George A. Witch Dies; Worked for Y.M.CA. In China for Decades

George Ashmore Fitch, secretary to the International Committee of the Young Men's Christian Association for 40 years and a resident of China from 1909 to 1946, died Sunday in a nursing home in Pomona, Calif. He was 95 years old and had been a resident of Pomona for the last 15 years.

The son of American missionaries, mr. Fitch was born in Soochow, China, on Jan. 23, 1883. He graduated from Wooster College, Wooster, Ohio, in 1906 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1909. He also studied at Columbia University during that period.

His first official post was as chaplain at the Riverview Military Academy in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., from 1906 to 1907, which he left to become assistant pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, where he served unti11909.

He joined the International Committee of the Y.M.C.A. that year and was sent to Shanghai, where he remained until 1936. He was sent to Nanking, where he served as adviser to the War Area Service Corps, a Chinese organization that tried to provide soldiers with minimal comforts and necessities, after the Japanese invasion.

“He was left in charge of the city as acting mayor and head of the International Safety Zone, in 1937‐38, when the government left; the Japanese performed terrible outrages on the people who remained,” Mr. Fitch's daughter, Marion Exter of Mountain Lakes, N.J., recalled yesterday.

Mrs. Exter, who was herself born in China, said that her father had witnessed many atrocities, some of which he photographed as documentation. He later smuggled out the photographs in the lining of an overcoat.

After leaving Nanking, Mr. Fitch went to Chungking in southwest China, where the Chinese Government had fled. After the defeat of the Japanese, Mr. Fitch testified at war crimes trials in Tokyo.

Fluent in Chinese, he was executive adviser to the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives from 1941 to 1943 and a deputy director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the flooded Yellow River area of Kaifeng in 1946.

He was the author of two books on his experiences in China, “To the Mecca of Inner Mongolia” and “My 80 Years in China,” and of a number of articles in newspapers and other periodicals.

After the Communists took over China, Mr. Fitch lived in Taiwan for many years and at the invitation of the Chinese Nationalist Government returned there to celebrate his 80th birthday. He retired to Pomona 15 years ago.

He is survived, in addition to Mrs. Exter, by another daughter, Mrs. Edith Swapp of Palma, Majorca, Spain, and by three sons, Albert C. of Hague, N.Y., John T. of Concord, Mass., and Dr. Robert M. of Coventry, Conn.