When the Japanese entered Nanjing, China's ancient capital city on the southern banks of the Yangtze River and a good 250 kilometers west of Shanghai, Xia Shuqin was eight years old. "Suddenly, the soldiers burst into the house. They gunned down my father without a word," she recalls. Then they raped and killed the women of the household, leaving only Xia and her young sister alive.

Sho Mitani was 18 at the time, 10 years older than Xia Shuqin. He was serving in a gunner team on the Japanese warship "Umikaze." When he arrived in Nanjing, the killing was already underway. "There were bodies heaped everywhere, in parks, on tennis courts," the old man recalls from his home in Osaka. Day after day, the army brought whole truckloads of Chinese to the banks of the Yangtze and mowed down the defenseless prisoners with machine guns.

This week saw the 70th anniversary of the massacre of Nanjing, then called Nanking. It was one of the bloody peaks of the Japanese invasion of China which finally ended with the defeat of Tokyo in World War II, after the Americans dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

In Nanjing alone, the Japanese killed at least 100,000 Chinese civilians; China talks of up to three times that number of victims. The Asian neighbors still disagree today on the exact figure and sometimes on whether the slaughter even took place. Many Japanese nationalists deny the massacre -- often referred to as the Rape of Nanking -- ever happened.

Nanjing and Chinese Patriotism

But the Chinese are just as determined to keep the memory of the bloody massacre of Nanjing -- a metaphor for war crimes the world over -- alive. Relations between Beijing and Tokyo may be more relaxed now than they have been in a long time, but hardly a day goes by without a show on Japanese war crimes being aired on Chinese television. The heroic fight to throw off the Japanese yoke is, after all, an important element in the Communists' effort to keep their 1.3 billion people united behind them, especially in today's essentially capitalist system. Only the Taiwan issue is as important. Nanjing remains vital to Chinese politics even today.

The memorial on the site of the horrific slaughter is currently under renovation. Museum Director Zhu Chengshan, 53, displays a wooden model of the new design. The form, that of a ship, will be over three times as large as the current museum. The workers had to take extra care during the renovation, he says, because countless skeletons from the massacre still lay under the site. The number 300,000 -- representing the number of those killed -- is chiseled into a concrete wall.

In Nanjing, the past is omnipresent. Almost every spot is politically symbolic, including the house that belonged to John Rabe, the "Good Nazi" of Nanjing, who protected thousands of civilians from their Japanese tormentors. The Siemens employee and Nazi Party official established a safety zone for around 250,000 inhabitants together with other Western foreigners. There, acting to all intents and purposes as mayor, police chief and judge, he defied the Japanese. The Chinese revere the German as a "living Buddha." Two of those he took in were the young Xia and his sister, who has referred to him as a "saint" since then. Rabe's journals remain of inestimable value to the Chinese: The former Siemens employee is an important foreign voice lending credence to the Chinese position in the debate surrounding Japanese wartime atrocities.

The diary is a gruesome compendium of shockingly evocative imagery and is currently being turned into a movie by Oscar-winning director Florian Gallenberger. "Every 100 or 200 meters we found new bodies," the Nazi noted. "One is left breathless with disgust by finding, time and again, the corpses of women who have had bamboo stakes driven into their vaginas. Even old women of over 70 are constantly being raped."

Swastika Flag

Rabe's former villa has been renovated with financial assistance from Siemens and the German government; the garden is adorned with a bust of the Hamburg businessman, who was a fervent supporter of Hitler. The statue stands on the spot where Rabe had a shelter dug to protect his neighbors. It was covered with a swastika flag -- the Japanese respected the Nazi symbol, having entered into a pact with the Third Reich against the Soviet Union in 1936. Nanjing was the exception -- where the insignia of Hitler's Reich actually prevented Axis fighters from furthering their World War II orgy of violence and terror.

Rabe's villa is used today as a center for peace studies. Project financers in Berlin, though, have been wary of the place becoming a place of pilgrimage for right-wingers; approaching "China's Oskar Schindler," as the New York Times has referred to Rabe, requires extreme diplomatic caution. On her recent visit to Nanjing, German Chancellor Angela Merkel avoided the memorial because her itinerary took her on to Japan.

Nanjing, after all, remains largely taboo in Japan and many politicians gloss over the imperial invasion as part of the Asian fight for liberation from Western colonial powers. In reality, however, the Japanese were partners with the West in accelerating the partition of China.

Barbarism in the Far East

As early as the first Sino-Japanese war in 1894-95, Japan acquired control over Taiwan; in World War I, Tokyo took over German-controlled Tsingtao. Then in 1932, the Japanese created the puppet state of Manchukuo -- a region historically known as Manchuria -- under Puyi, the last emperor of China.

But they also wanted to subjugate the rest of China and in 1932, Japanese forces continued their assault by attacking Shanghai. The actual war with China, however, finally broke out on July 7, 1937 -- with a night-time skirmish with Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing providing the pretext. Emperor Hirohito and his advisors hoped to conquer the country in just a few months, as part of what they hoped would become a Japanese-controlled "new order" in East Asia. They also wanted to put a stop to Chiang Kai-shek, the enigmatic General and bitter enemy of the Communists who, with his Kuomintang troops, had largely managed to unite the fragmented country. Chiang challenged the Japanese invaders and lured them to Shanghai, in the hopes that Western powers, heavily represented in the economic metropolis at the time, would join the battle.

In August 1937, Kuomintang airplanes attacked Japanese warships in the Huangpu River, but they badly missed their targets. From the hotel bars on the Bund, Shanghai’s pleasant promenade, foreign businesspeople watched in disbelief as Chinese airplanes bombarded their own city. Some 2,000 people were killed in the tragic attack.

Celebrating Pearl Harbor

The eventual Japanese victory came after a long, hard struggle with an estimated 200,000 Chinese falling victim to Japanese attacks. Chiang Kai-shek retreated far inland, first to the capital city of Nanjing, then through Wuhan to Chongqing. The Chinese dismantled entire factories in the east to have them shipped west along the Yangtze.

Chiang took up residence on a small hill in the city he used as his war headquarters; the gray-camouflaged villas are now a museum. Here, on the Dec. 7, 1941, he celebrated the Japanese attack on the US naval base in Pearl Harbor -- now, as China had hoped, the American superpower would officially enter World War II against Japan.

Chiang’s hopes for a swift victory over the Japanese were to be dashed, however. The US did send the harried general more supplies and money, but American help for the dictator was ultimately half-hearted -- victory over the Third Reich was the priority for Washington. In addition, the US advanced on Japan mainly from the Pacific Islands, with relatively few operations launched from China.

The second Sino-Japanese War dragged on. After their first victories, the Japanese got bogged down in the depths of China. Unable to break resistance themselves, even with the help of the puppet regime that they had installed in Nanjing in 1940, they resorted to increasingly brutal methods.

Many of the techniques used in Europe during World War II aimed at wreaking mass destruction, such as systematic air attacks on populous inner cities, had previously been used by the Japanese. The bombardment of Chongqing began in spring 1938, killing over 5,000 civilians in just two days. According to witnesses, the dead lay piled on the streets.

Japan’s "scorched earth" strategy fired up the excesses of the Japanese imperial soldiers, leading to behavior like that seen in Nanjing. The soldiers may not have been officially commanded to carry out the massacre, but the indoctrination of unconditional obedience to the god-like Tenno encouraged them to abuse the Chinese as an inferior race. They were, however, almost as merciless with themselves. "From when we were small, we were raised to die for the Emperor," says Sho Mitani, a former marine rifleman who later participated in the bomb attack on Chongqing as an engineer.

Brutal Cooperation between Japan and Germany

The Japanese also used poison gas and biological weapons against their enemies; the infamous "Unit 731" in Pingfang in northeastern China killed thousands of Chinese prisoners in brutal human medical experiments. The Unit’s director, Shiro Ishii, had brought back the idea for the experiments from a trip to Germany.

During the war on China, the Japanese military doctors then exchanged their experiences with their Nazi allies: On Hitler’s recommendation, German medical officers traveled to East Asia in February 1938 to research the effects of new combat techniques. German doctors later provided Unit 731 with the yellow fever virus, so that the Japanese could test it in China -- a macabre cooperation intended to exterminate huge numbers of people. The criminals in the white coats were never brought to trial in Japan. The occupying US forces later promised Shiro Ishii immunity so that he would provide them with the results of his research. The American authorities still keep material from Unit 731 under wraps and used some of the Japanese findings for their campaigns in Vietnam.

Wu Xuelong is still suffering the consequences of the Japanese "dirty bombs." In his ramshackle brick hut in Jinhua, in the Zhejiang province, Wu lifts his trousers and shows his legs. From the shins to the feet they are blackish in color, as though carbonized. Wu, a farmer, is one of many victims in Zhejiang. The majority lived beside the railway line along which the Japanese dropped bombs during their attacks. Like Wu, they have symptoms that point to the use of anthrax. "The doctors want to amputate my legs," says Wu with a bitter smile. "But I still need them."

Wu can expect no compensation from Japan. Although a Japanese court acknowledged the damages caused by biological weapons, Chinese law disallowed the decision: Individuals have no right to file for compensation incurred by war.