The new release book UNIT 731: The Japanese Auschwitz, by James and Lance Morcan, leaves readers in no doubt this World War Two Japanese concentration camp, located in northeast China, truly was a place of unimaginable evils – as the following excerpt from the book reveals.
Unit 731 as it is today.
Be warned, the following excerpt is not an easy read…
Unit 731 had already established itself as a center of highly secretive biological warfare research by the start of World War Two. However, it wasn’t until conflict in China intensified and global conflict loomed that the atrocities occurring inside the Manchurian complex sank to unprecedented depths of immorality.
With ambitious General Ishii at the helm, Unit 731 was transformed into a chamber of horrors where thousands of mainly Chinese civilians (men, women, and children) were interned and subjected to the cruelest experiments. Experiments that blurred the line between science and sadism, or civilization and depravity perhaps.
In this chapter, we provide a fulsome account of those experiments, using survivor testimonies and historical reports as our source while comparing these with Nazi medical atrocities at Auschwitz.
Dissection of live subjects
Vivisection and surgical experiments without the use of anesthesia were among the most horrific practices at Unit 731 with vivisection, or the dissection of live people, perhaps being the worst of all.
After being deliberately infected with pathogens such as syphilis or plague, inmates were then dissected alive to observe the progression of disease in organs. The effects of frostbite, burns, and chemical exposure were also scrutinized.
Anesthesia wasn’t an option as the surgeons knew it would interfere with results. Little wonder that victims usually had to be tied down while their bodies were cut open and their organs removed for studying.
Some were subjected to amputations, having limbs removed and reattached in often grotesque configurations while others had stomachs surgically removed, esophagi reconnected to intestines, or lungs exposed to observe the results of various types of infection.
Systematic torture
Records show that these experiments were not isolated acts of cruelty, but systematic practices conducted on large numbers of prisoners who were simply treated as expendable. They also show that survivors recalled the screams of victims echoing inside the walls of Unit 731.
Because the unit’s primary mission was the development of biological weapons, inmates were deliberately infected with deadly pathogens. These included plague bacteria delivered courtesy of laboratory-bred fleas, and many plague victims were dissected to study the spread of infection in lymph nodes and lungs.
Inmates were forced to drink contaminated water or were injected with bacteria to enable studies of the effects of cholera and typhoid. One upshot of this was outbreaks of one or other of those diseases were later engineered in Chinese villages, causing mass civilian deaths.
Anthrax subjects were infected to test lethality and transmission of that terrible disease, and anthrax spores were also tested on livestock, highlighting the program’s military applications.
Rape of prisoners commonplace
Rape was a common occurrence at Unit 731.
Prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis, often through rape, to study progression of that notorious disease, and pregnant women were also infected with syphilis to observe transmission of the disease to fetuses.
Victims were exposed to variola virus, the highly contagious virus that causes smallpox, to enable the study of that dreadful disease; the resulting lesions and organ damage were studied through vivisection.
The Japanese, like the Germans, were sticklers for meticulous documentation of experiments, tests and events, and so the experiments conducted at Unit 731 were well documented.
The resulting data was traded to the United States after the war. But that’s a whole other story, which is addressed in later chapters.
Chinese death toll in the hundreds of thousands
The records referred to above show that the scale of pathogen testing at Unit 731 was vast with estimates suggesting field deployments killed hundreds of thousands across China while thousands died directly in laboratories inside the unit itself.
Manchuria’s harsh winters lend themselves well to the study of frostbite and hypothermia.
Prisoners at Unit 731 were forced to stand outside in subzero temperatures until their limbs were frozen solid. Experimental treatments for this included having salt rubbed into their skin, being immersed in hot water, or being burnt with a naked flame.
It’s no surprise that victims often died from shock or lost limbs to gangrene.
One testimonial describes inmates having one or both arms held in ice water until frozen and then being struck with sticks to test their brittleness while others were stripped naked and exposed to freezing winds to subject them to hypothermia.
The perpetrators justified these particular experiments by claiming they were aimed at developing treatments for Japanese soldiers fighting in cold climates.
Unit a weapons testing site
Unit 731 also served as a testing site for both conventional and chemical weapons.
The former included the use of grenades and flamethrowers while the latter entailed the use of chemical agents.
Grenades and bombs were tested on prisoners who were secured to stakes and subjected to the resulting explosions while flamethrowers were used on live captives to measure the severity of burns.
Mustard gas and phosgene were among the chemical agents tested with victims then being dissected to study lung damage.
The line between battlefield testing and execution was essentially blurred with these experiments with victims being reduced to little more than playthings, their deaths rationalized as data points to better equip Japanese soldiers in the front line.
In the following chapter we explore Unit 731’s biological weapons (experimentation and testing) in more detail.
Brutality mirrored
Once again, the experiments mirrored the brutality of Nazi experiments at Auschwitz where prisoners were exposed to similar chemical agents and sterilization procedures.
The sexual violence referred to earlier was institutionalized soon after Unit 731’s formation. We remind readers that women were raped by infected men to transmit venereal diseases including gonorrhea and syphilis, and pregnant women were deliberately infected to study transmission of those and other diseases to the fetuses they carried; and victims, alive and deceased, were later dissected to observe disease progression.
The scientific exploitation of prisoners was often combined with physical violence, and survivors recalled the suffering they endured.
References
Harris, S. H. (2002). Factories of Death. Routledge.
Gold, H. (1997). Unit 731 Testimony. Tuttle Publishing.
Barenblatt, D. (2004). A Plague Upon Humanity. HarperCollins.
Tsuneishi, K. (2005). The Germ Warfare Unit That Disappeared. Iwanami Shoten.
Unit 731: The Japanese Auschwitz (The Underground Knowledge Series Book 9) is now available on Amazon and Audible as an ebook and audiobook. (Paperback edition still to come).
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GRJ8LR8P
Audible: https://www.amazon.com/ITEM_NAME/dp/B0GRGFYB6G/
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Morcan Books & Films 