Fitch served as director of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, and like John Rabe, was one of the few foreigners in the city at that time.

[4] They held bible study sessions every Wednesday, in which they encountered high-profile Chinese people, including Sun Yat-sen, Tang Shaoyi, and Wang Chonghui.

[3][4][5] Fitch's parents also corresponded with a number of Korean Christians during their time in China, including Yun Chi-ho and Lyuh Woon-hyung.

[3][5] Fitch and his siblings all returned to the United States for schooling and went back to China to work as missionaries.

[...] Is it any wonder that I look back upon my three years in Korea as among the richest and most gratifying in my life?According to Fitch's autobiography, he helped facilitate the later South Korean president Syngman Rhee's move to the United States.

Fitch was one of 27 Westerners who chose to remain in the city during the Battle of Nanking.Fitch served as director of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone at the time.

When the massacre began, he worked with John Rabe and Searle Bates to protect civilians from the atrocities of the Imperial Japanese Army.

[2][4] Complete anarchy has reigned for ten days-it has been hell on earth... to have to stand by while even the very poor are having their last possession taken from them-their last coin, their last bit of bedding (and it is freezing weather), the poor ricksha [sic] man his ricksha; while thousands of disarmed soldiers who had sought sanctuary with you together with many hundreds of innocent civilians are taken out before your eyes to be shot or used for bayonet practice and you have to listen to the sounds of the guns that are killing them; while a thousand women kneel before you crying hysterically, begging you to save them from the beasts who are preying on them; to stand by and do nothing while your flag is taken down and insulted, not once but a dozen times, and your home is being looted and then to watch the city you have come to love and the institution to which you have planned to devote your best deliberately and systematically burned by fire-this is a hell I had never before envisaged.On January 23, 1938, Fitch and 13 other Americans were allowed to leave the city on a Japanese military train.

[12][13] He smuggled in the lining of his coat eight reels of 16 mm negative movie film that contained evidence of the massacre.

[2][12] After Fitch's departure, Hubert Lafayette Sone was elected administrative director of the successor to the Nanking Safety Zone, the Nanjing International Relief Committee.

In a speech at the Cleveland Heights Presbyterian Church, he said:[13] The destruction of Nanking was the blackest page in modern history [...] The Japanese for two months kept up continuous looting, burning, robbing and murdering [...] Chinese men by the thousands were taken out to be killed by machine guns or slaughtered for hand grenade practice.

[...] The poorest of the poor were robbed of their last coins, deprived of their bedding and all that they could gather out of a city systematically destroyed by fire.

There were hundreds of cases of bestiality inflicted upon Chinese women.Fitch was quoted in a June 11, 1938, story about Fitch's advocacy published in the San Francisco Chronicle:[13] I heard the cries of tens of thousands of women kneeling and praying for help which we were helpless to give.

Theirs was a fate worse than death.Fitch returned to China in 1939 to serve with YMCA and later with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration until 1947.

[2] Around this time, Fitch provided intelligence and assistance to the US Office of Strategic Services to counter the Japanese invasion.

The Fitch couple joined two organizations that Syngman Rhee founded: the Korea–America Association (KAA) in 1942 and the Christian Friends of Korea in 1943.

She also advocated for the formal recognition of the KPG by the Kuomintang and by the US government via her connections to Soong Mei-ling and Eleanor Roosevelt.

He then served as deputy director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the flooded Yellow River area of Kaifeng in 1946.

Fitch established YMCA meeting halls around the country and distributed relief aid for two years.

[3] In 1951, he resigned his post as head of the Korean YMCA and went to Taiwan, where the Kuomintang had retreated to after their 1949 loss of the Chinese Civil War.

[2][3] Fitch and his wife Geraldine are now buried in the Valley View Cemetery of Essex County, New York.

[16] On December 12, 2016, Li Qiang, then the Party Secretary of Jiangsu, awarded Fitch and five others the Zijin Grass International Commemorative Medal of Peace for their role in protecting civilians during the Nanjing Massacre.

[17] The personal documents of him and his wife between 1909 and 1949, including their correspondence with Syngman Rhee, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek, are held in the Fitch collection at the Harvard–Yenching Library of Harvard University.

[3] In total, Fitch had six children, including four sons (George Kempton, Albert, John, and Robert) and two daughters (Marion and Edith).