The man largely responsible for the operation of Unit 731, Shirō Ishii, escaped punishment after the war. History of Unit 731 Experimentation began in 1933, but Unit 731 was established in 1936 disguised as the “Epidemic Prevention & Water Purification Department”, headed by the Kwatang Army. Started as an agency to promote public health, Unit 731 was meant to conduct research that would benefit Japanese soldiers, such as learning more about the ways in which the human body can withstand hunger and thirst and fight diseases. And as the concept of consent went out the window, so did the restraint of the researchers. Associated Press/LIFE via Wikimedia CommonsA Japanese soldier uses a Chinese man’s body for bayonet practice near Tianjin, China. Prisoners would be exposed to extreme temperatures in order to develop frostbite, after which the Japanese would study how long it took before gangrene would set in, and how long a human could survive it. Published: 15:48 GMT, 8 May 2018 | Updated: 19:05 GMT, 8 May 2018. Wound patterns and penetration depths were then compared on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates. Eager to win the war, the scientists involved committed a lot of inhumane crimes like vivisection to Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Mongolian prisoners of war, and used the data gained to harm many Chinese civilians. Photographs from the new book - Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil, Auschwitz of the East - shows Japanese soldiers taking part in a vivisection - carrying out operations on a live person to study living tissue and organs. Date unspecified. Unit of torture: The senior officers of Unit 731 are pictured during World War II, Chinese adults and children have been infected with an unknown illness and are being monitored by Japanese medical staff at Unit 731. Unit 731 (731部隊), based at the Pingfang district of Harbin and led by the infamous Japanese microbiologist Shiro Ishii, was a covert biological warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was around this time that Unit 731 began referring to confined research subjects as “logs,” or “Maruta” in Japanese. There were many facilities, including units 100 and 531, but 731 (located in the Pingfang district of Harbin, now Northeast China) was the main center. A Unit 731 doctor operates on a patient that is part of a bacteriological experiment. They each received between two and 25 years in a Siberian labour camp. Curious, certain Japanese researchers in its army unit 731 conducted a series of indescribably cruel experiments testing the limits of the human body when subjected to harsh conditions, poisonous substances and lethal diseases. Despite its notorious war crimes, many of Unit 731’s pseudo-scientists took prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business and medicine. Date unspecified. Fears UK will now face 'Tier 5' restrictions after number of Covid cases in hospital soars HIGHER than first... Britain will be buried in up to SIX INCHES of snow before New Year's Day: Met Office issues FOUR-day warning... EU ambassadors unanimously approve the Brexit trade deal between Britain and Brussels in major step towards... Is Tier Four coming to YOUR area? Doctors injected prisoners with animal blood or forced them to share cells with diseased inmates to test how infectious the conditions were, historians say. More than 3,000 people - mostly Chinese civilians, but also Russian, British and American POWs - were dissected alive, infected with bubonic plague and used as human guinea-pigs for frost-bite treatments. None of the Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, or Russian prisoners assigned to Unit 731 survived their confinement. Unit 731 (731部隊) led by Japanese microbiologist Shiro Ishii, was a covert biological warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook human experimentation mainly on Chinese, Koreans, and Russians, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. As well as the 3,000 killed at Unit 731, tens of thousands are also thought to have died when the Japanese used what they had learned against their enemies in the war - mainly Chinese civilians. In addition to releasing plague-infected fleas, the Japanese are known to have planted typhoid fever, cholera and other diseases into the water systems in Chinese villages. It’s been reported that at least 12,000 people died due to Unit’s 731 inhumane experiments. In World War II, Japan created a top-secret project named Unit 731. 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