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There were no survivors of Unit 731, the laboratory in Harbin, China, where occupying Japanese forces conducted horrific biological experiments on Chinese, Russians and POWs during World War II. But the memories of these crimes are still fresh in the minds of many residents of Khabarovsk, where the war criminals were tried.
Late in December 1949, Communist Party leaders began distributing tickets in factories and institutes for an upcoming trial. Twelve Japanese physicians and military officers — researchers at a secret facility near Harbin, China, known as Unit 731 — were accused of manufacturing biological and chemical weapons through experiments on human guinea pigs. The authorities decided that the masses should hear firsthand what had gone on at the sprawling complex, dynamited by the Japanese as Soviet troops advanced at the end of World War II.
The proceedings began in an orderly fashion, with the audience sitting quietly in the hall and balconies of the colonnaded Soviet Army Officers' House. But the depravity of the crimes shocked the listeners. Graduates of Japan's leading medical universities had infected their victims with typhus, anthrax, cholera and bubonic plague — and later let loose these same diseases in Chinese villages. A 3-day-old baby was jabbed with needles and submerged in icy water. Doctors dissected live victims without anesthesia. Circles of eager physicians would cut open screaming women to examine their reproductive organs.
"The first day everything was quiet in town," says Khabarovsk resident Georgy Permyakov, an 83-year-old language instructor who was the chief translator at the trial. "But after the evening session the entire city was talking about it."
By the second day of the proceedings, angry crowds thronged the court. Party leaders, eager to discredit "Japanese militarists," set up loudspeakers outside. The crowds learned about the doctors who subjected their victims — whom they termed "logs" — to any number of experiments. They injected them with animals' blood, exposed them to syphilis, hung them upside down until death, surgically removed their stomachs and then connected the esophagus to the intestines, amputated arms and reattached them on the opposite side. Some 10,000 people died in Japan's 26 known killing laboratories in China and other occupied countries. Field tests by the unit and other germ and chemical warfare laboratories in China killed an estimated 270,000 people.
In Khabarovsk, the crowd could scarcely contain its wrath. "In the hall there were hysterics. People crying and screaming upon hearing about such things," remembers Permyakov.
The trial, rammed through Stalinist courts in five days, is the forgotten war crimes prosecution of the 20th century. It followed the 10-month-long Nuremberg trials and the two-year Far Eastern War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo. But the Khabarovsk trial casts light on a wound that festers in Asian international relations to this day. Anger at Japan runs deep in Korea, China, the Philippines and other nations occupied in World War II, to whom Japan has never paid reparations or issued a satisfactory apology. And even as war crimes victims and their descendants are suing the Japanese government seeking compensation, the nation's Education Ministry released a textbook this month glossing over the Imperial Army's culpability in war crimes.
"One can't overestimate the importance of the Khabarovsk trial since it was the third after Nuremberg and Tokyo, and it was dedicated to crimes against mankind," said Vladislav Bogach, director of the Khabarovsk Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology and author of a book about the trial, "Outlaw Weapon."
"Khabarovsk doctors — members of the commission for medical and bacteriological issues — proved that in the secret units of the Japanese army they were preparing extremely dangerous weapons intended for mass murder."
Japan launched its biological warfare program in the 1930s after Ishii Shiro, a military physician, returned from a European tour in which he gathered information on the progress of biological warfare research in Germany. Emperor Hirohito signed a decree establishing Unit 731 in occupied Manchuria, behind multiple barbed wire fences 20 kilometers south of Harbin in the village of Pingfan. Hirohito's younger brother, Prince Mikasa, toured the headquarters and later wrote that he was shown films on how Chinese prisoners were "made to march on the plains of Manchuria for poison gas experiments."
The base was publicly known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit, and its true mission was top secret. But the Soviet consulate in Harbin quickly realized what was going on, says Permyakov, who worked in the consulate during the war. Suddenly Chinese work crews under Japanese supervision built and paved a road to Pingfan, and it was crowded with the cars of ranking Japanese officers. Black prison vans known as voronki, or ravens, began racing through Harbin. As they headed out of town, pedestrians could hear prisoners pounding within and shouting for help. Unknown to the Japanese, the embassy lofted a small, clear plastic hydrogen balloon carrying a tiny camera that secretly photographed the entire complex.
Like many places associated with the horrors of 20th-century mass murder, Harbin today offers little hint of the evils that occurred nearby. The city of 2.5 million, once an enclave for Russians who fled the Bolsheviks, still has remnants of Russian architecture and onion-domed cathedrals mingling with Chinese high-rises. The former Unit 731 facility sits in what is now an industrial park in a suburb south of town. The war-era buildings are gone, replaced by row upon row of factories and businesses covered in white swimming pool tiles.
The main reminder of Unit 731 is a small museum built by the Chinese government, where dummies of doctors in smocks smeared with pink dye cut open a mannequin — its mouth open in a silent scream. Elsewhere, mannequins bedecked in underwear are tied to poles as dummy Japanese soldiers douse them with water. A soldier with a club knocks off the hand of one prisoner.
While the museum might not do justice to the crimes that went on there, some of the scenes it depicts are far from fictitious. Unit 731's physicians, preparing to fight in colder territories — such as the Soviet Union or Alaska — would experiment on victims in the bitter Harbin weather, where winter temperatures can fall below minus 40 degrees Celsius. Guards would strip a victim, tie him to a post outdoors and freeze his arm to the elbow by dousing him with water. Once the lower limb was frozen solid (guards rapped on the limb to see if it gave off a wooden sound), doctors would test their frostbite treatment, then amputate the damaged part of the arm. Then the guards would repeat the process on the victim's upper arm to the shoulder. Another test, another amputation. After the victim's arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs.
When the prisoner was reduced to a head and a torso, orderlies would lug him elsewhere in the compound and use him for experiments involving bubonic plague or other pathogens. And since Unit 731 had virtually no survivors, it had to find a steady supply of new human guinea pigs: members of resistance movements, children who strayed too close to the outer perimeter, a teenage girl found carrying a pistol she said was for her own protection, Mongolians, Koreans, Russians; any non-Japanese, really, provided a potential victim.
The work of Unit 731 was all part of a master plan. The Imperial Army was attempting to produce biological weapons that could be transported by balloon to the United States. (In the event that war between the Soviet Union and Japan was declared, the Japanese also had plans to launch germ warfare in Russia, the Khabarovsk trials revealed. But these plans were thwarted after the atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945, bringing an end to the war.) Japan succeeded in lofting hundreds of balloon bombs, intended to start forest fires and terrorize the local population. The balloons were swept eastward by the jet stream to the U.S. West Coast, where six people were killed when they detonated in Oregon and elsewhere. Late in the war, the Japanese devised Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, a plan to send kamikaze pilots to bomb San Diego with plague-infected fleas. But with the United States' atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the plan was never carried out.
Around the corner from the Harbin museum stands one of the few remaining structures of the camp: the concrete wall of a boiler house. Zhao Daobin is an unemployed factory worker who lives in its shadow. Stretched out on a platform bed in his home, he talked about Unit 731's legacy recently as he was recovering from an eye injury suffered when his electric saw threw a hunk of wood up in his face.
"People still find pieces of old Japanese ceramics and bring it to the museum," he said. "I found a container stuck in the ground and I wanted to dig it up, but people said, 'Don't touch it! There might be plague on it.' We are very frightened of the plague. Last year, they sent people out to spread some sort of medication on the ground to kill the germs."
Zhao's uncle, 76-year-old Zhang Guanghui, still recalls being drafted as a forced laborer for the Japanese during the war. Every day as he left the house, he warned his family that he might not return.
"They would catch people surreptitiously and bring them to their laboratory," Zhang said. "Local residents were afraid every day that they might be kidnapped by the Japanese. Before going outside, I had to stop and think: Are there Japanese around? I know people who lived across from my house; the Japanese caught them, and they never came back. And nobody could ever learn anything about it."
Indeed, Zhang's hatred of the Japanese has not abated in the past half-century. "If I saw a Japanese on the street today and I were young again, I would kill him," he said, trembling with anger.
When the war ended, the Soviet army overran Manchuria and brought back 500,000 Japanese prisoners of war, including some who had worked at Unit 731. While Soviet officials deliberated what to do about them, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological weapons. Presented with evidence that downed U.S. airmen had also been victims of grotesque Japanese experiments, MacArthur squelched the information.
Russians aware of the atrocities in Harbin were outraged. Stalin responded by ordering trials of his own. On Dec. 25, 1949, the trial of Unit 731's doctors began. Orders were to conclude the proceedings by the end of the year, when a decree reinstating the death penalty would come into effect in the Soviet Union. According to Permyakov's interpretation, Stalin apparently feared that the Japanese might execute Soviet prisoners of war if the physicians were hanged in Khabarovsk.
Nevertheless, the proceedings "were not a show trial in the Stalinist model," said Sheldon Harris, the American author of "Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45."
"It was a strange affair, having the trial take place in Khabarovsk rather than in Moscow or Leningrad," Harris said. "However, the evidence presented at the trial was reasonably faithful to the facts. It was discredited in the U.S. and elsewhere because of the notoriety of earlier show trials in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the [U.S.] State Department and MacArthur's people were in a panic that some evidence would come out at the trial that American POWs were [used as] human experiments."
It is still unknown whether any Americans were experimented on at Unit 731, according to Harris, but Americans and other Allied prisoners of war were subject to gruesome experiments at laboratories in Japan and elsewhere in occupied countries.
In Japan, some have alleged that the convictions were railroaded through the Stalinist courts. But Bogach, the author of "Outlaw Weapon," said the Khabarovsk court showed surprising attention to medical evidence. He became interested in the trial when he studied under a professor who had been one of the expert witnesses. He writes, "The former employees of Unit 731 insisted that they were making vaccines and other medicine. However, [Soviet] experts proved that in one cycle, up to 300 kilograms of plague bacteria, 800 to 900 kilograms of typhoid and about a ton of cholera were produced. Experts proved that in one of the unit's branches in the town of Hailar there were 13,000 rats [in the summer of 1945]. In Unit 731 there were hatcheries for fleas (they raised them on the bodies of rats infected with plague)."
Soviet prosecutors were angered by the testimony of the Japanese, Permyakov remembers, recalling some of the questions from the 1949 trial:
Question: Why did you help to cut out his eyes?
Answer: I received an order.
Question: Are you a puppet? Didn't you understand it was sadistic?
Answer: It was an order.
Question: Are you a Shinto believer?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Your belief is gentle and kind; how can you use people in experiments, instead of rabbits?
Answer: The interests of our mission required this.
Several Western and Japanese papers, among them The New York Times and Asahi Shimbun, wanted to send reporters to Khabarovsk to cover the trial, Permyakov said, but permission was refused. Instead, the only press reports recording the events of the trial were those of Soviet newspapers fueled by Stalinist xenophobia. (The papers also led with the more important news of the week: Stalin's 70th birthday). Reporters in a totalitarian state were ill-suited to consider the moral riddle of what impels men in uniform to commit mass murder and then return home to their wives and children, believing their work was good and necessary. The Soviet Union was, after all, a nation that sent millions to die in the gulag, including its own veterans as they straggled home from POW camps in Germany.
his notwithstanding, Khabarovsk's papers captured some of the anger felt by the audience and the crowds standing outside in the winter dark, stamping their feet to stay warm as the loudspeakers blared.
Tikhookeanskaya Zvezda reported Dec. 27 that "sitting behind the bar, the suspects looked askance at the overcrowded halls and then, with cowardice, shifted their eyes away, hunching their shoulders as if from a chill. The renowned samurai self-control doesn't last long: only through the first section of the charges."
The paper heaped scorn on the defendants' expressions of repentance: "The accused Karasawa Tonigo now babbles that he thinks his activities were a bad thing (because they will obviously end in a bad way for him). Yamada Otozoo wants it to be understood that he has repented for his crimes. Nisi Tosihilde announces that the experiments on human beings were inhuman. No doubt the haughty samurai Sato Syundzi, who looks from side to side like a malicious polecat, wants to talk about his love for mankind. But this will fool nobody."
Amid the bombast, the papers provided glimpses of drowned souls as they sank into Unit 731. "Witness Hotta told about a riot of the inmates in the unit who couldn't stand the fanatically cruel tortures any longer, and tried to escape, but all were killed. … Witness Hataki (an errand worker) said: 'I saw that the guard Mizuno shot and killed one Russian guinea pig after he was driven to complete exhaustion by the experiments."
As the trial ended, the daily Suvorovsky Natisk trumpeted its anger, but the indignant rhetoric of the Soviet press — overstated in the previous three decades of assaults on "enemies of the people" — fell flat. The paper could just as well have been describing the trials of Trotsky or Bukharin when it stated, "With feelings of outrage, disgust and repugnance, those present in the courthouse look at the accused. Honest people can have no other feeling. These are not humans the military court is trying; they are monsters and villains, and there is no proper word in the human language to characterize them. … It takes enormous willpower to restrain the indignation seizing the Soviet people in the session hall."
Permyakov didn't need to read the papers to formulate his own opinion about the defendants. He had a front-row seat.
"They treated the Chinese as cattle," he said. "They had no sympathy. I had the impression that the Japanese were merciless — they had no heart for their victims. What repentance? The Japanese were robots."
"There was a Lieutenant General Takahasi," Permyakov added. "He smoked all the time; he was very nervous. And he said, 'Didn't you make biological weapons, too? How can a big country exist without biological weapons? You did it, and we also did it.'"
Unlike the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, in which high-ranking German and Japanese officials were hanged or sentenced to life in prison, the Khabarovsk trial ended on a less definitive note. One Unit 731 convict received two years, a second got three years, and most received terms of 20 to 25 years. Several years later, one of the prisoners committed suicide behind bars. The rest were quietly slipped back to Japan and freed in 1956.
Indeed, even the angry citizens of Khabarovsk were not informed about the release, a fact that does not surprise Permyakov. "Don't you know Bolsheviks? This was absolutely secret," he said.
Most of the Unit 731 war criminals went on to respectable careers in Japan. Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito, a military physician, became the founder of the Japan Blood Bank, the predecessor of Green Cross. General Ishii Shiro (who escaped from the Soviet forces and was never tried) lived in peace until his death from throat cancer in 1959.
The trial's legacy has been mixed. Many Western historians have criticized the Soviet Union for meting out such light sentences.
Historian Harris speculates that the Kremlin may have cut a deal. "My guess is that the Soviets made a deal with the Japanese similar to the one completed by the Americans: information for, in this case, extremely light sentences," Harris said.
"The Soviets and their successors never released the interrogation reports of the Japanese, some 18 volumes," Harris added. "This leads me to believe that the Japanese did arrange a deal, did yield some information, and the Soviets settled for the best goodies they could get."
Yet the effort of the Khabarovsk trial was not completely wasted. The evidence gathered has proven useful to war crimes victims and their descendants who are suing the Japanese government for compensation, said Katsuhiko Yamado, executive secretary of the Tokyo-based Society to Support the Demands of Chinese War Victims.
"We, as Japanese citizens, support those who suffer from what Japan did in the war, just as we sincerely accept the fact that the Japanese army in the past invaded China," Katsuhiko said. "By supporting the victims, I hope we understand the importance of peace. … Japan must recognize our act of aggression against Asian countries and assume the responsibility to pay compensation to the victims."
However, in the face of a right-wing minority and an often-indifferent majority, the group admits it has a long road ahead in trying to change Japanese opinion about the war.
Sometimes it seems that many in China have forgotten as well. On a cold day in Harbin recently, there was little to see at the remnants of the boiler house. It sits in a muddy enclosure surrounded by walls and amply used by dogs as a squatting ground. A stone marker and plaque memorialize those who were murdered here. There is a sense that if the right offer were made, this corner of Unit 731, too, would be replaced by a furniture factory covered in white swimming pool tiles.
Yet a few still remember. Zhang Bo, a 40-year-old driver, says he sometimes brings visitors down from central Harbin. "Japanese tourists often come here. The old people fall down on their knees and pray. The young people — judging by their faces — they think it's funny."
The Moscow Times is a parent company of Independent Media which is largely Dutch owned.
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