Man's Claim of Finding Unseen Massacre Photos in Doubt

30 photos left at pawn shop in Minnesota may or may not depict the Rape of Nanjing
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 3, 2022 3:30 PM CDT
Man's Claim of Finding Unseen Massacre Photos in Doubt
In this Dec. 13, 2010 photo, pigeons are released during a ceremony marking the 73rd anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese troops at the memorial hall of Nanjing massacre, in Nanjing, in east China's Jiangsu Province.   (AP Photo)

Evan Kail, owner of the St. Louis Park Gold and Silver shop in Minnesota, is known as the "Pawn Man" on TikTok, where he shares videos of some of the unique items that arrive in his shop. But he would only show part of a photo album that arrived Monday because, as he put it to Newsweek, "I had nightmares for two nights." Kail believes he's uncovered 30 photographs, unknown to history, that depict the 1937 Rape of Nanjing, one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Over a six-week period, an estimated 200,000 Chinese citizens were murdered, and at least 20,000 rapes were said to take place. But at least one historian has expressed doubts about the photos.

Kail tells Newsweek that the photographs depict "people being executed" during the massacre of Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, by Japanese soldiers. "There's a lot of photos of bodies in the streets that have just been left to rot," he adds. "This is the most disturbing thing I have ever seen in my career," he told his TikTok followers in a video viewed more than 10 million times. He said the photos, apparently taken by a member of the US Navy stationed in China, begin before World War II but slowly become more war-involved to the point that "I cannot show you guys what's beyond this page." When "I got beyond that page, I screamed."

Kail is working to authenticate the images, which he says are "worse than anything I've seen on the internet," in the hope of selling them, perhaps to a museum. But research historian Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse—who operates a popular debunking account on Twitter, where Kail shared some of the photos—believes the images come from several events, with some dating back to 1905. Some "had been public for years, decades in some cases," she tells Rolling Stone. "They even appear in stock photo company archives." There are "famously few records of evidence left" of the massacre, which was "only documented by a minor cache of international civilians and a Nazi party member who stayed in the city's Safety Zone," per Rolling Stone. (More Nanjing stories.)

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