Mark Gagnon

Inside the safety zone, the foreigners shifted from emergency survival to long-term relief.

They helped refugees return to whatever remained of their homes, and they set up kitchens and clinics and makeshift schools, and they continued to document everything — eyewitness accounts, diaries, photos — because they knew that the world needed to see the evidence.

They understood one thing very clearly.

What happened in Nanjing couldn't be allowed to disappear into the silence.

The reckoning didn't come until after Japan's eventual defeat.

In 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East finally laid out the full scope of what had happened at Nanjing.

The evidence was overwhelming.

The photographs and the survivor testimony and even confessions from Japanese soldiers who could no longer live with the guilt of what they had done.

Some veterans, once allowed to speak honestly, just admitted everything.

One former Japanese military organization, after trying to disprove the accusations, ended up facing so much evidence from its own members that it issued this statement.

Well...

It came decades too late, and it didn't speak for everyone.

Many soldiers stayed silent, and some denied the massacre even until their final days.

But enough told the truth to build an accurate record that couldn't be erased.

Chinese survivors took the stand and shared what they had lived through.

They described family members killed in front of them, terror inside the safety zones, and crimes that they witnessed in the streets.

Their voices were calm, but the grief was palpable.

Western witnesses supported their accounts.

Their diaries, once again, were evidence the photograph showed what the Japanese army assumed would never be seen.

Their testimonies made denial completely impossible.