Some Japanese claim the fighting in Nanjing was the same or not much worse than fighting in other places and in other wars. That is simply untrue. There is a lot of evidence from the Chinese, from outsiders who were there, from outsiders who have studied it, and from the Japanese themselves that things were much worse. There were many, many war crimes: soldiers without weapons were killed; people who were not soldiers were killed; many were tortured (hurt very badly), mutilated (hurt ways that can never be fixed), or killed in very cruel ways; many were raped (forced to have sex) or forced to work and treated like things. We have the orders from the soldier's leaders telling them to do these kinds of things and not to follow rules against them. The Nanjing Massacre was so bad that some even think of it as a kind of genocide (trying to wipe out an entire group of people). 