Unit 731 Museum Harbin, China - the Japanese Army's site for "medical experimentation" on prisoners of war
Unit 731 Museum
UNIT 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development wing of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. Commanded by General Shiro Ishii, an officer in the Kwantung Army, the exact number of men, women, and children who died within its walls remain unknown, but conservative estimates place it around the several thousand mark. In the decades since, what has come to be understood is that every single one of Unit 731’s prisoners of war – the vast majority of whom were Chinese – died while being held at this camp in Pingfang, just outside the city of Harbin. Almost all these deaths were in horrific fashion. Prisoners were alternately infected or bombarded with the plague, anthrax, and other highly infectious diseases. They were then vivisected without anesthetic so that military scientists could explore the efficacy of their new weapons of biological warfare, all of which seem to have been designed to violate the Geneva Convention
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/unit-731-museum
The knights of Bushido : a history of Japanese war crimes during World War II (1958)
A visit to the Unit 731 Museum
Wikipedia Entry on Unit 731
NB: For those interested in crime drama: this TV film (part of the brilliant 'Inspector Morse' series) has a WW 2 motif, and mentions Unit 731 as part of its plot
UNIT 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development wing of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. Commanded by General Shiro Ishii, an officer in the Kwantung Army, the exact number of men, women, and children who died within its walls remain unknown, but conservative estimates place it around the several thousand mark. In the decades since, what has come to be understood is that every single one of Unit 731’s prisoners of war – the vast majority of whom were Chinese – died while being held at this camp in Pingfang, just outside the city of Harbin. Almost all these deaths were in horrific fashion. Prisoners were alternately infected or bombarded with the plague, anthrax, and other highly infectious diseases. They were then vivisected without anesthetic so that military scientists could explore the efficacy of their new weapons of biological warfare, all of which seem to have been designed to violate the Geneva Convention
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/unit-731-museum
The knights of Bushido : a history of Japanese war crimes during World War II (1958)
A visit to the Unit 731 Museum
In September of 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, and the following year it created
the puppet government of Manciukuo under the formal guidance of Emperor Pu Yi. In 1936 Unit 731 is
born, near Harbin, placed under the command of microbiologist and
medical officer of the Japanese army Ishii Shiro, a strong supporter of the
advantages chemical-bacteriological warfare could bring to the Japanese Empire...
In July 1937 Japan
invaded China, starting the second Sino-Japanese war which coincided with the
beginning of the Second World War in the Pacific. In 1939 the Unit 731
base was transferred to the Pingfang district, where the museum now stands, and
it will be more or less destroyed in 1945, before Japan’s unconditional
surrender that brought the Second World War to a close, for the purpose of
hiding the evidence of the crimes commited within. Unit 731 dealt with
experiments on plants, animals and human beings...Manchuria teemed with
“cheap” human material: the Chinese were considered an inferior race...
Women and men, young
and old, children, pregnant women, mainly of Chinese origin but to a lesser
extent also Koreans, Mongolians, Russians, English and Americans, were objects
(in the most truest sense of the word) of experimentation in Unit 731:
vivisection without anesthesia... https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/unit-731-museum
Wikipedia Entry on Unit 731
The researchers involved in Unit 731 were
secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they
gathered through human experimentation. Other
researchers that the Soviet forces managed to arrest first were tried at
the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in
1949. The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and
experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into their biological warfare program,... as they had done with German researchers
in Operation Paperclip. On
6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied
Forces, wrote to Washington that
"additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be
obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in
intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence". Victim
accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda...
NB: For those interested in crime drama: this TV film (part of the brilliant 'Inspector Morse' series) has a WW 2 motif, and mentions Unit 731 as part of its plot
*****************************
