I added a generic picture because the ones I can find having to do with this place are really not fun to see. This is the story of what happened in imperial Japan in 1937. Again, Content warning. This stuff is insane.
This incredibly is lesser known than the Nazi Experiments of the time. There is a really horrible reason why that is, I will get to that toward the end of the post.
The experiment was conducted at the Pingfang city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China). They built a huge complex with 105 buildings and brought in test subjects including infants, the elderly and pregnant women. Most of the victims they experimented on were Chinese while a lesser percentage were Soviet, Mongolian, Korean, and other Allied POWs. Thousands of them were subjected to vivisection, performing invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body, often without anesthesia and usually ending with the death of the victims. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was thought that the death of the subject would affect the results.
Prisoners sometimes had organs removed completely during these surgeries. However, other times the "doctors" would remove organs or limbs jut to reatach them to the oppoiste side or elsewhere on the body. Some accounts suggest that the practice of vivisection on human subjects was widespread even outside Unit 731.
The prisoners and victims were also injected with diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhoea, to study the effects of untreated venereal diseases. Female prisoners were also repeatedly subject to rape by guards and were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments. Plague-infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. They were used as the human targets to test grenades positioned at various distances. Flamethrowers were tested on them and they were also tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, and explosive bombs.
As if these events were not enough prisoners were deprived of food and water, placed into high-pressure chambers until death; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; placed into centrifuges and spun until death; injected with animal blood; exposed to lethal doses of x-rays; subjected to various chemical weapons inside gas chambers; injected with sea water; and burned or buried alive.
Accounts report at least 3,000 men, women, and children were experimented on in this unit. Even today there have never been accounts of survivors from the experiments.
The unit had massive support from the Japanese army, until the end of the war in 1945 that is. One of the scariest parts of this horrific event was that Instead of being tried for war crimes after the war, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation. Sad and sobering indeed, the way things are these days is it really any surprise.
usually like to write about more interesting and slightly lighthearted things, but I thought this just had to be done.
May we never see the likes of these dark days again.
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