She was 28 years old. That is the only personal detail that survived in the official record. No photograph, no address, no family name beyond Lopez. Just an age and a name and what was done to her. documented in a war crimes tribunal that put a Japanese general on trial in front of 16,000 spectators in a bombedout courthouse in Manila in the autumn of 1945.

Her name appears once in a list of 488 women. 488 documented cases of assault just from the Battle of Manila alone. Just from one month, just from the cases that witnesses survived to report, the actual number, historians believe, was far higher. But 488 is what made it into the record. 488 names that 286 witnesses, doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses took the stand to describe over 32 days of testimony.

Julia Lopez was one of them. What happened to her in February 1945 was so extreme, so deliberate, so methodical in its cruelty that the prosecution chose her case specifically to show the tribunal what the Japanese military had done to Manila. The general who commanded the Japanese forces in the Philippines denied he had ordered any of it.

He said he didn’t know. He said his orders had been to evacuate the city, that what happened was not his command. He was hanged anyway. February 23rd, 1946. But here is what nobody tells you. The man who actually ordered the destruction of Manila. The admiral who chose to ignore the evacuation order and turn the city into a fortress.

Never faced a single day of trial. He died by his own hand in a building on the day the battle ended. Justice in Manila in 1945 was not clean. It was not complete. And the 488 women in that tribunal record, the women whose names the prosecution read aloud over 32 days in that bombed out courtroom. Most of them never saw anything that looked like justice at all.

Julia Lopez was 28 years old. Her name is in the record. January 9th, 1945. American forces land at Lingayan Gulf on the island of Luzon, 110 mi north of Manila. General Douglas MacArthur has returned 3 years after he was ordered to evacuate the Philippines in the darkest days of 1942. The Japanese general responsible for defending the Philippines is Tomoyuki Yamashita, 59 years old, known as the Tiger of Malaya for his lightning conquest of Singapore in 1942, a campaign in which his forces outmaneuvered British defenders three

times his size. He is not a man who makes careless decisions. His decision about Manila is precise. He cannot defend it. The city sits on a flat coastal plane with no defensible terrain. Holding it would cost tens of thousands of soldiers he cannot afford to lose. On January 26th, 1945, Yamashita issues formal orders.

All Japanese military forces will evacuate Manila. The city will not be defended. His orders are ignored. Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi commands the Manila Naval Defense Force. Approximately 12,500 sailors and 4,500 soldiers. He decides unilaterally to hold the city. He fortifies every building. He floods every street approach.

He prepares Manila for a fight to the last man. Yamashita 125 mi away in the mountain town of Baguio issues the order again. Evacuate. Iwabuchi does not move. On February 3rd, 1945, American forces enter Manila from the north. What happened next was not a battle. It was a decision. As American forces pushed deeper into the city from the north, the Japanese forces under Iwabuchi began to understand that the battle was lost.

The question was no longer whether they would hold Manila. The question was what they would do with the time they had left. The Bay View Hotel was converted into a designated rape center. According to testimony at the Yamashita war crimes trial, 400 women and girls were rounded up from Manila’s wealthy district and submitted to a selection process that chose the 25 considered most beautiful.

They were taken to the hotel. Japanese officers and enlisted men took turns. This was not chaos. This was not the uncontrolled behavior of troops under combat stress. This was organized. It required logistics. It required decisions by commanders who knew what was happening and allowed it to continue. Julia Lopez was 28 years old.

She was not at the Bay View Hotel. What happened to her happened in the streets of her city, in the neighborhood where she lived in the weeks when Manila was being systematically destroyed building by building. And the Japanese forces had decided that if they were going to lose the city, nothing inside it would survive intact.

Not the buildings, not the bridges, not the people. She had her breasts sliced off. She was assaulted by Japanese soldiers. Her hair was set on fire. She survived. She testified. Her name is in the record. March 3rd, 1945. The Battle of Manila ends. What is left of the city is unrecognizable. Manila had been before the war one of the most beautiful cities in Asia called the pearl of the Orient.

Wide boulevards, Spanish colonial churches, modern buildings, a thriving port. In one month of urban combat, it was reduced to the second most devastated Allied capital city of the entire war after Warsaw. Over 100,000 civilians dead, 286 witnesses who testified, 488 documented cases of assault in the war crimes record alone.

Admiral Iwabuchi, the man who made the decision to hold Manila, the man who organized the Bay View Hotel, the man whose forces committed what the tribunal would call systematic atrocity, died in a building near the end of the battle. He slit open his own stomach. He never faced a courtroom. General Yamashita, 125 mi away in the mountains, the man who had twice ordered Manila evacuated, walked out of the jungle and surrendered on September 2nd, 1945.

He was immediately arrested. His trial opened in Manila on October 29th, 1945. 123 charges, 62,278 tortured and murdered civilians, 144 slain American officers and enlisted men, 488 assaulted women. Yamashetta’s defense was simple. He did not know he was in Baguio. His orders had been to evacuate. What Iwabuchi’s forces did was not his command.

The prosecution’s position was equally simple. It doesn’t matter. You were the commander. What happened under your command is your responsibility. Whether you ordered it, whether you knew, whether you could have stopped it. Command responsibility. The standard that this trial would write into international law forever. Over 32 days, 286 witnesses testified.

Doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, 16,000 spectators jammed into the bombedout courtroom shoulderto-shoulder every day to watch. Witness after witness described what they had seen, what had been done to their families, what had been done in their hospitals, their churches, their schools. Yamashitta sat and listened.

He did not display emotion. He maintained throughout that he had not known, that his command structure had broken down, that Iwabuchi had gone rogue, that the Navy forces in Manila were not under his operational control. None of it moved the tribunal. On December 7th, 1945, exactly four years after Pearl Harbor, the verdict was delivered. Guilty.

Death by hanging. Yamashetta’s lawyers appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The appeal was denied. On February 23rd, 1946, General Tomoyuki Yamashitta was hanged at Los Banos Lagona. The standard established at his trial that a commander is responsible for war crimes committed by forces under his command whether or not he directly ordered them became known as the Yamashittita standard.

It remains the foundational principle of command responsibility in international law to this day. Iwabuchi was dead. Yamashitta was hanged. The trial was over. For most of the 488 women in that record, nothing followed, no reparations, no individual acknowledgement, no government statement. The Philippines rebuilt. The war ended.

The city that had been called the Pearl of the Orient spent decades recovering from what one month had done to it. The Memorare Manila 1945 monument stands today in Intramuros, the old walled city where some of the worst atrocities occurred. It bears the names of the civilian victims. It is one of the few places where the scale of what happened is visible in a form you can stand in front of.

Julia Lopez’s name is not on it. Her name is in the war crimes tribunal record. One line, one age, one name. What was done to her described in the clinical language of legal prosecution, the way all atrocity is eventually described when it is translated into evidence. She was 28 years old. She testified.

Her testimony helped convict a general whose command had created the conditions for what happened to her and 487 other women and 100,000 dead in one city in one month in the second month of 1945. The general was hanged. The admiral who actually ordered it died by his own hand. The women in the record received no compensation, no individual acknowledgement, nothing that looked like the closure that word implies.

Julia Lopez survived February 1945. She walked into a courthouse and said her name and described what had been done to her in front of 16,000 people and five judges. Her name is in the record and the least we can do is say

Rasputin’s Forgotten Daughter

Before he died, Rasputin reportedly ate sweet cakes laced with cyanide. But the autopsy showed no poison in his system. Shockingly, it was Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, who held the key to this unsettling mystery. Maria Rasputin grew up in the eye of the storm. While her father, Gregory Rasputin, remains one of history’s greatest mysteries, Maria had a privileged look into his notorious life, and she was right there with him in both his rise to infamy and his brutal downfall.
But in the end, Maria would also pay dearly for her forbidden knowledge. When Maria was born, notoriety had yet to hit her family. Rasputin had married her mother, the peasant girl Prescovia Duplovina, at a young age, and they lived in a remote village far away from any drama. Soon they had three children, Maria, her older brother Dimmitri, and her younger sister Vavvara.
While Maria was still in her mother’s womb, her father made a historyaltering decision. Prodded by some emotional or spiritual crisis, Rasputin had a religious reawakening and went on a pilgrimage. Though some say his reasons for this trek were as earthly as evading punishment for stealing a horse. Regardless, it was the beginning of Rasputin as we now know him.
When Maria’s father came back to see his newly born daughter, he was a changed man. After staying with monks at the St. Nicholas Monastery, he appeared disheveled and strange. He also, seemingly temporarily, became a vegetarian and reportedly swore off drinking. Yet though he now repelled some of their neighbors, Rasputin’s effect on others was much more disturbing.
By the early 1900s, when Maria was a toddler, Rasputin was running his own makeshift chapel in a root cellar, holding secret meetings where reportedly his avid female followers would ceremonally wash him before each congregation. Just as Maria began walking and talking, Rasputin began gaining a reputation in the larger cities of Russia, and he traveled to places like Kazan.
Dark rumors followed him. Despite Rasputin gaining powerful friends during these trips, there were persistent whispers even then that he was sleeping with his followers. For now, though, the gossip hardly seemed to matter. Rasputin headed to the then capital of St. Petersburg, and nothing would ever be the same again.
In late 1905, thanks to his friendships with the black princesses, cousins to the imperial royal family, Rasputin met Zar Nicholas II and his wife Zarina Alexandra in person. In a very short time, he was a close confidant of the entire royal family, particularly since the Zarina believed that he was the only one who could heal her hemophiliac son, Alexi.
With such power swirling around him, Rasputin brought Maria right into the fray. At this point, Rasputin began not only to have a high opinion of himself, but also started to dream bigger for his own family. And in 1910, he brought Maria and her sister to St. Petersburg to live with him in the hopes that they would turn into little ladies and eventually do credit to his rising fame.
Maria’s given name was actually Matriiona, but her father evidently felt this was too backwoods and unsophisticated for the more European St. Petersburg. When he brought his daughter to live with him, he changed her name to the more French and worldly sounding Maria. For the Rasputin, any price seemed worth the entrance into the glittering world of the Romanoffs. It just didn’t work out.
When Rasputin sought to enter his girls to study at the legendary Smoly Institute, the school refused Maria and her sister enrollment on no uncertain terms. Instead, Rasputin was forced to settle for a second choice preparatory school. Then again, Rasputin’s list of enemies was building. Many relatives of the Zaran Zarina were appalled at the power Rasputin had over the rulers and were especially disturbed at the liberties he took with the young Romanoff princesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia.
At one point, a governness even complained that he was romping around the nursery with the girls in their night gowns. Strangely, Maria’s home life was much different. In contrast to the playful, even inappropriate energy Rasputin brought to the royal family, he treated his daughters something like inmates.
As Maria later described, “We were never allowed to go out alone. Rarely were we permitted to go to a matinea.” In addition, Rasputin would insist they kneel in prayer for hours every Sunday. And when he did let them go out, he chose their company very carefully. Maria and her sister were of an age with the Romanoff daughters, and they soon met the young princesses.
As Maria recalled, the girls were almost unbelievably graceful and often entered rooms so quietly that Maria couldn’t even hear their feet on the floor. With these companions, Maria and Vavara were soaring far beyond their station, and Rasputin was obsessed with ensuring they didn’t fall. As Maria turned into a teenager, young man began showing interest in the holy man’s daughter, and Rasputin’s response was control.
Maria, even in her nostalgic recollection of her father, called him the strictest of mentors. And after just a half an hour of any conversation with a boy, he would burst into the room and show the poor lad the door. Rasputin’s hold over the Zar and Zarina grew with the supposed miracles he was performing on Alexi.
But so too did civil unrest. Soon rumors about his intimate relationships with his followers grew to include accusations that he had seduced Zarina and even the four young Romanoff girls. The reality though was even worse than all that. Maria later admitted that as a young girl, she didn’t always have a clear idea of what was happening in her father’s adult world.
The truth may have broken her. There’s evidence that Rasputin’s religious worship was little more than drunken realry, and that if the rumors about the royal family weren’t true, he was nonetheless carrying on affairs with women from every corner of society. Indeed, several women who knew him accused him of assault.
In the face of this, Rasputin only clung harder to his control. To the extent that Maria was aware of the controversy around her father, it was mostly from Rasputin himself, insisting that he wouldn’t have people uttering the filth about you that they do about me. Rasputin took refuge in making his daughters unimpeachable and continued controlling the minutiae of their existence and reputations.
Yet even he couldn’t stave off disaster. In the summer of 1914, a woman acting on the hatred of Rasputin spreading through Russia stabbed him in the stomach while he was leaving his home. It took seven long weeks for Rasputin to recover enough to go back to St. Petersburg, but he could never be completely healed. According to Maria, her father was permanently affected both mentally and physically from the attempt on his life.
She claimed that the stress on his nerves also made him develop acid reflux to the point where he began avoiding sugar. But Rasputin would get little peace from now on. The year of Rasputin’s attempted assassination was also the year Russia entered World War I, hurling the country into turmoil. This did Rasputin no favors.
Over the coming months, Russia’s economy plummeted and it lost soldier after soldier to the conflict, further stirring the opposition to the Romanoffs and their adviser Rasputin. In December 1916, the single worst event of Maria’s young life took place. Prince Felix Yusupov, one of Rasputin’s acquaintances and it would turn out his most bitter enemy, lured the holy man to his house and then assassinated him with the help of several other discontented Russian aristocrats.
The manner of Rasputin’s end is now the stuff of legend. Yusupov later claimed that he first poisoned Rasputin with cookies laced with cyanide to no avail. Shocked at Rasputin’s otherworldly constitution, Yusupov had to resort to beating him with his co-conspirators, then shooting him and dumping him finally in a frozen lake.
As we’ll see, it may have been more complicated than this, but with her father gone, it was Maria who had to deal with the fallout. The day after Rasputin went over to Yusupovs and never came home, Maria knew in the pit of her stomach that something was deeply wrong. She and her sister went right to the royal family, reporting him missing to one of Zarina Alexandra’s closest confidants.
By now, all of St. Petersburg was a buzz with the supposed murder of the evil Rasputin. But Maria was simply missing and worried for her father. As the investigation started, her dread increased. Officers found traces of blood on the Bojoy Petroski bridge, indicating the point where the conspirators had thrown him off, and showed Maria a boot that she identified as her father’s.
From then on, it was just a matter of confirming the worst. A couple of days after Rasputin’s brutal end, they finally found his body in the frozen river below the bridge. When the city’s surgeon performed the autopsy, he found traces of that night’s trauma on Rasputin’s body, including three gunshot wounds, a slicing wound, and other injuries, some of which the surgeon believed happened postmortem.
Incredibly, there was no evidence that he’d been poisoned, but this was cold comfort to Maria, and so was her father’s funeral. Maria maintained that she attended Rasputin’s funeral, and her memories are harrowing. She claimed that many places in the little chapel were empty, for the crowds that had knocked at my father’s door while he still lived to ask some service of him neglected to come and offer up a prayer for him once he was dead.
However, other accounts suggest that neither Rasputin’s children nor his wife were permitted at the service. If so, they did get one consolation. Whether or not Maria attended her father’s funeral, the Imperial family did rally around the remaining Rasputans. After the small service, which took place in a lady in Wading’s garden, Maria and her family met with the Romanovs in the lady’s home, where they offered their friendship and protection.
The trouble was the Romanoff’s protection was about to mean nothing. Within months, the simmering unrest throughout Russia boiled over into a civil war, forcing Zar Nicholas to abdicate in March of 1917. Even Maria wasn’t safe. That April, she was locked up in a palace for questioning. She eventually gained release thanks to one of her father’s old followers, Boris Solovv.
But this was no mere altruistic act. After her father’s death, Boris, who was considered by many to be Rasputin’s spiritual successor, seemed like a natural option for a husband. He likewise considered her the smart option to be his wife, despite the fact that neither of them even liked the other. But in these last days of the Russian Empire, bizarre forces began drawing them together.
Maria and Boris, like good students of Gregory Rasputin, often participated in seances with a group of other like-minded people in an attempt to commune with the dead. Naturally, Maria sought to speak with her late father. And when she finally got him, according to Maria, Rasputin’s ghost kept insisting she love Boris. Eventually, Maria gave in.
trying to survive in her rapidly decaying world, Maria married Boris in October 1917, making good on her father’s seance predictions. In his diary, Boris would go on to note that Maria wasn’t even really that useful to him in the bedroom since he was so much more attracted to women who weren’t her. The die was cast, however, and it was only going to get darker from there.
The next months of Maria’s life passed by in a blur, and she clung to the imperial family and her home of St. Petersburg as best she could. It was all just delaying the inevitable, and everyone knew the end was near. On her final visit to the Romanoffs, Maria recalled the last words the Zarina would ever speak to her. Go, my children.
Leave us. Leave us quickly. We are being imprisoned. But it was Maria’s own family who would help hand over the Romanoffs to their tragic fate. With Russia falling apart at the seams, Maria’s husband began scrambling for power. And he hit devastating lows. Believing him to be a trusted friend, the royal family went to Boris and asked him to take some jewels for safekeeping in the event they needed quick cash for an escape.
He promptly proved he wasn’t worthy of that trust. In the most generous interpretation, Boris lost the funds, but according to some, he outright embezzled them. By the time that news came out, he made sure he was far, far away. By 1918, not even Boris Solovv could stand to be in St. Petersburg anymore. And he and Maria fled first to her hometown where her mother currently was and then hopped around various other out of the way towns, hoping to wait out the storm of civil unrest that was now fully raging through Russia as the Bolevixs took
over. Still, this wasn’t enough for Maria’s husband. In choosing to lose the Romanoff jewels, Boris had made a bet on himself, and it was a bet he kept making no matter who it hurt. Some even accused Boris of turning in some pro-Imperial officers who had been planning to help the Romanoff’s escape, apparently deciding that if he wasn’t going to save the royal family, no one was.
To add insult to injury, Boris soon paraded Romanoff imposters around Russia, ironically asking for money to help them escape, a feat he refused to perform for the real Romanoffs so he could keep lining his own pockets. It was a hint of what was to come in the next decades with Romanoff impersonators popping up everywhere. But it was no less cowardly.
If this upset Maria, it was nothing compared to what was to come. In the summer of 1918, she received devastating news. The Romanoffs never did make it to safety, and the Bolevixs eventually imprisoned them. Then, one July night, the revolutionaries brought royal parents and children alike into a basement to face a firing squad, killing them all.
In a further tragedy, both Maria’s mother and brother disappeared into the Soviet gulogs. With her old world gone, Maria knew she needed to start again. Barely 20 years old at the time of the Romanoff’s end and half of her family’s disappearance, Maria now tried desperately to build her life back up. By 1922, she and Boris had two daughters, Tatiana and Maria, who were named after the Romanoff princesses.
They ended up settling in Paris and for a time took on a mundane existence with Boris working in a soap factory and doing various odd jobs around town. But Maria Rasputin was never meant for a normal life. And in the mid1 1920s, tragedy caught up with her again. In 1924 or 1925, her younger sister Vavara died while still in Moscow.
Then just a year or two later, so too did her husband Boris, slipping away in a Paris hospital of tuberculosis. Alone, except for her two girls, she was forced to plunge back into a life of danger. After her husband’s death, her infamous name got her a job as a cabaret dancer, where she traveled around as the daughter of the mad monk.
Her dancing act was biographical, and Maria described the anguish she felt every time she had to go on stage and confront the tragedy of my father’s life and death. Her itinerate performing life soon led her to a job in the circus. And not just any job. She took up work as an animal trainer, taming lions and performing with bears.
As she Riley told an interviewer, “They ask me if I mind to be in a cage with animals, and I answer, why not? I have been in a cage with bolshviks.” Her life as a performer lasted until 1935, and it ended with a horrific moment. While traveling with an American circus, she was mauled by a bear.
Although she held it together for most of the rest of the run, she eventually quit by the time they reached Miami, Florida. She had, after all, already swallowed enough trauma to last a lifetime. Maria settled in America in 1937 without her daughters who were denied entry and married her childhood friend Gregory Burn a few years later, taking up residence in Los Angeles.
However, when they divorced in 1946, Marie admitted to a judge that Gregory had verbally bered her, hit her, and then just deserted me. Her final years weren’t any less dramatic. She became a US citizen in the 1940s and even worked as a riveter during World War II to help support the American effort.
for all that and despite her imperial Romanoff background, when the Red Scare came, people began whispering she was a communist, prompting Maria to write to the Los Angeles Times and unequivocally deny the rumors, which went against her entire upbringing. By the late 1950s, Maria was too old for her machinist work and instead cobbled together money from hosting Russian lessons, babysitting, and giving interviews to people still interested in her past.
In these conversations, although possibly to keep people interested, she would sometimes make bizarre admissions, including her confession that she was a psychic and that Richard Nixon’s wife had come to her in a dream. As rumors swirled in the next decades that one or more Romanoffs had survived the firing squad, Maria was asked to weigh in on whether Anna Anderson, perhaps the most famous Romanoff impostor, was really the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Maria initially supported Anderson, but later recanted. It has since been proven that Anderson was not Anastasia and that all the Romanoffs did perish in July 1918. Anastasia was not the only ghost from Maria’s old life to come back to haunt her. Much of her life in exile was devoted to remembering her father and reinstating his image.
So when Felix Yusupov, her father’s asalent, came out with a memoir in 1928 detailing Rasputin’s end, Maria unsuccessfully sued him for damages. Soon after, she presented her own memoir, The Real Rasputin, and would follow it up with two more, in addition to sneeringly naming her dogs, Yuso and Pov, after Yusupov. It was in these writings that Maria put forward a bombshell accusation.
According to Maria, the motive behind Rasputin’s demise was nothing like what they teach in history class. In one of her memoirs, Maria insisted that her father’s murder was personal, not political. She claimed that Yusupov had made romantic advances toward her father and that the prince had lashed out and killed the monk because Rasputin had spurned these attempts.
Although most historians dismissed this claim, Maria stood by it. Maria also disputed the common account of her father’s death, which claimed that he had eaten cyanide lace sweets and been eerily completely unaffected by the poison. Instead, according to Maria, her father didn’t like sweet things and would have never eaten the offered cakes, meaning he was never poisoned in the first place.
This may have seemed like a small point to some, but it meant everything to Maria. Instead of some superhuman evil being, Rasputin was just a man, and he was murdered like one. Maria Rasputin lived to nearly 80 years old, dying in 1977 in the Russian-American Silverlake community of Los Angeles. She kept going until the very end.
Her third and last book, Rasputin: The Man Behind the Myth, which continued her efforts to humanize her father’s legacy, was published right around her passing. Through blood and exile, Maria Rasputin was nothing if not a survivor. Thanks for watching History Expose. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us.
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CUT OFF. BURNED. – When Japanese Soldiers Raped and a Filipino Woman and a General Was Executed HT

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