The Most Painful Execution of Moritake Tanabe *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

He gave the order, then he went home for dinner. That’s the part nobody talks about. The men who orchestrated one of the worst massacres in modern history didn’t see themselves as monsters. They saw paperwork. They saw promotions. Moritake Tanabe climbed the ranks of the Imperial Japanese Army while a city bled beneath his command.

And for over a decade, he got away with it completely. This is Untold War Story. If you want the histories that mainstream channels won’t touch, the real footage, the real names, the real reckoning, hit subscribe right now and turn on notifications. Because what happened in Nanjing and what finally happened to the man responsible is a story you need to see through to the end.

Let’s go back to where it started. September 18th, 1931. Japan’s factories are hungry. Steel mills, shipyards, an empire building itself into a war machine. And none of it runs without raw materials Japan doesn’t have. So, Tokyo looks north to Manchuria, a Chinese region packed with coal and iron ore just waiting to be seized. The Japanese Army doesn’t wait for permission.

Soldiers plant a small explosive next to their own railway tracks near Mukden, blame it on Chinese saboteurs, and use it as an excuse to invade. Within 5 months, all of Manchuria belongs to Japan. The League of Nations investigates, condemns the invasion, and Japan’s response is to simply walk out of the league entirely. No consequences. No accountability.

Just a green light for what comes next. For 6 years, Japan and China trade incidents, skirmishes, provocations, nothing that quite tips into full war. Then on July 7th, 1937, a Japanese patrol near the Marco Polo Bridge demands entry into a small walled town to search for a missing soldier. The Chinese garrison refuses.

A shot rings out. Nobody agrees on who fired it. It doesn’t matter anymore. The match has hit the fuse. This is the real start of the second Sino-Japanese War, and it will not end until Japan’s surrender eight brutal years later. Now, here’s where Moritake Tanabe enters the picture. Born in 1889 into a samurai bloodline, Tanabe was practically engineered for military life.

His father had been an Imperial Army Colonel. Tanabe graduated the Military Academy in 1910, Staff College in 1918, and spent the next two decades quietly climbing. Instructor postings, a stint as military attaché in France, command assignments, ministry work. By August 1937, he’s a newly minted major general, and within weeks, he’s handed one of the most consequential and horrifying assignments of the entire war.

After Japan crushes Chinese forces in the brutal three-month Battle of Shanghai, a fight so vicious, historians later call it Stalingrad on the Yangtze. General Iwane Matsui sets his sights on China’s capital, Nanjing. Tanabe is appointed Chief of Staff of the 10th Imperial Japanese Army, a reinforcement force built specifically to punch through toward the capital.

Matsui is blunt about his intentions. He tells his superiors the war won’t end until Nanjing falls. He’s convinced that capturing the capital will collapse the entire Chinese government. So, the Japanese Army pushes west, 300 km from Shanghai to Nanjing, and along the way, something breaks loose inside the ranks.

Japanese newspapers back home actually reported, like a sports column, on a killing contest between two officers competing to see who could reach 100 kills first with a sword. Updates ran for days. This wasn’t hidden. It was celebrated. By December 9th, 1937, Japanese forces reached the gates of Nanjing.

Word of what’s coming has already spread. 3/4 of the population, anyone with money, anyone with a car, anyone with somewhere else to go, has already fled. What’s left behind are the people with nowhere to run. The poor, the elderly, families too rooted to leave everything behind. A small group of foreigners, led by German businessman John Rabe, sets up something called the Nanjing Safety Zone.

A designated area meant to shelter civilians from what’s coming. Roughly 250,000 people crowd inside it. For a while, Japanese troops mostly respect the boundary. Outside it, there is no such mercy. On December 12th, under relentless shelling, the Chinese garrison commander orders a retreat. It turns into chaos. Soldiers stripping off uniforms trying to blend in with civilians.

Others shot by their own side while fleeing. By December 13th, the first Japanese divisions enter the city, facing almost no resistance. And then it begins. What followed over the next 6 weeks is documented by foreign diplomats, missionaries, journalists, and damningly by the Japanese soldiers themselves in post-war testimony. Mass detentions of young men, many innocent, rounded up on suspicion of being soldiers.

Executions along the riverbank. Systematic destruction. Reports from foreign witnesses describe scenes so horrific that even hardened diplomats struggled to find words for their dispatches home. One former Japanese soldier, Shiro Azuma, gave a chilling post-war interview admitting the scale of sexual violence inflicted on women throughout the city.

Violence historians estimate affected tens of thousands of victims. Some children, some elderly. Rather than discipline the soldiers responsible, Japanese military command’s actual response was to formalize the abuse into an institutional system. The city itself didn’t survive intact either. A third of Nanking burned.

Historians still can’t agree on an exact death toll because the chaos, the mass graves, and the fires destroyed the evidence needed to count precisely. But the estimate ranges as high as 300,000 civilians and disarmed soldiers killed in roughly 2 months. Let that sit for a second. 2 months. A number larger than the population of most American cities today, gone in the time it takes to finish a single semester of school.

By February 1938, the violence finally tapers off as occupation authorities install a puppet government. Tanabe’s unit is officially disbanded that same month. And Tanabe? He gets promoted. Lieutenant General, October 1939. No tribunal, no consequences. Just another rank, another posting, another decade of service ahead of him.

Here’s the part of this story that should genuinely disturb you. Tanabe didn’t stay a war criminal frozen in 1937. He kept working. From 1941, he served as Vice Chief of the Imperial Army General Staff. And in that role, he actually opposed the attack on Pearl Harbor. He argued against declaring war on the United States, favoring a defensive strategy designed to stretch Allied supply lines thin rather than provoke a direct confrontation with America’s industrial might.

He was right, as it turned out. But being strategically correct about one war doesn’t erase what he oversaw in another. In 1943, as Japan’s grip on the Pacific began slipping, Tanabe was sent to Japanese-occupied Sumatra to command the 25th Army. There, under his watch, prisoners of war were forced into brutal labor building a railway.

Malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion killing laborers by the hundreds. Survivors later testified that Tanabe showed no interest whatsoever in their welfare. He stayed on Sumatra until the war’s final collapse in August 1945. By then, the numbers coming out of China were staggering. China’s official post-war accounting, 20 million dead, 15 million wounded across eight years of occupation and war.

Nanjing was one of atrocity among thousands, but it became one of the most documented because foreign witnesses were there to see it and refused to stay silent. When Japan finally surrendered, Dutch authorities arrested Tanabe and transported him to Medan in North Sumatra to face a military tribunal. But here’s the twist that makes this case so strange.

He wasn’t tried for Nanjing. The crimes that finally caught up with him were the ones committed on Sumatra, the abuse of Dutch prisoners of war under his command. The architect of atrocities in China was never formally held accountable for China. He answered instead for what happened on an island most Americans have never heard of, to prisoners of a different nationality entirely.

On December 30th, 1948, the Dutch military tribunal delivered its verdict, death by hanging. Tanabe was 60 years old when he was executed on July 10th, 1949, nearly 12 years after Nanjing burned, nearly four years after the war that started it all had ended, and thousands of miles from the city where his real crimes took place.

No memorial marks his grave with sympathy. No family monument celebrates his service. History remembers him, when it remembers him at all, as a name attached to horror, a man who helped orchestrate one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, then spent a decade building a respectable career on top of it before the reckoning finally, belatedly, caught up with him.

There’s a strange kind of justice in that delay, and a deeply uncomfortable lesson buried in it, too. Accountability doesn’t always arrive on schedule. Sometimes it takes 12 years, a completely different war crime, and a tribunal thousands of miles from where the real damage was done. Sometimes the people responsible for the worst atrocities in human history get promoted before they get punished.

Moritake Tanabe walked free for over a decade after Nanjing. He kept his rank. He kept his career. He advised generals on strategy against the United States. And when the news finally caught up with him, it wasn’t for the city he helped destroy. It was for a railway on an island in Indonesia. That’s the story history rarely tells straight.

Not because it’s hidden, but because it’s inconvenient. It doesn’t offer clean justice. It offers a man who got 14 extra years of life after presiding over the deaths of hundreds of thousands, only to be hanged for something else entirely. If this story hit you the way it hit us to research it, that’s exactly why this channel exists.

Untold war story isn’t here to give you the sanitized version of history. We’re here to show you what actually happened, who was actually responsible, and how justice actually played out, even when it’s messy, even when it’s late, even when it’s uncomfortable. Subscribe if you want more stories like this one.

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