This year is the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, committed by Japanese troops during World War II.

During the six-week-long massacre, over 300,000 Chinese people, including both disarmed soldiers and innocent civilians, were killed. In Nanjing, the capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, a long air attack alarm sounded across the city at 10 in the morning.

The Nanjing Massacre occurred in December, 1937. That's when Japanese troops occupied the then capital of China. Historical records show that over 300,000 Chinese were killed. More than 20,000 women were raped. And one third of houses in the city were burned down.

Background:

In December 1937, Nanjing fell to the Japanese Imperial Army. The Japanese army launched a massacre for six weeks. According to the records of several welfare organizations which buried the dead bodies after the Massacre, around three hundred thousand people, mostly civilians and POWs, were brutally slaughtered.

Over twenty thousand cases of rape were reported. Many of the victims were gang raped and then killed. The figure did not include those captives who were sent to army brothels (the so-called "comfort stations").

The actual Memorial Hall is built to commemorate the victims.

The actual Hall is located in Jiangdongmen (The Gate on the Eastern Bank of the River), one of the sites where countless human bones of the victims of the Massacre were excavated. It is just one of those "wan ren keng" (pit of ten thousand corpses) which can be found in many Japanese occupied areas in China during the war.

The Hall is built in the eighties when a number of Japanese politicians and writers claimed that the Massacre had never ocurred and history textbooks were rewritten by the authority describing the Massacre as a minor incident.

It must be reminded that contrary to Germany the Japanese government has never made any formal or official apology to the Chinese people for their crimes committed during the war.

Instead, a number of Japanese politicians and writers denied not just the Massacre but any of their wrong doings in the Second World War. They claimed that they had "liberated" Asian peoples from Western colonialism. The Nanjing Massacre is one of their so-called "liberations".

This WWW Memorial Hall is created to expose their lies and to preserve the historical truth.

Let the victims of the Massacre be remembered but not buried in lies.