The Unit 731 complex in Harbin, China.
Chinese civilians and Russian, British and American prisoners of war were infected with diseases, forced to rape prisoners, incinerated. Horrible experiences under Shiro Ishii, who never had to face justice.
Behind the high walls of a brick building in the Harbin region of northeastern China, the military complex remained hidden for decades. Unit 731. It was a secret center of the Imperial Japanese Army and the scene of some of the most atrocious war crimes on record.
The Kwantung Army’s Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department (its official name, ‘on paper’) actually hid a camp where thousands of men, women and children entered, but from where almost no one came out alive.
Unit 731’s true mission was to develop biological weaponsresearch the limits of human resistance and experiment with extermination methods. But that’s a very, very euphemistic description.
Prisoners were treated there simply as something non-human. It was under direct orders from the military surgeon Shiro Ishiian ultranationalist fanatic whose ambition and cruelty earned him the nickname “Doctor Death”that the unit became a true laboratory of horrors.
Shiro Ishii as lieutenant-colonel
Created in 1936 with state financing and authorization from the Emperor Hirohitothe 731 was installed in Ping Fana town about 25 kilometers from Harbin, China. Chosen for its strategic location and the total control that the Japanese occupiers exercised over the territory, the area was shaped in such a way that nothing could be seen or heard from the outside: trains had to pass with closed curtains; Aircraft risked being shot down if they flew too close to the secret location.
The Japanese Military Police captured Chinese civilians, including childrenand transferred it there too Russian, British and American prisoners of war. They were fed rice, fish, meat and even alcohol: not out of sympathy, but to ensure that their bodies were in ideal conditions for experiments. You bodies were incinerated in electric ovens high power, leaving no traces.
Various testimonies collected over the decades describe vivisections done without anesthesia, amputations, organ removal and other unimaginable practices. Sheldon H. Harris, a historian who deeply investigated the program, cited here by , describes acts such as immediate extraction of brains from living prisoners: guards opened their skulls with axes and took the organ to the laboratory, while the remains were sent for cremation. For many workers at the unit, this had become routine.
“If Ishii or one of his colleagues wanted to do research on the human brain, they would order the guards to find them a useful sample,” the author wrote in : “A prisoner was taken from his cell. The guards held him down while another guard crushed the victim’s head with an axe. His brain was extracted and taken immediately to the laboratory. The body was then taken to the pathologist and then to the crematorium for the usual disposal.”
Years later, a former medical assistant reported his first vivisection: the prisoner, already aware of his fate, did not resist while being tied up, but began to scream desperately when the scalpel opened his chest. He died during the procedure. Another day of work for the Japanese in the room.
Simultaneously, Ishii and his team produced gigantic quantities of deadly bacteria: hundreds of kilos of , , and dysentery agents every month. These microorganisms were tested on prisoners: children were fed with chocolates contaminated with anthrax, plague-infected cookies were distributed among the elderly, and teenagers were poisoned with lemonade contaminated with typhus. Thirty young people from Harbin died after drinking one of these mixtures.
One of the most monstrous methods was infecting men with syphilis and forcing them to rape female prisonerswith the aim of studying transmission mechanisms. Women were forcibly impregnated so that doctors could analyze the behavior of illnesses in mothers and newborns. No baby will have survived.
In other experiments, prisoners were tied to poles and exposed to biological bombs dropped by planes. In some cases, they were so close to the detonations that they directly inhaled the clouds of bacteria.
Shortly before the Japanese surrender, troops there were ordered to eliminate all survivors of Unit 731 and destroy evidence. Three days after the fall on Nagasaki, soldiers buried charred bones of hastily executed prisoners.
The approach of Soviet forces precipitated a total withdrawal: most of the scientists and military personnel involved returned to Japan and managed to maintain silence about the atrocities committed.
And the evil was not buried. Various data obtained through these horrendous experiments were considered useful in the advancements of modern medicine. Examples include discoveries about the freezing mechanism: prisoners were exposed to temperatures of minus 20 degrees, with limbs submerged in ice water and were then subjected to different rewarming methods to assess the effectiveness of each one.
In the post-war period, the North American government negotiated with Ishii and other officials a impunity agreement in exchange for access to scientific results obtained in the terror complex.
Shiro Ishii would die of throat cancer in 1959, without ever facing any court case.
Today, the memory of the small town of Ping Fan remains one of the darkest chapters in contemporary history.
