Beiruting News

These days, human experimentation is a strictly controlled process conducted on willing volunteers when scientists are almost 100 per cent certain that whatever they're testing is safe. Back in WWII, however, human testing had a much more sinister meaning. We've all heard of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in their concentration camps, but there was another, lesser known testing ground that came out of the second (and hopefully last) world war.

Led by Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro, Japan’s Unit 731 was run by 3,000 Japanese researchers at its headquarters in Harbin, China. The unit’s ultimate goal was to develop Japan’s biological warfare programme, and resulted in some of the worst war crimes in human recorded history.

Despite the size of the unit, the entire operation remained a secret for decades. That’s because when the Soviet Union entered China and liberated Harbin, the unit hastily abandoned the compound, blowing it up behind themselves to destroy evidence of the atrocities committed there.

However, over the years, personal accounts from workers and prisoners at the unit has revealed the true nature of the horrific experiments conducted on American, Chinese, Mongolian, and Korean victims.

Amongst other atrocities, Unit 731 conducted experiments in vivisection, limb amputation, frostbite testing, rape, and forced pregnancy. The unit developed biological bombs, which were designed to release things like bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, and botulism on the masses. These bombs were tested on prisoners.

The following from clip is from the 1988 film Man Behind the Sun, which described many of the torturous experiments conducted at Unit 731.

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Most of the experiments were conducted on prisoners while they were still alive, without anaesthetic. Just to make that clear – human beings were cut open, frozen, given STDs, burned and starved, all without the aid of painkillers.

It took until 1984 before Japan officially acknowledged the horrific experiments even happened, and much of what occurred there is still unknown. Most of the unit’s survivors have since died, and finding a worker who’s willing to talk about the horrors of the unit is incredibly rare. Just another of the world’s atrocities that will seemingly remain a mystery for eternity.[viralthread]