Unit 731 Site, Japanese R&D Concentration Camp (Harbin)

 museum, Second World War 1939-1945, interesting place, war memorial, war cemetery

Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during World War II.
Its purpose was the development and manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction, specifically biological and chemical weapons. Weapons developed by Unit 731 were deployed during WWII, mostly in China.
Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japan.
It was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, USSR. After the Japanese invasion of 1931, Harbin became the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. In 1949, the region was gifted, transferred from the USSR to the People's Republic of China.
Unit 731 was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. Originally set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shiro Ishii, a combat medic officer in the Kwantung Army. The facility itself was built between 1934 and 1939 and officially adopted the name "Unit 731" in 1941.
At least 3,000 men, women, and children — from which at least 600 each year were political prosioners provided by the Kempeitai police. Subjects were used as "lab rats", called "logs") in medical procedures conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang. The experiments tested the efficacy of various weaponized bio and chemical weapons.
One well-documented procedure was to drop bio-bombs from small airplanes on victims who were tied to stakes in a field. After exposure, the subjects were returned to cells where they were monitored for the onset of disease symptoms. As soon as infection was confirmed, the subjects were vivisected to measure the effects on internal organs.
Unit 731 participants of Japan claim that most of the victims they experimented on were Chinese while a smaller percentage were Soviet, Mongolian, Korean, and Allied POWs. Almost 70% of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese, including both civilian and military. Close to 30% of the victims were local Soviet residents, mostly from Harbin. Others were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of Allied prisoners of war.
Because of this rare opportunity to conduct live human experiments and strong financial incentives from the army, medical research doctors and professors from Japan were encouraged by their universities to join Unit 731. After the war, the region was liberated by the Soviet Army. But most of the staff escaped back to Japan and were there when Japan surrendered.
Instead of being tried for war crimes after the war, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for their weaponized medical data. Soviet forces arrested a few stragglers and they were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949.
The aftermath of Unit 731 created mistrust between the USSR and USA, and this tension contributed to the Cold War.