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20th Century Japan
The Rape of Nanjing
On December 13, 1937, several divisions of the Japanese Army’s Central China Command under General Matsui Iwane captured Nanjing, then the capital of Nationalist China. Over the next two weeks they perpetrated an orgy of killing, rape and looting which has few parallels in modern history. In Nanjing and its outskirts, by conservative estimate, Japanese troops murdered at least 150,000 Chinese civilians and war prisoners. More than 10,000 women were raped, most of them repeatedly; many were afterward killed. A third of the city was destroyed.
The rape and looting of the city went on for days; the systematic cruelties of some units rivalled the worst excesses of the Nazi SS. Nor was this a case of troops "getting out of hand". Discipline in the Imperial Army was severe, administered by a chain of command that stretched tightly from division chiefs of staff to superior privates. (The only orders later unearthed about the incident were those forbidding any mention of what had happened.) Somewhere a decision had been taken to terrorise the Chinese by devastating their capital; the troops had, with appalling enthusiasm, obeyed.
NB: The grim statistics of the Nanjing atrocities are taken from the post-war crimes trials (International Ministry Tribunal for the Far East); they were amply confirmed from eyewitness accounts at that time.
Interestingly enough, the affluent Japan of the early nineties is full of literary and scholarly apologists who contend that the Rape of Nanjing never happened, or that if it did, it was a small incident that was greatly exaggerated by "anti-Japanese" propagandists. This appalling "incident" is rarely mentioned in modern Japanese school textbooks.