Japanese soldiers guard Chinese prisoners during the invasion of Manchuria, September 1931. Many prisoners of war, as well as civilians, were used as subjects in the horrific experiments.
It goes like this: in 1936 Harbin, a Chinese railway megalopolis near the Russian border, is conquered by the Japanese. Here the nightmare comes to life when Shirō Ishii, a physician devoted to the cause of “biological armament,” turns a fake epidemic prevention center into a laboratory of terror: Unit 731.
To put it briefly, a lager where men, women and children -- mostly Chinese, but also Soviet, Korean and Western prisoners -- become “maruta,” human logs to be dissected with beating hearts.
Here objects of death are designed to pass themselves off as legitimate research tools, new anti-personnel bombs are developed and their “live” effects studied, bacteria-laden artillery shells are made, fleas and infected mice are released on Chinese camps.
Lethal pathogens are injected here: bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, smallpox, gaseous gangrene. Hypothermia techniques are studied, between freezing and thawing, to test the limits of the human body.
Forced pregnancies and dissections are practiced on live people and even infants. In the end, casualties were estimated at between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women and children.
In 1945, after the surrender of Japan, American Colonel Murray Sanders, a military microbiologist, lands in Tokyo and discovers the Unit 731 documents. Inside is a recipe for evil, the skeleton of a criminal science that no laboratory in the world could have replicated, much less made public.
The Americans are interested in biological weapons research and the results of tests on humans that are “impossible to repeat” and are faced with the possibility of obtaining them-a calculated, cynical, cold choice. Enter the intelligence community. Unit 731 officers, beginning with General Shirō Ishii, negotiate immunity for them and their collaborators in exchange for the data obtained from the experiments.
The pact is sealed: legal immunity “to anyone with data to offer” . Promises of silence, low-key agreements, token payments (150-200 000 yen at that time). Testimony on human crimes is withdrawn from Tokyo trial, officers are sent home.
There will be no trials (like the Nuremberg trials for the Nazis) for those responsible for Unit 731: the guilty are spared. Many will have respectable careers in postwar Japan, some even in academia and industry. The United States classifies Unit 731 crime records as secret and prevents the information from being released.
The Soviet Union, which had captured a dozen Unit 731 officers, tries and convicts them in the winter of 1949 in Khabarovsk. The trial proceedings, chock-full of gruesome episodes, are published and echoes reach the West, but they are considered Soviet propaganda and ignored.
The curtain of silence is as effective as ever; for 40 years nothing or almost nothing appears in American newspapers about the affair. Only in 1999 does a congressional law require the archives to be opened. And that is like uncovering Pandora's box. But more than half a century has now passed, and the games are played.
Today in Harbin, at the original site of Pingfang, there is a museum dedicated to the memory of the victims of the horror. Testimonies, documents and the very structures that have remained partly intact tell the story of one of the most heinous crimes committed with impunity in human history.
