Invading Japanese troops massacred at least 500,000 Chinese
before the occupation of Nanjing in 1937, according to declassified
documents from the United States government, said a Chinese
scholar.
Two telegrams from the U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration added evidence to support claims of a "Pan-Nanjing
Massacre" that included the slaughter of people in the area
surrounding China's then capital, said Wang Lan, a research worker
for the State Archives Administration of China.
Telegrams sent by the U.S. diplomats pointed to the massacre of
an estimated half a million people in Shanghai, Suzhou,Jiaxing,
Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi and Changzhou, said Wang.
Historical records show that more than 300,000 unarmed soldiers
and innocent civilians were murdered by Japanese troops during the
six-week Nanjing Massacre during a period from December 1937 to
January 1938.
However, the massacre of Chinese before the occupation of
Nanjing is less well documented.
William Edward Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany, sent a telegram
from Berlin to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Dec. 14, 1937,
one day after the Japanese army occupied Nanjing, saying, "Today
the news from the Far East is worse than ever and I have read yours
and Secretary Hull's statement as to Japanese brutality. The
Japanese Ambassador here boasted a day or two ago of his country's
having killed 500,000 Chinese people."
Dodd also suggested in the telegram that the U.S. government
should take action to resist Japanese brutality at once.
In the other telegram sent by Clarence E. Causs, U.S. Consul in
Shanghai, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on Jan. 25, 1938,
Gauss reported the brutalities of Japanese army spotted by the U.S.
missionaries in the cities near Nanjing during the same period.
Wang said he found the telegrams, numbered as
RG59-793.94/11631and RG59-793.94/12207, while searching for
materials related to China's war against the Japanese invasion from
1937 to 1945 in the U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration.
"The new evidence, given by a Japanese official and a third
party, verifies and proves the slaughters took place along the way
of the Japanese from Shanghai to Nanjing. The Nanjing Massacre was
not the beginning," said Wang in an article published in the latest
edition of the Shanghai-based Academic Monthly.
Wang said he identified the Japanese Ambassador mentioned by
Dodd as Shigenori Togo, who accepted the post in Berlin in October
1937.
"Togo was a leading planner and executor of Japan's expansion
policies during World War II, and he was also one of Japan's 14
Class A war criminals. He was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment by
the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946," he
said.
Wang said that the content of the two telegrams was reliable as
they were classified in the administration's record group 59, which
contains the most important archives of the U.S. State
Department.
"It is of great importance that we should never forget the
victims of the Nanjing Massacre, but we should also remember others
so far unknown to the public," said Wang.
Documents from international humanitarian and charity
organization personnel who witnessed the tragedy and records seized
from Japanese troops show that Japanese troops killed more than
200,000 civilians and soldiers in 28 mass killings, and another
150,000 people were killed in scattered cases during the infamous
Nanjing Massacre.
The Nanjing City government plans to reopen the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial on Thursday after an expansion project to mark the 70th
anniversary of the massacre.
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(Xinhua News Agency December 13, 2007)