Unit 731 Museum Harbin, China - the Japanese Army's site for "medical experimentation" on prisoners of war

By Dilip -
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
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

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