In Japan there is a museum "Detachment 731", the notorious fame of which is the reason for the mass pilgrimage here of tourists from all over the world, but, above all, of the Japanese themselves. However, if a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in Germany causes the Germans to feel shudder, hatred for Nazism and pity for the tortured, then the Japanese, especially young people, most often leave the museum with such an expression as if they had visited a national shrine.
Still, after all, visiting the museum, they learn that many of the members of Detachment 731 after the Second World War continued to live and work in peace in their native Land of the Rising Sun, and even hold positions of responsibility. Including those who performed monstrous biological experiments on people who were brutally brutal than the SS doctor Joseph Mengel.
Death factory
In 1936, a terrible factory started working on the hills of Manchuria. Thousands of living people became its "raw material", and its "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 deceit or kidnap, then conduct terrible experiments on them.
The beginning of this factory of death was laid back 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 mankind assigns science the role of serving good purposes, then Hirohito, without hiding, directly spoke 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 of the matter: by education he was a biologist. He sincerely believed that biological weapons would help Japan conquer the world, and he, a descendant of the goddess Amaterasu, would help him fulfill his divine destiny and rule the universe.
The emperor's ideas about "scientific weapons" inspired the aggressive Japanese military. They were fully aware of the fact that a protracted war against Western powers that were superior in quantitative and qualitative terms could not be won on the basis of the samurai spirit and conventional weapons. Therefore, on behalf of the Japanese General Staff in the early 30s, the Japanese colonel and biologist Shiro Ishii made a long voyage through the bacteriological laboratories of Italy, Germany, the USSR and France, during which he found out in detail all possible details of scientific developments. In a report on the results of this voyage, submitted to the highest echelon of power in Japan, he argued that biological weapons will ensure the superiority of the army of the Land of the Rising Sun. “Unlike artillery shells, bacteriological weapons are not capable of instantly killing manpower, but they quietly hit the human body, bringing a slow but painful death. Ishii asserted. - 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. Let the first attack not be massive - all the same bacteria will multiply and hit targets”…
Unsurprisingly, this optimistic report impressed Japan's top military-political leadership, and it 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 went down in history under the most famous of them - detachment 731.
"Logs" are not people, they are lower than cattle "
The detachment has been deployed 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 color and hope of Japanese science, were selected for the squadron.
The squad was stationed in China, not Japan, for a variety of reasons. First of all, when he was stationed directly in the metropolis, and not in the colony, it was very difficult to observe the regime of complete secrecy. Secondly, in the event of a leak of lethal materials, only the Chinese population was at risk.
Finally, in China, it was easy to find and isolate "logs" - this is how arrogant Japanese bacteriologists dubbed those unfortunates on whom deadly strains were tested and other inhuman experiments were carried out.
“We believed that the 'logs' are not people, that they are even lower than cattle. However, among the scientists and researchers who worked in the detachment, there was no one who at all sympathized with the "logs". Everyone believed that the extermination of “logs” was a completely natural matter,”one of those who served in“detachment 731”said at the Khabarovsk trial.
The most important experiments that were put on the experimental were all kinds of tests of the effectiveness of various strains of the most dangerous epidemic diseases. The "horse" of Shiro Ishii was the plague, the epidemics of which in the Middle Ages completely mowed down the population of the most densely populated cities in the world. It must be admitted that on this path he achieved outstanding successes: by the end of World War II, Detachment 731 had developed a strain of such an extremely dangerous plague bacterium, which was 60 times superior in virulence (the ability to infect the body) of an ordinary infectious bacillus.
The experiments were usually set up in the following way. In special barracks, special sealed cells were set up, where people doomed to death were locked. These rooms were so small that the test subjects could not even move in them. People were injected with a deadly vaccine with a syringe, and then watched various changes in the state of the body for days on end. Then the infected were dissected alive, pulling out the organs and observing how the disease spreads to all organs.
The test subjects were not allowed to die for as long as possible and the dissected organs were not sewn up for days on end, so that these, if I may say so, "doctors" could calmly observe the disease-causing process without bothering with a new autopsy. No anesthesia was used, so that it would not interfere with the "natural" course of the experiment.
The most "lucky" were those of the victims of the newly appeared "experimenters", on whom not bacteria were tested, but gases: these people died faster. “All of the test subjects who died from hydrogen cyanide had crimson-red faces,” one of the officers of “Detachment 731” told the court. “Those who died of mustard gas had their entire bodies burned so that it was impossible to look at the corpse. Our experiments have shown that the endurance of a person is approximately equal to the endurance of a pigeon. In the conditions in which the pigeon died, the experimental person also died."
When the Japanese military became convinced of the effectiveness of the Ishii special detachment, 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 amount of lethal ammunition.
According to the staff, by the end of the war, such a critical mass of epidemic bacteria had accumulated in Detachment 731's vaults that if, under ideal conditions, they were scattered around the globe, they would have been enough to calmly destroy all of humanity …
In July 1944, it was only the principled position of Prime Minister Tojo - an opponent of all-out war - that 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 that were fatal to humans to those that were supposed to destroy livestock and crops. But Tojo was well aware 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 also informed the country's leadership that work on the atomic project is 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 a radioactive atom …
But Detachment 731 was not only concerned with biological weapons. Japanese scientists, following the example of SS fanatics in white coats, also meticulously figured out the limits of the endurance of the human body, for which they conducted the most terrible medical experiments.
For example, doctors from the special squad have empirically concluded that the best way to stop frostbite is not rubbing the affected limbs, but immersing them in water at a temperature of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. “At temperatures below minus 20, the experimental people were taken out into the courtyard at night, forced to lower their bare arms or legs into a barrel of cold water, and then put under an artificial wind until they got frostbite,” a former detachment employee. “Then they tapped the hands with a small stick until they made a sound, as if hitting a piece of wood.”
Then the frostbitten limbs were dipped into water of a certain temperature and, changing the degree, watched with keen interest the death of muscle tissue in 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 squeeze his hand into a fist and not violate the "purity" of the experiment, they drove a needle into his middle finger.
Other victims of the special squad were turned into mummies alive. For this, people were placed in a hotly heated room with the lowest humidity. The man was sweating profusely, begged to drink all the time, but he was not given water until he was completely dry. Then the body was carefully weighed … In the course of these inhuman experiments, it turned out that the human body, completely devoid of moisture, weighs only about 22% of the original mass. This is how the doctors of Detachment 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. “The subject was placed in a vacuum chamber and the air was gradually pumped out,” one of the Ishii detachment trainees recalled at the trial. - As the difference between the external pressure and the pressure in the internal organs increased, his eyes first crawled out, then his face swelled to the size of a large ball, the blood vessels swelled like snakes, and the intestines began to crawl out like a living one. Finally, the man just exploded alive."
In this barbaric way, Japanese doctors determined the permissible high-altitude ceiling for their pilots.
Rather senseless experiments on humans were also carried out, so to speak, out of pure "curiosity" dictated, obviously, by pathological sadism. Whole organs were cut out from the 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 of horses, monkeys, and other animals. And then a living person was subjected to transcendental X-ray radiation. Someone was scalded with boiling water or tested for sensitivity to electric current. Curious "scientists" sometimes filled the lungs of a person with a large amount of smoke or gas, and sometimes they injected rotting pieces of decomposed flesh into the stomach of a living experimental …
According to the testimony of the members of Detachment 731 at the Khabarovsk trial, during the entire period of its existence, at least three thousand people were destroyed in the walls of the laboratories in the course of criminal misanthropic experiments.
However, some researchers believe that this figure is grossly underestimated; the actual victims of the experimental torturers turned out to be much higher.
On a somewhat smaller scale, but just as purposefully, another division of the Japanese army, Detachment 100, also part of the Kwantung Army, and located not far from Detachment 731, was engaged in breeding strains of deadly diseases designed to kill livestock, poultry and crops.
End of the barbarian conveyor
The Soviet Union put the end to the existence of the Japanese death factory. 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.
Hurrying to quickly cover up the traces of criminal experiments, some of the materials were burned by the executioners of Detachment 731 in specially dug pits. They also destroyed all the experimental people who remained alive. Some of the unfortunate "logs" were gassed, 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 kept in flasks in alcohol were hastily thrown into the river. This "exhibition room" could serve as the clearest evidence of the criminal nature of Detachment 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 of it as a kind of far-off for the fact that in the future they will not be persecuted and will be allowed to lead a comfortable existence …
It was 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 member of the bacteriological warfare preparation detachment of war crimes."
And it is no coincidence that, in response to a request from the Soviet side for the extradition and prosecution of members of Detachment 731, Moscow was told by Washington that "the whereabouts of the leadership of Detachment 731, including Shiro Ishii, is unknown, and there are no grounds to accuse the detachment of war crimes."
The court is fair and … humane
Nevertheless, the trial of the captured criminals did take place, only in the Soviet Union. From December 25 to December 30, 1949, in the city of Khabarovsk, the Military Tribunal of the Primorsky Military District considered court cases against 12 former military personnel of the Japanese army, 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 the commission of the Japanese military in the period from 1938 to 1945 of crimes related to the large-scale preparation of bacteriological warfare, as well as its episodic conduct on the territory of China. The defendants were also charged with carrying out numerous inhuman medical experiments on people, during which the "test subjects" inevitably and extremely painfully died.
Twelve former servicemen of the Japanese army were brought to trial in Khabarovsk.
The composition of the defendants was very heterogeneous: from a general in command of an army to a corporal and a medical orderly. This is understandable, since the personnel of Detachment 731, almost in full force, were evacuated to Japan, and the Soviet troops captured only a few of them who were directly involved in the preparation and conduct of bacteriological warfare.
The case was considered in open court by the Military Tribunal of the Primorsky Military District, with the presiding officer, Major General of Justice D. D. Chertkov and members of the tribunal of Colonel of Justice M. L. Ilinitsky and Lieutenant Colonel of Justice I. G. Vorobyov. The state prosecution was supported by the 3rd class counselor of justice L. N. Smirnov. All the accused were provided with qualified lawyers.
Eleven of the defendants pleaded guilty in full to the charges, and the chief of the Kwantung Army's sanitary department, Lieutenant General Kajitsuka Ryuji, pleaded partially guilty. Most of the defendants in the last word repented of their crimes, and only the commander of the Kwantung Army, General Yamada Otozoo, in the last word turned to the argument that was the main one for the defense and the 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.
Defendants Hirazakura Zensaku and Kikuchi Norimitsu in their last speech at the trial expressed the hope that the main organizers and inspirers of the bacteriological warfare will be brought to trial: the Japanese emperor Hirohito, generals Ishii and Wakamatsu.
It should be noted that the Soviet justice, in spite of the widespread opinion from the beginning of Gorbachev's perestroika about its allegedly unlimited severity, passed very mild sentences: none of the defendants was sentenced to death by hanging as a punishment, as it was stipulated in the Decree. Of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the punishment of war criminals, since at the time of the sentencing, 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 in prison camps. All prisoners under the sentence of the Military Tribunal, who had not served their sentences in full, were amnestied in 1956 and were given the opportunity to return to their homeland …
Death put on stream
Determining the production capacity of Detachment 731, the accused Kawashima reported during interrogation: "The production department could produce up to 300 kg of plague bacteria a month." With such an amount of deadly infection, it was possible to exterminate the entire population of the United States …
The commander of the Kwantung Army, General Yamada Otozoo, very frankly admitted during interrogation: "When examining Detachment 731, I was extremely amazed at the scope of the detachment's research and production activities in the manufacture of bacteriological warfare weapons."
The functions of Detachment 100 were similar to those of Detachment 731, with the difference that it produced bacteria intended to infect livestock and crops (rinderpest bacteria, sheep pox, mosaics, glanders, anthrax).
As it was convincingly proved during the trial, along with the production of means of bacteriological warfare, large-scale work was carried out in parallel to search for methods of using bacteriological weapons. Infected fleas were used to spread 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 called the Ishii bomb. The main feature of this bomb was that it had a porcelain case, where fleas infected with bacteria were placed. The bomb exploded at an altitude 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 proved that detachments 731 and 100 of the Japanese army went far beyond laboratory and field tests of bacteriological weapons and embarked on the path of practical use of the weapons they created in combat conditions.
The well-known Russian expert on 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 the question of the use of bacteriological weapons was not considered at the Tokyo trial, and only one document was mentioned about conducting experiments on people, 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 in the course of hostilities. The indictment detailed 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, with a large supply of plague-infected fleas. In the Ningbo area, a large area was contaminated from an aircraft, as a result of which a severe plague epidemic broke out in the area, about which Chinese newspapers wrote. 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 divisions of Detachment 731, Lieutenant Colonel Oota, using plague-infected fleas sprayed from aircraft, 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 to Central China, where the Japanese army was defeated and retreated at that time.
The sinister plans of the Japanese militarists for the large-scale use of bacteriological weapons were disrupted as a result of the rapid offensive of the Soviet Army in August 1945.
How Soviet soldiers saved the population of Eurasia, and perhaps the whole of humanity from infection with pathogenic strains, is colorfully shown in the 1981 feature film (USSR, Mongolia, East Germany) "Through the Gobi and Khingan", filmed by filmmaker Vasily Ordynsky.
… To hide the evidence of preparations for conducting bacteriological warfare, the Japanese command issued orders to eliminate detachments 731 and 100 and to destroy traces of their activities. At the same time, as announced at the trial, another crime was committed when, in order to eliminate living witnesses with the help of potassium cyanide added to food, they killed most of the prisoners in Detachment 731. Those who did not take the poisoned food were shot through the viewing windows. in the cells. The prison building, where the future test subjects were kept, was blown up with dynamite and aerial 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, handed a special note to the governments of the United States, Great Britain and China. On February 3, 1950, the note was published in the Soviet press. This document cited 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. However, it would be unfair to leave unpunished the other main organizers and inspirers of these heinous crimes."
The note listed among such war criminals the top leaders of Japan, including Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, who was charged with issuing secret decrees to create a special center for the preparation of bacteriological warfare in Manchuria for the Japanese army, known as Detachment 731, and its branches.
In connection with what was stated in the note, the government of the USSR insisted on appointing in the near future a special International Military Court and handing it over to it as war criminals, convicted of committing the gravest war crimes.
However, the diplomatic demarche of the Soviet government was doomed to a sad failure. After all, the "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 only had to be remembered …
The Americans did not want to bring the main organizers of the preparation for bacteriological warfare Shiro Ishii and Kitano Masazo, who replaced him as the leader of Detachment 731 in March 1942, who were also indicated in the note of the Soviet government, and the Americans did not want to bring them to trial.
In exchange for guaranteed safety, Ishii and Kitano passed on valuable classified information concerning bacteriological weapons to American specialists in this field.
According to the Japanese researcher S. Morimura, the Americans allocated a special room in Tokyo for Ishii, where he was busy 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 impudent hypocrisy that "the whereabouts of the leadership of Detachment 731, including Ishii, are unknown and there are no grounds to accuse the detachment of war crimes."
The Soviet proposal to create a new International Military Court turned out to be unacceptable for the United States also because at that time they had already begun to release Japanese war criminals convicted by the American military courts of occupation in Japan. Only at the end of 1949, just as the trial of the creators of bacteriological weapons was under way in Khabarovsk, the Commission on 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 note from the USSR from the United States was the publication on March 7, 1950 by General D. MacArthur of Circular No. 5, which explicitly stated that all Japanese war criminals who were serving sentences under court sentences could be released.
This was the reason for the statement by the USSR government of another note to the US government on May 11, 1950, where such intentions were assessed as an attempt to change or completely cancel the decision of the International Court of Justice in Tokyo, which, in the opinion of the Soviet side, constituted a gross violation of elementary norms and principles of international law.
There was no 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 United States and Great Britain …
Thus, all the scientists of the "death squad" (which is almost three thousand people), except for those who fell into the hands of the USSR, escaped responsibility for their criminal experiments.
Many of those who infected with pathogenic bacteria and dissected living people became fine-looking 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 stocks of deadly strains and viruses, not only did not incur 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 "truthful" materials about the samurai knights from Detachment 731, who later glorified their "exploits" in the exposition of a museum in Japan, opened in 1978 …
