Unit 731 Museum

Unit 731 Museum - This has to be one of the darkest places on Earth. Here, in the north-eastern corner of China on the outskirts of the city of Harbin, the Japanese conducted research on biological warfare using humans as live guinea pigs, mostly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians, Mongolians and others. The level of cruelty exceeded even that of the Nazis at concentration camps like Auschwitz or Dachau . Set up in the late 1930s in Manchuria, then occupied by imperial Japan , the facility code-named Unit 731 aimed at developing bio-weapons (in contravention of the Geneva Conventions!), and it was the largest such facility in the world at the time. “Research” included tying victims to wooden stakes out in the open and then dropping germ bombs on them in order to test the feasibility of active use of bio-warfare on the battlefield. Victims were infected with plague, cholera and anthrax pathogens, amongst other things. An especially gruesome “experiment” involved exposing victims to extreme cold (easily done in the winter in this sub-Siberian location) in order to “study” extreme frostbite. In other “experiments” victims were placed in low-pressure chambers to see at what level their eyes popped out. Moreover, victims were also subjected to vivisection, i.e. they were dissected alive, without anaesthetic! The levels of agony caused are beyond the imaginable. It is estimated that at least 3000 victims lost their lives at Unit 731. Some of the bio-weapons developed here were also used in the field in China, but it is hard to say how many more victims this resulted in, possibly hundreds of thousands. What is clear is that none of Unit 731’s human guinea pigs survived – those still held alive there at the end of WWII were murdered before the Japanese evacuated the site. Of the thousands of people working at the unit, none were ever brought to justice in Japan.