The Rape of Nanking (Nanjing Massacre) Blog

John Rabe and George Ashmore Fitch I still remember sitting in the archives at Yale Divinity School, reading through George Fitch's diary, when I first fully understood what I was looking at. Here was the head of the YMCA in Nanking — a lifelong Christian missionary, the son of missionaries, a man whose entire identity was built around faith and service — working side by side with the local leader of the Nazi Party. Not reluctantly. Not at arm's length. Working together. E

How one American missionary's life of faith, service, and unlikely courage became the heart of a novel about history's forgotten witnesses. Born Into a World That Was Already China's George Ashmore Fitch didn't choose China. China was chosen for him — at birth. He was born on June 12, 1883, in Suzhou, China, to George Field Fitch and Mary Seymour Fitch, both Presbyterian missionaries who had devoted their lives to the country. Growing up in the missionary compound world of l

Korean "comfort women" liberated by Chinese troops from the Japanese army, September 1944. /VCG In December 1937, Minnie Vautrin stood at the gates of Ginling College in Nanking, physically blocking Japanese soldiers from dragging Chinese women out of the refugee camp. She would repeat this act dozens of times each day for weeks. Her diary entries from that period make for harrowing reading: soldiers arriving in trucks to select women like livestock, girls as young as 11 bein