Asian Auschwitz

There is so many different things wrong about this story. The most bizarre thing that took me by surprise in this whole story was that the U.S. did nothing to the people at the camp once Japan surrendered. The scientists were all let go. Even the leader of unit 731, Shiro Ishii. They let them all go free because the U.S. wanted all of the chemical and biological warfare information the Japanese had. Even when concerns about the information were sent to president Truman they were just brushed aside and never heard of again. I cannot believe that our government would let this be a secret and let everyone go just to gain an upper hand in war techniques.

Some of the experiments that were done to the prisoners or "logs" could give you nightmares at night. They absolutely horrible. Sometimes the prisoners were actually used for medical testing to learn about anatomy and how the body works, but many of them were just harshly tortured. Sometimes guards would decapitate prisoners to see how sharp their swords were. Other times prisoners were given bacterial diseases, had water thrown on them and forced to sit naked in the cold until they were harshly frostbit, injected with horse urine into their kidneys, hung upside down until they suffocated, cut open dissected while they were alive, and some were even put into pressure chambers until their eyes popped out and their bodies practically exploded because of the pressure. 

Another thing that really caught my attention was the Japanese leader actually gave Shiro Ishii an award for the biological warfare techniques he was able to find. Although almost everything that was done at unit 731 was illegal, Ishii was still given an award for the terrible things he did.

Once the United States got all the information they needed from the Japanese war camp, the camp was destroyed. The camp was bombed and destroyed so that no information or evidence was left behind. One reason the U.S. did this was so that the Soviet Union could not retain any of this valuable information. The destroying of the camp also let all of the Japanese that worked in the unit off the hook. Since there was no evidence of the unit existing, they could deny it ever being created. To this day many Japanese still deny the camp and the horrible things that happened there, and Japan still has not apologized to China for all of the destruction and horrible events that occurred.