A number of new evidence items, including recordings of testimonies of witnesses of 1937 Nanjing Massacre and sleeve emblems of Japanese soldiers, were donated to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Thursday as the country is set to commemorate the 70th anniversary of holocaust which falls next Thursday.

The 18 cassettes, donated by the Nanjing Cultural Heritage Bureau's deputy director Yang Xinhua, were recorded in May 1984 when the Nanjing city government was conducting a survey of 1,138 witnesses of the massacre.

Among the 18-hour-long recordings, there were testimonies about the scene of a bridge comprised of bodies killed by Japanese troops and their atrocities of killing citizens to sacrifice for horses, Yang said.

A 62-year-old son of a solider who participated in the fight against Japanese troops in Nanjing donated sleeve emblems of Japanese military policemen and a calling card box of a Japanese infantry soldier.

"The newly donated items are hard evidences on the atrocities of Japanese soldiers," said Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre.

Japanese aggressors occupied Nanjing on December 13, 1937, and embarked on a six-week long orgy of destruction, pillage, rape and slaughter. Historical records show that more than 300,000 Chinese people, including both disarmed soldiers and innocent civilians, were murdered.

As a commemoration, a 27-volume series of historical materials on the Massacre was published in Nanjing Monday. The contents include a name list of 13,000 victims of the massacre, containing the name, sex, age, occupation and residential addresses of the victims, as well as sources of the information.

(Xinhua News Agency December 12, 2007)