China

1937, Nanking Massacre. An excellent movie on this event is Flowers of War, starring Christian Bale.

Here is the trailer

The article, “The Rape of Nanking and the Faith of John Rabe,” is an excellent introduction to the controversial figure, who acted as an Oscar Schindler-like savior to the besieged and brutalized Chinese inhabitants of Nanking by Japanese Imperial troops in December, 1937. Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed in the onslaught, and over 60,000 women and girls (from infants to the elderly) savagely raped. Nazi Party member Rabe was chosen leader of The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, a group of Westerners who tried to protect the civilians from getting killed by the Japanese military. The Committee is said to have saved between 200,000 and 250,000 Chinese people from extermination. The late Iris Chang’s international best-seller, The Rape of Nanking, and the films, History Undercover: The Rape of Nanking, Nanking, and John Rabe provide more searing historical documentation and graphic presentation of the horrific facts of this largely-forgotten series of atrocities.

Did not know that Iris Chang took her own life. That Wikipedia entry includes 3 suicide notes from Change. The third one read

There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.

Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government’s attempt to discredit me.

About Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, 2012, Charles Burris writes

In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered—a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written the definitive history of this horrifying episode.

This is the most comprehensive source I’ve seen on WWII in the Pacific. It’s collected by Charles Burris.

Here is a History Channel documentary on the Rape of Nanking.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aQnBvs3LTZw

“Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927-1945,” Jonathan Marshall, 1976.