The Forgotten Horrors of Unit 731

The crimes they covered up for science.

As the final months of World War II saw the liberation of hundreds of concentration camps, the true horror was unveiled. The Nazis would always be known for the inhumane acts they had subjected many to.

In Japan, many acts were carried out equally as inhumane and disgusting. These events, though, were not so well publicised, and few people learned the extent of their crimes until recently.

The Japanese army kidnapped girls to serve as their comfort women and used human beings for medical experiments in a unit they labelled 731. Although biological and chemical weapons were not unheard of in warfare, what was unknown was the testing of these weapons on human subjects.

Colonel Shiro Ishii

Twenty years before the war started, Japan had contributed heavily to medical science. The Japanese believed that the greatest enemy in war was not the army you were fighting, but the diseases that soldiers contracted. Around this time, they signed the Geneva Convention, which prohibited biological and chemical warfare.

Colonel Shiro Ishii saw this as an opportunity to develop weapons in biology. He was a highly intelligent but arrogant and immoral physician. He broke the ethical code and encouraged other doctors to do the same.

The Imperial Army backed his efforts. Ishii convinced senior army members by skirting Japan’s obligation to uphold the Geneva Convention or question the morality of these weapons.

He argued that bacteria and gas weapons were far more lethal and cheaper to manufacture than the costs of building and maintaining conventional armies.

China

In September 1931, Japanese forces began a battle with China and took over Manchuria. The area was the perfect place to begin testing Ishii’s new weapons. He was free to conduct any experiment that he saw as beneficial.

The following year, the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory was established in an army hospital in Tokyo. The unit became known as Unit 731.

To produce these weapons, Ishii stated that animal subjects would not provide suitable data; human subjects were needed. Japan’s control over Manchuria supplied the necessary research materials.

Men and women were taken from the streets and carried off in black vans to the cells in Unit 731. Japan’s Kempeitai, the military police, were tasked with these kidnappings. They were the Japanese version of the Gestapo.

Larger Facilities

In 1932, Ishii built the first biological and chemical weapons facility in Harbin, southwest of Manchuria. It was ideal as it had an airport and a nearby rail line to move the victims.

Ishii recruited the top scientists and doctors for the work and labelled those who would not participate as traitors. Most of them saw the work as their service to the Emperor; the fact that they were killing non-Japanese did not concern them.

The budget was ten million yen a year; salaries were generous. The unit had state-of-the-art equipment and the factory itself was luxurious. The food was considered exceptional for those who worked in the facility. The subjects were not treated to the same luxuries.

Ping Fang

When forty prisoners escaped, the Harbin operation was closed and moved to a nearby suburb, Ping Fang, in 1939. The prisoners were all captured and killed.

The new facility was a walled city that contained seventy buildings. Within the complex was a prison that housed five hundred men, women, and children selected for vivisection.

These subjects were poisoned with disease, and their organs were removed to be examined. All of these procedures were carried out without the use of anaesthetics.

Prisoners were infected with lethal pathogens, examined, and tortured in some of the most inhumane ways imaginable. One of their experiments involved placing hands on ice until frostbitten and experimenting with ways to restore feeling.

I never used to consider talking about it… But having great‑grandchildren … I had to speak out. … There were rows of jars… full of human bodies … children; ten or twenty of them… I was dumbfounded. - Survivor

More Locations

These were not the only facilities known as Unit 731; there were other locations in Nanking, Beijing, and Changchun. It is thought that at the height of the experiments, there were 20,000 personnel working across all sites.

All of these locations came under the command of Ishii. Between 1938 and 1939, the Soviet Union and Japan began to clash.

Ishii facilitated dropping biological weapons on Soviet soldiers; this included poisoning water supplies with typhoid and releasing plague-infected insects. None of these attacks succeeded.

Japanese Attack

As Japan fell in 1945, Ishii forbade researchers from discussing their work and ordered the demolition of the Harbin headquarters.

One of the least-known attacks by Japan occurred when they attacked Canada and the United States in 1944. After the war, records uncovered that Japan had released 9,000 balloon bombs into the jet stream.

More than two hundred reached the US. Six people were killed in Oregon when a bomb exploded. Ishii had proposed that the balloons be filled with cattle plague and anthrax. It is unclear whether they were or not.

No Justice

At the end of World War II, Lt. Col. Murray Sanders recommended to President Harry Truman that Ishii and his doctors be given immunity from prosecution as war criminals in return for the research data from Unit 731.

Truman approved the deal, and Japan’s weapons and testing regime remained hidden until 1990. The information turned over to the US proved worthless; the human subjects had provided no better results than could have been obtained through animal testing.

Most of those who worked in Unit 731 walked away as free men. Immune from prosecution, the doctors went on to have promising careers in prominent universities and hospitals.

Dr Ishii returned to private practice and died in 1959 of throat cancer. The Soviet Union remains the only country to bring anyone associated with Unit 731 to trial.

In 1998, one hundred Chinese plaintiffs filed a suit demanding that the Japanese government acknowledge the crimes of Unit 731.

The Tokyo Court ruled on 26 August 2002 that Unit 731 had indeed waged germ warfare on China and caused significant harm to the population. However, the court then dismissed the plaintiffs’ claim for compensation.

Unit 731 conducted experiments on an estimated 3,000 Chinese and Korean prisoners.

Further Reading

If this glimpse into the horrors of Unit 731 shook you, there’s more where that came from.

No Honour in Victory rips the veil off wartime atrocities that the history books buried, from chemical warfare to cover-ups, and the victims they tried to silence.

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