Rape of Nanking\" and \"The

¶ … Rape of Nanking" and "The Holocaust"

The Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust in Europe are two if the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century. Though both of these events resulted in mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of people they had very different beginnings, and world reaction.

In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanking and proceeded to murder 300,000 out of 600,000 civilians and soldiers in the city. The six weeks of carnage became known as the Rape of Nanking and represented the single worst atrocity during the World War II era in either the European or Pacific theaters of war.

Prior to the actual military invasion of Nanking a tough battle at Shanghai, that began in the summer of 1937, surprised the Japanese forces who expected an easy victory. The Japanese had bragged they would conquer all of China in just three months, but the battle dragged on through the summer into late fall. The stubborn resistance by the Chinese troops upset and infuriated the Japanese and whetted their appetite for the revenge that was to follow at Nanking.

The beginnings of the holocaust can be traced to the arrival of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis Party, which came into power in Germany in January of 1933 after a bitter ten-year political struggle. By the end of the Second World War in 1945 it is estimated that the Nazis succeeded in killing somewhere between five and six million people in concentration camps, killing centers, shooting operations, and inter-city ghettos. The scope of the Holocaust was unprecedented. Jews were murdered in Germany, Poland, the U.S.S.R., Hungary, Romania, Lithuania and the Netherlands. Sixty percent of all the Jews in Europe were lost.

During his rise to power, Hitler had repeatedly held the Jews responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I and ensuing economic hardships. Hitler also claimed Germans with fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes were the supreme form of human, or master race and the Jews, according to Hitler, were the racial opposite. He accused the Jews of actively engaging in an international conspiracy to keep this master race from assuming its rightful position as rulers of the world.

Another significant difference in these two events is the way the governments of Japan and Germany accounted for them. In Japan news reports of the happenings in Nanking appeared in the official Japanese press. The Japanese news reports were a sign of national support in a country where any victory by the Imperial Army resulting in further expansion of the Japanese empire was celebrated. Eyewitness reports by Japanese military correspondents reflected an outlook that justified the dominance of people considered inferior. One paper, the Japan Advertiser, published a running count of the heads severed by two officers involved in a decapitation contest, as if it was some kind of a sporting match. There were also accounts in the West of the massacre, including reports in the New York Times.

On the other hand the Nazis attempted to keep the existence of the death camps secret. As you might expect, rumors and some eyewitness reports gradually filtered out to the rest of Europe and the West. More difficult to conceal were the mass shootings occurring throughout occupied Russia. The Nazis attempted to quiet the increasing reports of violence against the Jews by inviting the International Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt, a ghetto in Czechoslovakia. The delegation toured Theresienstadt observing stores, banks, cafes, and classrooms which had been hastily spruced-up for their benefit. They also witnessed a musical program put on by Jewish children. After the Red Cross departed, most of the ghetto inhabitants, including all of the children, were sent to be gassed and the model village was left to deteriorate.

A further contrast between the Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust was the West's response to both events. In the United States, reports published in the New York Times, Reader's Digest and Time Magazine were met with skepticism. The stories out of Nanking seemed almost too fantastic to be believed. For the most part Americans had only a passing knowledge or little interest in Asia at this time. Political leaders and the citizens of both America and Britain remained overwhelmingly focused on the situation in Europe.

In 1942 the New York Times reported that already over 1,000,000 Jews had been shot. That summer, Swiss representatives of the World Jewish Congress received information from a German industrialist regarding the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews and passed the information on to London and Washington. In December 1942, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden stood before the House of Commons and declared the Nazis were now carrying into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe.