35 Rare Images of the Infamous Japanese Experiment Unit 731 in China

Japanese Experiment Unit 731: Rare Historical Images

Unit 731 (731部隊), based in the Pingfang district of Harbin and led by the infamous Japanese microbiologist Shiro Ishii, was a covert biological warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II.

Featured image: A photograph released from Jilin Provincial Archives, which, according to Xinhua Press, “shows personnel of ‘Manchukuo’ attend a ‘plague prevention’ action which indeed is a bacteriological test directed by Japan’s ‘Unit 731’ in November 1940 at Nong’an County, northeast China’s Jilin Province.”

Part of our China History Archive

What was the Unit 731

At least 12,000 men, women, and children were killed during the experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone. The unit had its origins in a secret chemical and biological research group Ishii organized in the early 1930s, and was formally established at the purpose-built Pingfang complex in 1936, a self-contained facility with its own railway spur, airstrip and power plant, designed to keep its work hidden from the outside world.

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Prisoners of war were subjected to a range of brutal experiments without anesthesia, including vivisection. Researchers infected detainees with various diseases before performing invasive surgeries to remove organs. This was done to study the effects of diseases on the human body, with the operations carried out on living subjects to avoid the impacts of decomposition on the results. Victims held at Pingfang were referred to internally as maruta, or “logs,” a term that reflected how thoroughly the unit’s staff had dehumanized the people in its custody. The majority of victims were Chinese, though Soviet, Korean and Mongolian prisoners were also held there..

Human Experimentation at Pingfang

In a series of inhumane tests, humans were also used as live targets to assess the effectiveness of grenades, flamethrowers, and germ-releasing bombs, as well as chemical and explosive weapons. These prisoners were positioned at different distances and orientations to gauge the lethality of these weapons.

Shiro Ishii, a prominent figure in these experiments, oversaw the injection of prisoners with disease inoculations under the guise of vaccinations. This allowed scientists to observe the progression of diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea, which were deliberately transmitted to both male and female prisoners without treatment, to study their effects.

The Toll of Biological Warfare

Additionally, to further research into germ warfare, prisoners were infested with fleas to produce large quantities of disease-carrying fleas. Techniques of warfare included dropping bombs filled with plague fleas, infected clothing, and other contaminated materials on various targets, including the cities of Ningbo and Changde. The dissemination of cholera, anthrax, and plague through these means is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of approximately 400,000 Chinese civilians. Tularemia was another disease tested on Chinese civilians in these horrific experiments. Taking into account both the deaths inside the Pingfang facility and the far larger toll of the unit’s field operations against Chinese cities, historians place the overall death toll connected to Unit 731’s activities in a range from roughly 200,000 to as high as several hundred thousand.

After the War: Destruction of Evidence and Impunity

As Japan’s defeat became certain in August 1945, Ishii ordered the Pingfang complex destroyed and the remaining prisoners killed so that no witnesses would survive to testify. Buildings were dynamited and specimens burned, though the site was not erased completely, and physical traces along with surviving testimony later allowed researchers to reconstruct much of what had happened there. Unlike the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals that prosecuted other Axis war crimes, Ishii and the unit’s senior scientists were never tried for their actions: American occupation authorities granted them immunity from prosecution in exchange for access to their research data on biological warfare, a decision that remained secret for decades. The Soviet Union, by contrast, tried twelve former Unit 731 personnel it had captured at a war crimes tribunal held in Khabarovsk in December 1949. Today the former Pingfang site houses the Unit 731 Museum in Harbin, built around the surviving ruins of the complex.

Unit 731 images

Related article: Japanese officer performing seppuku during World War II

Source: Wikipedia, incredibleimages4u.blogspot.com, picturechina.com.cn, enviromental graffiti, http://xubaojun.blog.163.com

Topic: causes of unit 731, what did they do at Unit 731, Unit 731 Japanese experiments, Unit 731 Pingfang human experimentation

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