While Germany experimented with biological weapons in World War I, the Japanese military practiced biowarfare on a mass scale in the years leading up to and throughout World War II. China became the first nation to experience the horrors of World War II. During the invasion of China, Japanese forces used methods of warfare that led to mass death and suffering on new unimaginable level.
In 1932, a few months after Japanese troops moved into Manchuria, disguised as a water purification plant, Dr. Ishii and his colleagues followed them in. Instead of a water purification plant, they built Zhoghma Fortress, a prison so named because of its location on the outskirts of HARBIN AND ITS INTIMIDATING APPERANCE>
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The New York Times, March 17, 1995, reported the testimony of a seventy-two year old Japanese farmer who was a medical assistant during World War II. He enthusiastically described how he dissected a 30 year-old un-anesthetized man. He said, "The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle. But when I picked up the scalpel that's when he began screaming. 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." The former medical assistant, who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection. The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project.
In Sheldon Harris’s “Factories of Death”, details of many other experiments including the suspending subjects upside down to determine how long it took for them to choke to death. He mentions in his book how others had air injected into them to test for the onset of embolisms and others had horse urine injected into their kidneys. Dr. Kanisawa said “The first time I was very hesitant to do what I was told to do. The second time you get used to it. The third time you more or less volunteered. There are times when I look at my hands and remember
Starting in the early 1930’s, the Japanese began to display their great imperialistic dreams with ambition and aggression. Their goal was to create a "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere" where they controlled a vast empire in the western Pacific.1 In September of 1939, Japan signed the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis Treaty, allying themselves with Germany and Italy in an effort to safeguard their interests in China from the Soviet Union. Japan’s only major obstacle left lay in the significant size of the United States Pacific Fleet. To rid themselves of this, Japan attacked the United States Pacific Fleet in hopes of crippling it enough to prevent any further hindrance from the
Experiments were conducted to find an antidote to phosgene, a toxic gas use as a weapon during World-War I. At Fort Ney near Strasbourg, France, Nazi doctors exposed roughly 52 concentration camp prisoners to the phosgene gas. This gas caused extreme irritation to the prisoners’ lungs. Many of the prisoners suffered pulmonary edema after the exposure. Four died as a result of the experiments. (The Experiments)
It was just an ordinary, lazy, Sunday morning to the thousands of military personnel at the Pearl Harbor Naval Station. Then, the unthinkable happened. Over the loud-speaker a call came to warn the people about the impending attack that was about to take place only a few short minutes away. They were unprepared for what was about to happened. Within minutes, the Japanese planes flew over bombing the Naval station leaving a trail of total destruction. Because of this one horrific act, the United States of America joined the allies in what would be the beginning of a long, bloody war.
A scream echoed throughout the harsh winter air, where it passed a frail man tied to a post whose eyes drooped and arms rotted. The noise flew past a few soldiers loading a biological weapon into a plane. The scream landed upon the ears of a scientist who stood inches away from that horrible cry, and continued his work, uncaring of a heart beating at his fingertips. He was the sole spectator and sole perpetrator of this person’s death through live dissection. This was what happened in Japan’s biological warfare experimental camp from 1935 to 1945. The camp was made possible by the Manchurian Incident which is when the Japanese bombed their own property and claimed it was an attack by the Chinese, prompting the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. However, Japan yearned to conquer more nations. Sensing a war with Manchuria’s north
They slaughtered thousands of Chinese civilians during the rape of Nanking in 1937. It was necessary for America to drop the bomb.
Take the High altitude ‘experiment’, also conducted a Dachau under Dr. Rascher, for example. In this experiment Rascher wanted to ‘find’ the best way to save German pilots who ejected at high altitudes. Rascher had subjects put into low pressure chambers “that simulated altitudes as high as 68,000 feet, and monitored their physiological response as they succumbed and died.”(Tyson) If Rascher were testing for Pilot survival, he would no that the pressure would slowly increase, as the ejected pilot slowly parachuted down to the ground. Rascher, however, kept the pressure chamber at a set pressure, incorrectly representing how the human body would react to ejecting at high altitude. Furthermore, if the point of the experiment was to save pilots from high altitudes, why did they let some of the subjects die in the chamber? Shouldn’t they be testing ways to revive them, rather than kill them? Even worse, to the subjects that survived the chamber, Rascher would perform vivisections, “[dissecting] victims’ brains while they were still alive to show that high-altitude sickness resulted from the formation of tiny air bubbles in the blood vessels of a certain part of the brain.”(Tyson) The dissections of the brain to discover the formation of blood vessel could easily have been discovered in autopsy. Sure, this would require the subject to die, but at least they wouldn’t have died by having their skull cracked
This included dissecting twins during experiments, gassing and burning to kill quickly and easily, injections chemicals into the wombs of women, phenol injections, and many more unthinkable
On December 7th, 1941, Japan used the paralysis of peace of the U.S to make them successfully attack Pearl Harbor; after that it was a turning point of World War II. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor symbolized and marked the outbreak of the Pacific War, Japan 's attack on Pearl Harbor, while implementation of the "south", to launch a comprehensive attack on the South-East Asia, defeated the United States, Britain, the Netherlands East Indies in the Far East more than 300,000 troops, have occupied Thailand, Malaya, Burma, the Philippines, the Netherlands East India, some islands of Hong Kong and the Western Pacific, seized 3.86 million square kilometers of land, control of the 150 million population and wealth of strategic resources in the region, Asia-Pacific battlefield in full swing.
experiments where they were taken advantage of and put at high risk of further sickness, and even death.
Unit 731 was a research team under the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Their main facilities were set up in 1938 in the northeastern region of China known as Manchuria, which was under Japanese occupation at the time. Led by Lieutenant Shiro Ishii, this unit focused on researching the usage of biological weapons, although the use of such weapons was prohibited under the Geneva Protocol. The research here was typically conducted on live human subjects, mostly Chinese locals. Some of the experiments performed included infecting patients with diseases, then vivisecting them without the use of anesthesia to study how their internal organs had broken down from the diseases. Other experiments tested the effects of certain environmental conditions, including extremely cold temperatures and high pressure.
Dr. Clauberg developed a method of mass sterilization. It used a chemical irritant that produced severe inflammation. This caused the fallopian tubes to shut and close. Some of his experiments killed his subjects. Others were put to death so an autopsy could be performed. Dr. Mengele would pick a pair of twins or someone with a physical handicap and conduct painful and exhausting examinations. They could last for hours and were terrifying for children. Photographs, casts of teeth and jaws, and fingerprints and toe prints were taken from the subjects. Once the examinations were over, Dr. Mengele ordered the twins to death by lethal injection. He would then move on to the next phase, analysis of internal organs at autopsy. Interesting specimen were preserved and shipped to the Institute in Berlin-Dahlem for more
One of these experiments conducted on prisoners dealt with freezing. The doctors were looking for ways to care for pilots who had to eject into icy water. To do this they put prisoners in tubs of freezing water wearing only aviator suits or nothing at all, and sometimes for up to 5 hours. Other prisoners were forced outside and stripped down to the nude in the freezing weather. Another experiment was infecting prisoners with tuberculosis in an effort to find a cure. German doctors were trying to find if anybody was immune to the disease so they could study them and come up with a cure. However, a doctor by the name of Kurt Heissmeyer directly injected the disease into prisoners at a concentration camp which resulted in the death of at least 200 people. Forcing Gypsies to live off of nothing but sea water was another torturous study conducted on concentration camp prisoners. Hans Eppinger, another German doctor, tried to make seawater consumable. He forced ninety Gypsies to participate in this study. Some victims reportedly licked a recently washed floor just to get some fresh water. All these experiments resulted in either serious bodily harm, or death. Most of the evidence to these experiments was
The Japanese didn't understand how the allies could so easily surrender with no shame or dishonour as they believed that you were either to be killed in the war or commit suicide if captured. This is why they were overwhelmed by the amount of prisoners they had to put in camps. In February 1942 there was 15,000 ‘Australian’ POW, and by mid-1943 only 2,500 remained. In May 1444 Changi had a total of 5,000 Australian POWs of the 11,100 prisoners; who were all crammed into less than a quarter of a square kilometre. In Selarang Barracks, the POW’s camps, unlike others, resorted to commanding officers of the allies (who were also prisoners) to taking care and controlling what happens in the camp.The POWs were given supplies and food and left till
This has been described as the Asian Holocaust. The Japanese are responsible for killing about 14,000,000 people. That number of people do not include the "lucky ones" who survived and are suffering today. Prisoners of war experienced through massacre, human experimentation, starvation, and forced labor. Massacre or also known as Nanking Massacre, was a mass killing and rape. Human experimentation was using conducting deadly and extremely dangerous experiments on humans to use the results on the rest of China. Extreme famine lasted the entire war. Forced labor or slavery, was having the imprisoned Chinese do hard work, and if not done or well, they would be threatened with deadly consequences. A white girl, Mary Previte, living in China who was schooled there, her school was taken over and imprisoned. Japan's military decided to turn the school into a military headquarters. She explained how gross the living was there by saying "If there were too many rats, the teachers would set the children the task of catching them. It was the same for flies and bedbugs. There were small prizes for the winners" (Mary). Imprisonment was horrible and it brought down a race and leads to tension that will be carried through many
In 1936, Ishii’s plan was approved by the Emperor of Japan, Hirohito. Shiro made his way to Harbin; the process of Shiro’s plan began immediately. Unit 731 was built in an isolated part of the conquered empire of Manchuria in a small suburb called Pingfang in Harbin. Pingfang was home to over 240,000 Chinese and around 81,000 foreigners. Shiro Ishii considered the people of China and prisoners of the war (POW) like research material. Ishii controlled every feature for the building of the unit. He was given an unlimited supply of funds from the Japanese Government for equipment and anything needed.