The photograph above the caption "This was Japanese Bushido!" was taken in 1937 during the capture of Shanghai. It's from the Simmen archive, a collection of photographs taken by Swiss businessman Tom Simmen, who was in the city when it was captured by the Japanese.

Simmen destroyed the negatives, and he smuggled a series of small prints out of China on the body of his wife, who was pregnant.

Simmen kept the photos hidden for most of his life, but before he died, he asked his son, Simon, to publish them. He did so right about the 60th anniversary of the Shanghai massacre. There were 19 photographs, I believe, and I suspect that others on that page are also Simmen photos.

Regardless of their source, they do represent what was happening in China during the war.

While I can't speak to the authenticity of each image, I'll say that I have expertise and have worked with many archival images of this period, including definitely authentic Chinese images that are a bit earlier than these. And many of the images look fake, including ones others have already named. Cameras and film of this time period were much more primitive than today's cameras. Typically for news images that are authentic for the time, the lines are muddy and details are not clear. News services would paint onto the pictures to sharpen the lines for publication. This is obvious in such images to anyone looking at them. I don't see that in the case of several of the photos here--the ones that have sharp images. Sharp pictures like the one of the person who has just been decapitated and who had blood gushing out of his neck, would be very difficult to take. You would need a tripod and even then, a very fast exposure plus perhaps telephoto lens for some of the close up images, which decreases the amount of light the picture is getting, making crisp lines and fine details less likely. Same with the mother and baby being decapitated. The pictures are much clearer than others I've seen of the time and place. Which doesn't mean they're not real--I don't know the provenance, I'd need more info to make a firm judgment. I'm just explaining how they differ from all of the other images I've seen, and what makes them initially questionable.

However, the images of groups of dead bodies do look more like pictures I've seen of this time period, and a number of them, particularly the latter ones in this collection, are well-known images of the Rape of Nanking. You can see they lack the sharp focus of the more questionable images, with finer details difficult to see. And those are of motionless subjects. To have so much more focus for rapidly moving people seems more unlikely. The authentic images almost look less horrible than the questionable images, because the people taking the authentic images didn't have the wherewithal to be careful with the pictures.

Another issue is that some do not provide context--I was once given a trove of horrific photos of China to examine and catalogue, with the person giving them to me thinking they were from World War II. But examination showed they were from attacks on "bandits" decades earlier. So definitively linking these pictures to the appropriate time period is important. Some show Japanese soldiers, others do not.

It's important to say that there are many credible stories that the things being depicted did happen. It's not like these are shocking exposé photos of previously unknown horrors. they happened, we don't need the photos as proof. But many of the most horrible atrocities weren't photographed. We know them only from the word of the survivors, and the perpetrators.

And to contextual this trove showing up now: Japan started denying the Rape of Nanking happened almost as soon as it happened. And lately right wing forces in Japan have been trying even harder to rewrite history. While in China and Korea, people have been asserting the truth of the atrocities, sometimes in a politicized way.

Based on Google's Reverse Image search, I am fairly certain the "Japanese soldiers bayoneting a baby" picture is fake.