In total, 200,000 Chinese POWs and civilians likely were murdered during the Japanese Rape of Nanjing in 1937; the total may even be as high as the 300,000 given in one of my sources. The Chinese POWs shown in the photo were captured (or surrendered) in Nanjing, and no doubt were murdered shortly after this photo was taken, since no POWs were allowed to survive. For documentation on Japan's murder of near 4,000,000 Chinese during the Sino-Japanese War (which in 1941 merged into World War II) and the Nanjing massacres, see China's Bloody Century Source: "Alliance in Memory of Victims of the Nanjing massacre." This photo was among "30 photos were donated by Mrs. Marian Exters to the AMVNM on July 7, 1991, when she was 79. Mrs. Exters is daughter of Mr. George A. Fitch, director of the YMCA in Nanjing in 1937 and a member of the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone during the Massacre.... According to her memory, she was told that these photos were believed to have been taken during the Massacre by Japanese soldiers themselves and were developed by a photo studio run either by a Chinese or a Korean, who or whose clerk secretly made reprints and smuggled them to a foreign friends in order to expose Japanese crimes of atrocities."A different source claims that it was the clerk, a Mr. Hong, who duplicated the photos and disappeared upon being subsequently investigated by the Japanese. |
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