Nanjing Massacre
Japanese troops kill prisoners and civilians for weeks
On 13 December 1937 the Japanese army took Nanjing, capital of the Republic of China, and for six weeks its soldiers killed prisoners and civilians en masse, raped and looted. Estimates of the dead range from tens of thousands to 300,000; the Tokyo tribunal put it above 200,000.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 19 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 2 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 10 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 11 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 12 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 9 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 4 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 1 year earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 4 years later
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 16 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 8 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 1 year earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 4 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 5 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 8 years later
Middle East
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 22 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 21 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 5 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 4 years later
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 11 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 15 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 2 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 11 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 15 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 19 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 23 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 8 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 7 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 4 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 8 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 1 year earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 4 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 5 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 17 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 22 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 81)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 68)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 66)
- Winston Churchill (aged 63)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 59)
- Albert Einstein (aged 58)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 56)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 56)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 48)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 48)