During the biggest war in human history it was a race for all the countries involved to get ahead of their enemies, and so all laws and regulations went out the window when it came to research. Some countries were worse than others, with the Nazis and Soviets both doing some pretty horrific experiments, but no country or organisation even comes close to the living nightmare known simply as Unit 731.
To the rest of the world Japan’s Unit 731 was officially a lumber mill, but in reality it was the site of horrific experiments and torture. The victims were also referred to as “logs”, with a former guard claiming how the others would joke about “how many logs fell today”.
The facility was opened in 1935, but it wasn’t until 1941 during the peak of Japans power during the war that it was renamed to Unit 731. Its purpose was to study the human body and how it reacts to certain things, and also to develop new chemical, biological and explosive weapons.
The victims were made up of mostly Chinese civilians, but prisoners of war, local criminals, bandits, any anti-Japanese groups, the homeless and anyone with a mental disability was a target. They were often rounded up by the military police and sent directly to the facility under armed guard to be studied. The people sent there were officially all prisoners of the state, but this wasn’t the case as both men and women of all ages were taken there, including babies and pensioners.
When at Unit 731 the victims were in for a number of horrifying treatments, with the most common listed below:
Weapon Testing
The lucky ones at the facility could expect to be blown to pieces, which considering the other fates they could receive was almost a blessing. Prisoners would be tied to stakes or chained to the ground, and grenades and other explosives would be tested at specific distances from them to monitor the effects. The more agonising side of weapons testing would involve getting set of fire during flamethrower testing, or being infected with a disease such as smallpox or cholera.
Frostbite Testing
During winter prisoners would be taken outside and a part of their body would be covered in water. They would be left to freeze and then testing would take place on the frozen limb, but only after it was sufficiently bludgeoned with sticks to make sure it was frozen all the way through.
They would thaw out the frozen limbs at different speeds to monitor the effects, and cut it off at certain points to see what happened when it defrosted. Other cold testing included partial freezing someone to death to see how fast they could be warmed up again without dying, which normally involved putting them into an oven.
Rape and Syphilis
Infecting people with Syphilis provided all the results it seemed it ever would, so the next stage was to force a non infected male prisoner to rape a female prisoner and get her pregnant. The goal would be to see the effects of diseases being passed from mother to child, but many of these children were never born as the mother was often transferred to surgery to be cut open so the disease could be seen and studied at its various stages.
The following is a quote from a former guard at the facility:
“Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other. Four or five unit members, dressed in white laboratory clothing completely covering the body with only eyes and mouth visible, rest covered, handled the tests. A male and female, one infected with syphilis, would be brought together in a cell and forced into sex with each other. It was made clear that anyone resisting would be shot.”
Another particularly dark experiment was to force a woman to become pregnant, and then surgically remove some of her vital organs to see how it affected the babies development.
Vivisection
This is the process of experimental surgery, which was always carried out with no anaesthesia of any kind. It normally included removing something to see how it effected the bodies ability to recover from disease, or just to see how it would behave when organs were severed and reattached to other organs.
Everything from seeing how long someone can live without a stomach to removing parts of the brain and lungs just to “see what happens” took place here, but most of the vivisection’s were done to study the effects of disease. A number of victims would be infected with the same disease, and then one would be cut up every so often to see how the disease was developing internally. This would also be done with victims of frostbite and people affected by chemical weapons.
Other Testing
Some of the other things that happened here weren’t really tests at all, but instead just plain torture with no purpose. Prisoners were sometimes buried alive, exposed to lethal amounts of X-rays, injected with sea water and animal blood and put into centrifuges and spun until dead. After knowing exactly what happens when people are electrocuted to death or burned alive, the researchers still put people to these horrible fates for seemingly no other purpose than their own amusement.
Outside testing
Most of the experiments conducted outside the facility mostly involved testing biological weapons on the Chinese population. Whole towns and villages were infected with diseases just to see how effective their bombs were and how long until everyone died.
The Death Count
The number of people killed in Unit 731 is believed to be just over 10,000, though the Japanese destroyed most of the evidence at the end of the war so an exact number will never be known. The amount of people who died as a result of Unit 731 was no less than 400,000 people. Most of these victims were Chinese civilians used as test subjects for biological weapons.
The vast majority of the several thousand people working in the facility survived and in April of 2018, the National Archives of Japan released a list of the 3607 people who worked at 731 during the war to Dr. Katsuo Nishiyama of the Shinga University of Medical Science, who claimed he’s going to publish the list of names online.
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