At one time, a terrible factory began to work on the territory of the hills of Manchuria. They used living people as "raw materials". And the "products" that were made in this place could wipe out its entire population from the face of the earth in a relatively short period of time.
Peasants never approached this territory without special need. No one knew what the Japanese "death camps" ("Detachment 731" included) were hiding. But there were a lot of terrible rumors about what was going on there. It was said that terrible and painful experiments were carried out on people there.
Special "Squad 731" was a secret death laboratory where the Japanese invented and tested the most terrible ways of torturing and destroying people. Here the threshold of endurance of the human body, the border between life and death, was determined.
Hong Kong Battle
During World War II, the Japanese captured that part of China called Manchuria. After the famous battle near Pearl Harbor, more than 140 thousand people were taken prisoner, one in four of them were killed. Thousands of women were tortured, raped and killed.
In the book of the famous American historian and journalist JohnToland described a large number of cases of violence of captives by the military. For example, in the Battle of Hong Kong, local British, Eurasians, Chinese and Portuguese fought off the Japanese who attacked them. Just before Christmas, they were completely surrounded and captured on the narrow Stanley Peninsula. There were a lot of slaughtered, butchered, wounded and raped Chinese and British medical workers. This marked a humiliating end to British rule on Chinese soil. A more terrible character was characteristic only of the atrocities of the Japanese against prisoners, which Japan is still trying to hide. "Factory of death" ("Squad 731" and others) - among them.
Death camp
But even all together the atrocities were nothing compared to what the Japanese were doing in this unit. It was located near the city of Harbin, in Manchuria. In addition to being a death camp, Unit 731 was also the site of various experiments. On its territory, studies of bacteriological weapons were carried out, for which the living Chinese population was used.
In order for the leading Japanese specialists to be fully engaged in solving the assigned tasks, they needed laboratory assistants and middle technical personnel. To do this, schools were specially selected talented teenagers who really wanted to learn, but were low-income. They were given a very quick discipline training, after which they became specialists and were part of the technical staff of the institution.
Characteristic features of the camp
What were the Japanese "death camps" hiding? Detachment 731 was a complex that included 150 structures. Block R0 was located in its central part, where experiments were carried out on living people. Some of them were specially injected with cholera bacteria, typhoid fever, anthrax, plague, syphilis. Others were pumped with horse blood instead of human blood.
Many were shot, burned alive with mortars, blown up, bombarded with huge doses of X-rays, dehydrated, frozen and even boiled alive. Not a single person survived from those who were here. They killed absolutely everyone whom fate brought to this concentration camp "Detachment 731".
Criminals are not punished
The United States granted an amnesty to all Japanese doctors and scientists who carried out atrocities during that period of time. According to the results of the research, the one who founded the "Detachment 731" - Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii and the people around him - were amnestied immediately after the fall of Japan in 1945. These individuals paid for their release from punishment by providing the US authorities with full and valuable information about the results of the tests.
Among them were "field trials", during which civilians in China and Russia were infected with the deadly bacteria of anthrax and plague. As a result, they all died. When Japan was supposed to surrender in 1945,the head of Shiro Ishii decided to kill absolutely all the prisoners who were in the "death camps". The same fate was provided for employees, security guards and members of their families. He himself lived until 1959. Shiro Ishii's cause of death is cancer.
Block R0
Block R0 is where Japanese doctors conduct experiments. They involved prisoners of war or local natives. In order to prove the existence of immunity to malaria, the doctor Rabaul injected the blood of the guards into prisoners of war. Other scientists have been studying the effects of injecting a variety of bacteria. They dismembered their test subjects in order to determine the nature and characteristics of a particular impact.
Some people were intentionally shot in the stomach area. Then the Japanese practiced pulling bullets on them, amputating human organs. Unit 731 was also known for a very widespread experiment, the main essence of which was to cut out part of the liver of living prisoners. This was done in order to determine the limit of endurance.
When two of the prisoners attempted to escape, they were shot in the legs, dismembered and cut out the liver. The Japanese said that they had to observe working human organs for the first time. However, despite the horror of these operations, they considered them very informative and useful, as well as the "Detachment 731" itself.
It also happened that a prisoner of war was tied to a tree, his arms and legs were pulled out, his torso was cut andamputated heart. Some prisoners had part of their brain or liver removed to see if they could live with the defective organ.
They were mistaken for "logs"
There were several reasons for placing this Japanese concentration camp - Detachment 731 - in China and not in Japan. These include:
- observance of secrecy;
- in the event of force majeure, the population of China, not the Japanese, was put at risk;
- constant availability of "logs" needed for deadly tests.
He alth workers did not consider "logs" as people. And none of them showed even the slightest sympathy for them. Everyone was inclined to think that this is a natural process, and this is how it should be.
Features of experiments
Profile type of experiments on prisoners - the test of the plague. Shortly before the end of the war, Ishii developed a strain of the plague bacterium, the virulence of which was 60 times greater than normal.
The way the experiments were conducted was about the same:
- people were locked in special cells, where, due to their small size, they could not even turn around;
- then prisoners of war were infected;
- observed the ongoing changes in the state of the body;
- after that, a preparation was performed, organs were taken out and the features of the spread of the disease inside a person were analyzed.
Manifestations of the highest degree of inhumanity
Whenpeople were not killed, but they were not sewn up either. The doctor could monitor the ongoing changes for several days. At the same time, it was not necessary to bother yourself once again and carry out a second autopsy. In addition, absolutely no anesthesia was used, as, according to doctors, it could disrupt the natural course of the study disease.
It was considered a great "luck" among the people who were brought to Unit 731 to be used for experiments using the gas. In this case, death came much faster. In the course of the most terrible experiments, it was proved that human endurance in its strength is almost equal to the endurance of pigeons. After all, the latter died in the same conditions as a person.
When the effectiveness of Ishii's work was proved, the Japanese military began to develop plans for the use of weapons of a bacteriological nature against the USA and the USSR. At the same time, there were so many "ammunition" that they would be enough to destroy all people on earth. And the Kwantung Detachment 731 was involved in the development of each of them in one way or another.
Crimes covered until our time
No one knew what the Japanese were doing with the captured peoples. According to them, the prisoners were simply treated, and there were absolutely no violations. When the war was just starting, there were various reports of atrocities in Hong Kong and Singapore. But none of all officialUS protests received no response. After all, the government of this country was well aware that even if they condemn or admit what the Kwantung army (including Detachment 731) was doing, this would in no way affect the safety of prisoners of war.
So officially they refused to bring the perpetrators to justice in exchange for receiving the "scientific" data collected on the "logs". They were able not only to forgive so many deaths, but also to keep them a secret for many years.
Practically all the scientists who worked in the "Squad 731" were not punished. The exceptions are those who fell into the hands of the USSR. The rest soon began to head the universities, medical schools, academies of post-war Japan. Some of them became businessmen. One of those "experimenters" took the chair of the governor of Tokyo, the other - the president of the Japan Medical Association. Also among those who founded "Unit 731" (whose photographs testify to those terrible experiments), there are many military men and doctors. Some of them even opened private maternity hospitals.
