Unit 731 Japan. “Even lower than brutes.” The most terrible experiments on people were carried out by the Japanese. Characteristic features of the camp

In Japan there is a museum “Unit 731”, the notoriousness of which is the reason for the massive pilgrimage here of tourists from all over the world, but, above all, the Japanese themselves. However, if a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in Germany evokes in Germans a feeling of shudder, hatred of Nazism and pity for the martyred, then the Japanese, especially the young, most often leave the museum with a facial expression as if they had visited a national shrine.

Of course, when visiting the museum, they learn that many employees of Detachment 731 after World War II continued to live and work peacefully in their native Land of the Rising Sun, and even hold responsible positions. Including those who carried out monstrous biological experiments on people whose cruelty surpassed the SS doctor Joseph Mengele.

Factory of death

In 1936, a terrible factory opened on the hills of Manchuria. His “raw materials” were thousands of living people, and his “products” were capable of destroying all of humanity in a matter of months... Chinese peasants were afraid to even approach the terrible town of Pingfan near Harbin. No one really knew what was going on behind the high, impenetrable fence. But they whispered among themselves: the Japanese lure people there by deception or kidnap them, then conduct terrible experiments on them.

This death factory began in 1926, when Emperor Hirohito took the throne of Japan. As you know, he chose the motto “Showa” (“Enlightened World”) for the era of his reign.

But if the majority of humanity assigns science the role of serving good purposes, then Hirohito, without hiding, spoke directly about its purpose: “Science has always been the best friend of murderers. Science can kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people in a very short period of time.”
The emperor could judge such terrible things with knowledge: he was a biologist by training. He sincerely believed that the biological would help Japan conquer the world, and he, the descendant of the goddess Amaterasu, would fulfill his divine destiny and rule the Universe.

The emperor's ideas about “scientific weapons” inspired the aggressive Japanese military. They were fully aware that the samurai spirit and conventional weapons alone could not win a protracted war against the Western powers, which were superior in quantity and quality. Therefore, on behalf of the Japanese General Staff, in the early 30s, Japanese colonel and biologist Shiro Ishii made a long voyage to the bacteriological laboratories of Italy, Germany, the USSR and France, during which he learned in detail all possible details of scientific developments. In a report on the results of this voyage, submitted to the highest echelons of power in Japan, he argued that biological weapons would ensure the superiority of the army of the Land of the Rising Sun. “Unlike artillery shells, bacteriological weapons are not capable of instantly killing living force, but they silently attack the human body, bringing a slow but painful death. – Ishii stated. – It is not necessary to produce shells; you can infect completely peaceful things - clothes, cosmetics, food and drinks, you can spray bacteria from the air. Even if the first attack is not massive, the bacteria will still multiply and hit targets”...

It is not surprising that this optimistic report impressed the top military-political leadership of Japan, and they allocated large funds to create a full-scale secret complex for the development of biological weapons. Throughout its existence, this unit had a number of names, but was included under the most famous of them - detachment 731.

"Logs" are not people, they are lower than cattle."

The detachment was stationed since 1932 near the village of Pingfan near Harbin (at that time the territory of the puppet pro-Japanese state of Manchukuo). It included almost 150 buildings and blocks. The most talented graduates of the best Japanese universities, the flower and hope of Japanese science, were selected for the detachment.

The unit was stationed in China rather than Japan for a variety of reasons. First of all, when he was stationed directly in the metropolis, and not in a colony, it was very difficult to maintain complete secrecy. Secondly, in the event of a leak of deadly materials, only the Chinese population was at risk.
Finally, in China, without much difficulty, it was possible to find and isolate “logs” - this is how arrogant Japanese bacteriological scientists dubbed those unfortunate people on whom deadly strains were tested and other inhumane experiments were carried out.

“We believed that “logs” are not people, that they are even lower than cattle. However, among the scientists and researchers working in the detachment there was no one who had any sympathy for the “logs”. Everyone believed that the destruction of “logs” was a completely natural thing,” one of those who served in “detachment 731” said at the Khabarovsk trial.

The most important experiments that were carried out on experimental subjects were all kinds of tests of the effectiveness of various strains of the most dangerous epidemic diseases. Shiro Ishii’s strong point was the plague, epidemics of which in the Middle Ages wiped out the population of the most densely populated cities in the world. It must be admitted that along this path he achieved outstanding success: by the end of the Second World War, Detachment 731 had developed a strain of such an extremely dangerous plague bacterium, which was 60 times more virulent (the ability to infect the body) than an ordinary infectious bacillus.

The experiments were arranged, most often, as follows. In special barracks, special hermetic cages were set up, where people doomed to death were locked. These rooms were so small that the subjects could not even move in them. People were injected with a deadly vaccine using a syringe, and then observed for days on end for various changes in the body's condition. Then the infected were dissected alive, organs were removed and the disease was observed to spread throughout all organs.

The experimental subjects were not allowed to die for as long as possible and the opened organs were not sutured for days on end, so that these, so to speak, “doctors” could calmly observe the disease process without bothering themselves with a new autopsy. No anesthesia was used so that it would not disturb the “natural” course of the experiment.

The luckiest victims of the new “experimenters” were those who tested not bacteria, but gases: these people died faster. “All the experimental subjects who died from hydrogen cyanide had purple-red faces,” one of the employees of “Detachment 731” said at the trial. - Those who died from mustard gas had their whole body burned so that it was impossible to look at the corpse. Our experiments have shown that a person's endurance is approximately equal to that of a pigeon. Under the conditions in which the pigeon died, the experimental subject also died.”

When the Japanese military became convinced of the effectiveness of the Ishii special squad, they began to develop detailed plans for the use of bacteriological weapons against the armies and populations of the United States and the USSR. There were no longer any problems with the quantity of lethal ammunition.

According to the stories of employees, by the end of the war, such a critical mass of epidemic bacteria had accumulated in the storage facilities of Detachment 731 that if under ideal conditions they had been scattered throughout to the globe, they would be quite enough to calmly destroy all of humanity...
In July 1944, only the principled position of Prime Minister Tojo, an opponent of total war, saved the United States from a terrible catastrophe. The Japanese General Staff planned to transport strains of the most dangerous viruses to American territory in balloons - from those fatal to humans to those that were supposed to destroy livestock and crops. But Tojo understood perfectly well that Japan was already clearly losing the war, and America could give an adequate response to a criminal attack with biological weapons. It is likely that Japanese intelligence informed the country's leadership that work on the atomic project was in full swing in the United States. And if Japan had realized the “cherished dream” of Emperor Hirohito, it would have received not only Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but dozens of other cities incinerated by radioactive atoms...

But Unit 731 dealt with more than just biological weapons. Japanese scientists, following the example of the SS fanatics in white coats, also meticulously found out the limits of endurance of the human body, for which they carried out the most terrible medical experiments.

For example, doctors from the special squad experimentally came to the conclusion that the best way to stop frostbite is not to rub the affected limbs, but to immerse them in water with a temperature of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. “At temperatures below minus 20, the experimental people were taken out into the yard at night, forced to put their bare arms or legs in a barrel of cold water, and then put under an artificial wind until they received frostbite,” the former shared his terrible memories at the trial in Khabarovsk squad member. “Then they tapped their hands with a small stick until they made a sound like hitting a piece of wood.”

Then the frostbitten limbs were lowered into water of a certain temperature and, changing the temperature, they watched with keen interest the death of muscle tissue on the arms.

Among the test subjects, according to the testimony of the defendants, there was even a three-day-old child: so that he would not clench his hand into a fist and not violate the “purity” of the experiment, a needle was driven into his middle finger.

Other victims of the special squad were turned into mummies alive. To do this, people were placed in a hotly heated room with very minimal humidity. The man was sweating profusely, asking for water all the time, but he was not given water until he was completely dry. Then the body was carefully weighed... During these inhumane experiments, it turned out that the human body, completely devoid of moisture, weighs only about 22% of its original weight. This is how the doctors of Unit 731 experimentally confirmed that the human body is 78% water.

And in the interests of the imperial air force, monstrous experiments were carried out in pressure chambers. “They placed a test subject in a vacuum pressure chamber and began to gradually pump out the air,” one of the trainees of Ishii’s squad recalled at the trial. - As the difference between the external pressure and the pressure in the internal organs increased, his eyes first bulged out, then his face swelled to the size of a large ball, the blood vessels swelled like snakes, and his intestines began to crawl out, as if alive. Finally, the man simply exploded alive.”

In this barbaric way, Japanese doctors determined the permissible altitude ceiling for their pilots.

Quite senseless experiments were also carried out on people, so to speak, out of pure “curiosity,” dictated, obviously, by pathological sadism. Entire organs were cut out from experimental subjects. Or they cut off the arms and legs and sewed them back, swapping the right and left limbs. Or they gave a person a blood transfusion from horses, monkeys, or other animals. Otherwise, a living person was exposed to extreme X-ray radiation. Some were scalded with boiling water or tested for sensitivity to electric current. Curious “scientists” sometimes filled a person’s lungs with large amounts of smoke or gas, and sometimes introduced rotting pieces of decomposed flesh into the stomach of a living experimental subject...

According to the testimony of Detachment 731 employees at the Khabarovsk trial, during its existence, at least three thousand people were killed within the walls of the laboratories during criminal misanthropic experiments.
However, some researchers believe that this figure is greatly underestimated; the actual victims of the experimental executioners turned out to be much greater.

On a somewhat smaller scale, but just as purposefully, another unit of the Japanese army, Detachment No. 100, also part of the Kwantung Army and located not far from Detachment 731, was breeding strains of deadly diseases intended to attack livestock, poultry and crops.

The end of the barbaric conveyor belt

The existence of the Japanese death factory has been put to an end Soviet Union. On August 9, 1945, the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the American Air Force, Soviet troops launched an offensive against the Japanese army, and the detachment was ordered to evacuate to the Japanese Islands, which began on the night of August 10-11.

In their haste to quickly cover up the traces of criminal experiments, the executioners of Detachment 731 burned some materials in specially dug pits. They destroyed all the experimental people who were still alive. Some of the unfortunate “logs” were poisoned with gas, while others were “nobly” allowed to commit suicide. The exhibits of the notorious “exhibition room” - a huge hall where severed human organs, limbs, and severed heads were stored in flasks in alcohol - were hastily thrown into the river. This “exhibition room” could serve as the most visual evidence of the criminal nature of Unit 731.

But the most important materials, perhaps still awaiting their further use, were preserved by Japanese bacteriologists. They were taken out by Shiro Ishii and some other leaders of the detachment, handing all this over to the Americans - one must think as a kind of payoff for the fact that in the future they would not be persecuted and would be allowed to lead a comfortable existence...

It is not for nothing that the Pentagon soon announced that “due to the extreme importance of information about the bacteriological weapons of the Japanese army, the US government decides not to accuse any employee of the bacteriological warfare training squad of war crimes.”
And it is no coincidence that in response to the Soviet side’s request for the extradition and prosecution of members of Detachment 731, Washington stated to Moscow that “the location of the leadership of Detachment 731, including Shiro Ishii, is unknown, and there is no reason to accuse the detachment of war crimes.”

The trial is fair and... humane

However, the trial of the captured criminals did take place, only in the Soviet Union. From December 25 to 30, 1949, in Khabarovsk, the Military Tribunal of the Primorsky Military District considered court cases against 12 former Japanese army servicemen who were charged with the development and use of bacteriological weapons during the Second World War. The trial was opened by the announcement of previously unknown facts of crimes committed by the Japanese military in the period from 1938 to 1945 related to the large-scale preparation of bacteriological warfare, as well as its occasional conduct on Chinese territory. The defendants were also charged with conducting numerous inhumane medical experiments on people, during which the “experimental subjects” inevitably and extremely painfully died.

Twelve former servicemen of the Japanese army appeared before the court in Khabarovsk.

The composition of the defendants was very heterogeneous: from the general, the commander of the army, to the corporal and the laboratory orderly. This is understandable, because almost all of the personnel of Detachment 731 were evacuated to Japan, and Soviet troops captured only a few of them who were directly related to the preparation and conduct of bacteriological warfare.

The case was considered in open court by the Military Tribunal of the Primorsky Military District, chaired by Major General of Justice D.D. Chertkov and members of the tribunal Colonel of Justice M.L. Ilyinitsky and Lieutenant Colonel of Justice I.G. Vorobyova. The state prosecution was supported by 3rd Class Counselor of Justice L.N. Smirnov. All accused were provided with qualified lawyers.

11 defendants pleaded guilty in full to the charges, and the head of the sanitary department of the Kwantung Army, Lieutenant General Kajitsuka Ryuji, pleaded partially guilty. Most of the defendants in their last word repented of their crimes, and only the commander of the Kwantung Army, General Yamada Otozoo, in his last word addressed the argument that was the main one for the defense and defendants at the Nuremberg and Tokyo military trials: the reference to the fact that the crimes were committed exclusively on the orders of a superior manuals.

The defendants Hirazakura Zensaku and Kikuchi Norimitsu, in their last words at the trial, expressed the hope that the main organizers and instigators of bacteriological warfare would be brought to trial: the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Generals Ishii and Wakamatsu.
It should be noted that Soviet justice, contrary to the opinion that had spread since the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika about its supposedly limitless severity, handed down very lenient sentences: the Military Tribunal of the Primorsky Military District did not impose the death penalty by hanging as punishment on any of the defendants, as was provided for in the Decree Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the punishment of war criminals, since at the time of the verdict the death penalty in the USSR was temporarily abolished. All generals were sentenced to twenty-five years in a forced labor camp. The remaining eight defendants received from two to twenty years of imprisonment in camps. All prisoners sentenced by the Military Tribunal who did not fully serve their sentences were amnestied in 1956 and were given the opportunity to return to their homeland...

Death on stream

When determining the production capacity of Unit 731, accused Kawashima said during interrogation: “The production department could produce up to 300 kg of plague bacteria every month.” This amount of deadly infection could exterminate the entire population of the United States...

The commander of the Kwantung Army, General Yamada Otozoo, admitted very frankly during interrogation: “When examining Detachment 731, I was extremely amazed at the scope of the detachment’s research and production activities in the production of bacteriological means of warfare.”

The functions of unit 100 were similar to those of unit 731 with the difference that it produced bacteria intended to infect livestock and crops (bacteria of cattle plague, sheeppox, mosaic, glanders, anthrax).

As was convincingly proven during the trial, along with the production of bacteriological warfare agents, large-scale work was carried out in parallel to search for methods of using bacteriological weapons. Fleas exposed to infection were used as distributors of deadly epidemics. For breeding and infecting fleas, rats, mice and other rodents were used, which were caught by special teams and kept in large numbers in special pens.

For the most effective use of bacteriological weapons, Ishii Shiro invented a special bomb, which was called the “Ishii system bomb.” The main feature of this bomb was that it had a porcelain body into which fleas infected with bacteria were placed. The bomb exploded at a height of 50-100 m above the ground, which ensured the widest possible contamination of the area.

As Yamada Otozoo showed during interrogation, the main and most effective methods of using bacteriological weapons were dropping bacteria from aircraft and using bacteria on the ground.

During the trial, it was convincingly proven that detachments 731 and 100 of the Japanese army went far beyond the scope of laboratory and field tests of bacteriological weapons and embarked on the path practical application weapons they created in combat conditions.

Well-known Russian specialist in international law I. Lukashuk writes in one of his works: “Bacteriological weapons were used by Japan during the war against China. Military tribunals in Tokyo and Khabarovsk qualified these actions as war crimes.” Unfortunately, this statement is only partly true, since at the Tokyo trial the issue of using bacteriological weapons was not considered and experiments on people were discussed only in one document, which, due to the fault of the American prosecutor, was not voiced at the trial.

During the trial in Khabarovsk, strong evidence was presented of the use of bacteriological weapons by Japanese special forces directly during combat operations. The indictment described in detail three episodes of the use of bacteriological weapons in the war against China. In the summer of 1940, a special expedition under the command of Ishii was sent to the war zone in Central China, having a large supply of fleas infected with the plague. In the Ningbo area, a large area was contaminated from an airplane, resulting in a severe plague epidemic in the area, which was reported in Chinese newspapers. How many thousands of people died as a result of this crime - as they say, only God knows...

The second expedition, led by the head of one of the departments of Detachment 731, Lieutenant Colonel Oota, using plague-infected fleas sprayed from airplanes, provoked an epidemic in the area of the city of Changde in 1941.

The third expedition under the command of General Ishii was sent in 1942 also to Central China, where the Japanese army at that time suffered defeats and retreated.

The sinister plans of the Japanese militarists for the large-scale use of bacteriological weapons were disrupted as a result of the rapid offensive Soviet army in August 1945.
How soviet soldiers saved the population of Eurasia, and perhaps all of humanity, from infection by pathogenic strains, is colorfully shown in feature film 1981 (USSR, MPR, GDR) “Through the Gobi and Khingan”, filmed by film director Vasily Ordynsky.

...To hide evidence of preparations for bacteriological warfare, the Japanese command gave orders to liquidate detachments 731 and 100 and destroy traces of their activities. At the same time, as was announced at the trial, another crime was committed when, in order to eliminate living witnesses, most of the prison inmates in Detachment 731 were killed using potassium cyanide added to food. Those who did not accept the poisoned food were shot through observation windows in the cells. The prison building where future experimental subjects were kept was blown up with dynamite and air bombs. The main building and laboratories were blown up by sappers...

The Khabarovsk trial had a peculiar continuation: on February 1, 1950, the plenipotentiary ambassadors of the USSR in Washington, London and Beijing, on behalf of the Soviet government, presented a special note to the governments of the USA, Great Britain and China. On February 3, 1950, the note was published in the Soviet press. This document presented the most important facts established during the trial by the Military Tribunal of the Primorsky Military District.

The note, in particular, emphasized: “The Soviet court convicted 12 Japanese war criminals guilty of preparing and using bacteriological weapons. It would, however, be unfair to leave the other main organizers and instigators of these heinous crimes unpunished.”

The note listed the top leaders of Japan as such war criminals, including Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, who was charged with issuing secret decrees to create a special center of the Japanese army for the preparation of bacteriological warfare on the territory of Manchuria, known as Detachment 731, and its branches.

In connection with what was stated in the note, the government of the USSR insisted on appointing a special International Military Court in the near future and transferring to it war criminals convicted of committing the most serious war crimes.

However, the diplomatic demarche of the Soviet government was doomed to sad failure. After all " cold war"was already in full swing and the former unity of the allies in the face of a common enemy - German Nazism and Japanese militarism - now had only to be remembered...

The Americans did not want to bring the main organizers of the preparation of bacteriological warfare, Shiro Ishii, and Kitano Masazo, who replaced him as head of Detachment 731 from March 1942, who were also mentioned in the note from the Soviet government, to justice.

In exchange for guaranteed security, Ishii and Kitano handed over valuable secret data regarding biological weapons to American experts in this field.
According to the Japanese researcher S. Morimura, the Americans allocated a special room in Tokyo to Ishii, where he began putting in order the materials of Detachment 731, taken from Pingfan. And the Soviet side, which demanded the extradition of the organizers and perpetrators of the war crimes committed, was given an answer imbued with boundless and arrogant hypocrisy that “the whereabouts of the leadership of detachment 731, including Ishii, are unknown and there is no reason to accuse the detachment of war crimes.”

The USSR's proposal to create a new International Military Court turned out to be unacceptable to the United States also because at that time they had already begun to free Japanese war criminals convicted by American occupation military courts in Japan. Only at the end of 1949, just when the trial of the creators of bacteriological weapons was going on in Khabarovsk, the Commission for Early Release, created at the headquarters of the Allied Commander-in-Chief, US Army General Douglas MacArthur, released 45 such criminals.

A peculiar response to the USSR's note from the United States was the publication on March 7, 1950 by General D. MacArthur of Circular No. 5, which directly stated that all Japanese war criminals who were serving sentences under court sentences could be released.

This was the reason for the government of the USSR to announce another note to the US government on May 11, 1950, where such intentions were assessed as an attempt to change or even cancel the decision of the International Court in Tokyo, which, in the opinion of the Soviet side, constituted a gross violation of the elementary norms and principles of international law.

There was never an official response to the proposal of the USSR government regarding the creation of an International Military Court over the organizers of bacteriological warfare from the governments of the USA and Great Britain...

Thus, all the scientists of the “death squad” (which is almost three thousand people), except those who fell into the hands of the USSR, avoided responsibility for their criminal experiments.
Many of those who infected and dissected living people with pathogenic bacteria became handsome deans of universities and medical schools, venerable academics, and resourceful businessmen in post-war Japan.

And the ever-memorable Prince Takeda, who inspected the special squad and admired the accumulated reserves of deadly strains and viruses, not only did not suffer any punishment, but even headed the Japanese Olympic Committee on the eve of the 1964 World Games. The evil spirit of Pingfan Shiro Ishii himself lived comfortably in Japan and died in his bed only in 1959. There is evidence that it was he who had a hand in collecting and storing “true” materials about samurai knights from unit 731, who later glorified their “exploits” in the exhibition of a museum in Japan, opened in 1978...

Unit 731, or the Japanese Death Camp Emperor Hirohito’s ideas about “scientific weapons” found support among the aggressive Japanese military. They understood that the samurai spirit and conventional weapons alone could not win a protracted war against the Western powers. Therefore, on behalf of the Japanese military department, in the early 30s, Japanese colonel and biologist Shiro Ishii made a voyage to the bacteriological laboratories of Italy, Germany, the USSR and France. In his final report, presented to the highest military officials of Japan, he convinced everyone present that biological weapons would bring enormous benefits to the Land of the Rising Sun. The detachment was created in 1932, consisted of three thousand people and was stationed in the occupied territory of China near the village of Pingfang, Binjiang province, twenty kilometers south of Harbin. The detachment had its own aviation unit and was officially called the “Main Directorate for Water Supply and Prevention of Units of the Kwantung Army.” According to testimony at the trial in Khabarovsk by the commander of the Kwantung Army, General Otsuzo Yamada, “Detachment 731” was organized to prepare bacteriological warfare, mainly against the Soviet Union, but also against the Mongolian People’s Republic, China and other states. The judicial investigation also proved that in “Detachment 731” other, no less cruel and painful experiments were carried out on living people, whom the Japanese among themselves called “logs”, on experimental subjects, which were not directly related to the preparation of bacteriological warfare. The specialized experiments that were carried out on experimental subjects were tests of the effectiveness of various strains of diseases. The detachment had special cages - they were so small that the prisoners could not move in them. People were infected with an infection, and then observed for days to see changes in the condition of their body. They were then dissected alive, removing their organs and watching the disease spread inside. People were kept alive and not stitched up for days, so that doctors could observe the process without bothering themselves with a new autopsy. In this case, no anesthesia was usually used. There were also experiments just for “curiosity”. Individual organs were cut out from the living body of the experimental subjects; they cut off the arms and legs and sewed them back, swapping the right and left limbs; they poured the blood of horses or monkeys into the human body; placed under the most powerful x-ray radiation; scalded various parts of the body with boiling water; tested for sensitivity to electric current. Curious scientists filled a person's lungs with large amounts of smoke or gas, and introduced rotting pieces of tissue into the stomach of a living person. Later, many employees of this detachment received academic degrees and public recognition. Many moved to the United States, for example the head of the detachment, Ishii, where they were valued for their knowledge acquired in the detachment. American authorities did not bring these criminals to justice because information about Japanese experiments in the field of biological weapons was of great value to the American program for its development. Many of the doctors subsequently (after the war) became successful, famous doctors in civilian life; some of them founded their own clinics and maternity hospitals. According to the recollections of the employees of Unit 731, during its existence, about three thousand people died within the walls of the laboratories. According to other sources, 10,000 people died...

“Do not participate in the unfruitful works of darkness, but reprove them. For it is shameful to even talk about the things that they do in secret.” Ephesians 5:11-12

During World War II, the Japanese captured part of China - Manchuria. In the first few months after Pearl Harbor, they captured more than 140,000 Allied prisoners, and it is documented that one in four of these men died at the hands of the invaders. Thousands of men or women were tortured, raped and killed.

In his book, the famous American historian and journalist John Toland describes numerous cases of military violence against their captives. For example, in the Battle of Hong Kong, a group of local English, Eurasian, Chinese and Portuguese conscripts fought against hordes of Japanese attacking them. On Christmas Eve they were captured and completely cut off on the narrow Stanley Peninsula. The Japanese slaughtered, dismembered the wounded, and raped Chinese and British nurses. It was a humiliating end to British rule in China, but even worse were the terrible atrocities the Japanese committed against prisoners.

Death camp and bacteriological weapons

But all the atrocities were nothing compared to what happened in Detachment 731 in Pingfan, Manchuria, near the city of Harbin. It was a death camp where bacteriological weapons experiments were carried out on living Chinese prisoners. Leading Japanese specialists needed many assistants, laboratory assistants, and mid-level technical personnel. For these purposes, schools specially selected capable teenagers of 14-15 years old with a desire to learn, but from low-income families. The trainees quickly learned the discipline, became specialists, and from them formed the technical staff of Detachment 731.

Unit 731 complex

The entire complex consisted of 150 buildings. In the center was block R0 for experiments on living human prisoners. 70 percent of the prisoners were Chinese, about 30 percent Russian. The test subjects were called “logs.” Some were deliberately infected with bacteria of cholera, typhoid, anthrax, plague, and syphilis. Others had their blood drained and replaced with horse blood. Many were shot, burned alive with flamethrowers, blown up, shot with lethal doses 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.

The criminals escaped punishment

The United States has 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 Unit 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 tests at the death camp.

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 anthrax and plague. Before Japan's surrender in 1945, Shiro Ishii decided to kill all prisoners in the "death camps", as well as all employees, guards and members of their families, and he himself died of cancer in 1959. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of Simon Wiesenthal, at a press conference in Los Angeles called on the US government to rescind the amnesty order for the Japanese who took part in medical experiments on people, in testing chemical or bacteriological weapons. He called for the names of Japanese war criminals to be added to a “watch list” to be banned from entering the United States.

Atrocities in Block R0

In Block R0 at Pinfani, Japanese doctors experimented on prisoners of war or local aborigines. A Rabaul doctor took blood from Japanese guards suffering from malaria and injected it into prisoners of war to prove immunity to malaria. Other doctors injected various bacteria and then dismembered the victims to determine how this or that drug affected different human organs. Some shot living people in the stomach to practice removing bullets from wounds, amputated arms, 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 livers. 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 was removed. Some doctors used prisoners to see if they could live with part of the brain, part of the liver.

Surviving photographs of the work of Detachment 371

Crimes continue to be covered

The Japanese hid what they were doing to the conquered peoples in their occupied territories. They claimed that the captives were receiving treatment and that no irregularities existed. Even at the beginning of the war, reports began to emerge of atrocities in Hong Kong, massacres and rapes after the fall of Singapore. But all official US protests were left unanswered. The United States and its allies understood that recognizing and condemning Japanese atrocities would not reduce the danger of prisoners of war.

Unknown victim of squad 371 employees

Officially, the United States agreed not to bring the perpetrators of Unit 731 to justice in exchange for access to “scientific data” collected on experimental “logs.” But the Americans and other allies not only “forgave” these atrocities in the name of science, but also participated in the cover-up of the crimes 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 soldiers took their anger out on their enemies. This is how Australian prisoners of war fell into a trap near Parit Sulong. The Japanese mowed them down with a machine gun, then pierced them with bayonets, put the dead and those still alive together and set them on fire. One can imagine how filled the Australian soldiers were with a thirst for revenge. If the Japanese had treated their prisoners according to all the rules of the Geneva Military Convention, then there would have been no acts of personal revenge on the part of the Allied soldiers. However, Japanese atrocities against American troops are barely mentioned in 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 towards what the United States used atomic bomb on thousands of civilians and became the real villains of World War II. But nowhere are the atrocities of Detachment 731 and their use of bacteriological weapons on thousands of captured and enslaved people described. By and large, not only Japan, but the whole world is mired in this lie. Americans already believe that they were the aggressor in the fight against Japan, even though the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Brief information:
"Unit 731" (Japanese: 731部隊 nanasanichi butai?); whale. trad. 七三一部隊, ex. 七三一部队, pinyin: qīsānyi bùduì, pal.: tsisanyi budu) - a special detachment of Japanese armed forces, was engaged in research in the field of biological weapons, experiments were carried out on living people (prisoners of war, kidnapped). Experiments were also conducted to establish the amount of time that a person can live under the influence of various factors (boiling water, drying, food deprivation, water deprivation, freezing, electric shock, human vivisection, etc.). The victims were included in the detachment along with family members.
Created in 1932, it consisted of three thousand people and was stationed in the occupied territory of China in the area of the Pingfang village of Binjiang province, twenty kilometers south of Harbin (now the Pingfang district of Harbin). The detachment was commanded by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii.
To prepare the site for the secret complex, 300 Chinese peasant houses were burned. The detachment had its own aviation unit and was officially called the “Main Directorate for Water Supply and Prevention of Units of the Kwantung Army.”
According to testimony at the trial in Khabarovsk by the commander of the Kwantung Army, General Otsuzo Yamada, “Detachment 731” was organized to prepare bacteriological warfare, mainly against the Soviet Union, but also against the Mongolian People’s Republic, China and other states. The judicial investigation also proved that in “Detachment 731”, other, no less cruel and painful experiments that were not directly related to the preparation of bacteriological warfare.
Some military doctors of the detachment gained unique experience, for example, autopsy of a living person. A live autopsy consisted of gradually removing all the vital organs from the experimental subjects under general anesthesia or local anesthesia, one by one, starting from the peritoneum and chest and ending with the brain. Still living organs, called “preparations,” were sent for further research to different departments of the detachment.
The endurance limits of the human body were studied under certain conditions - for example, at high altitudes or at low temperatures. To do this, people were placed in pressure chambers, recording the agony on film, their limbs were frozen and the onset of gangrene was observed. If a prisoner, despite being infected with deadly bacteria, recovered, this did not save him from repeated experiments, which continued until death occurred. The “prototypes” never left the laboratory alive.
Detachment 100 was engaged in similar activities in relation to domestic animals and agricultural crops. Also, “Detachment 100” was assigned the task of producing bacteriological weapons and carrying out sabotage activities.
The main base of “Detachment 100” was located 10 kilometers south of Xinjing in the town of Mengjiatun. "Detachment 100" was slightly smaller than "Detachment 731", its staff consisted of 800 people.
The detachment had aviation at its disposal, and 11 county cities in China were subjected to bacteriological attack by the Japanese: 4 in Zhejiang province, 2 each in Hebei and Henan provinces, and one each in Shanxi, Hunan and Shandong provinces. In 1952, official Communist Chinese historians calculated the number of victims of the man-made plague from 1940 to 1944. approximately 700 people. Thus, it turned out to be less than the number of prisoners killed.
The activities of Unit 731 were investigated during the Khabarovsk Trial, which ended with the conviction of a number of Kwantung Army servicemen involved in its creation and work to various terms of imprisonment.
Later, many members of this unit received academic degrees and public recognition, such as Masaji Kitano. Many moved to the United States, for example the head of the detachment, Ishii, where they were valued for their knowledge acquired in the detachment. American authorities did not bring these criminals to justice because, as Morimura's book points out, information about Japanese experiments in the field of biological weapons was of great value to the American program to develop them. Many of the doctors subsequently (after the war) became successful, famous doctors in civilian life; some of them founded their own clinics and maternity hospitals.
According to the recollections of the employees of Unit 731, during its existence, about three thousand people died within the walls of the laboratories. According to other sources, 10,000 people died.
According to the unanimous admission of former employees of the detachment, National composition prisoners were like this: almost 70 percent are Chinese, 30 percent are Russians, a few Koreans and Mongols. The vast majority are between 20 and 30 years old, with a maximum of 40 years.

The current negative attitude towards Japan from China, North Korea and South Korea is mainly due to the fact that Japan has not punished most of its war criminals. Many of them continued to live and work in the Land of the Rising Sun, as well as hold responsible positions. Even those who carried out biological experiments on people in the notorious special “detachment 731”. This is not unlike the experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. The cruelty and cynicism of such experiences does not fit into the modern human consciousness, but they were quite organic for the Japanese of that time. After all, what was at stake then was the “victory of the emperor,” and he was sure that only science could give this victory.

One day, on the hills of Manchuria, a terrible factory started working. Its “raw materials” were thousands of living people, and its “products” could destroy all of humanity in a few months... Chinese peasants were afraid to even approach the strange city. No one knew for sure what was going on inside, behind the fence. But in a whisper they told horror stories: they say that the Japanese kidnap or lure people there by deception, on whom they then conduct terrible and painful experiments for the victims.

"Science has always been a killer's best friend"

It all started back in 1926, when Emperor Hirohito took the throne of Japan. It was he who chose the motto “Showa” (“The Age of Enlightened World”) for the period of his reign. Hirohito believed in the power of science: “Science has always been a killer’s best friend. Science can kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people in a very short period of time.” The emperor knew what he was talking about: he was a biologist by training. And he believed that the biological would help Japan conquer the world, and he, the descendant of the goddess Amaterasu, would fulfill his divine destiny and rule this world.

The emperor's ideas about “scientific weapons” found support among the aggressive Japanese military. They understood that the samurai spirit and conventional weapons alone could not win a protracted war against the Western powers. Therefore, on behalf of the Japanese military department, in the early 30s, Japanese colonel and biologist Shiro Ishii made a voyage to the bacteriological laboratories of Italy, Germany, the USSR and France. In his final report, presented to the highest military officials of Japan, he convinced everyone present that biological weapons would bring enormous benefits to the Land of the Rising Sun.

“Unlike artillery shells, bacteriological weapons are not capable of instantly killing living force, but they silently attack the human body, bringing a slow but painful death. It is not necessary to produce shells; you can infect completely peaceful things - clothes, cosmetics, food and drinks, you can spray bacteria from the air. Even if the first attack is not massive, the bacteria will still multiply and hit targets,” said Ishii. It is not surprising that his “incendiary” report impressed the leadership of the Japanese military department, and they allocated funds for the creation of a special complex for the development of biological weapons. Throughout its existence, this complex had several names, the most famous of which is “detachment 731.”

They were called "logs"

The detachment was stationed in 1936 near the village of Pingfang (at that time the territory of the state of Manchukuo). It consisted of almost 150 buildings. The detachment included graduates of the most prestigious Japanese universities, the flower of Japanese science.

The unit was stationed in China rather than Japan for several reasons. Firstly, when it was deployed on the territory of the metropolis, it was very difficult to maintain secrecy. Secondly, if the materials were leaked, it would be the Chinese population that would suffer, not the Japanese. Finally, in China there were always “logs” at hand - that’s what the scientists of this special unit called those on whom the deadly strains were tested.

The specialized experiments that were carried out on experimental subjects were tests of the effectiveness of various strains of diseases. Ishii’s “favorite” was the plague. Towards the end of World War II, he developed a strain of plague bacteria that was 60 times more virulent (the ability to infect the body) than the normal one.

The experiments proceeded mainly as follows. The detachment had special cages (where people were locked) - they were so small that the prisoners could not move in them. People were infected with an infection, and then observed for days to see changes in the condition of their body. They were then dissected alive, removing their organs and watching the disease spread inside. People were kept alive and not stitched up for days, so that doctors could observe the process without bothering themselves with a new autopsy. In this case, no anesthesia was usually used - doctors were afraid that it could disrupt the natural course of the experiment.

Those of the victims of the “experimenters” who were tested not with bacteria, but with gases were more “lucky”: these died faster. “All the experimental subjects who died from hydrogen cyanide had purple-red faces,” said one of the employees of Detachment 731. - Those who died from mustard gas had their whole body burned so that it was impossible to look at the corpse. Our experiments have shown that a person's endurance is approximately equal to that of a pigeon. Under the conditions in which the pigeon died, the experimental subject also died.”

When the Japanese military became convinced of the effectiveness of the Ishii special squad, they began to develop plans for the use of bacteriological weapons against the USA and the USSR. There were no problems with ammunition: according to the stories of the employees, by the end of the war, so many bacteria had accumulated in the storerooms of “detachment 731” that if they had been scattered across the globe under ideal conditions, this would have been enough to destroy all of humanity.

In July 1944, only the attitude of Prime Minister Tojo saved the United States from disaster. The Japanese planned to use balloons to transport strains of various viruses to American territory - from those fatal to humans to those that would destroy livestock and crops. But Tojo understood that Japan was already clearly losing the war, and if attacked with biological weapons, America could respond in kind, so the monstrous plan was never brought to life.

122 degrees Fahrenheit

But “Detachment 731” dealt with more than just biological weapons. Japanese scientists also wanted to know the limits of endurance of the human body, for which they conducted terrible medical experiments.

For example, doctors from the Special Forces found that the best way to treat frostbite was not to rub the affected limbs, but to immerse them in water at a temperature of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Found it out experimentally. “At temperatures below minus 20, experimental people were taken out into the yard at night, forced to put their bare arms or legs in a barrel of cold water, and then placed under an artificial wind until they received frostbite,” said a former special squad employee. “Then they tapped their hands with a small stick until they made a sound like hitting a piece of wood.” Then the frostbitten limbs were placed in water of a certain temperature and, changing it, they observed the death of muscle tissue in the arms. Among these experimental subjects was a three-day-old child: so that he would not clench his hand into a fist and not violate the “purity” of the experiment, a needle was stuck into his middle finger.

Some of the victims of the special squad suffered another terrible fate: they were turned alive into mummies. To do this, people were placed in a hot room with low humidity. The man sweated profusely, but was not allowed to drink until he was completely dry. The body was then weighed, and it was found to weigh about 22% of its original mass. This is exactly how another “discovery” was made in “unit 731”: the human body is 78% water.

Experiments were carried out in pressure chambers for the Imperial Air Force. “They placed a test subject in a vacuum pressure chamber and began to gradually pump out the air,” recalled one of the trainees in Ishii’s squad. - As the difference between the external pressure and the pressure in the internal organs increased, his eyes first bulged out, then his face swelled to the size of a large ball, the blood vessels swelled like snakes, and his intestines began to crawl out, as if alive. Finally, the man simply exploded alive.” This is how Japanese doctors determined the permissible altitude ceiling for their pilots.

There were also experiments just for “curiosity”. Individual organs were cut out from the living body of the experimental subjects; they cut off the arms and legs and sewed them back, swapping the right and left limbs; they poured the blood of horses or monkeys into the human body; exposed to powerful X-ray radiation; scalded various parts of the body with boiling water; tested for sensitivity to electric current. Curious scientists filled a person's lungs with large amounts of smoke or gas, and introduced rotting pieces of tissue into the stomach of a living person.
According to the recollections of the special squad members, during its existence, about three thousand people died within the walls of the laboratories. However, some researchers argue that there were much more real victims of bloody experimenters.

"Information of extreme importance"

The Soviet Union put an end to the existence of Unit 731. On August 9, 1945, Soviet troops launched an offensive against the Japanese army, and the "squad" was ordered to "act at its own discretion." Evacuation work began on the night of August 10-11. Some materials were burned in specially dug pits. It was decided to destroy the surviving experimental people. Some of them were gassed, and some were nobly allowed to commit suicide. The exhibits of the “exhibition room” - a huge hall where cut off human organs, limbs, and heads cut in various ways were stored in flasks - were also thrown into the river. This “exhibition room” could become the most clear evidence of the inhuman nature of “Unit 731.”
“It is unacceptable that in the hands of the attackers Soviet troops at least one of these drugs was ingested,” the leadership of the special squad told their subordinates.

But some of the most important materials were preserved. They were taken out by Shiro Ishii and some other leaders of the detachment, handing it all over to the Americans - as a kind of ransom for their freedom. And, as the Pentagon stated then, “due to the extreme importance of information about the bacteriological weapons of the Japanese army, the US government decides not to charge any employee of the Japanese army’s bacteriological warfare training detachment with war crimes.”

Therefore, in response to a request from the Soviet side for the extradition and punishment of members of “Detachment 731”, a conclusion was sent to Moscow that “the location of the leadership of “Detachment 731”, including Ishii, is unknown, and there is no reason to accuse the detachment of war crimes.” . Thus, all the scientists of the “death squad” (which is almost three thousand people), except those who fell into the hands of the USSR, escaped responsibility for their crimes. Many of those who dissected living people became deans of universities, medical schools, academics, and businessmen in post-war Japan. Prince Takeda (cousin of Emperor Hirohito), who inspected the special squad, was also not punished and even headed the Japanese Olympic Committee on the eve of the 1964 Games. And Shiro Ishii himself, the evil genius of Unit 731, lived comfortably in Japan and died only in 1959.

Experiments continue

By the way, as Western media testify, after the defeat of “Detachment 731,” the United States successfully continued a series of experiments on living people.

It is known that the legislation of the vast majority of countries in the world prohibits conducting experiments on people, except in cases where a person voluntarily agrees to the experiments. However, there is information that Americans practiced medical experiments on prisoners until the 70s.
And in 2004, an article appeared on the BBC website claiming that Americans were conducting medical experiments on children from orphanages in New York. It was reported, in particular, that children with HIV were fed extremely poisonous drugs, from which the babies experienced convulsions, their joints swelled so much that they lost the ability to walk and could only roll on the ground.

The article also quoted the words of a nurse from one of the orphanages, Jacqueline, who took in two children, wanting to adopt them. Children's Services administrators took the babies from her by force. The reason was that the woman stopped giving them the prescribed medications, and the students immediately began to feel better. But in court, the refusal to give medications was regarded as child abuse, and Jacqueline was deprived of the right to work in children's institutions.

It turns out that the practice of testing experimental drugs on children was sanctioned federal government USA back in the early 90s. But in theory, every child with AIDS should be assigned a lawyer, who could demand, for example, that children be prescribed only drugs that have already been tested on adults. As the Associated Press found out, most of the children participating in the tests were deprived of such legal support. Despite the fact that the investigation caused a strong resonance in the American press, it did not lead to any tangible result. According to the AP, such tests on abandoned children are still being carried out in the United States.

Thus, inhumane experiments on living people, which were “inherited” to the Americans by the white-coated killer Shiro Ishii, continue even in modern society.

dir. E. Masyuk

The documentary film by Elena Masyuk tells about the events that took place on the territory of modern China during the Second World War.
In 1939, a special detachment 731 was formed in Manchuria. A laboratory was organized in which experiments were carried out on living people.
What happened to the victims of these studies? What was the fate of their executioners? The main focus of the film is on the fate of former executioners in the post-war period.