The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project - the full horror of which is only now emerging - to develop plague bombs for use in World War II.
From a 1995 article in The New York Times, relating a story from a medical assistant in Unit 731: It didn't matter.įrom the start, Unit 731, under General Shirō Ishii, was merciless.Īmong the thousands of experiments conducted on prisoners: vivisections without anesthesia injections of venereal diseases to examine their spread amputations to study blood loss removal of other body parts and organs starvation and deliberate exposure to freezing temperatures to examine the effects of frostbite. Such activities were outlawed by at least two international treaties at the time, though the Japanese did not ratify the 1925 Geneva protocol. The Unit's charge was clear from the beginning: testing, producing and storing biological weapons. It came about sometime in the mid-1930s when Japan and China went to war, a conflict that eventually morphed into World War II's war in the Pacific theater. Unit 731 - its official name was the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army - was formed before World War II began (at least for the U.S., which didn't officially enter the war until December 1941). "If you include those victims who suffered from the other activities - not necessarily just used as human guinea pigs - the bombs in China.
"It's very difficult to calculate," says Yue-Him Tam, a history professor at Minnesota's Macalester College and co-author of a book entitled, " Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil, Auschwitz of the East (Japanese Biological Warfare in China 1933-1945)." Tam, born and raised in China, has taught a class at Macalester on war crimes and memory in contemporary East Asia for more than 20 years. Perhaps hundreds of thousands more - maybe as many as a half-million - were killed when the Japanese tested their biological weapons on Chinese civilians. Thousands of prisoners were killed in cruel human experiments at Unit 731, which was based near the northeastern China city of Harbin, north of the Korean peninsula and on a border with Russia. The truth is that Japan's Unit 731 committed some of the most heinous war crimes ever. Perhaps you could say it's cynical in that everybody does it." "There is a 'uses of the past' question here. And there is a certain truth to that," says Daniel Sneider, a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. And the Japanese right, the nationalist right, their basic view is that, 'Oh, the Chinese. The Chinese have seized upon this quite a bit. "I think that it has become a piece of this tortured dialogue over the war between Japan and China. And for those who seek to use them for their own personal reasons. But the facts are out there for those who seek them.
0 kommentar(er)
