NANJING: It’s been 83 years since the mass atrocities carried out by the Japanese army after it captured Nanjing. Now, evidence of their crimes has been made clearer and more permanent.
A collection of digital archives about the Nanjing Massacre will be made public for the first time this month by the Second Historical Archives of China. Research archivist Zhang Kaisen showed CGTN some of the more important files related to the Japanese war crimes, including a clipping from The Tokyo Daily News about the killing race between two Japanese generals, an English list of major Japanese war criminals, and documents on their trials. “These documents are precious first-hand original files. From them, we can basically recreate the post-war trials of Japanese war criminals. Most are available to the public for the first time,” Zhang said.
After the Second World War, the Chinese government organized numerous trials of Japanese war criminals. In the process of investigating and collecting evidence of war crimes, a large number of documents was produced and accumulated. The main body is currently housed in the Second Historical Archives of China. But they were not systematically sorted and the paper has become very fragile.
“Many of the files have been damaged or affected by mould, so we carried out repairs and then scanned them in high definition.
–The Daily Mail-CGTN News exchange item
