According to Dai Yuanzhi, a senior reporter from China Youth Daily who has researched the Nanjing Massacre for years, the diary came from Anita Guenther, whose uncle Dr Karl Guenther was working in Nanjing and helped many Chinese refugees during the massacre.

The diary provides new evidence of the crimes committed by Japanese invaders against the Chinese people.

During the six weeks of bloodshed and looting, the Japanese killed over 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers and burned thousands of houses, leaving the city in almost total devastation.

The diary reveals that, in one atrocity, about 120 local residents who had their hands tied together with wires were pushed into a pond and drowned.

The Japanese invaders also warned foreign diplomats or missionaries not to protect the Chinese who went into hiding at refugee camps set up by international rescue organizations.

Shocked by the killings, foreign missions in Nanjing, including those of the United States, Germany and Denmark, began to set up security areas to protect the bullied Chinese refugees.

"The Japanese imposed a news blackout and restricted foreign diplomats' movements in the city" to conceal their crimes from the international community, the diary discloses.

During the past few years, more evidence of Japanese crimes in the notorious Nanjing Massacre has been discovered.

So far, diaries and reports by John Rabe, Dr George Rosen and Christian Kroeger have surfaced as proof of the slaughter of Nanjing people by the Japanese 66 years ago.

The discovery of Scharffenberg's diary offers further proof and complements existing evidence of the Nanjing Massacre which Japanese right-wingers have repeatedly denied in recent years, said Zhang Lianhong, director of the Research Center on the Nanjing Massacre with the Nanjing Normal University.

At present, researchers and scholars are compiling a 30-volume book on the Nanjing Massacre as a historical record and call for justice and world peace.

(China Daily February 25, 2003)