Japanese forces captured Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China, on 13 December 1937 after a difficult campaign from Shanghai. Over the following weeks, soldiers killed Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, committed widespread rape, looting, arson, and other atrocities, and devastated communities across the city and surrounding area. The exact death toll remains debated in scholarship and politics, while the scale and systematic character of mass violence are established by survivor testimony, burial records, photographs, diaries, diplomatic documents, and Japanese as well as Chinese sources.

Chinese and foreign residents attempted rescue and documentation amid the violence. Members of the Nanjing Safety Zone organized camps intended to shelter civilians, protested abuses, and recorded conditions. Figures including John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, Robert Wilson, and others left diaries, letters, films, and medical evidence. Chinese charitable organizations buried large numbers of bodies, generating records later used in investigations. Postwar tribunals in Nanjing and Tokyo prosecuted some Japanese commanders and officials. Memory nevertheless developed unevenly amid civil war, Cold War politics, changing Sino-Japanese relations, and the personal trauma carried by survivors.

The Memorial Hall was built at Jiangdongmen, where victims' remains had been discovered in a burial site often called the Pit of Ten Thousand Corpses. It opened on 15 August 1985, marking the anniversary of Japan's announced surrender. The institution expanded in later phases, notably in the 1990s and 2000s, into a museum, preserved burial site, outdoor memorial landscape, archive, and space for mourning. Its architecture and sculpture use broken forms, stark materials, chronological routes, names, testimony, and exposed remains to move visitors from catastrophe toward remembrance and peace.

The memorial collects documents, objects, oral histories, photographs, and evidence concerning the massacre, wartime sexual slavery, international relief, resistance, trials, and postwar memory. Exhibitions are curated historical presentations, not surviving 1937 interiors. The burial remains and archaeological context constitute original evidence, while museum buildings, sculptures, inscriptions, and reconstructed scenes are modern commemorative fabric. Expansion has changed the visitor experience as scholarship, state commemoration, and international engagement evolved. Ethical conservation must protect human remains and testimony while acknowledging differences among evidentiary categories and avoiding the conversion of suffering into spectacle.

China designated 13 December as the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims in 2014, and the annual state ceremony is held at the memorial. The institution operates as a national museum and patriotic education site with controlled, generally free admission and advance reservation procedures. It remains active in collecting and research as survivor numbers decline. The Hall's historical importance comes from the conjunction of an authentic burial location, documentary collections, survivor memory, postwar justice, and deliberately modern memorial design. Visitors should distinguish the preserved evidence of atrocity from later architecture while understanding why both are necessary to public remembrance.