Editing Nanjing Massacre (section)

==== Death toll ====
Based on the dutiful records of the Safety Zone committee, the post-war International Military Tribunal found that some 20,000 civilian men were killed on false accusations of being soldiers, while 30,000 former combatants were executed, and their bodies thrown into the river.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Mitter |first=Rana |title=Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937–1945 |page=139}}</ref>

Durdin, who had left Nanjing on December 17 on the USS ''Oahu'', had born witness to the mass execution of captured Nationalist soldiers and suspected soldiers. He reported in early January that the Japanese had admitted to rounding up around 15,000 Chinese men in the first three days, and that they had captured another 25,000 Chinese soldiers who were systemically rounded up and executed.<ref name=":15" />

Canadian historian Bob Wakabayashi's analysis of Japanese wartime records implicates Japanese forces in the illegal and "unjustifiable" mass murder of 46,215 men whom they considered Chinese military personnel, including men they had rounded up in civilian clothing.<ref name=":16" />

Of these numbers, the IJA 16th Division executed between 4,000 and 12,000 prisoners near Xiaguan, then shoved the corpses into the Yangtze to transform it into a "river of dead bodies". The Mufu Mountains massacre, the deadliest of these mass killing incidents, saw the execution of between 17,000 and 20,000 male prisoners by the 65th Infantry Regiment of the IJA 13th Division. The 9th Division reported executing around 6,700 Chinese prisoners of war during their "mopping up operations".<ref name=":15" />