The son of the late John Magee who recorded the Japanese slaughter of Nanjing residents in 1937 donated the movie camera recording the events to the memorial hall of the Nanjing Massacre victims in this capital city of Jiangsu Province in east China Wednesday.
A missionary in Nanjing from 1912 to 1940, Magee was one of the founders of the safe zone international committee and refugee hospital and ultimately rescued a huge number of Chinese people who would have otherwise died during the Japanese rule, said Zhu Chengshan, curator of the memorial hall.
Magee secretly filmed the slaughter of more than 300,000 Chinese by Japanese troops.
The 105-minute-long documentary is considered the only moving film found so far to record that part of history, said Zhu.
Ten photographs from the film were published in the May issue of the American Life Magazine in 1938 and shocked the world with the Japanese brutality.
Magee showed the flim as his testimony during the far east international court-martial win 1946.
Magee's son David Magee who brought with his father's legacy to Nanjing this week has inherited his father's will to reveal the wartime events to the world by lecturing throughout America and Canada and providing files to historians.
During his stay in Nanjing, he is scheduled to unveil a library named after his father.
(Xinhua News Agency October 3, 2002)
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