During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Japanese Kou set up a large number of prisoner-of-war camps and concentration camps in the occupied areas, such as the Fengtian concentration camp in Shenyang, which concentrated on thousands of prisoners of war in China, the United States, Britain, and Australia. What many people don't know is that there is also a concentration camp called Shimen in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province, which imprisoned 50,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians, of whom more than 20,000 died tragically at the hands of concentration camp guards.
How terrifying is the Shimen concentration camp?
The Shimen concentration camp was also known as the Shijiazhuang Prisoner of War Camp, but the cunning Japanese guards declared it a "labor training center" and a "labor training center", so few people doubted its true use. In fact, the real purpose of the Shimen concentration camp was to brainwash the captured anti-Japanese soldiers and civilians, transform them into slave laborers and servants of the Japanese army's invasion of China, and also be an important institution for the bloody suppression of anti-Japanese forces.
The Shimen concentration camp and even all the prisoner-of-war camps (concentration camps) established by Japan during World War II have seriously violated international laws and regulations, because they have the following characteristics: "Most Chinese prisoners of war are imprisoned in concentration camps as laborers, and the Japanese army brutally plunders the labor resources of Chinese prisoners of war; the management of the Japanese army is extremely cruel, and the living conditions of Chinese prisoners of war are extremely bad; Chinese prisoners of war have never enjoyed the treatment of prisoners of war stipulated in international law, and their lives, freedom, and dignity are completely unprotected." ”
In order to control the prisoners of war, Japanese guards laid out many facilities in the Shimen concentration camp. The perimeter of the camp was surrounded by a high wall covered with hundreds of volts of high-voltage electrified barbed wire, and if a prisoner of war wished to escape from the camp over the wall, he would be electrocuted alive in seconds. In addition to the high-voltage power grid, the Japanese also laid a large number of sentries in the concentration camps. Heavy machine guns and searchlights were set up on the sentry posts, and as soon as fleeing prisoners of war were spotted, they were immediately dealt with with machine guns. Underneath the sentry is a dense barbed wire fence and a high-voltage power grid, which cannot be escaped without the use of tools.
Therefore, as long as the soldiers and civilians who are sent to the Shimen concentration camp have almost no possibility of escape. The Shimen concentration camp was also changed by the prisoners of war because of its high mortality rate and low survival rate, and the prisoners unanimously called it "the Hall of Yama, where people enter and ghosts come out."
The Shimen camp is full of violence and death, and the prisoners of war can feel it from the first step into the camp. For the prisoners of war, the Shimen concentration camp will carry out a simple set of procedures, and then the prisoners will be concentrated, slowly torturing their will to resist and squeezing out their surplus value.
When the stuffy train transported the prisoners of war to the Shimen concentration camp, the guards of the concentration camp would strictly follow the six steps of "verification, disinfection, registration, numbering, interrogation, and education" to deal with the detained prisoners of war. The most dehumanizing of these six steps is disinfection.
According to relevant historical records, the so-called "disinfection" is that the guards stripped the prisoners of war of their clothes and ordered them to immerse themselves in gasoline barrels filled with carbonated or ice water. Infuriatingly, no matter how many degrees of temperature it was that day, the guards would use bayonets to force prisoners of war to jump into gasoline barrels to "disinfect."
If the prisoners of war did not comply, they would grab the prisoners' hair and immerse them head-down and feet up into the cold liquid. When the guards felt they could do it, they would grab the cold and shivering prisoners of war and drive them to run in the camp square and dry the moisture on their bodies. If you don't want to run, you'll be served with sticks and bayonets.
Due to ill-treatment and poor transport conditions when captured, many prisoners of war contracted serious illnesses before entering concentration camps. In addition, they were tortured to death by the Japanese guards before they could enter the barracks.
For those prisoners of war who survived the first round of torture, the suffering was far from over. They would be given numbers from the guards and a dirty, tattered prisoner's coat that had been ripped from the prisoners who had been tortured to death.
Infuriatingly, prisoners of war had only one such set of clothes in a prisoner-of-war camp. If they were worn out in the course of heavy labour, the prisoners of war would have to be naked. In order to keep warm, many PRISONERs of war had to pick up broken sacks or cement bags that no one wanted to wrap their bodies when they went out to work. When the Japanese guards saw this, they would point to the prisoners of war in "strange costumes" and laugh: "Look at the Chinese guy in the sack!" ”
International conventions obliged States to protect the legal rights of prisoners of war, but this was a nod to the fierce and cunning Japanese. In order to circumvent these rules, the Japanese army cleverly argued that they were not capturing prisoners of war, but "bandits", so that the Japanese army had the right to dispose of prisoners of war at will.
In order to "save" costs, the Japanese guards deliberately cut the daily rations distributed to prisoners of war. The Shimen camp provided the prisoners of war with two "meals" a day, and if they went out to work, they could add another meal. The prisoners of war did not eat at all, they only received a small amount of moldy millet and cornmeal, and ate it with pickles. In 1942, the Japanese army was in a tight war, and the prisoners of war could not even eat millet and cornmeal, but could only eat shelled sorghum rice.
Also in order to save costs, the Japanese army used discarded wooden boxes to fill the prisoners of war with "meals", and even tableware was not distributed to the prisoners. In order to eat a "human-like" food, the PRISONERs could only steal the empty canned boxes discarded by the guards from the garbage heap to serve rice, and then grab it with their hands and eat it. Poor eating conditions led to prisoners of war often running out of food, and there were incidents of being starved to death by guards.
Not only was the food bad, but the Japanese guards did not intend to give the prisoners enough drinking water. As a sign of "concern" for the prisoners of war, the guards falsely erected a piece in the camp that read, "No cold water drinking!" "The brand. But the prisoners of war alone could not receive even a liter of drinking water a day, and in order to quench their thirst, they would even steal the water from the canal that watered the vegetable fields. If the guards find out, it is inevitable to punch and kick. Even if a poor man was kicked in the head several times by the guards, he was unwilling to let go of his hands to fetch water, and he was finally beaten to death by the guards.
Seeing someone stealing water from the ditch, the cruel Japanese guards simply put "No drinking cold water!" The sign was replaced by "No drinking raw water!" ”。 There was no way, and the prisoners of war who could not stand the thirst ended up surviving on their own urine. And this was found by the Japanese guards and inevitably beat up, on the grounds of "polluting the barracks environment".
The prisoners of war were poorly dressed, ate poorly, and did not even have access to water, but they had to bear heavy physical labor. The Japanese believed that prisoners of war were slaves who did not have to pay for their work, and as long as they were not seriously ill, they had to serve the Japanese free of charge.
Escorted by Japanese guards, the tortured prisoners of war dragged their tired steps to serve the Japanese war machine. Some were assigned to vegetable gardens to produce grain and vegetables for the Japanese army, some went to factories opened by the Japanese in the local area to produce military supplies for the Japanese army, and some were even escorted to the front to build fortifications for the Japanese army...
Japanese troops
Wherever they went to work, the Japanese guards next to them would stare at each other, and if they found that the prisoners were slow to work, they would kick them. In order to squeeze the labor force of the prisoners of war to the maximum, the Japanese guards set them daily targets for almost impossible work. If it could not be completed that day, the guards would take them out of the line and slap them hard until the guards felt relieved.
Many prisoners of war, who were tortured to the point of inhumanity, were physically exhausted in the heavy labor, and finally fell into the ground and could no longer get up. Seeing that someone had unfortunately died of overwork, the Japanese guards did not show mercy. They poked the dead on the ground with bayonets in their hands, and if they did not respond, they ordered the prisoners of war next to them to collect the dead bodies and pull them to a special place to bury the prisoners of war. The newly arrived prisoners of war dared to be angry at the ruthlessness of the Japanese guards, but after seeing more of this kind of thing, they gradually became numb.
Under the threat of the Japanese guards, the prisoners of war still made a lot of "achievements": eight large barracks, two airfields, dozens of fortifications, thousands of artillery towers... These were built brick by brick by the prisoners of war.
The Japanese did not show due respect to the prisoners of war held in the Shimen concentration camp. They drove the prisoners of war into heavy manual labor in the morning and locked them in cramped barracks like cattle at night.
The living conditions of the prisoners of war were very poor. The barracks were made of wooden planks, cold in winter and hot in summer, and breathless, and living in them was as uncomfortable as being locked in a large steamer. The most frightening thing was the condition of the barracks, in order to "save" space, a small barracks of less than 10 square meters had to be crammed into more than twenty prisoners of war. Due to the small space, the PRISONERs could only sleep with their heads against their heads and feet next to their feet.
POW Camp Beds (Non-Shimen POW Camp)
The shrewdness and cunning of the Japanese can also be seen in the barracks arrangement. The only place for the PRISONERs to sleep was a large bunk made of light wooden planks, many of which had no quilts on them and two bricks on the pillows. When prisoners of war were held for a long time, the beds could not sleep, and some people had to make bunks on the cold cement floor. There were a little more people, not even bunks, and the prisoners of war who did not have beds to sleep could only sit on the ground and rest.
In the harsh environment and the combination of severe beatings by Japanese guards, many prisoners of war suffered from severe infectious diseases, and the cramped barracks helped the plague spread rapidly among prisoners of war. Many prisoners of war who were not very resistant may have contracted the disease the day before and were found dead in their beds the next day.
Even the prisoners of war who had not been killed by the plague were not much better. They would be examined by military doctors and sent to different "wards" according to the severity of their illness if they were diagnosed with the plague. The so-called "wards" were simple barracks without any medical equipment, filled with prisoners of war infected with the plague. If strong and young prisoners of war were infected with the plague, japanese guards would send them to wards one and two. Here, Japanese military doctors would give the prisoners limited treatment, and when the prisoners were slightly stable, they would be driven back to the construction site. Because in the eyes of the Japanese army, they are talking beasts, and they do not deserve good treatment.
Frail and sickly and aging prisoners of war who suffered from the plague were thrown to the third ward by the Japanese guards to wait for death, which was crowded with the elderly and sick who suffered from cholera, typhoid fever, and scarlet fever. The insidious Japanese guards gathered them together, not for anything else, but to hasten their deaths, so that many rations could be saved.
For the prisoners of war who unfortunately died of the plague, the Japanese army did not show any mercy. They would pretend to make several coffins out of thin wooden planks and pull sick and dead prisoners of war out of the camps. When we arrived at the Humen Yidi Mass Grave used to bury the body, I saw the two Japanese soldiers pulling the cart open the lid of the coffin, directly dump the prisoner of war who unfortunately died of the plague into the mass grave, and then hastily buried the matter.
This was because the Japanese believed that Chinese prisoners of war were not worthy of using coffins, plus these thin wooden coffins could continue to be transported back to carry dead people. After more and more dead people, the Japanese army simply saved the coffin, and directly used a board truck to transport the pile of corpses to the mass grave and buried it hastily. Therefore, being sent to ward 3 in the eyes of prisoners of war in shimen concentration camp means "death". Even if many people are seriously ill, they dare not tell their roommates, let alone show their illness to the Japanese guards.
In 1944, a large-scale death of prisoners of war broke out in the Shimen concentration camp. In that year, the Japanese transported more than 10,000 prisoners captured from the front line to the Shimen concentration camp by stuffy train, and hundreds of people died of illness before they reached the camp due to deliberate mistreatment by the Japanese army. Bacteria and viruses spread through the closed carriages, and many of the low-resistance PRISONERs of war were so sick that they did not have days to live when they arrived at the concentration camps.
According to relevant records, after arriving at the concentration camp, dozens of prisoners of war died of illness every day due to lack of timely treatment, and even 290 people died of illness in one night. Seeing that the small board truck could not hold the body, the Japanese troops guarding it simply used a military truck to pull the body.
The brutality of the Japanese army shocked the nearby grave watchers, Mr. and Mrs. Li Xiaoke, and it is not difficult to see from their descriptions in an interview with reporters in 1951 how inhumane these Japanese troops guarding the prisoner-of-war camps were:
"The devils have killed more of us. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, which day does not die dozens of mouths, that year the winter snow fell heavily, frozen to death of many people, usually the sun fell to the ground to pull, this time the sun is high on the pull, a car loaded with thirty, four people pulled, pulled three times, grunted and thrown in a big pit, those people, are bare ass, yellow muscle thin, skin and bones. In the summer, the face is swollen and tall, staring at two big eyes, mixed with injuries, blood, feces, some moved down from the car, it rotted into a section, and then there was no place to bury. Just plan and fill in the original buried place. We have been looking at the graves for more than two years, and we estimate that at least 20,000 people have been buried. ”
Even more infuriating is that in order to escape responsibility, the Japanese guards destroyed any evidence of their war crimes after the defeat. Therefore, there has been no conclusive as to the number of people who died in the Shimen concentration camp. But one thing is for sure, more than 20,000 people is already a conservative figure, and many people think that the real number must be more than 20,000.
In addition to deliberately causing a large number of prisoners of war to die, the Japanese troops guarding the concentration camps also invented many torture methods for torturing prisoners of war. As long as the imprisoned prisoners of war have the slightest disagreement with the guards, they will be punched and kicked by the guards, and the guards will be killed alive and lose their lives.
According to the surviving prisoners' recollections, the victims of the same barracks were killed by the Japanese guards because they took a few biscuits while working in the storage room. When these Japanese soldiers beat the prisoners of war with the butts of their guns, they did not forget to angrily scold: "Dead Chinese!" Dare to steal the things of the Imperial Army! Dead dead! ”
Even if the prisoners of war did nothing wrong, they would become the object of amusement for the Japanese guards. When the PRISONERs of War were releasing the wind in the concentration camp, the Japanese watching from the watchtowers would raise their rifles and shoot at them, just to watch the prisoners who were frightened by the gunfire.
According to the recollections of surviving prisoners of war, senior officers in the camp once executed a prisoner of war who had committed no mistake in public for fun. It was a hot afternoon, and many prisoners of war were chatting and resting in the open space of the concentration camp. The guards next to him were bored and wanted to take pleasure in the prisoners of war. Listening only to the sound of a whistle, hundreds of prisoners of war were lined up in a line of trepidation.
Seeing the whole line, the largest of the guards showed a sinister smile, pointed to a prisoner of war with a vegetable face and said, "Yours, go out and work in the field!" Seeing the prisoner of war standing out in fear, the soldier next to the officer waved his hand and immediately tied him to the camp's torture post.
Seeing that the Japanese army wanted to execute himself, the prisoner was so frightened that his face was blank, and his legs could not help but scream: "Taijun... Taijun... Don't kill me! Only to hear the officer laugh and say, "Misymith work!" The Japanese soldier with the military dog next to him loosened the cage on the dog's mouth, only to see that the military dog, which had been hungry for several days, immediately flew up and bit the prisoner tied to the execution pillar into pieces.
Japanese fierce dogs
……
The Shimen camp was not only a place to hold prisoners of war, but also dealt with The Japanese gendarmes, anti-Japanese guerrillas captured by agents, and Communists.
After the captives entered the camp, the Japanese guards carried out strict screening of the prisoners' identities. If Communists are found, they are held separately from ordinary prisoners of war. Captured Communists were sent to separate interrogation chambers because the Japanese were trying to dismantle the anti-Japanese forces through the arrested Communists.
If the Communists "did not cooperate," the Japanese guards would use many cruel means against them, the most frightening of which was the direct injection of calcium carbonated water. Stone carbonate water is an important raw material for the production of resins and preservatives, and if it is directly injected into the human body, it will lead to death! The Japanese soldiers guarding the captives certainly knew this, and they injected the imprisoned Communists with calcium carbonated water.
In March 1944, the Japanese gendarmerie in Handan, Hebei Province, handed over a group of captured prisoners to the Shimen concentration camp, including 30 underground parties. After screening, the underground party was sent to the camp's interrogation room for separate processing. In order to pry open the mouths of the underground party, the Japanese guards tortured them severely. Seeing that no one was relieved, the Japanese army directly arranged for military doctors to inject them with stone carbonated water.
Of course, in order to cover up the beastly behavior, before using stone carbonated water to execute the underground party, the Japanese guards announced to the outside world that they were giving them a "preventive shot". As a result, more than twenty of the underground parties that were injected with "preventive injections" died on the spot. The rest of the underground parties, even after carrying the erosion of the stone carbonate solution, only had half a breath.
The bestiality of the camp guards aroused the determination of the prisoners of war to resist, and the Communists arrested by the Japanese became the mainstay of the organization of resistance.
Every morning before they went to work, the Japanese army would force the prisoners of war to shout slogans and sing the song "Sino-Japanese Goodwill" written by the Japanese puppet government. Led by the Communists, the PRISONERs deliberately went out of tune and misbehaved while singing, disrupting the rhythm of the song. When shouting slogans, the voice is loud and small, and even the content of the slogan is adapted.
If they were picked out by the angry Japanese guards, these people would prevaricate on the grounds of "ignorance of music theory" and so on. Because of the stereotype of the low level of education of the Chinese, the Japanese guards did not care whether the Chinese prisoners deliberately wrote damage.
In order to break the will of resistance of the prisoners of war, the prisoners of war in the camp were enslaved. Japanese guards carried out the same "imperial education" in the prisoner-of-war camps as in the occupied areas and other Japanese-occupied colonies, forcing everyone to bow to the portrait of Emperor Hirohito in the morning.
Emperor Hirohito (middle viewer)
Communists suggested that a simple Guandi temple without a statue of Guan Gong should be erected in a place where the emperor's portrait was placed. In this way, on the surface, the prisoners of war were bowing to the portrait of the emperor, but in fact they were bowing to Guan Laoye. Because Guan Gong's spirit of "being in Cao Ying's heart in Han" is an important pillar to encourage every prisoner of war to continue to struggle.
Of course, the struggle against the fierce and vicious Japanese guards still has to pay attention to methods. Delaying the progress of labor without being discovered, and damaging labor tools can add great trouble to the Japanese army. The guards instructed the prisoners of war to bring in a pile of new bricks and tiles, which turned into fragments in the blink of an eye.
Without the guards noticing, the prisoners of war secretly let go of the gas from the trolley tires and threw away the pickaxes of the pickaxes... All this caused headaches for the Japanese troops in the custody.
However, the end of the evil deeds in the Shimen concentration camp was not until Japan announced its unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945. The Japanese guards, who once flaunted their might, are now like grasshoppers in the autumn. In order to save a dog's life, they began to improve the food of the prisoners of war, and even took the initiative to give the red cross donated supplies to the prisoners of war for use. However, the "good intentions" of the Japanese guards did not soften most of the prisoners of war. Because they had been in the Shimen concentration camp for six years, they already knew exactly what kind of virtue the Japanese devils really were.
On September 3, 1945, Japan formally surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The camp guards, knowing that the tide had turned, destroyed all the evidence of the crime and packed up everything they could take away in the camp. Still, they were one step too late. Angry people publicly exposed concentration camp guards who planned to flee back to Japan in the crowd. The executioners, whose hands were stained with Chinese blood, were tied behind their backs and escorted to the place where they had committed their heinous crimes to face justice.
Although the guards thought they could escape responsibility by destroying all the written evidence, they forgot one of the most important pieces of evidence, and that was people! Not only were there prisoners of war in the Shimen camp who survived the end of World War II, but also ordinary people who witnessed the massacre of prisoners by the guards also stood up and identified war criminals.
After a serious trial, most of the Shimen camp guards were found guilty. Several concentration camp leaders who committed the most heinous crimes were taken to the execution site for execution, and the guards who committed the lesser crimes also paid their due price for their crimes.
Execution of Japanese war criminals (non-Shimen concentration camp)
The reason why the Shimen concentration camp and even most of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps were frequently tragic was actually closely related to the twisted and perverted personality of Japanese soldiers at that time. Brainwashed by militaristic ideas, the Japanese naturally despised captives who surrendered on the battlefield, believing that they did not deserve human rights. At the same time, the thirst for free labor also prompted the Japanese to force captives to perform heavy manual labor.
Under the combined effect of two factors, the mortality rate of japanese prisoner of war camps has remained high, even 13 times higher than that of Nazi Germany's prisoner of war camps!
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[2] LIU Tong. A History That Has Been Obliterated: How Chinese Tried Japanese War Criminals[J].Shangguan News, 2020(9)[3]Zhang Shuai. The Living Conditions and Spiritual World of Chinese Prisoners of War in Japanese Concentration Camps[J].Journal of Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, 2018(01)