At one time, a terrible factory began to operate on the territory of the hills of Manchuria. As "raw materials" they used living people. 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. Nobody knew about what the Japanese "death camps" were hiding (Detachment 731, including). But there were many terrible rumors about what was happening there. It was said that terrible and painful experiments were carried out on people there.
The special "Detachment 731" was a secret death laboratory, where the Japanese invented and tested the most terrible variants of torment and destruction of people. Here the threshold of endurance of the human body, the boundary 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 captured, one in four of whom was killed. Thousands of women were tortured, raped and killed.
The book of the famous American historian and journalist John Toland describes a huge number of cases of violence by prisoners of war by the military. For example, in the Hong Kong battle, the local British, Eurasians, Chinese and Portuguese fought off the Japanese who attacked them. Before Christmas, they were completely surrounded and captured on the narrow Stanley Peninsula. There were many slaughtered, butchered wounded and raped Chinese and British medical workers. This was the humiliating end of British rule in Chinese territory. A more terrible character was characteristic only of the atrocities of the Japanese against the prisoners, who are still trying to hide Japan. "Factory of death" ("Detachment 731" and others) - among them.
Death camp
But even all together, the atrocities were nothing compared to what the Japanese did in this unit. It was located near the city of Harbin, in Manchuria. Besides the fact that Detachment 731 was a death camp, it was also the venue for various experiments. On its territory, studies of bacteriological weapons were carried out, for which they used the living Chinese population.
In order for leading Japanese specialists to fully deal with the tasks, they needed laboratory assistants and average technical personnel. For this purpose, capable teenagers who really wanted to study, but were low-income, were specially selected at schools. Very fast discipline training was conducted with them, after which they became specialists and were part of the technical staff of the institution.
Camp features
What did the Japanese "death camps" hide? "Detachment 731" was a complex, which included 150 structures. In its central part, the R0 block was located, where experiments on living people were carried out. Some of them were specially injected with cholera bacteria, typhoid fever, anthrax, plague, syphilis. Others were pumped up with horse blood instead of human blood.
Many were shot, burned alive using mortars, detonated, bombarded with huge doses of x-rays, dehydrated, frozen and even cooked 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 announced an amnesty to all Japanese doctors and scientists who committed atrocities in that period of time. According to the results of the research, the one who founded Detachment 731 — Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii and the people around him — was amnestied immediately after the fall of Japan in 1945. These individuals paid for their release from punishment by providing the American authorities with complete and valuable information about the results of the tests.
Among them, "field tests" were carried out, during which civilians in China and Russia were infected with deadly bacteria of anthrax and plague. As a result, they all died. When the capitulation of Japan was supposed to happen in 1945, the head of Shiro Ishii decided to kill absolutely all the prisoners in the "death camps". The same fate was foreseen by employees, security guards and members of their families. He himself survived until 1959. The cause of Ciro Ishii's death is cancer.
Block R0
Block R0 is the place where Japanese doctors conduct experiments. They included prisoners of war or local Aborigines. In order to prove the presence of immunity to malaria, the doctor Rabaul introduced 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 subjects in order to determine the nature and characteristics of a particular impact.
Some people specifically suffered a gunshot wound to the stomach. Then they practiced drawing bullets, amputating Japanese human organs. Detachment 731 was also known for a very common experiment, the main essence of which was to excise a portion of the liver of living prisoners. This was done in order to determine the limit of endurance.
When two of the prisoners made an attempt to escape, they shot him 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 terrible nature of these operations, they considered them to be very informative and useful, as well as Detachment 731 itself.
It was such that the prisoner of war was tied to a tree, his arms and legs were pulled out, his body was cut and his heart was amputated. Part of the brain or liver was removed for some prisoners in order to see if they could live with a defective organ.
They were mistaken for "logs"
There were several reasons for deploying this Japanese concentration camp, Detachment 731, in China, not Japan. These include:
- respect for privacy;
- in the event of force majeure circumstances, the population of China, and not the Japanese, was attacked;
- the constant presence of "logs" necessary for carrying out deadly tests.
The medical staff didn’t count the 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 it should be so.
Features of the experiments
The profile of experiments on prisoners is the test of the plague. Shortly before the end of the war, Isaiah developed a strain of plague bacteria, the virulence of which was 60 times greater than usual.
The experiment method was about the same:
- people were locked in special cages, where, due to their small size, they were not even able to turn around;
- then prisoners of war were infected;
- watched the ongoing changes in the state of the body;
- after this, preparations were carried out, organs were removed and the characteristics of the spread of the disease inside the person were analyzed.
Manifestations of the highest degree of inhumanity
At the same time, people were not killed, but they were not sewn up. The doctor could monitor the changes for several days. In this case, it was not necessary to trouble yourself again and conduct a second autopsy. Moreover, absolutely no anesthesia was used, since, according to doctors, it could disrupt the natural course of the spread of the disease under study.
Great “luck” among the people who were brought to Detachment 731 was considered to be used for conducting experiments using gas. In this case, death came much faster. During the most terrible experiments, it was proved that human endurance is almost equal in strength to that 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 United States and the USSR. At the same time, there were so many “ammunition” that they would be enough to destroy all the people on earth. And in the development of each of them in one way or another, the Kwantung "Detachment 731" was involved.
Crimes are 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 began, various reports of atrocities spread throughout Hong Kong and Singapore. But not one of all official US protests received a response. After all, the government of this country was well aware that even if they condemn or admit what the Kwantung army did (Detachment 731, in particular), this will in no way affect the safety of prisoners of war.
Therefore, they officially refused to bring the perpetrators to justice in exchange for receiving “scientific” data collected on “logs”. They could not only forgive so many deaths, but also keep them secret for many years.
Almost all the scientists who worked in Detachment 731 were not punished. An exception are those who fell into the hands of the USSR. The rest soon began to lead 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 Japanese Medical Association. Also among those who founded Detachment 731 (photographs of which testify to those terrible experiments), there are many military and doctors. Some of them even opened private maternity hospitals.