic. Apr. 1998.)

Yet those comparisons aside, it is worth pointing out that Nazi war crimes were not limited to the ghettos and death camps. According to British historians David Stahel and Alex J. Kay, 6 million of the 10 million Wehrmacht troops deployed to the Eastern Front in the fight against the Soviet Union were guilty of war crimes. (Kay, Alex J, and David Stahel. “Reconceiving Criminality in the German Army on the Eastern Front.” Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2018.) These acts included mass exterminations of Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, at least 3 million of whom were murdered. Other crimes included mass rape and sexual slavery in cities like Smolensk and Lviv in the Soviet Union. Citing Germany’s own documents, historian Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen estimates that over 1 million Soviet children were born as products of rape by German soldiers (Gertjejanssen, Wendy Jo. Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front During World War II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2004.) Thus, the actual incidence of rape is estimated to be significantly higher.

These factors are worth considering if only because the author on a number of occasions highlights of severity of Japanese soldiers’ behavior by comparing it to the behavior of German Wehrmacht soldiers. For example, she points out that “only one in twenty-five American POWs died under Nazi captivity, in contrast to one in three under the Japanese” (173). What she doesn’t point out is that the German treatment of American and British prisoners of war was vastly less severe than its treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, 58% of whom died in captivity—a larger ratio than the one in three Americans who died in Japanese captivity. What’s more, irrefutable evidence exists of direct orders from Nazi central command to commit war crimes against Soviet civilians and prisoners in the form of the Commissar Order and the Barbarossa decree. True, there may be similar documents produced by Japan’s leadership, though they would have been destroyed by the Japanese at the end of the war, the author writes. All of this is not to minimize the behavior of the Japanese or the Nazis during World War II. Moreover, the author is correct to applaud Germany’s postwar efforts to take responsibility for war crimes. Yet any attempt to evaluate either country’s wartime record based on a comparative analysis is questionable, given the immensity of the atrocities on both sides.

Following the avalanche of deeply disturbing material in Chapter 4, the author explores the extraordinarily courageous and inspiring behavior of the Americans and Europeans on the Nanking International Safety Zone Committee. Leading the charge is Rabe, an unlikely hero whom the author calls “the Oskar Schindler of China” (109). Schindler, subject of the Academy Award-winning Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List, was a Nazi Party member credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews. While comparing the two men’s courage is no more fruitful than comparing the barbarity of the Japanese and German armies, the author estimates Rabe and his Safety Zone colleagues provided accommodations for between 200,000 and 300,000 individuals. It is an open question how many of those individuals the Committee members can be rightly credited with “saving.” Yet as the author points out, “If half of the population of Nanking fled into the Safety Zone during the worst of the massacre, then the other half—almost everyone who did not make it to the zone—probably died at the hands of the Japanese” (140).

Despite death threats and individual acts of nonlethal violence, it is remarkable that none of the Committee members were killed. The biggest reason for refraining from harming Committee members was to avoid an international diplomatic incident with Great Britain or the United States, before either of them were directly at war with Japan. Yet it seems unlikely that the average Japanese soldier, raping and marauding with impunity, had those diplomatic considerations at top of mind. It is therefore fair to reason that these orders came from political leaders back in Tokyo and were relayed through officers. In turn, this would mean that in addition being fully aware of the slaughter, Tokyo’s top leaders were capable of stopping it but refused.

The power of Rabe’s swastika armband, meanwhile, is evidence of the strength of Japan’s and Germany’s diplomatic relations, which at this point did not consist of a full-fledged alliance. While Hitler courted both China and Japan as possible allies in a potential fight against the Soviet Union, he sided decisively with Japan once war with China broke out in 1937. Such diplomatic nuances may have been lost on Rabe, who incorrectly believed that Hitler would take pity on the plight of the Chinese when he discovered the full extent of the Nanking massacre. Or perhaps Rabe was simply wildly mistaken about his measure of Hitler as a human being. Whatever the case, Rabe’s obliviousness with regard to Nazi power politics may be one way to make sense of the fact that he helped save between 200,000 and 300,000 individuals despite belonging to a party responsible for killing 11 million civilians, including 6 million Jews, during World War II. By 1937, the Third Reich’s systematic persecution of Jews had yet to turn explicitly violent in nature, yet the party’s anti-Semitism was clearly reflected in its passing of the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, and thus Rabe remains troublingly enigmatic as a humanitarian hero of Nanking.