Very, very few photographs exist of the Nanjing Massacre, which makes a new find documenting the atrocities of 1937 all the more remarkable. But it’s today’s social media and an unusual content creator which have propelled our city’s history back into the limelight.
Yesterday, 1 September, saw a pawn-shop owner in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, USA, hit the headlines worldwide for his vlog in which he claimed to have found extremely rare photographs of the Nanjing Massacre.
Evan Kail is owner of St. Louis Park Gold and Silver. On Monday of this week, he was asked by a client to have a look at a book with a view to selling it on their behalf.
Kail didn’t get around to looking at the book for a while, since he runs across old books of photographs all the time. And when he did, he began flicking through and found it to be not particularly remarkable, other than the photos therein seemed to be have been shot by a US Navy serviceman stationed in China during WWII.
Then he turned a page, and as he says on his vlog, he screamed.
Kail would not show viewers any further photos from the book for fear of disturbing his audience. As he says, they are, “the most disturbing things I have seen in my career”. His vlog has already been watched 10 million times on TikTok.
But it is understood the book contains 30 photographs of atrocities taking place during the Nanjing Massacre. So far, two in particular have emerged. One accompanies this article.
The other depicts corpses lying in a street and is captioned, “Hell on Nanking Road”. But of course Nanjing doesn’t have a Nanjing Road, since that would be downright confusing. Likewise, Shanghai doesn’t have a Shanghai Road, but we do. This photo therefore is either taken in another city, where plenty atrocities were also taking place, or could be interpreted as “a road in Nanjing”.
The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall (侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆) has responded to Kail’s reporting of the photos, saying they are in the process of verifying the claims, reports Jiangsu Broadcasting.
Karl closes out his video by saying, “You should know that there are still people who deny that the Nanjing Massacre occurred, and those people’s reason is there is no evidence. I found the evidence”.
