Collected Historical Materials on the Nanjing Massacre, Volume 28: Historical Images

The Collection of Historical Sources on the Nanjing Massacre is a major scholarly undertaking. Gathering and organizing historical sources, as well as translating, editing, and publishing documents in English, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian, and other languages, is an enormously complex and demanding task. As a result, the collection can only be published in installments. Similar source material has sometimes had to be published in separate volumes at different times; we ask readers for their understanding. We hope this collection will provide researchers and readers around the world with as much rich and comprehensive historical material as possible.

However, because the sources come from many places and include firsthand accounts and eyewitness testimony from perpetrators, victims, and third parties, as well as memoirs, archival documents, newspapers, and other publications, they do not always agree in their accounts of the Nanjing Massacre. Some accounts are contradictory because of the authors' perspectives, viewpoints, or limited understanding, and some contain errors or inaccurate opinions. This is not surprising. Accounts of a catastrophe of such world-shaking scale cannot all be identical.

Preserving historical sources in their original form is a professional duty and scholarly standard for historians. We have therefore included all the materials exactly as they were, without alteration, so that researchers can examine and analyze them and arrive at sound conclusions grounded in historical fact.