UNIT 731--JAPAN'S WW@ DEATH LABORATORY in Manchuria
Mio, a former officer of the “kempei-tai,” Japan’s notorious wartime military police, testified that he arrested and sent Chinese men to Unit 731, known as the “Ishii Unit” under orders of the unit’s commander, General Shiro Ishii.
The kempei-tai alone sent close to 600 Chinese prisoners to Unit 731, according to Mio. “It was all a big secret. We didn’t know what that unit did, but we knew that it was a frightening unit and that once you were sent there, you never came back alive,” he said.
While he was not directly involved in experiments conducted by Unit 731, he said he also bore responsibility as the unit would not have been able to operate without people like him. “Unit 731 was able to exist because of the kempei-tai, which provided it with people to experiment on. Sending someone to Unit 731 was an act of murder,” Mio said.
The atrocities continued throughout the war, but were mild, in many ways, compared to what went on at Unit 731, located at Pingfan, Manchuria, just outside the city of Harbin.
The Japanese called this place the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit of the Kwantung Army. We called it what it was -- a Death Camp.
Unit 731 had a compound of 150 buildings. A part of this compound, Ro Block, was reserved for experiments on live human prisoners. Prisoners would be brought in and used as guinea pigs: men, women, and children -- Asians and Caucasians.
They were called "maruta", meaning "logs of wood".
Some prisoners were purposely infected with disease: cholera, typhoid, anthrax, plague, syphilis. Others were cut up while they were still alive to see what happened in the successive stages of hemorragic fever. Others had their blood siphoned off and replaced with horse blood.
Many others were shot, burned with flame-throwers, blown up with explosives and left to develop gas gangrene, bombarded with lethal doses of X-rays, whirled to death in giant centrifuges, subjected to high pressure in sealed chambers until their eyes popped out of their sockets, electrocuted, dehydrated, frozen, and even boiled alive.
Two prisoners were put on a diet of water and biscuits and then worked nonstop, circling the compound loaded with twenty-kilogram sandbags on their backs until they dropped dead. One lasted longer than the other -- about two months. This was supposed to be research into malnutrition, like the Minnesota experiment -- but, done the Japanese Army way, it was to the death.
Of all the thousands of POW's taken to Unit 731, not a single prisoner survived. To the last man they were slaughtered. It is also a fact that Japan had plans to slaughter the entire prisoner population if and when we invaded their homeland.
OTHER ATROCITIES
Ro Block at Pingfan was where the Japanese kept killing human experimental subjects under so called scientifically controlled conditions: but the book on starvation, torture and murder could have been written on the tortured dead bodies of prisoners in Japanese prison camps anywhere.
It seems that nothing would stop the Japanese doctors from experimenting on POW's, civilians and or local natives.
For example, a doctor at Rabaul on New Britain took blood from Japanese guards with malaria and injected it into POW's, in an attempt to prove -- contrary to accepted medical doctrine -- that there was such a thing as immunity to malaria. He told the POW's he wanted to go to the United States after the war, to the New York clinic, and that if his experiments were successful he might become a very famous man.
At Shinagawa, the head doctor did operations and gave injections no Western doctor would have approved: caprilic acid, soybean extract, sulfur, castor oil, serum from malaria patients, and urine. He enjoyed seeing pain; he bled men to death for plasma.
In another camp, a POW was tied to a tree, his fingernails torn out, his body cut open, and his heart removed. On the Japanese home island of Kyushu, some doctors used prisoners as guinea pigs to see if they could live with parts of their brain and liver cut out. In China, Japanese doctors shot living men in the stomach so they could practice removing bullets out of wounds. They amputated arms and legs, sewed intestines together, and took out teeth and appendixes and brains and testicles -- all for "practice". One doctor, with two prisoners to "practice" on, chopped the head off one to test his own strength.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Warning: below pictures are very graphic.
http://images.google.com.sg/images?...esult_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CB4QsAQwAw
Mio, a former officer of the “kempei-tai,” Japan’s notorious wartime military police, testified that he arrested and sent Chinese men to Unit 731, known as the “Ishii Unit” under orders of the unit’s commander, General Shiro Ishii.
The kempei-tai alone sent close to 600 Chinese prisoners to Unit 731, according to Mio. “It was all a big secret. We didn’t know what that unit did, but we knew that it was a frightening unit and that once you were sent there, you never came back alive,” he said.
While he was not directly involved in experiments conducted by Unit 731, he said he also bore responsibility as the unit would not have been able to operate without people like him. “Unit 731 was able to exist because of the kempei-tai, which provided it with people to experiment on. Sending someone to Unit 731 was an act of murder,” Mio said.
The atrocities continued throughout the war, but were mild, in many ways, compared to what went on at Unit 731, located at Pingfan, Manchuria, just outside the city of Harbin.
The Japanese called this place the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit of the Kwantung Army. We called it what it was -- a Death Camp.
Unit 731 had a compound of 150 buildings. A part of this compound, Ro Block, was reserved for experiments on live human prisoners. Prisoners would be brought in and used as guinea pigs: men, women, and children -- Asians and Caucasians.
They were called "maruta", meaning "logs of wood".
Some prisoners were purposely infected with disease: cholera, typhoid, anthrax, plague, syphilis. Others were cut up while they were still alive to see what happened in the successive stages of hemorragic fever. Others had their blood siphoned off and replaced with horse blood.
Many others were shot, burned with flame-throwers, blown up with explosives and left to develop gas gangrene, bombarded with lethal doses of X-rays, whirled to death in giant centrifuges, subjected to high pressure in sealed chambers until their eyes popped out of their sockets, electrocuted, dehydrated, frozen, and even boiled alive.
Two prisoners were put on a diet of water and biscuits and then worked nonstop, circling the compound loaded with twenty-kilogram sandbags on their backs until they dropped dead. One lasted longer than the other -- about two months. This was supposed to be research into malnutrition, like the Minnesota experiment -- but, done the Japanese Army way, it was to the death.
Of all the thousands of POW's taken to Unit 731, not a single prisoner survived. To the last man they were slaughtered. It is also a fact that Japan had plans to slaughter the entire prisoner population if and when we invaded their homeland.
OTHER ATROCITIES
Ro Block at Pingfan was where the Japanese kept killing human experimental subjects under so called scientifically controlled conditions: but the book on starvation, torture and murder could have been written on the tortured dead bodies of prisoners in Japanese prison camps anywhere.
It seems that nothing would stop the Japanese doctors from experimenting on POW's, civilians and or local natives.
For example, a doctor at Rabaul on New Britain took blood from Japanese guards with malaria and injected it into POW's, in an attempt to prove -- contrary to accepted medical doctrine -- that there was such a thing as immunity to malaria. He told the POW's he wanted to go to the United States after the war, to the New York clinic, and that if his experiments were successful he might become a very famous man.
At Shinagawa, the head doctor did operations and gave injections no Western doctor would have approved: caprilic acid, soybean extract, sulfur, castor oil, serum from malaria patients, and urine. He enjoyed seeing pain; he bled men to death for plasma.
In another camp, a POW was tied to a tree, his fingernails torn out, his body cut open, and his heart removed. On the Japanese home island of Kyushu, some doctors used prisoners as guinea pigs to see if they could live with parts of their brain and liver cut out. In China, Japanese doctors shot living men in the stomach so they could practice removing bullets out of wounds. They amputated arms and legs, sewed intestines together, and took out teeth and appendixes and brains and testicles -- all for "practice". One doctor, with two prisoners to "practice" on, chopped the head off one to test his own strength.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Warning: below pictures are very graphic.
http://images.google.com.sg/images?...esult_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CB4QsAQwAw
