马吉 · 1884 – 1953 · American
John Magee (John Gillespie Magee Sr.) was born in 1884 into an Episcopal family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He graduated from Yale University and the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. Ordained in 1912, he went to China that year as a missionary of the American Episcopal mission and served for many years in Nanjing, in the Xiaguan and Daoshengtang area, as rector of Daoshengtang (St. Paul’s Church). He knew the everyday life of ordinary Nanjing residents well and made many friends among local church members and the city’s poor.
In December 1937, when the Japanese army captured Nanjing, Magee joined John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, Miner S. Bates and some twenty other European and American residents in founding the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. It designated areas including the University of Nanking, Ginling College and the Gulou Hospital to shelter several hundred thousand refugees. He also served as chairman of the Nanking Committee of the International Red Cross.
During the six most brutal weeks of the massacre, at the risk of his life, he secretly filmed Japanese executions, rapes and arson with a hand-cranked 16 mm Kodak movie camera, and in the International Safety Zone he recorded the testimony of victims. The film was sewn into the lining of a wool coat by George Fitch, a secretary of the YMCA, and smuggled out of China. It was first shown publicly in Hankou, then sent on to the United States, becoming the most important visual evidence of the Nanjing Massacre, and was later used at the Tokyo Trial.
After returning to the United States, Magee served as a curate at St. John’s Church in Washington, and from 1946 as Episcopal chaplain at Yale University. In 1946 the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo called him to testify, and he explained the footage he had shot frame by frame. His son, John Gillespie Magee (Jr.), was the author of the well-known poem “High Flight” and was killed in the Second World War. Magee died of illness in his hometown of Pittsburgh in 1953 and was buried there in Allegheny Cemetery.