Inside Unit 731 — Japan’s Disgusting Human Experiment Concentration Camp
Nazi Germany is often held at the top of the list for its abhorrent crimes against humanity. In truth, Hitler was not alone in the inhuman treatment of their enemies. The Japanese leadership committed similar crimes, perhaps even worse.
One such act of brutality is the biological experimentation that happened in a Japanese medical facility called Unit 731. It was set up in 1938 in Japanese-occupied China under the disguise of being a research facility, its actual aim was to develop biological weapons. Prisoners from China, Mongolia, and Russia were brought in and lethal experiments were conducted on them.
Vivisection on Conscious Human Beings
Vivisection is the act of dissecting a human being or animal unanesthetized while he or she is still alive.
The Japanese doctors opened up conscious human beings to study the effects of diseases on them. The subjects were referred to as “logs.” They were usually first injected with a disease such as cholera and then the effects of were observed by operating on the patient while they were still conscious.
In some cases, the limbs of the victims were mutilated, attached to the other side of the body or their circulation cut off to observe the effect of gangrene. When the subjects remained of no use to the doctors, they killed him by shooting or by giving him a lethal injection.
A 72-year-old farmer who used to be a medical assistant in the unit recounts: “I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.” — (Nytimes)
Frostbite Experiments
The Japanese doctors were not mad scientists that needlessly just inflicted horror on the subjects.
These experiments were strategic and designed to study the effects of various phenomena on human body. Since, the cold was something the soldiers often had to endure, brutal trials were conducted to observe the effects and treatment of frostbite.
The subjects were taken out in extremely cold weather and cold water was thrown on them until their limbs were frozen solid. Sometimes of their limbs was submerged in ice-cold water until, according to the eyewitnesses, it made the sound of a plank of wood when struck with a cane. Different methods were then used to thaw the limbs or the victims were left untreated and the time and temperature required for their limbs to reheat were noted.
The Japanese concluded that the water of temperature 100–122-degree Fahrenheit was most suitable to defrost the frozen appendages.
Target Practice On Prisoners
Weapons were tested on people. They were tied to stakes and blasted with various weapons from different ranges to study wound patterns and the effect of bullet penetrations. Japanese also tested effects of poisonous gasses on Chinese prisoners.
Germ testing
Although biological warfare, even during the war had been banned in the 1925 Geneva Convention, the Japanese did not honor this agreement and infected the Chinese with various diseases during the war.
Planes dropped cholera, typhoid, and plague cultures in parts of eastern China. Sometimes plague-infected animals were also released in the various villages of china that were under Japanese occupation.
To develop and study the effectiveness of these cultures, inmates in Unit 731 were infected with the most lethal pathogens known to mankind. After being infected, the victims were put under observation until they showed symptoms of the disease. They were then opened up and their blood was fed to fleas who would carry the infection to the Chinese troops and innocent civilians.
Syphilis Testing
The doctors in Unit 731 were particularly interested in studying the effects and transmission of syphilis.
They focused on devising a treatment for it. They ordered the victims invested with syphilis to rape other subjects. The newly infected patients were then not treated to observe the progression of the disease.
Forced pregnancies
The Japanese doctors raped and impregnated women of childbearing age. They then experimented on them to understand how they affected both the mother and the fetus.
They shot them, infected them with various diseases, and made them suffer other types of injuries. The female subjects were then opened up to study how the fetus had reacted to all this.
They even experimented on infants as young as three days old as a recently published book says:
“Usually a hand of a three-day-old infant is clenched into a fist,” the booklet says, “but by sticking the needle in, the middle finger could be kept straight to make the experiment easier.”
Aftermath
By the time the war ended in 1945, none of the prisoners survived and the death count is reported to as high as 3000 people. The doctors and the supervisors were never tried for their crimes mainly because the US government agreed not to prosecute them in exchange for the results and the reports of the experiments that were conducted.
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