The Nanjing Massacre Trivia Quiz

Answer: December 1937 - February 1938

Nanjing fell to Imperial Japanese troops on December 13, 1937. Atrocities were first documented by "Manchester Guardian" journalist Harold John Timperley the following month.

A note on transliteration: the spelling "Nanking" comes from the postal map designation that was drawn up in 1906 for international communication and commerce. The preferred English rendering today is the more phonetically correct "Nanjing", from the newer Pinyin transliteration of Chinese. When I refer to "The Rape of Nanking", it is in deference to historiographic tradition, as this term has been used in academic and journalistic treatments for decades. "The Nanjing Massacre" is a more recent coinage.

Answer: True

This directive prefigured other war crimes in the Pacific Theater, including the Bataan Death March, use of slave labor in building the Burma Railway, and the use of female captives as "comfort women" throughout the war.

Answer: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

It is difficult to say whether Prince Asaka or General Matsui was really in command at Nanjing, especially given Matsui's illness and lack of participation in the campaign itself. Never the less, Matsui was convicted at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo trials) and was executed in December, 1948 after expressing his own dismay at how the Nanjing occupation had turned out. Asaka was not charged at the Tokyo trials, largely because US General MacArthur granted a blanket amnesty to all members of the royal family. Nakajima died shortly after the Japanese surrender and was not brought to trial. Yamamoto was the commander of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and was not connected with the 1937 campaign in Nanjing.

Answer: 300,000

Many Japanese scholars give smaller totals than this. However, given that burial societies in the area tallied about 155,000 interments and that body disposal in the Yangtze River or cremation was reckoned to be roughly as common as burial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East put its estimate at "greater than 200,000", and most writers on this tragedy, including the most prominent, Iris Chang, have settled on 300,000.

Answer: False

Westerners who reported on the events of the Massacre estimated the number of rapes to be roughly 20,000 and this count was affirmed at the Tokyo trials. The details of these are quite indescribable for a family site, except to say that they violated nearly every standard of human conduct according to the above accounts.

After being raped, women were typically killed; these offenses included a great number of women in the later stages of pregnancy.

Answer: All of these

As American diarist Minnie Vautrin wrote in her entry for December 16, 1937, "How many thousands were mowed down by guns or bayoneted we shall probably never know. For in many cases oil was thrown over their bodies and then they were burned."

Answer: Grave desecration

Japanese troops burned approximately one-third of the city, and looting, foraging, and theft were widespread, especially considering that the territory surrounding Nanjing had been bereft of such spoils given the "scorched earth" policy of the retreating Chinese army.

As above, the details of other crimes are too grisly to relate here. I have found no allegations or physical evidence of grave desecration related to the Rape of Nanking. If I am incorrect in this, please let me know.

Answer: There was no definitive end - the massacre gradually trailed off

Hirohito never left Japan during World War II, Shanghai was secured prior to the taking of Nanjing, and the US did not enter the war for another four years. No grand action seems to have ended the depredations, other than the eventual exhaustion of the invaders. Both Asaka and Matsui were recalled to Tokyo in 1938, but the Nanjing Massacre was effectively over by then.

Suggested motivations for the Nanjing Massacre have included the nationalist ideals of the Japanese commanders, frustration and desire for revenge following a hard-fought battle for Shanghai that had just concluded in August, and Japanese disgust at the 90,000 Chinese soldiers who surrendered at Nanjing - an act that, according to some historians of the region, was unthinkable under the Japanese martial mindset. In the final analysis, perfunctory answers are not adequate for an understanding of mass killing on this scale, and the cultural underpinnings of the Nanjing Massacre are a topic of great interest for modern scholars of the period.

Answer: The Nazi Party

Following the Nanjing Massacre, Rabe, an executive with German engineering conglomerate Siemens AG, returned to Germany and campaigned for German intervention to stop further war crimes in China. Unfortunately, Rabe had failed to appreciate the zeitgeist of his own homeland during the period.

He was detained by the Gestapo, his film of the depredations was confiscated, and he was ordered to keep silent about the atrocities in China. Today, a monument stands in his honor at the Memorial Center in Nanjing.

Answer: False

In Germany and Austria, the Holocaust is at the forefront of education on World War II, both governments actively prosecute those who deny the historical truth of the genocides in Europe, and display of the swastkia outside of a historic context is illegal. The Rape of Nanking in treated much more ambivalently in Japan, where history textbooks gloss over the events. Many Japanese scholars and national leaders deny that events there were atrocities at all, claiming that the dead were legitimate casualties of war and that other affronts, such as the murder of children or widespread rape, either did not occur or only occurred with roughly the same frequency as in Allied invasions. This view is held by virtually no reputable historians outside of Japan.

As always, I'd love to hear any corrections or comments you might have, especially those that will make this a better quiz. Thanks for playing.