Today we’re going to talk about the darker aspects of war.
Yes, war is dark enough in itself, but as you’ll know from some of our other shows
many despicable things happen in war behind what we might call closed doors.
We only need to look at the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, who conducted experiments on people
that make your stomach churn.
We might also look at the Nazi ‘Death Marches”, the massacres, the genocides, the torture
of prisoners and prisoners literally being worked to death.
These things all happened during the Second World War, as did biological warfare and the
testing of deadly agents on those captured by certain militaries.
But today we’ll focus on just one matter of total depravity during that war, in this
episode of the Infographics Show, The Horror of Unit 731.
Unit 731 was the brainchild of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
It was a biological and chemical warfare research unit that conducted experiments on prisoners
with the aim of developing deadly weapons.
It’s written that at its base in China – remember the Japanese were at war with China – around
3,000 men, women, and children were tested on.
Most of these we are told were Chinese, but some of them were from the Allied Nations,
the Soviet Union, Korea and Mongolia.
The unit lasted until the end of the war in 1945 and it’s written that it had ample
funding from the Japanese government.
Ok, so this unit was developing dastardly weapons and it needed to test those weapons
on people first.
But other tests were also done, related to trying to understand what the human body could
endure.
That way the Japanese military might better understand what its own soldiers could go
through.
The Cold One of the things many soldiers had to put
up with during the war was cold, and cold did kill a lot of people.
At Unit 731 they wanted to understand just how cold someone could get and still survive.
The website Unit731.org tells us, “Some human test subjects were taken outside during
the harsh winter until their limbs froze off for the doctors to experiment how best to
treat frostbite.”
The New York Times, which had testimonies from people who had seen the horrors of this
unit, wrote that these people would be taken outside and guards would throw water on them
until they saw the victim had frostbite.
Sometimes, wrote the newspaper, the guard would hit the arm of the prisoner with a stick
and if he heard something like a wood-against-wood sound he knew the arm was totally frozen.
What happened next is the doctors would use various methods to try and unfreeze the arm
or other body part.
Sometimes the prisoner would be left alone to unfreeze, sometimes warm water would be
thrown on him or her and sometimes much warmer water.
The Japanese doctors, according to The Times, concluded that water over 100 degrees fahrenheit
but never more than 122 degrees fahrenheit worked the best.
Vivisection The Japanese military also wanted to know
how best to treat disease and injuries, but we are told that to do this they would often
use live prisoners to operate on.
It’s said that some of these prisoners would be deliberately given a disease, and then
the doctors would open up the body of the patient without any kind of anesthesia.
They wanted to look at the effects of the disease before the body began decomposing,
and that’s why they kept the subjects alive.
These people were called marutas, or logs.
The New York Times, with testimony from a former surgeon, said they just wanted to know
what had happened inside.
That man told the Times, “I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed
terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.
He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly.
But then finally he stopped.
This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because
it was my first time.”
Testing Pathogens One of the major experiments at Unit 731 was
to test how certain pathogens, including cholera or anthrax, would affect a number of people
if they were exposed to the pathogens.
They didn’t just do this inside the camp, but also did what they called field testing.
This was done by dropping the pathogens on small communities in China.
They wanted to see if they could cause an outbreak of disease.
We are told some of these experiments were successful, so the Japanese then had the idea
to carry these pathogens to the United States in what were called balloon bombs.
It’s written that the Japanese did send about 200 balloons to the U.S. but these failed
for the most part, only leading to the death of seven people.
They also had a plan to drop plague-infected fleas on San Diego by using Kamikaze pilots.
Testing Weapons The Japanese also wanted to test weapons that
they could use on the battlefield, and this included regular weapons but also toxic gases.
To do this prisoners would be taken out to a field and tied to a spot with a stake.
The soldiers would then start testing, which sometimes just meant shooting guns at the
target, and other times throwing grenades at certain distances to see how effective
they were.
The bodies of the victims would then be analyzed so the Japanese knew exactly what damage their
weapons could do.
We are told that in one experiment gas was fired at the tied-up prisoners, but the wind
changed direction and it sent the Japanese soldiers running.
It’s also said that the soldiers would occasionally test their flamethrowers on the prisoners.
The pressure chamber and spinning While Japanese people who had worked in the
camp later recalled how many parts of prisoners could be seen in jars all over the camp, it’s
not always known how those people died.
Perhaps one of the worst deaths was the pressure chamber.
We are told that prisoners would be placed inside a pressure chamber, sometimes alongside
another prisoner, and the pressure would be turned up until basically the prisoners’
eyes popped and they eventually died.
If that wasn’t horrific enough, other prisoners would be literally spun to death so that the
military could test centrifugal forces.
Operations The Japanese also wanted to have better surgeons,
and those surgeons needed subjects to work on.
One report found tells us how one subject was given an appendectomy.
After that, his arm was removed and after that he received a tracheotomy.
This all took about 90 minutes and when the doctors were done, they just killed that patient.
The man who did these surgeries was at the time a student doctor.
He told the media that he’d had no idea what to expect when he was told he was going
to China to practice surgeries.
Spreading syphilis This is the testimony from a worker at Unit
731: “Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started
forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other.”
It’s said that if the pair refused, they would be shot.
At other times children were infected with the disease.
The reason this happened was so those infected prisoners could be vivisected at various stages
of the disease and the doctors at the camp could better understand how it affected a
person’s organs during that stage of infection.
Forced pregnancy It’s said that female prisoners would be
made pregnant by force so that the doctors could understand if disease was passed to
the child.
They also wanted to know what damage a disease may have caused to the woman’s reproductive
organs during pregnancy.
It’s said the guards would just take women and do this, even to those already injured
from other experiments.
While many children were thought to have been born on the camp, it’s said that none survived.
One former soldier said this sometime later, “Of course there were experiments on children.
But probably their fathers were spies.”
For a long time this unit was not talked about, but The Guardian reported in 2018 that Japan
released lots of information from its national archives relating to Unit 731.
Prior to this, much of what we knew was only based on testimonies.
No one has denied what we have talked about today did not happen, but there are more reports
that tell us smaller experiments also happened.
These included people being exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, being injected with the
blood from animals, being injected with sea water and also being burned alive.
It’s said during the war the Americans knew about the camp and after they granted immunity
to the physicians of Unit 731 if they shared all their findings with the U.S. military
as some of those findings might be useful and the U.S. didn’t want the Soviets getting
hold of the research.
We will leave you with a comment made by a former Unit 731 worker when he was contacted
some years later.
“I don't want to think about Unit 731.
Fifty years have passed since the war.
Please let me remain silent.”
Do you think anything like this could happen again?
How do you think people could do to this other human beings?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Could You Survive the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.