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.
Jews in America responded to the various reports by holding a rally...
Rape Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust WWII Iris Chang. The Rape of Nanking The Rape of Nanking, according to Chinese-American author Iris Chang, is one of the forgotten atrocities committed during World War II. Chang was the child of parents who had survived the Cultural Revolution in China before immigrating to America and the siege of the Japanese Army during the 1930s was an important part of their cultural history (Chang 7-8).
These include claims for Japanese revisionists that "… critics have stretched tales of Japanese brutality as means of putting political pressure on Japan and winning compensation." There has in fact been a revisionist interpretation of the events at Nanking since the 1900s, with the intention of either ignoring or invalidating the resurgence of interest in the horrific facts of rape, torture and wanton slaughter attributed to the Japanese forces. For
Nanking Massacre At some point in the concluding moments of the Tokugawa shogun ate, the professed risk of foreign infringement, particularly from the time when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived as well as the signing of the Kanagawa agreement led to improved standings to the growth of pro-self-rule dogmas. A number of famous daimyo propped up the notion of a come back to the precedent (fukko), at the same time as supplementary
Specifically, in the decades following the conclusion of World War II, the new German nation that eventually emerged from the physical devastation of the country and, more importantly, from the moral bankruptcy of having embraced, supported, and made possible the implementation of Hitler's racial hatred and the murderous atrocities it inspired. Naturally, certain Germans never accepted responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust, even denying that it ever occurred. However, the official
But, Chang writes: "I would have to conclude that Japan's behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise. The Rape of Nanking should be perceived as a cautionary tale -- an illustration of how easily human beings can be encouraged
Over 1,000 Chinese witnesses came forth to testify in the trials which lasted until February of 1947 after the Chinese government posted notices in Nanking regarding the need for credible witnesses, (Chang 1997:170). Unlike the Nuremburg Trials, however, much of the case against the Japanese fell apart thanks to faulty prosecution and a lack of true concern for justice in the region. The events which conspired in Nanking during the
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