NANJING, May 1 (Xinhua) — Eighteen uncommon archival objects associated to David Nelson Sutton, a U.S. assistant prosecutor on the Tokyo Trial and one of many earliest worldwide prosecutors to research the Nanjing Massacre, have been formally donated Wednesday to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.
With this yr marking the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Tokyo Trial, the donation contains six unique diaries written by Sutton between 1946 and 1948, when he was conducting investigations for the trial, in addition to a sequence of unique studies titled “Reports from China.”
From May 3, 1946 to Nov. 12, 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was held in Tokyo by 11 nations, together with the United States, China, the UK and the Soviet Union, to attempt Japan’s Class-A warfare criminals after World War II.
Sutton got here to China with the International Prosecution Section in 1946 and was tasked with investigating Japanese warfare crimes in China, with a specific deal with amassing proof associated to the Nanjing Massacre.
“Sutton was among the earliest members of the International Prosecution Section to conduct investigations in Nanjing and other places, and he played an irreplaceable role in the trial of the Nanjing Massacre case,” stated Zhou Feng, curator of the memorial corridor.
The diaries recorded many particulars of Sutton’s work throughout the Tokyo Trial. In one entry, dated March 9, he wrote that he had acquired formal orders to go to Shanghai, Nanking (Nanjing), Peiping (Beijing) and different websites within the China theater to research warfare crimes and collect proof. Another entry recorded his arrival in Nanjing at 11:20 a.m. on April 2. On May 3, the day the trial opened, he described the defendants as trying like “insignificant beaten men.”
Barak Kushner, a professor on the University of Cambridge, stated the Sutton diaries “will be of great interest since there isn’t a comparable diary from the time.”
The donated supplies additionally embrace Sutton’s “Reports from China,” which additional uncovered Japanese wartime atrocities in China, together with mass killings, violence towards civilians, germ warfare and the coercion of Chinese folks into opium cultivation.
Yang Xiaming, a researcher with the Institute of National Memory and International Peace who started learning Sutton about twenty years in the past, stated the archives donated this time are prone to have originated from a folder misplaced throughout the outsourced digitization of the Sutton archives by the legislation library of the University of Richmond in 2009, earlier than ultimately getting into the public sale market.
“The core value of these archives lies in their status as irrefutable original first-hand historical materials, further strengthening the hard evidence of Japanese war crimes in China,” Yang stated.
The donor, Zou Dehuai, a collector born within the Nineties who has lengthy looked for wartime historic proof, first discovered the Sutton supplies in November 2025 on a U.S.-based public sale web site specializing in navy artifacts. After confirming Sutton’s identification and reviewing preview pictures that indicated the objects have been unique archival supplies, Zou positioned a bid for the gathering and later organized for its return to China with help from others.
At the donation ceremony, Zou acquired a donation certificates. He stated the Sutton archives have been the costliest objects he had acquired in a decade of amassing, and likewise his first donation.
“I hope that after the Sutton diaries settle in the memorial hall, they can better fulfill their value and tell every visitor that justice, though delayed, did arrive,” Zou stated.
Zhou, the curator of the memorial corridor, stated the Tokyo Trial had a profound and unshakable influence on safeguarding the victory of World War II and the postwar worldwide order. The return of those useful archives to Nanjing, he stated, supplies new historic supplies and views for additional analysis on the Tokyo Trial and helps uphold the authorized conclusions of postwar justice and defend peace.