The war crimes for which Nazi Germany was responsible are widely considered
some of the most abhorrent of all time, and are widely seen as the greatest evil
of World War II. But in truth, similar horrors - and in some cases even worse
crimes - were carried out by units in other WWII-era powers. Imperial
Japan’s Unit 731 contained perhaps the worst of these war criminals,
and committed some of the greatest crimes against humanity in the history of the world.
Unit 731 - officially termed the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department
of the Kwantung Army - was created in 1935, and operated out of a facility in Manchuria.
The unit was originally run by Japanese military police, but was taken over by General Shiro Ishii
in fairly short order. The unit ran under the cover of being an epidemic prevention department,
but it was in fact the opposite. General Ishii had been tasked with developing chemical weapons,
and has been given permission to use human experimentation.
Unit 731 operated in a number of facilities in Manchuria, and at its height in 1939
contained ten thousand personnel. Their primary facility operated under the cover
of being a logging facility, which led to the unit’s personnel referring to the people sent
to the site for experimentation as “logs”. These human guinea pigs were mostly Chinese,
though Allied prisoners of war were experimented on by the unit as well.
The unit had a long list of crimes to its name, including dissection of human subjects while
they were still alive, injection of prisoners with deadly diseases, forced transmission of syphilis,
rape, chemical attacks on nearby civilian targets, and testing weapons on live, unarmed targets. Unit
731 had eight divisions, which focused on weaponizing disease, researching biological
weapons, developing artillery shells containing biological agents, producing and storing bacteria,
training personnel, maintaining equipment, medical duties, and administration respectively.
Several so-called breakthroughs achieved by Unit 731 led to the development of weapons that saw
varying degrees of use in the Pacific Theater. Bombs designed to spread disease or deforest
land were the most common of these weapons, while among the more sinister were food stores tainted
with pathogens that were dropped in areas of China that continued to resist Japan,
or were given to unsuspecting civilians in Japanese-controlled parts of China. Hundreds
of thousands of people died as a result of these attacks and near the end of the war,
the unit was even preparing biological agents for an attack on San Diego,
California, though the war ended before this could be executed.
After the war, the remaining personnel of Unit 731 fled Soviet wrath to Japan, and attempted to
destroy the evidence of their work, with limited success. Unfortunately, not all members of the
unit were brought to justice. The United States secretly offered many who worked with the unit
immunity, provided that they shared their findings with the US government, and them alone. Those that
were captured by the USSR didn’t fare much worse, as despite the conviction of several unit members
during the Khabarovsk Trials, none received a sentence worse than 25 years in a Siberian gulag.
To this day, not all the details about Unit 731’s activities are public knowledge. But
regardless of the full extent of their activities, what we do know about them
is enough to paint a full picture of the atrocities that this unit carried out,
which were on the same level as the experiments of Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany.