The album itself is not rare and the photos, at least the ones he's shared online are also not unique or never before seen.

I've posted a long thread on Twitter ( here ) but I'll share some of my finds here.I've been a historian/researcher/consultant for over 20 years, working for museums, film, tv, authors, documentary makers, etc and Penguin is about to publish my book on Fake History, the spread if misinformation about the past online.Daily life in the 1920s-1940s is one of my specialities and I've been collecting photo albums from that era for a very long time.But this is my first proper reply here and somehow posting stuff on Reddit is always messy (can't copy/paste without the whole thing imploding) so I hope I don't mess this up, bear with me.

The "my oriental" albums are not rare, they were sold or perhaps given to sailors about to go on their tour of duty and you can find quite a few of them online.

Like here and here and you can even buy a completely empty one here , which is a of course a bit of a red flag because that means someone could buy the album, a bunch of random unrelated photos and create their own "unique" album, but I don't think that that is the case here.

The album does look genuine, I think that it probably is an album some US sailor bought in the 1930s and then put his own photos and other types of souvenirs in.

This was quite common, here another album just like it is discussed, this owner also mentions that the album contained photos depicting "public executions (beheadings, death of thousand cuts, etc.) but in this case the pictures came separately in a little envelope. But it sure does sound familiar doesn't it?

And here is yet another album like it, but on this site you can see all the pictures very clearly.

So the album itself looks genuine but one of many.

Of course it's not about the album though, it's about the content and the pawn man has shared some of the pictures on Twitter and the second I saw them I realised I had seen them before.If these were unique never before seen photos of the Nanking massacre, well, then I wouldn't have seen them before.Just to be sure I did a reverse image search online and quickly one after the other photo was found, some even on stock photo websites and so far most, of not all of the pictures are not directly related to the rape of Nanking.Some show events happening in the 1920s and one, 'the death of a 1000 cuts' is very likely the execution of Fu Zhuli in 1905.

We also know this sailor sailed on the USS Augusta, which doesn't seem to have been in Nanking during the massacre.So we can say that it is very unlikely that the album owner was also the photographer.

It was relatively common back in the 1930s-40s for people to buy newsworthy photos/postcards, even of gruesome events.And some people put these then in their own albums, next to photos of auntie Deirdre by the Christmas tree.So this is probably what happened here, on shore leave the sailor sees a set of these photos for sale, he buys them, puts them in his service souvenir album.As some of the other albums I shared earlier show, he was not the only one who did this.

I once bought an 1930s-40s Dutch album myself and it contained pictures of the bombing of Rotterdam, but although a great find, I knew right away that these too were just photos people were buying and selling in a time when there was no internet and (almost) no tv and even the newspapers and magazines only had a limited amount of space for pictures to show people what just happened to them.

Bonus;Footage of the USS Augusta during the bombing of Shanghai in 1937 when at least some of the photos in the album seem to have been made; youtube link

I'm not sure why this is causing a stir, I think it's mostly based on people believing the pawn man when he says this bit of history is hidden, photos are very rare and that this is an important find.Millions have seen the video and I bet lots of those people really have never heard about the rape of Nanking.As gruesome as it was, it's also something that happened far away from Europe and America, so I doubt it's in the curriculum of many countries.Although it's not hidden or suppressed here, it's also not a very famous subject.

In China & Japan of course is and there are quite a lot of Japanese who deny any of it happened, which of course infuriates the Chinese and this is also part of why stories like these go viral.

Update!

An article has appeared with some more photos, you can see it here.

I've already identified some of the pictures, which means they too aren't new, rare, unique historical finds, you can see my analysis twitter thread on them here.

Here's another very interesting find that supports my earlier claim about people selling photos like these, this is a little envelope of photos showing "Actual photographs of Chinese Executions", which includes "the death of a thousand cuts", it was published in San Francisco in 1915.You can see it here, a few of the photos are shared, these also appear in the sailor's album with 1930s photos.Remember please that these pictures are gruesome, you can see the envelope being sold here, I wish we could see more of the pictures, I wonder how many we'll find in the 1930s Nanking album.

Update 2

Another addendum, the idea that this album may not be what originally claimed seems to be spreading and the pawnman now appears to be accepting that the photos depict something else, according to this NBC article; https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/pawnshop-owner-nanjing-massacre-photos-historians-dispute-tiktok-rcna46531

(edit: I didn't see the answer by /u/fakehistoryhunter; they are definitely the experts on the provenance of these photos, but I hope this answer adds a bit of context about why Chinese netizens were excited by the album)

The simple answer to this is that the state of the photo evidence for the Nanking Massacre remains quite poor.

As you can see from the Twitter thread, the physical album appears to have been sold as a blank album for American troops to fill with atrocity photographs that they came across in their travels. Unfortunately, this was the way that atrocity photos circulated in wartime China. Prints would appear from unknown sources, get reproduced for sale as souvenirs and circulate among visitors, and eventually be reprinted in books about the war without any source information.

Massacre deniers in Japan have had a field day with this, because many of the photos which appeared in Chinese books, even some of those in the Nanking museum, can be shown to have not been taken in Nanking, or do not display any Japanese troops. There is no need to politicize this reality. This was an age before portable camera snapshots, so it would have been hard to take actual photos of Japanese soldiers in the act of committing war crimes. Most photographers who were embedded with Japanese troops were probably sympathetic to the Japanese side and focused on photos which would make Japan look good, but even those who were shocked and tried to help the Chinese (a few such people were named in this earlier answer) could not be expected to secretly take photos on their very visible cameras and then hide the negatives.

The number of professional photographers among the general Chinese population was comparatively small in 1937, and those who did own a camera were probably working for the KMT in some capacity. We know that the KMT did not do any photo documentation of the Nanking Massacre. (As a side note, you should definitely check the metadata for images uploaded to Wikipedia for precisely this reason.) So, who would have been taking genuine photos? This would have been the American and Europeans resident in Nanking, and other cities that fell to Japanese aggression such as Shanghai. Because of this, it is not surprising to me at all that many Chinese people interested in World War II would have been excited to see this album, even though it is a standard photo album with poor labeling.

As noted in the Rolling Stone article about this TikToker, it seems unlikely that anything in this album is uncommon because of the sheer number of atrocity photos which were being sold, some of which were decades old by 1937, but the TikToker continues to believe that at least some of the photos must be new.