Eighty years after the gavel first fell at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a significant piece of legal and historical architecture has returned to the city where the prosecution’s case began. The personal diaries and archives of David Nelson Sutton, an American deputy prosecutor who played a pivotal role in the Tokyo Trials, have been formally inducted into the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing. This collection, acquired by private collector Zou Dehuai at a U.S. auction for nearly $100,000, offers a rare, granular look at how the international community constructed the legal case against Japanese war crimes in the mid-1940s.
Sutton, a seasoned legal mind who was 51 at the time of the trials, was tasked with investigating Japanese atrocities across the China theater. His meticulously kept diaries from 1946 reveal the grueling nature of evidence collection, documenting his arrivals in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Beiping (Beijing). The archives include an 89-page report titled 'Report from China: Nanking Atrocities Against the Civilian Population,' which contains 27 witness testimonies and detailed accounts of biological warfare and economic aggression—evidence that would ultimately help secure the convictions of high-ranking Class-A war criminals.
Beyond mere legal documentation, the Sutton archives provide a window into the human dimension of the trial’s evidentiary chain. One notable inclusion is the testimony of Dr. Robert Wilson, an American physician at Nanjing’s Drum Tower Hospital who stayed behind during the 1937 massacre to treat the wounded. Sutton’s records detail Wilson’s firsthand accounts of treating victims, such as an eight-year-old boy bayoneted by Japanese soldiers, anchoring the high-level legal proceedings in the visceral reality of civilian suffering. These documents serve as a vital link between the physical carnage of the war and the formalized 'justice' delivered in the post-war courtroom.
The return of these documents to Nanjing is more than a simple archival addition; it is a calculated effort to fortify the historical record against the tides of revisionism. For donor Zou Dehuai and the researchers at the memorial hall, the diaries represent 'ironclad evidence' that resists the political fluctuations of modern East Asian relations. By highlighting the international and collaborative nature of the Tokyo Trials—which involved judges and prosecutors from 11 nations—China continues to frame the legacy of the war not merely as a national tragedy, but as a globally recognized violation of human rights and international law.