Worst war crimes by a Nation! Japanese war crimes

What are war crimes?

War crimes were considered the part of the whole war incidents that tool place and only sometimes prosecuted at national level. The scenario changed after world war 2 due to extreme loss in life following the events like Jewish holocaust the first tribunal to investigate major war crimes was held in 1945 conducting trials against Nazis.

Japanese war crimes-

Japan’s 731 unit

(Warning: Contains graphic photos and content that some may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.  )

In 1937 and 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army conducted lethal and inhumane human experimentation in northeast China. Mainly on Chinese and Russian populations.

The group conducting the experiments was known as Unit 731, comprising 3,000 researchers, but started with one man—Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro.

Shiro hoped to use his knowledge of science to help make Japan a global power. Then, when the government took an interest in biological weapons following the 1925 Geneva Protocol ban on germ warfare (along with Japan’s acquisition of Manchuria, which made for a high supply of “test subjects”), Shiro set up shop and started conducting some of the most heinous war crimes ever committed in the name of science.

Researchers vivisected prisoners (often without anesthesia)

Injected diseases such as: syphilis, anthrax, and gonorrhea into victims

Raped women to then conduct experiments on their fetuses

Used prisoners as human targets for grenades

Burned people alive

Dropped plague-carrying fleas onto nearby Chinese villages to study how quickly the disease spread.

After committing the most heinous atrocities, many Unit 731 researchers never stood trial for their war crimes.

The United States—eager to beat the Soviet Union in the global arms race, granted them immunity on the condition that they give the U.S. the information they gathered when conducting their experiments.

Two declassified government documents reveal that the U.S. eventually paid over $2.3 million for that data.

Here are the experiments in more detail:

Freezing humans alive:

Yoshimura Hisato (a physiologist assigned to Unit 731), took a special interest in hypothermia. Hisato routinely submerged prisoners’ limbs in a tub of water filled with ice and had them held until the arm or leg had frozen solid and a coat of ice had formed over the skin.

One eyewitness described the limbs making a sound like a plank of wood when struck with a sugarcane.

Hisato also looked at the rapid rewarming of the frozen appendage. He often did this by dousing the limb with hot water, by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the “subject” untreated overnight to see how long it took for the person’s own blood to thaw it out.

Unit 731 Vivisections on live prisoners with no anesthesia.

Thousands of men and women, mostly Chinese communist prisoners, as well as children and elderly farmers were infected with diseases such as cholera and the plague before having their organs removed for examination. This was whilst they were alive and without anesthesia, to study the effects of the disease without the decomposition that occurs after death.

Limbs were amputated and reattached to the other side of the body, while others had their limbs crushed or frozen, or had the circulation cut off to observe the progress of gangrene. Alive and without anesthesia.

After they were done with the bodies, they were either buried alive, shot or given the lethal injection.

Weapon testing on live prisoners

Unit 731 herded prisoners together on a firing range and blasted them from varying ranges with multiple Japanese weapons such as the Nambu 8mm pistol, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Wound patterns and penetration depths were then compared on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates.

Flamethrowers were tested on both covered and exposed skin. Gas chambers were also set up at unit facilities where test subjects were exposed to nerve gas and blister agents.

Bayonets, swords, and knives were also studied in the same way as guns, except the prisoners were usually bound for these tests.

Heavy objects were dropped onto bound prisoners to study crush injuries, people were also locked up and deprived of food and water to learn how long humans could survive without them, and some were allowed to drink only sea water or were given injections of mismatched human/animal blood to study transfusions and their clotting process.

Prolonged X-ray exposure sterilized and killed thousands of research participants. Not to mention inflicting horrible burns when the emitting plates were miscalibrated or held too close to the subjects’ nipples, genitals, or faces.

Unit 731 personnel loaded human beings into large centrifuges and spun them at higher and higher speeds until they lost consciousness and/or died to study the effects of high G-forces on pilots and falling paratroopers. This usually happened around 10 to 15 G’s. Young children showed a lower tolerance for acceleration forces.

Forced rape and injected disease

Unit 731 infected prisoners with the disease and withheld treatment to observe the uninterrupted course of the illness. To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male prisoners were ordered to rape both female and male prisoners, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. If the first exposure failed to establish infection, more rapes would be arranged until it did.

Female prisoners of childbearing age were sometimes forcibly impregnated so that weapon and trauma experiments could be done on them.

After being infected with various diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering crush injuries, bullet wounds, and shrapnel injuries, the pregnant subjects were opened up to study the effects on the fetuses.

Unfortunately there have been no account of any survivors from Unit 731 including children. It was disguised as water purification facility surrounded by high voltage wires and other security measures meaning no common resident could enter or travel around the area. It was deliberately burned down including all the study objects.

In 1982 Japan established a museum at the same place where the Unit 731 operated.