Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. 290 pages.

Her grandparents narrowly escaped when Japanese soldiers invaded Nanking in December 1937, and the author grew up hearing stories about the sadistic slaughter of 300,000 civilians and disarmed Nationalist Chinese soldiers. This is the first major history of the Nanking holocaust, which lasted for six weeks and was one of the major crimes of the twentieth century. Thanks to cold war politics, the story has not been widely told. After the revolution in 1949, neither the old nor the new China pressed for reparations from Japan, but instead competed for Japanese trade. At the same time, the U.S. needed Japan as an ally against the Soviet Union.

Some Japanese war criminals were tried in Nanking and Tokyo from 1946-1948; about a dozen were found guilty of complicity in Nanking and executed. The royal family was never investigated, and continued their lives of leisure after the war. Many Japanese scholars and politicians still insist that nothing happened in Nanking. But the evidence is undeniable, thanks in part to a couple dozen brave Western missionaries and diplomats who chronicled the events from the Nanking Safety Zone, and somehow managed to accommodate 200,000 desperate refugees as the holocaust was underway. One of bravest of these Westerners was John Rabe, a pro-Nazi businessman who had lived in China for thirty years. The author unearthed thousands of pages of his diary, and calls him "the Oskar Schindler of China."
ISBN 0-14-027744-7

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