Today marks the 90th anniversary of the "September 18 Incident" in which Japanese imperialism launched its aggression against China.
For the next 14 years, the Chinese people won the final victory in the anti-fascist war through arduous resistance; it was also in 14 years that the Japanese aggressors committed countless inhumane crimes against the Chinese.
Even if there have been uninterrupted voices over the years, in the name of "letting go of hatred" and "carrying the burden of history not far", hoping that the people of Chinese will forget history, but Chinese will never forget. We hope that Japan's acts of aggression and crimes will not only be remembered Chinese, but should belong to the common historical memory of all mankind, so that mankind can learn from history and prevent the tragedy from happening again.
However, it is clear that not all human beings have such good expectations.
To what extent Japan's "reflections" on war crimes are bad, as Crow mentioned in previous articles, infamous crimes like Unit 731 were considered "premature for the Japanese to be written into textbooks."
But Japan has hurt too many people in the war of aggression, and in addition to China, there are still people who remember.
Not long ago, during the "Victory Day" cycle from the announcement of the unconditional surrender of Japanese imperialism (August 15) to the official surrender of Japan (September 2), our neighbor Russia, which was also the victorious in the anti-fascist war, published a number of archival documents exposing the development of bacteriological weapons by the Japanese Kwantung Army.
The documents were declassified by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) and continuously reported by RIA Novosti. A series of historical ironclad evidence, which was first exposed, once again smashed into the heinous crimes committed by Unit 731.
In the face of these terrible crimes of humanity, although 90 years have passed, how dare we forget?!
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The files released by Russia are mainly derived from the interrogation records of Japanese war criminals.
Interrogating 731-related war criminals is a technical task, because the members of this force and the senior officers of the Japanese Kwantung Army are really cunning and liarious. But the facts are there, and there are always flaws in their words.
Among them, the content of Seki's interrogation of the last Commander of the Japanese Kwantung Army, Yamada Otozo, was like this, and Yamada denied the "living experiment" in every way, but his words were inconsistent and contradictory.
At first, Yamada remained silent about human experiments, saying he had a bad memory and couldn't remember. In the next two years, as the evidence continued to accumulate, Yamada's memory inexplicably "improved significantly."
(The first from the right is Ozo Yamada)
Let's look at this transcript of the interrogation.
Interrogation Statement: According to the report, we (the Soviet side) learned that the purpose of the Training Ground of Unit 731 was to conduct experiments on the masses through research, to study the combat situation of bacteriological weapons, and the use of animals and living people as experimental subjects.
Q: What biological category are the subjects used in the specified experiment?
A (Yamada): I'm not sure, but "they" are all held in prison by Unit 731.
Q: The nationality of the people detained by Unit 731?
A: Most of them are Chinese.
Q: Why were these people sent to prison in 731?
A: I think they are prisoners convicted by the Manchurian authorities.
Q: Are you sure?
A: I'm not sure.
Q: Did Unit 731 and Unit 100 experiment with these living people through your subordinate agencies?
A: No.
Q: You haven't approved anything?
A: Yes, I'm sure.
The former commander of the Japanese Kwantung Army, knowing that the "creatures" used as experimental objects by 731 were all imprisoned in the prison of 731, knew that there were living prisoners who were sent to the 731 prison, but asked whether unit 731 had conducted a living experiment.
For such a clear foolishness, the hunter and the fox began to game. Soviet interrogators then continued to question Yamada on the premise of authorizing 731 to conduct human experiments, forcing him to reveal flaws.
Q: Who authorized the testing of living people held by Unit 731?
A: I find it difficult to answer this question, I personally did not do these things to these people, if these people really suffered from live experiments, I suspect that the order was issued by the Japanese Defense Minister or my predecessor (the commander of the Kwantung Army).
Q: Who authorized the sending of prisoners to Unit 731 for living experiments?
A: It was the decision to use the killed people for The Experiments on Unit 731, and I believe the decision came from my predecessor.
Earlier, Yamada said that he did not know whether the 731 experiment was used by humans or animals, and now he knew that 731 used "dead people" to do experiments. Although he still does not admit to experimenting on living people, the flaws have gradually been revealed, and the focus of his sophistry has shifted from "denying human experimentation" to "having nothing to do with me", putting all the blame on his predecessor.
But this statement was full of errors, and the interrogators immediately asked questions.
Q: Do you think those orders were dealt with by the Kwantung Army without the permission of the commander-in-chief?
A: This is not possible. During my tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army, no subordinate would send prisoners to Unit 731 without my knowledge.
Q: Then I'll read it to you, this is an excerpt from xx's testimony: prisoners were sent to Unit 731 with the approval of the gendarmerie officers and commander-in-chief. Do you acknowledge these statements?
A: Yes, I admit it, but I have noticed that the order to send prisoners to Unit 731 existed during my predecessor's tenure, I did not cancel it, it automatically remained in effect.
Good guys, this is already confused, the ex's order, you continue to execute, it has nothing to do with you?
I am afraid that Yamada himself realized that there were too many unspeakable testimonies, and the Soviet side read out more key testimony from relevant witnesses in front of him.
One of the witnesses, Matsumura, testified that he had orally reported to Commander Yamada in the autumn of 1944 on his preparations for the use of the Ishii bacteriological bomb, which was described as follows:
"The bacteriological bomb is named after 'microbiologist' Major General Shiro Ishii, the (former) head of the Kwantung Army's 731 Special Forces, who conducted biological experiments on prisoners of war in North Korea, China and the Soviet Union. Ishii invented a special bomb that proved the most effective use of bacteriological weapons. The main feature of this bomb is that it has a ceramic shell filled with plague fleas. Bombs can explode at altitudes of 50-100 metres above the surface, which will ensure that the area is contaminated as widely as possible. ”
As such evidence became more and more presented to Yamada, he admitted during interrogation that he knew about military experiments on bacteriological weapons on living people during his interrogation. At this time, Yamada, who could no longer deny it, fiercely released an extremely anti-human statement:
"I personally believe that the human experiments that determine the validity of biological weapons are not crimes against humanity, because international law does not prohibit such acts."
He even suggested that there was nothing wrong with experiments on living people in Chinese, North Koreans, Soviets and other countries, "I believe that without experiments, the effectiveness of the bacterial action cannot be determined"...
A lot of nonsense was made up in front of it, and finally they were forced out of the real idea of Japanese militarism, and they didn't even think there was anything wrong with doing so!
Through interrogation records, russia's archival materials have exposed many live experiments on civilians in China, North Korea, the Soviet Union and other countries, injecting them with bacteria such as plague, anthrax, cholera, typhoid fever, etc., and a large number of infected people died of extreme pain; and even the terrible facts of dissecting and removing organs from living experimental subjects.
Russian archives show that More than 3,000 Troop 731 personnel confessed to dying in the test, compared to at least 10,000 according to other studies.
Alexander Zvyyazev, deputy director of the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences, mentioned in an interview with the Satellite News Agency that during a sabotage operation by the Japanese army in China, representatives of the so-called "education department" of Unit 731 distributed 3,000 breads contaminated with typhoid bacteria to Chinese prisoners of war. He noted that the Japanese military left behind cookies, bread, sugar cakes and chocolate in China, all of which were contaminated with other deadly bacteria.
Zvyagintsev added: "Infected people return and infect their own cities. And they all died in convulsions, and everyone, the whole family, died in pain. ”
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In the second year of the Japanese invasion of northeast China during the "918 Incident", Ishii Shiro formed the 731 unit that carried the evils of mankind. That is to say, the crimes of 731 almost ran through the entire history of the War of Resistance. The pain left on Chinese people is unimaginable.
(Shiro Ishii in 1932)
Over the years, all walks of life in our country have also been the most focused and in-depth force in exposing the crimes of Unit 731, represented by the Exhibition Hall of Evidence of the 731 Unit of the Japanese Army invading China in Heilongjiang, and the Chinese side has carried out long-term and fruitful work on the research and exposure of 731 crimes, including many cross-border evidence collections to obtain new archival materials.
These research materials, which describe the crimes, are unbearable to read.
In the Chinese material, there are also many confessions of Japanese 731 members.
For example, this confession of 731 member Kiyoshi Kawashima:
"In order to study as completely as possible the contagion effects of bacteria on human beings, and to devise as quickly as possible the method of making bacteriological weapons for use in wartime, the 731st Unit has extensively conducted experiments in using living human objects to check the effectiveness of all deadly bacteria, and every year five or six hundred prisoners are sent to Unit 731."
He also admitted to having personally participated in experimenting with the effectiveness of bacteriological weapons on living people. In the 731 Special Prison, "Ma Ida" (Japanese for "log", referring to the person who is the subject of the experiment, which shows the degree of humanity) is continuously brought in from all over the world, and then provided to the laboratories. After various experiments in the laboratory, some were sent to the autopsy room, most of the dissected bodies were sent to the crematorium for incineration, and a few dismembered bodies were put into the exhibition hall. In Unit 731, 400-600 people are imprisoned each year for experimental materials.
Tang Qianqian was a military doctor at the Lu'an Army Hospital in Shanxi Province during the Japanese invasion of China, and was directly involved in vivisection experiments for 7 times. In his testimony, he said:
"After the surgery starts, start with the appendix first. Cut hard, the inside is soft and soft, so cut again, I remember reaching in and looking for it. When the subject was just laughing at himself, he cut open the trachea, put his hand on his neck, and as soon as he cut the blood, it gushed out, it was the first time he had done such a thing, and he remembered it very clearly. ”
Unit 731 was not satisfied with such "small" experiments on Chinese individuals, and they even took the entire area and city of China as the subject of experiments.
In order to "test" the "research results" of bacteriological weapons, in the summer of 1943, the 1855th bacteriological unit conducted a test of spreading cholera bacteria in the city of Beijing!
By the end of October of that year, 2,136 cholera patients had been found in Jeopyeong City, with 1,872 deaths and 92 deaths.
In early August, 200 health corporal cadets of Unit 731, as well as about 50 military doctors, health corporal officers and hygienic soldiers, conducted cholera bacteria examinations on Chinese in Beiping City, and in order to make their experimental data more accurate, cholera patients were forcibly locked off at home, forbidden to enter and exit, and no treatment, killing more than 300 residents.
These experimental results obtained from living people were directly used by the Japanese on the battlefield. The Russian archives stated that the Japanese army was ready to use germ bombs in the Soviet war, etc., and used more and on a larger scale on the Chinese battlefield.
In October 1940, the Japanese army invading China launched germ warfare against Ningbo, Zhejiang and other places.
Before the start of the war, Unit 731 had done a lot of preparatory work. With Kiyoshi Kawashima as the commander-in-chief, a large-scale production of bacteria was set up, organizing 120 people and dividing them into two brigades to produce plague, typhoid fever, cholera and other germs day and night. At the same time, the Japanese army began to transport a large number of bacteria and personnel to central China.
On October 27, 731 launched a germ warfare, dispatching more than 100 people and dropping 125 kilograms of plague, cholera, typhoid fever and other bacteria. Two days later, plague broke out in the 5,000-square-meter area south of Zhongshan Road, north of Kaiming Lane, east of Kaiming Street, and west of Taiping Lane, killing 106 people with surnames, including 40 children and teenagers.
In the Battle of Zhejiang from July to August 1942, 731 repeated the same technique.
Under the personal command of Shiro Ishii, Unit 731 launched a larger germ warfare. This time, the Japanese Kou dispatched 160 officers and 3 planes to drop test tubes and items containing cholera, plague, typhoid fever, malaria and other germs on the borders of Hangzhou, Jinhua, and Zhejiang. This time, more Chinese were affected, reaching tens of thousands of people, especially cholera.
To what extent did 731 go crazy about germ warfare? In this germ warfare in Zhejiang, due to the deviation of the drop-off location, many Japanese officers and soldiers fell ill and died.
Look, this is not the devil, what is the devil?!
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Unit 731 and the Japanese 100th Special Forces, which were also engaged in germ warfare, were quite large, with a total number of more than 4,000 personnel according to statistics.
However, this unit, which was also arguably the most anti-human in World War II, which was flooded with war criminals, received very little accountability after the war. In the world-renowned trial of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, Japan's Unit 731 was exempted from responsibility for its germ warfare activities and treated like the Emperor of Japan. Only some members were tried and punished in China and the Soviet Union. A large number of members of the 731, including the first evil Ishii Shiro and his successor, the second 731 chief official Kitano Masaji, escaped justice and went unpunished.
How can such a great treachery and great evil be easily released? The reason is simple, the evil forces have a protective umbrella.
Kitano was captured in Shanghai after Japan's surrender in August 1945 and fell into the hands of Chinese, who had committed heinous crimes. However, under the "coordination" of the intelligence services of the Allied General Command, which was manipulated by the United States, Kitano was extradited back to Japan in January 1946.
In Japan, Kitano Masaji was questioned by a U.S. base at Fort Detrick to investigate Japanese germ warfare.
Some time ago, the personnel of the aforementioned 731 Crimes Exhibition Hall obtained the interrogation records of Kitano by Debao personnel in the United States through cross-border evidence collection, which was eye-opening after reading.
The process of Kitano's confession seems to be somewhat similar to that of Yamada, who was tried in the Soviet Union, in that he pretended to be stupid and blamed before admitting the facts. But the fundamental difference is that Yamada was later angry and broke the jar, while Kitano was simply comfortable in his later confession.
At the beginning of the trial, Kitano Masaji insisted that there was nothing for me here, it was all his personal behavior of Shiro Ishii. Or sell the former chief officer to escape his own guilt.
However, during the interrogation, Kitano gradually discovered that the purpose of the Americans was not to punish themselves at all, but to extract germ warfare and other data from his mouth.
Kitano ichi looked: Okay, then you didn't say it earlier. So he began to openly and generously admit the fact that Unit 731 used bacteriological weapons and conducted human experiments.
If he had known about his predecessor Shiro Ishii's encounter, perhaps even this resistance would have been superfluous.
Before Japan surrendered, Ishii had fled back to Japan. From August 1945 to 1947, Ishii Shiro was actually in a state of "disappearance", and the US military occupying Japan also informed the Soviet Union: "The whereabouts of Shiro Ishii and others are unknown." ”
However, the truth is that as early as December 1945, Ishii was captured by American intelligence agents. In 1946, he was secretly interrogated by the Americans.
When Ishii reappeared in front of the world, he was already an adviser to the Americans, openly presiding over the germ warfare research institute set up by the United States in Japan.
It was a devil's deal.
The United States benefited the most from the deal in Fort Detrick, where Shiro Ishii was interrogated.
According to reports, the information handed over by Ishii and others to the Us side includes more than 8,000 samples of human and animal tissue slices, which are stored in Fort Detrick to promote the development of biochemical weapons in the United States.
Through this transaction, Key figures of 731 such as Ishii and Kitano were not only exempt from criminal responsibility, but also became guests of honor in the United States. At the end of 1951, on the eve of the US military's germ warfare against China and North Korea, Shiro Ishii, Yujiro Wakamatsu, and Masaji Kitano also went to the Korean battlefield to conduct field investigations and prepare for germ warfare.
If the Republic of China government of President Chiang Kai-shek was too weak to obediently let Kitano Masaji go, the Soviet Union, as a superpower on the other side of the Yalta system, could not extradite war criminals from the United States.
As recently as Russia released in the file, it was revealed that during the Tokyo trial, although the Soviet side provided detailed materials for the trial of Japanese prisoners of war, the United States refused to include the issue in the indictment; in 1950, the Soviet Union issued three notes to the United States, demanding that the United States deliver the main Japanese germ war criminals to the war court, but Washington ignored it.
With such protection, the 731 war criminals behaved even more arrogantly after the war than in wartime.
During his service in Unit 731, Kitano Masaji published many "research papers", in his papers, when involving human experiments, sometimes he would use "monkeys" to cover people's eyes and ears, but he did not do things secretly, and some parts of the paper also mentioned human experiments, which exposed the truth. But I can see that the people of 731 at that time still have to hide their own things.
The archival materials recently released by the 731 Incriminating Evidence Museum have shocked people's jaws. Shunichi Kaneko, who had served in 731, actually published a paper after the war with the results of the bacteriological warfare experiment of unit 731 during the war, and obtained a doctorate in medicine.
In a paper titled "A Basic Investigation of 'Rainfall' Sowing", Shunichi Kaneko details the methods of bacterial scattering by aircraft and the experimental data. The paper openly displays such cases:
Taking the first as an example, on June 4, 1940, in Nong'an (Jilin), if 5 grams of plague fleas were dropped, the first time it would kill 8 people, and these 8 people would infect 607 people, which converted into 1 kg of plague fleas, the first time would cause 1600 deaths, and the second would cause 123000 deaths.
Moreover, the first page of the paper is written in a dignified manner, and the paper is directed by Major General Ishii Shiro.
At that time, 27 evaluation experts from the University of Tokyo had no objection to this and unanimously passed.
At this time, less than four years had passed since Japan announced its unconditional surrender.
The evidence of the sin is still there, the sinner is dead, and the sin remains. And this new combination of demons now may be much more terrifying than the one in the past.
It is not Chinese revenge, nor is it Chinese does not love peace, time can erase many traces, but there is always a powerful force in this world, and in inheriting and developing those evils of the past, we can't forget it.
For example, in an interview with the Russian military historian Yuri Knutov, he talked about the latest declassified materials from the Russian side, which he believes can make mankind remember the cruel lessons of World War II:
"Of course, the atrocities committed by the Japanese are well known, and the anti-human actions of Unit 731 have long been exposed at trial. Today, however, it is still necessary to remember this ruthlessness and cruelty of the Japanese militarists, of how they destroyed Chinese mouths on a massive scale and insulted our citizens. ”
Forgetting history does amount to betrayal before the wicked change.
Resources:
The Russian Federal Security Service declassified archival series report on the "Secret War Guide" of the General Staff of the Japanese Kwantung Army
Why did the leader of Unit 731 escape trial? The latest evidence reveals the criminal transaction behind the extradition of war criminals by Japan and the United States" CCTV News
"Russia's First Blockbuster Declassification: The Heinous Crimes Committed by Japanese Unit 731!" Observer Network
"The Germ Warfare of the Japanese Army Invading China Adds New Evidence!" CCTV News
The "Historical Review" series of pictures and texts in the Exhibition Hall of the 731st Unit of the Japanese Army invading China
"The Testimony Files of a Group of Japanese Germ Warfare Team Members Released" Xinhua News Agency