NANJING — Eighteen rare archival items related to David Nelson Sutton, a US assistant prosecutor at the Tokyo Trials and one of the earliest international prosecutors to investigate the Nanjing Massacre, were officially donated on Wednesday to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.

With this year marking the 80th anniversary of the start of the Tokyo Trials, the donation includes six original diaries written by Sutton between 1946 and 1948, when he was conducting investigations for the trial, as well as a series of original reports titled "Reports from China".

From May 3, 1946, to Nov 12, 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was held in Tokyo by 11 countries, including the United States, China, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, to try Japan's Class A war criminals after World War II.

Sutton came to China with the International Prosecution Section in 1946 and was tasked with investigating Japanese war crimes in China, with a particular focus on collecting evidence related to the Nanjing Massacre.

"Sutton was among the earliest members of the International Prosecution Section to conduct investigations in Nanjing and other places, and he played an irreplaceable role in the trial of the Nanjing Massacre case," said Zhou Feng, curator of the memorial hall.

The diaries recorded many details of Sutton's work during the Tokyo Trials. In one entry, dated March 9, he wrote that he had received formal orders to go to Shanghai, Nanking (Nanjing), Peiping (Beijing) and other sites in the China theater to investigate war crimes and gather evidence.

Another entry recorded his arrival in Nanjing at 11:20 am on April 2. On May 3, the day the trial opened, he described the defendants as looking like "insignificant beaten men".

Barak Kushner, a professor at the University of Cambridge, said the Sutton diaries "will be of great interest since there isn't a comparable diary from the time".

The donated materials also include Sutton's "Reports from China", which further exposed Japanese wartime atrocities in China, including mass killings, violence against civilians, germ warfare and the coercion of Chinese people into opium cultivation.

Yang Xiaming, a researcher with the Institute for National Memory and International Peace who began studying Sutton about two decades ago, said the archives donated this time are likely to have originated from a folder lost during the outsourced digitization of the Sutton archives by the law library of the University of Richmond in 2009, before eventually entering the auction market.

"The core value of these archives lies in their status as irrefutable original first-hand historical materials, further strengthening the hard evidence of Japanese war crimes in China," Yang said.

The donor, Zou Dehuai, a collector born in the 1990s who has long searched for wartime historical evidence, first found the Sutton materials in November 2025 on a US-based auction website specializing in military artifacts.

After confirming Sutton's identity and reviewing preview images that indicated the items were original archival materials, Zou placed a bid for the collection and later arranged for its return to China with assistance from others.

At the donation ceremony, Zou received a donation certificate. He said the Sutton archives were the most expensive items he had acquired in a decade of collecting, and also his first donation.

"I hope that after the Sutton diaries settle in the memorial hall, they can better fulfill their value and tell every visitor that justice, though delayed, did arrive," Zou said.

Zhou, the curator of the memorial hall, said the Tokyo Trials had a profound and unshakable impact on safeguarding the victory of World War II and the postwar international order.

The return of these valuable archives to Nanjing, he said, provides new historical materials and perspectives for further research on the Tokyo Trials and helps uphold the legal conclusions of postwar justice and defend peace.

Xinhua