Film shows horrors of massacre

"We must learn from these sorrowful milestones in history in order to ensure it doesn't happen again. But more simply than that, we should always remember that love wins over hate," he said.

The docudrama is a joint production of the A+E Networks in the US and Jiangsu Broadcasting Corp, based in Nanjing, where the infamous massacre occurred.

Revealing the truth

Bu Yu, president of Jiangsu Broadcasting Corp, told China Daily that news media bear the responsibility of revealing the truth.

His team has not only done extensive research within China but has traveled to the US National Archives, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Divinity School Library of Yale University, Harvard-Yenching Library, the National Archives of Japan and the Japan Newspaper Museum.

The team found many witnesses' diaries, letters, memoirs and films of the massacre, and learned how some Westerners there helped refugees at the time.

The team also interviewed many historians, scholars and descendants of those witnesses to share their stories and knowledge.

Jiangsu Broadcasting also interviewed and filmed many survivors of the atrocity now living in Nanjing and across China.

From these survivors, they heard many more stories about Westerners who helped the local people. Bu said that telling the stories of these heroic Westerners is an important part of showing the truth of the carnage.

The film team found that ordinary people in the West know very little about the tragedy. Many know the Holocaust－the attempted annihilation of Jews by Nazi Germany－but not the Nanjing Massacre, in which more than 300,000 innocent Chinese were slaughtered and many women raped, Bu said.