Unit 731: Inhumane Experiments

Unit 731 It was in Manchuria, China, from 1938 to 1945, that Shiro Ishii and his Japanese army carried out experiments that resulted in things arguably more inhumane than the Holocaust. Unit 731 held Chinese, Russian, Manchurian, and even some American prisoners and used them as human guinea pigs before most of them ultimately died. Biological weapons were used against these prisoners as test subjects, resulting in up to 400,000 deaths. The goal of this paper is to bring light to what really happened in this research and development unit and discuss whether or not these things are validated. Unit 731 was the brainchild, or idea and invention, of General Shiro Ishii. After the terrible experiences of World War I, chemical and biological weapons

The list is extensive. For example, workers would inoculate the prisoners with a disease that was disguised as a vaccination. Some would even infect them by raping them. They thought that this would determine how viable biological and germ warfare would be and how communicable it may be. (AeonStorm) They would also take the prisoners outside, tie them to stakes, and then proceed to test biological weapons on them, such as plague infested flea bombs. Another study involved locking the prisoners inside pressure chambers as human guinea pigs. They would do this to test just exactly how much the body could take before their eyes literally popped out of their heads. Others were taken outside during the coldest, harshest winter weather conditions until their limbs froze off from frostbite so that the doctors could experiment how to best treat the effects of frostbite and gangrene. Some were even hung upside down just to see how long it would take them to choke to death. Other experiments included injecting horse urine into the prisoner’s kidneys, starvation, and exposing these people to extreme, lethal, amounts of radiation. The workers, scientist, and doctors who carried out these experiments called the prisoners used as test subjects “logs” to separate any type of emotional feelings or remorse they may have for what they were doing to these poor

There really isn’t an explanation as to why it has been missing from the World War II curriculum, and you never hear about it being taught in American high school history classes. There is an overall general lack of knowledge surrounding Unit 731 and it’s history not only in students, but in teachers as well. The Holocaust is something that has pretty much always been taught in school, yet Unit 731’s people and crimes were not any less horrible or horrific than what Nazi’s did to the Jews. When the term genocide is brought up in the classroom, one automatically thinks of The Holocaust, and for the most part, have no knowledge whatsoever about anything to do with Unit 731. Incorporating this information appropriately and revising the curriculum to view both of the horrible incidents from a logical, comparative place is important in delivering the details and viewing them both as the atrocities they are, not just one of them. (Pawlowicz and