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 to occupy positions of responsibility. Even those who performed biological experiments on humans in the infamous special "unit 731". This is not much different from the experiments of Dr. Josef Mengel. The cruelty and cynicism of such experiments does not fit into modern human consciousness, but they were quite organic for the Japanese of that time. After all, the “victory of the emperor” was at stake then, and he was sure that only science could give this victory.
Once a terrible factory started working on the hills of Manchuria. Thousands of living people became its "raw material", and "products" could destroy all of humanity in a few months … Chinese peasants were afraid to even approach a strange city. Nobody knew for certain what was going on inside, behind the fence. But in a whisper they told horror: they say, the Japanese kidnap or lure people there by deceit, over 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 the Enlightened World") for the period of his reign. Hirohito believed in the power of science: “Science has always been the best friend of assassins. 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 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 this world.
The emperor's ideas about "scientific weapons" found support among the aggressive Japanese military. They understood that a protracted war against the Western powers could not be won on the basis of the samurai spirit and conventional weapons. Therefore, on behalf of the Japanese military department in the early 30s, the 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 ranks of Japan, he convinced everyone present that biological weapons would be of great benefit to 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. 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,”Ishii said. It is not surprising that his "incendiary" report impressed the leadership of the Japanese military department, and it allocated funds for the creation of a special complex for the development of biological weapons. Throughout its existence, this complex has had several names, the most famous of which is "detachment 731".
They were called "logs"
The detachment was deployed in 1936 near the village of Pingfang (at that time the territory of the state of Manchukuo). It consisted of nearly 150 buildings. The detachment included graduates of the most prestigious Japanese universities, the flower of Japanese science.
The squad was stationed in China, not Japan, for several reasons. First, when it was deployed in the metropolis, it was very difficult to maintain the secrecy regime. Second, if the materials were leaked, the Chinese population would be affected, not the Japanese. Finally, in China, "logs" were always at hand - as the scientists of this special unit called those on whom the deadly strains were tested.
“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 the “logs” was a completely natural thing,”said one of the officers of“Detachment 731”.
Profile experiments that were put on the experimental were testing 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 the plague bacterium 60 times superior in virulence (the ability to infect the body) the usual.
The experiments were carried out mainly as follows. The detachment had special cells (where people were locked up) - they were so small that the prisoners could not move in them. People were infected with the infection, and then they watched the changes in the state of their body for days. Then they were dissected alive, pulling out the organs and observing how the disease spreads inside. People were spared their lives and did not have them sewn up for days on end, so that doctors could observe the process without bothering themselves with a new autopsy. At the same time, no anesthesia was usually used - the doctors feared that it could disrupt the natural course of the experiment.
More "fortunate" were those of the victims of the "experimenters" who were tested not with bacteria, but with gases: these died faster. “All the test subjects who died from hydrogen cyanide had crimson-red faces,” said one of the officers of “Detachment 731”. “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 plans for the use of bacteriological weapons against the United States 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 were scattered around the globe under ideal conditions, this would have been enough to destroy all of humanity.
In July 1944, it was only the position of Prime Minister Tojo that saved the United States from disaster. The Japanese planned to use balloons to transport strains of various viruses to American territory - from those that are fatal to humans to those that will destroy livestock and crops. But Todjo understood that Japan was already clearly losing the war, and when attacked with biological weapons, America could respond in kind, so the monstrous plan never materialized.
122 degrees Fahrenheit
But "Unit 731" was not only engaged in biological weapons. Japanese scientists also wanted to know the limits of the endurance of the human body, for which they conducted terrible medical experiments.
For example, doctors from the special squad found that the best way to treat frostbite was not rubbing the affected limbs, but immersing them in water at a temperature of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Found out empirically. “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,” said a former special squad officer. “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 placed in water of a certain temperature and, changing it, we observed the death of muscle tissue on the hands. Among such experimental subjects was a three-day-old child: so that he would not squeeze his hand into a fist and not violate the "purity" of the experiment, a needle was stuck in his middle finger.
Some of the victims of the special squad suffered another terrible fate: they were turned alive into mummies. For this, people were placed in a hotly heated room with low humidity. The man was sweating profusely, but he was not allowed to drink until he was completely dry. Then the body was weighed, and it turned out that it weighs about 22% of the original mass. This is exactly how another “discovery” was made in the “unit 731”: the human body is 78% water.
For the Imperial Air Force, experiments were carried out in pressure chambers. “The subject was placed in a vacuum chamber and the air was gradually pumped out,” recalled one of the Ishii detachment trainees. - 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. This is how the Japanese doctors determined the permissible high-altitude ceiling for their pilots.
There were also experiments just for "curiosity". Individual organs were excised from the living body; cut off the arms and legs and sewn back, swapping the right and left limbs; poured the blood of horses or monkeys into the human body; put under the most powerful X-ray radiation; scalding various parts of the body with boiling water; tested for sensitivity to electric current. Curious scientists filled the lungs of a person with a large amount of smoke or gas, injected rotting pieces of tissue into the stomach of a living person.
According to the recollections of the employees of the special squad, 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 the bloody experimenters.
Information of extreme importance
The Soviet Union put an end to the existence of Detachment 731. On August 9, 1945, Soviet troops launched an offensive against the Japanese army, and the "detachment" 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 honorably allowed to commit suicide. The exhibits of the "exhibition room" were also thrown into the river - a huge hall where severed human organs, limbs, heads cut in various ways were kept in flasks. This "exhibition room" could become the clearest proof of the inhuman nature of "Unit 731".
“It is unacceptable that even one of these drugs should fall into the hands of the advancing Soviet troops,” the leadership of the special squad told its subordinates.
But some of the most important materials have been preserved. They were taken out by Shiro Ishii and some other leaders of the detachment, passing all this to the Americans - as a kind of ransom for their freedom. And, as the Pentagon said at the time, "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 Japanese army's bacteriological warfare preparation unit for 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 whereabouts of the leadership of" Detachment 731 ", including Ishii, are unknown, and there are no grounds to accuse the detachment of war crimes." … Thus, all the scientists of the "death squad" (and this is almost three thousand people), except for 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, academicians, 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 "Detachment 731", lived comfortably in Japan and died only in 1959.
Experiments continue
By the way, as the 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 absolute majority of countries in the world prohibits conducting experiments on humans, with the exception of those cases when a person voluntarily agrees to experiments. Nevertheless, there is information that Americans practiced medical experiments on prisoners up to the 70s.
And in 2004, an article appeared on the BBC website claiming that the Americans were conducting medical experiments on inmates of orphanages in New York. It was reported, in particular, that children with HIV were fed extremely poisonous drugs, from which the babies had seizures, the joints swelled so that they lost the ability to walk and could only roll on the ground.
The article also quoted a nurse from one of the orphanages, Jacqueline, who adopted two children, wishing to adopt them. The administrators of the Children's Office took the babies away from her by force. The reason was that the woman stopped giving them the prescribed medication, and the inmates immediately began to feel better. But in court, the refusal to give medicine 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 by the US federal government 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 who participated 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 AR, such tests on abandoned children are still going on in the United States.
Thus, the inhuman experiments on living people, which were "inherited" by the killer in the white coat Shiro Ishii, continue even in modern society.
I strongly advise against watching people with a weak psyche, pregnant women and children
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 under it, in which experiments were carried out on living people.
What happened to the victims of this research? How was the fate of their executioners? The main focus of the film is on the fate of the former executioners in the post-war period.
