Detachment 731 went down in history as a secret laboratory of death, in which the Japanese invented and tested the most sophisticated methods of torturing and killing people, determining the thresholds of endurance of the human body, the boundaries between life and death.
Battle of Hong Kong
“Do not participate in the fruitless works of darkness, but expose them. For it is a shame to talk about those things that they secretly do. Ephesians 5: 11-12
During the Second World War, the Japanese captured part of China - Manchuria. In the first few months after Pearl Harbor, they captured more than 140,000 allies, and it is documented that one in four of these people died at the hands of the invaders. Thousands of men or women have been tortured, raped and killed.
In his book, renowned American historian and journalist John Toland describes numerous cases of military violence against their captives. For example, in the battle for Hong Kong, a group of local British, Eurasian, Chinese and Portuguese conscripts fought against the hordes of Japanese who attacked them. On Christmas Eve, they were captured and completely cut off on the narrow Stanley Peninsula. The Japanese slaughtered, butchered the wounded, and raped Chinese and British nurses. It was a humiliating end to British rule in China, but even worse were the horrific atrocities of the Japanese against prisoners.
Death camp and bacteriological weapons
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But all the atrocities were nothing compared to what happened in Detachment 731 in Pingfan, Manchuria, near the city of Harbin. It was an extermination camp that conducted bacteriological weapon experiments on living Chinese prisoners. Leading Japanese specialists needed a lot of assistants, laboratory assistants, and middle technical personnel. For these purposes, the schools specially selected talented adolescents aged 14-15 with a desire to study, but from low-income families. The trainees quickly learned discipline, became specialists, and formed the technical personnel of Detachment 731.
Detachment 731 complex.
The entire complex consisted of 150 buildings. In the center was block R0 for experiments on living prisoners. 70 percent of the prisoners were Chinese, about 30 percent Russian. The subjects were called "logs." Some were deliberately infected with the bacteria cholera, typhoid fever, anthrax, plague, syphilis. Others had their blood pumped out and replaced with horse blood. Many were shot, burned alive with flamethrowers, blown up, bombarded with lethal doses of X-rays, subjected to high pressure in sealed chambers, dehydrated, frozen and even boiled alive. Of the thousands of prisoners of war, not one survived. Every last person was killed.
Criminals escaped punishment
The United States granted amnesty to Japanese doctors and scientists who carried out atrocities during World War II. Research has confirmed that Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, who founded Detachment 731, and his men received a general amnesty after the fall of Japan in 1945. Ishii and his colleagues escaped punishment, and in return provided the American authorities with a lot of information about the results of the tests at the death camp.
Shiro Ishii.
There were also the results of "field trials" in which hundreds of thousands of civilians in China and eastern Russia were infected and then died from the deadly bacteria of anthrax and plague. Before the surrender of Japan in 1945, Shiro Ishii decided to kill all prisoners in the "death camps", as well as all employees, guards and their family members, he himself died of cancer in 1959. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Assistant Dean of Simon Wiesenthal, at a press conference in Los Angeles called on the US government to cancel the amnesty order for Japanese people who took part in medical experiments on humans, in testing chemical or bacteriological weapons. He called for the names of Japanese war criminals to be added to a "watchlist" to deny entry to the United States.
Atrocities in the R0 Block
In the R0 block in Pingfani, Japanese doctors experimented on prisoners of war or local aborigines. Doctor Rabaul took blood from Japanese guards with malaria and injected it into prisoners of war to prove he was immune to malaria. Other doctors injected various bacteria and then dismembered the victims in order to determine how one or another drug affects different human organs. Some shot living people in the stomach to practice removing bullets from wounds, amputated arms and legs, cut out parts of the liver from living prisoners, and observed the limits of the body's endurance. Two prisoners were caught trying to escape. They were shot in the legs. The doctor then dismembered them alive by cutting out their liver. One of the Japanese wrote in his diary: "For the first time I saw the internal organs of a person working, it was very informative."Another prisoner of war was tied to a tree, his nails were pulled out, his body was cut open and his heart removed. Some doctors used the prisoners to see if they could live with part of the brain, part of the liver.
Surviving photographs of the work of Detachment 731.
Crimes keep getting covered
The Japanese hid what they were doing with the conquered peoples in their occupied territories. They argued that the prisoners were being treated and that there were no violations. As early as the beginning of the war, reports of atrocities in Hong Kong, massacres and rape began after the fall of Singapore. But all official US protests were left unanswered. The United States and its allies understood that recognizing and condemning the Japanese atrocities would not lessen the danger of the POWs.
Unknown victim of Detachment 731.
Officially, the United States has agreed not to bring the guilty of Detachment 731 to justice in exchange for access to "scientific data" collected on the experimental "logs". But the Americans and other allies not only “forgiven” these atrocities in the name of science, but also participated in the cover-ups and kept them secret for many decades.
Rewriting history
In war it is difficult not to become like the enemy. After learning about all the atrocities committed by the Japanese, some American, British and Australian military took out their anger on their enemies. So Australian prisoners of war fell into a trap near Parith Sulong. The Japanese "mowed" them with a machine gun, then pierced them with bayonets, put the dead and still alive together and set them on fire. One can imagine how overwhelmed the Australian soldiers were with a thirst for revenge. If the Japanese treated their prisoners in accordance with all the rules of the Geneva Military Convention, then there would be no acts of personal revenge on the part of the Allied soldiers. However, there is little mention of Japanese atrocities against American troops in the history books. All knowledge about the war is presented in such a way that any negative comments about the Japanese are eliminated. Today, Japanese children have not read anything about the atrocities and torture camps of the Japanese army. All over the world, interests are reoriented to the fact that the United States used the atomic bomb on thousands of civilians and became the real villains of the Second World War. But nowhere are the atrocities of Detachment 731 described and their use of bacteriological weapons on thousands of those captured and enslaved. By and large, not only Japan, but the whole world is mired in this lie. The Americans already believe they were the aggressor against Japan, even though the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.that they were the aggressor against Japan, even though the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.that they were the aggressor against Japan, even though the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
The families of Chinese prisoners, on whom Detachment 731 conducted bacteriological experiments, filed a lawsuit in 1995 demanding compensation from the Japanese government. Under the secret order of Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese army created bacteriological weapons, codenamed 731 and 100, which were tested on living prisoners of war. During the experiments, no one survived. Everything was kept under great secrecy, no one knew what was arranged there, but who was sent there never returned alive. All documents related to the 731 group were destroyed.
After the war, Shiro Ishii and his colleagues received immunity from prosecution for their crimes in exchange for the results of "devilish" experiments. Many of the participants in the torture became famous and respected people, even received their degrees. But we must remember these atrocities and prevent a repetition of this. Humanity must not allow the continuation of the arms race, the creation of new ways to destroy people.