He firmly believed that capturing Nanjing, the Chinese capital, would lead to the collapse of the entire Nationalist Government of China, thereby securing a swift and decisive victory for Japan.

In an attempt to secure permission for this cease-fire from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Rabe, who was living in Nanjing and had been acting as the Chairman of the Nanking International Safety Zone Committee, boarded the USS Panay (PR-5) on December 9.

On December 11, Rabe found that Chinese soldiers were still residing in areas of the Safety Zone, meaning that it became an intended target for Japanese attacks despite the majority being innocent civilians.

Then we'd lock up the women and children in a single house and rape them at night... Then, before we left the next morning, we'd kill all the women and children, and to top it off, we'd set fire to the houses, so that even if anyone came back, they wouldn't have a place to live.” According to one Japanese journalist embedded with Imperial forces at the time:[27]The reason that the [10th Army] is advancing to Nanjing quite rapidly is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wish.In his novel Ikiteiru Heitai ('Living Soldiers'), Tatsuzō Ishikawa vividly describes how the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force committed atrocities on the march between Shanghai and Nanjing.

[42] As the massacre began, Sindberg and Karl Gunther, a German colleague, converted the cement factory into a makeshift refugee camp where they offered refuge and medical assistance to approximately 6,000 to 10,000 Chinese civilians.

John Rabe boarded the U.S. gunboat Panay on December 9 and sent two telegrams, one to Chiang Kai-shek by way of the American ambassador in Hankow (Hankou), and one to the Japanese military authority in Shanghai.

[52] The criteria used in identifying former soldiers was often arbitrary, as was the case with one Japanese company which apprehended all men with "shoe sores, callouses on the face, extremely good posture, and/or sharp-looking eyes."

[55] The rounding-up and mass killings of male civilians and captured POWs were referred to euphemistically as "mopping-up operations" in Japanese communiqués, in a manner "just like the Germans were to talk about 'processing' or 'handling' Jews.

[57] In one of the largest massacres, Japanese troops from the Yamada Detachment and the 65th Infantry Regiment systemically led 17,000 to 20,000 Chinese prisoners to the banks of the Yangtze River near Mufushan and machine gunned them to death.

[64] In a diary entry from Minnie Vautrin on December 15, 1937, she wrote about her experiences in the Safety Zone: The Japanese have looted widely yesterday and today, have destroyed schools, have killed citizens, and raped women.

The extreme cruelty witnessed in Nanjing, including extensive killing, torture, sexual violence, and looting, was not an isolated occurrence, but rather a reflection of Japan's behavior throughout the war in China.

[65]Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, who presided over the Second Sino-Japanese War,[69] justified the massacre as retaliation against persistent Kuomintang aggression,[70] and advocated for the regime's destruction in January 1938.

On March 7, 1938, Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the university hospital in the Safety Zone administrated by the United States, wrote in a letter to his family, "a conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000, including of course thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms.

[96] However, Jean-Louis Margolin does not believe that the Nanjing atrocities should be considered a genocide because only prisoners of war were executed in a systematic manner and the targeting of civilians was sporadic and done without orders by individual actors.

Their stories and those of the German residents tell of the city having fallen into the hands of the Japanese as captured prey, not merely taken in the course of organized warfare but seized by an invading army whose members seemed to have set upon the prize to commit unlimited depredations and violence.

[99]On February 10, 1938, Legation Secretary of the German Embassy, Georg Rosen, wrote to his Foreign Ministry about a film made in December by Reverend John Magee to recommend its purchase.

news correspondents F. Tillman Durdin and Archibald Steele reported seeing corpses of massacred Chinese soldiers forming mounds six feet high at the Nanjing Yijiang gate in the north.

"[109][110] Ralph L. Phillips, a missionary, testified to the U.S. State Assembly Investigating Committee, that he was "forced to watch while the Japs disemboweled a Chinese soldier" and "roasted his heart and liver and ate them.

"[112] Based on the dutiful records of the Safety Zone committee, the post-war International Military Tribunal found that some 20,000 Chinese male civilians were killed on false accusations of being soldiers, while some 30,000 genuine former combatants were executed and their bodies thrown in the river.

[120][121] Eyewitness accounts include testimonies of expatriates engaged in humanitarian work (mostly physicians, professors, missionary and businessmen), journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel.

After the establishment of the weixin zhengfu (Chinese: 维新政府; pinyin: Wéixīn zhèngfǔ) (the collaborating government) in 1938, order was gradually restored in Nanjing and atrocities by Japanese troops lessened considerably.

[126] During his time in China, Bernhard Arp Sindberg, an amateur photographer and friend to several foreign journalists, always had his camera with him, taking graphic photos of the civilian massacres and extensive destruction.

[93] According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, estimates made at a later date indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000.

[135] According to the verdict of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal on March 10, 1947, there are "more than 190,000 mass slaughtered civilians and Chinese soldiers killed by machine gun by the Japanese army, whose corpses have been burned to destroy proof.

According to the archives research "The telegrams sent by the U.S. diplomats [in Berlin] pointed to the massacre of an estimated half a million people in Shanghai, Suzhou, Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi and Changzhou".

General Matsui was indicted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for "deliberately and recklessly" ignoring his legal duty "to take adequate steps to secure the observance and prevent breaches" of the Hague Convention.

[151] On May 1, 1946, SCAP officials interrogated Prince Asaka, who was the ranking officer in the city at the height of the atrocities, about his involvement in the Nanjing Massacre and the deposition was submitted to the International Prosecution Section of the Tokyo tribunal.

[206] According to Guo-Qiang Liu and Fengqi Qian of Deakin University, only since the 1990s, through the revisionist Patriotic Education Campaign, the massacre had become a national memory as an episode of the "Century of Humiliation" prior to the communist founding of a "New China".

This orthodox victimhood narrative has become entwined with the Chinese national identity and is very sensitive to the revisionist sentiments from the far-right in Japan, which makes the memory of the massacre a recurring point of tension in Sino-Japanese relations after 1982.

Zhang Xianwen, editor-in-chief of the report, states that the information collected was based on "a combination of Chinese, Japanese and Western raw materials, which is objective and just and is able to stand the trial of history".