Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.

An estimated 20,000 – 80,000 Chinese women were raped. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. “…Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chang's research on the book was credited with the finding of the diaries of John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, both of whom played important roles in the Nanking Safety Zone, a designated area in Nanjing that protected Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre.

It has been praised as a work that 'shows more clearly than any previous account' the extent and brutality of the episode, while elements of Chang's analysis of the motivations for the events, Japanese culture, and her calculation of the total numbers killed and raped were criticized as inaccurate because of her lack of training as a historian. The book received both acclaim and criticism by the public and by academics. The book significantly renewed public interest in Japanese wartime conduct in China, Korea, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. It is one of the first major English-language books to introduce the Nanjing Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike, and has been translated into several languages. It also criticizes the Japanese people for their ignorance about the massacre. It describes the events leading up to the Nanjing Massacre, provides a graphic detail of the war crimes and atrocities committed by Japanese troops, and lambastes the Japanese government for its refusal to rectify the atrocities. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is a bestselling 1997 non-fiction book written by Iris Chang about the 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre - the mass murder and mass rape of Chinese civilians committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang