[First of two-part series on the U.S. cover-up of Japanese war crimes during World War II]
On September 3, 2025, the People’s Republic of China held a commemorative military parade to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Chinese victory over Imperial Japan in the second Sino-Japanese War.
The parade sparked outrage from Japan, inciting Tokyo’s leadership to urge European and Asian leaders to boycott the event, claiming that it “excessively exhibits anti-Japanese sentiment and seeks China’s interpretation of the war to spread.”
However, it is ironic that Tokyo attempted to paint the Beijing-held military parade as a display of national hatred and racism toward Japan when the island nation has consistently whitewashed its history of expansionist militarism and institutionalized racism against the Chinese.
This culminated during the World War II era in outright imperialist aggression and the dehumanization of Chinese people, most notably the Nanjing Massacre and the gruesome experiments performed by the Imperial Japanese Army at its network of secret bacteriological and chemical weapons research facilities.
Even prior to World War II, Japan showed its imperialist ambitions and allegiance to the West by joining the Americans and the British in the Siberian Intervention.
The so-called Siberian expedition was the Western powers’ attempt to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib” by sending a coalition of troops into the newly formed Soviet Union to support the Tsarist White Army during the Russian Civil War.
Throughout the imperialist onslaught, Japan sent more than 70,000 troops to join the British and American forces and the three Allied powers occupied areas in Far Eastern Russia from 1918 to 1920.
By the early 1920s, nationalism and militaristic politics were on the rise within Japan. Concerned that the success of the Russian Revolution would spark socialism elsewhere, the Japanese government began to consider the recently created Soviet Union as its “most dangerous and malicious enemy.”
Subsequently, Tokyo began to formulate plans to prevent the communist revolution from crossing the Ural Mountains and spreading eastward.
In 1923, Japan began preparing for war with the USSR despite Moscow’s repeated attempts to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Tokyo, which continued to craft military expeditions to be carried out in Soviet territory. Two years later, the Japanese delegation to the Geneva Convention signed the agreement on the prohibition of chemical and bacteriological weapons, but Japan’s governing body, the National Diet, did not ratify the protocol.
In 1927, Japan’s top ministers held the East Conference where it was decided that the Kuomintang government of China should be supported in its war on the Chinese communists.
The meeting also outlined the Japanese militarists’ plans of economic expansion into China and the geopolitical importance of surrounding regions, forecasting Manchuria’s falling under Japanese control.
Although it is often overlooked in more Western-centric accounts of World War II, Japan’s invasion of Manchuria laid the groundwork for what would soon be a global conflagration. On September 18, 1931, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria and subsequently installed a puppet regime complete with a titular emperor.
The invasion was catalyzed by what is known as the Mukden Incident, when the Kwantung Army, a semi-independent military force stationed in Manchuria on behalf of Japan, set off dynamite near a railway located in the city of Mukden which was owned by the Japanese South Manchuria Railway Company. The Imperial Japanese Army blamed the false-flag attack on Chinese dissidents and used it as a pretext to invade and occupy the region.
By 1932, Manchuria was under the complete control of the Japanese military. In March of that year, sensing the geopolitical threat Japan represented, Joseph Stalin, then the General Secretary of the Communist Party, warned the imperialist archipelagic state that “we neither want even a clod of foreign territory nor will we yield even a single inch of our land” and promptly sent a reinforcement of troops to the USSR’s eastern border.
Similar to the West, much of Japan’s geopolitical maneuvers during the World War II era were made with the intent of halting the spread of communism and to antagonize the Soviet Union.
However, Japan was hesitant to go toe-to-toe with the USSR in a hot war, given its reputation as a militarily advanced country with a large and formidable fighting force. Instead, the island nation made a strategic decision to develop a bacteriological arsenal, a decision that recognized fighting dirty would provide a competitive advantage.
The occupation of Manchuria was pivotal in the development of Japan’s bioweapons program. In fact, the Imperial Japanese Army’s first bioweapons research facility was built in the Manchurian town of Beiyinhe and was known as the Zhong Ma Fortress (alternately known as the Togo Unit).
In 1932, during Japan’s occupation, a section of the town was taken over by the forces under Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, who would soon become the head of Unit 731, Japan’s infamous bacteriological research unit.
At the complex, prisoners were experimented on and immolated in an electric furnace, not unlike the crematoria of Nazi concentration camps.
In 1934, a number of Chinese prisoners of the complex escaped, exposing the Togo Unit and leading to its closure due to security concerns over the potential revelation about Japan’s top secret bioweapons program. The termination of the Zhong Ma Fortress led to the creation of Unit 731, the crimes of which would far outstrip the atrocities of the former.
Located in the Pingfang District of Harbin in occupied Manchuria, Unit 731 was created in 1936 and tasked with the research and development of chemical and bacteriological weapons.
Authorized by Emperor Hirohito, the unit was led by Ishii, a microbiologist and army medical officer who had been advocating for the creation of a Japanese biowarfare program since 1927.
A bureaucratic and mundane title was given to Unit 731 to disguise the true purpose of the facility. Officially named the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, the germ breeding and medical torture that occurred at the unit was a closely guarded secret.
The research facility was constructed in Manchuria not only because of its strategic location near the Soviet border, but also because the multi-ethnic region offered more human test subjects of non-Japanese nationalities.
The Japanese government had ruled that human experimentation on Japanese citizens within the country was illegal, and the choice of location avoided breaking that specific law (although it did violate the Geneva Convention). The groups subjected to the medical experiments carried out at Unit 731 were for the most part Han Chinese, but many Russians, Mongolians, Koreans, the mentally disabled, criminals, communist spies, and captured Allied soldiers (including some Americans) were also victims of the scientific torture.
Similar to the Nazis, the Japanese made use of dehumanizing rhetoric, with the Unit 731 staff dubbing their human guinea pigs as “maruta” which translates to “logs,” an equivalent of the Nazi “untermensch.”
Indeed, Shiro Ishii and Kurt Blome, the high-ranking Nazi scientist also guilty of human experimentation who was later recruited by the CIA to work at Camp King, a black site in occupied West Germany, were aware of and admired each other’s work.
By no means a small facility, Unit 731 had 150 buildings, and spanned a perimeter of 4 miles. The complex was equipped with a railway, a power supply, an incinerator, and its own airfield, employing more than 3,000 researchers and technicians.
The unit even boasted its own Youth Corps comprised of 15- to 17-year-old Japanese boys who were forced to assist with the human experiments. Aside from being a large compound, its bacteriological research laboratory was home to an impressive array of pathogens.
The diseases researched at the facility were as varied and deadly as the bubonic plague, anthrax, dysentery, glanders, typhoid, cholera, and salmonella. General Ishii’s staff bred fleas and exposed the parasites to plague-ridden rats so as to infect the insects with the disease. The fleas were placed inside ceramic bombs which were later deployed as WWII heated up.
As contemporary historians continue to challenge Eurocentric accounts of the war, it is now more readily acknowledged that World War II originated in the East, although it is still an underdiscussed subject.
For example, French historian and international relations specialist Robert Frank, argued in 1937-1947: The World War, a collaborative book written with dozens of other historians, that the global conflict began in Asia in 1937.
British historian and political scientist Rana Mitter argued similarly in his 2013 book Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945, stated that “China was the first country to face the onslaught from the Axis Powers in 1937, two years before Britain and France, and four years before the United States.”
Flexing their military prowess, Japanese soldiers, on July 7, 1937, conducted night-time training exercises ten miles southwest of Beijing and, in November of the same year, the Imperial Japanese Army seized the city and captured Shanghai as well. In December, Japanese forces entered Nanjing, the Chinese nationalist (KMT) capital, and killed approximately 300,000 people, as well as sexually assaulting more than 20,000 women in what has come to be known as the Nanjing Massacre.
The Rape of Nanjing was an event of unparalleled aggression against China, but the research conducted at Unit 731 led to equally brutal war crimes. In 1938 and 1939, Japanese planes unloaded plague and cholera bombs onto Yanjin County in Guangdong, China, a weapons design which had been tested on the prisoners of the bioweapons research unit.
These plague and cholera munitions were a technology that had been refined at Unit 731, specifically in a testing area called the Anta Station. At the testing ground, plague bombs were field-tested on human subjects tied to stakes who were bombarded by infectious munitions or aerially sprayed with the plague.
However, these were by no means the most brutal experiments conducted at the bioweapons research facility. For example, in complete violation of medical ethics, vivisection was performed on the victims of Unit 731, as if human beings were laboratory frogs to be dissected at leisure. Conducted without any anesthesia, mostly on Chinese communist prisoners, the vivisection was executed after the “patients” were infected with cholera or the plague, with the organs removed before death in order to study the effects of the diseases on living tissue.
Similar to Nazi experiments, the resident physiologist of the unit, Hisato Yoshimura, conducted frostbite and hypothermia experiments in which he submerged prisoners’ limbs in ice water until the appendages were frozen solid. Gangrene was also studied by amputating a person’s limbs and reattaching them to the other side of their body.
Other areas of research involved the effects of flame throwers on skin, prolonged x-ray exposure, and syphilis where male prisoners were infected with the disease and forced to rape fellow inmates so that the scientists could monitor the progression of the contagion.
Female prisoners at Unit 731 were treated little better. Often, they were forcibly impregnated and subsequently experimented on. Pregnant test subjects were infected with diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, crash injuries, and bullet wounds, after which the women were dissected so that the researchers could observe the effects on the fetuses. All inmates of the unit were executed after being experimented on and it is estimated that some 14,000 people were disposed of within the facility.
To be sure, the research under way at Unit 731 had broader ramifications on the general Chinese population, and even the Soviet Red Army was impacted by General Ishii’s bacteriological concoctions. In 1939, during the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, in which the Imperial Japanese Army and the Red Army clashed for four months in Manchuria, General Ishii dispatched two scientific teams to contaminate the Halaha (or Khalkh) River, Manchuria’s critical water source, with salmonella and typhoid bacteria.
Conversely, the Allied Powers began to take tougher actions against the Empire of the Rising Sun and lend a hand to China. Stalin supplied the Chinese nationalists with arms to aid them in their effort to beat back the Japanese forces, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration placed an oil embargo on the island nation. In 1940 and 1941, the U.S. president extended credits to China and included the country in his Lend-Lease program, which supplied the Allied nations with food, oil, and military supplies.
Yet the Japanese assault on China and the Soviet Union continued unabated. In 1940, Japanese biowarfare activities caused a plague outbreak in the Chinese cities of Changde, Quzhou, and Ningbo, leading to many fatalities. In May of that year, members of Unit 731 aerially contaminated Ningbo, located in Zhejiang Province, with plague-infected fleas which made their way into the city’s food and water sources.
To add to the regional contaminants, a train carrying cholera and typhoid bacteria was brought into the province where its deadly cargo was dispersed into the water supply. In October 1940, a Japanese plane unloaded rice and wheat grains mixed with fleas over the city of Quzhou. A month after the enemy flyover, the city was overcome by the plague which afflicted its population for three weeks.
In some instances, the Unit 731 staff administered their pathogenic concoctions in a sinister fashion that resembled the distribution of smallpox-infected “flea blankets” to the Native Americans by European colonists.
For example, General Ishii ordered the preparation of thousands of bread roll buns to be contaminated with typhoid bacteria and distributed to Chinese POWs. Also by Ishii’s orders, hundreds of biscuits were baked and infected with typhoid and a sabotage group dispatched to covertly deposit the defiled baked goods in the homes of residents in the Zhejiang Province, with the hope that the occupants would consume the cookies and succumb to the illness.
Because of the broad spreading of pathogens by the Japanese Army, it is difficult to calculate the exact number of deaths caused by the Empire’s biowarfare activities but, recently, researchers have discovered that there was an entire network of bacteriological weapons research units, not just Unit 731, extending from Unit 731 in Harbin, Unit 8604 in Guangdong, Unit 1644 in Nanjing, Unit 1855 in Beijing, and Unit 100 in Changchun.
At other facilities in Japan’s nexus of germ-warfare labs, similar human experiments were conducted, although there is less information about the other locations due to destruction of evidence. However, some light has been shown on Unit 100, where the staff poisoned and drugged captured Chinese, Russians and Koreans with heroin, castor oil, and tobacco over the course of multi-week tests.
One staff member, Senior Sergeant Kazuo Mitomo described the experiments as follows:
“I put as much as a gram of heroin into some porridge and gave this porridge to an arrested Chinese citizen who ate it; about 20 minutes later he lost consciousness and remained in that state until he died 15-16 hours later. We knew that such a dose of heroin is fatal, but it did not make any difference to us whether he died or lived. On some of the prisoners I experimented 5-6 times, testing the action of Korean bindweed, bactal and castor oil seeds. One of the prisoners of Russian nationality became so exhausted from the experiments that no more could be performed on him, and Matsui ordered me to kill that Russian by giving him an injection of potassium cyanide. After the injection, the man died at once. Bodies were buried in the unit’s cattle cemetery.”
Unit 100 was controlled by veterinarian Major Wakamatsu Yujiro and the facility was focused on researching animal diseases, with particular attention to sabotage expeditions, such as infecting pastures and contaminating the Chinese water and food supply.
For example, in one excursion, Major Yujiro ordered a unit staff member to purchase hundreds of cattle and set them grazing along the Siberian border of Soviet-aligned Mongolia, planning to infect the ruminants later with pathogens via aerial spray. The hope was that, in case of a Soviet invasion, the diseased livestock would mix with the local herds and spark an epidemic to damage the food supply.
Unit 100 was also engaged in growing crops of poisonous plants so that the scientists could research the possibility of new toxins devised from flora. The interest in poison went further, with the study of pesticides and defoliants, not to mention the fact that poisonous snakes were bred at the facility to study the effects of their venom.
As far-fetched as the experiments became, Japan’s war-time interest in bioweapons stemmed from the strategic recognition that the Red Army was superior in strength and numbers, requiring that its war plans hinge on asymmetric warfare tactics such as sabotage and damaging the Trans-Siberian Railway.
As the Soviet-German War began, Japan developed the Kantokuen Plan, approved by Emperor Hirohito, which capitalized on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and proposed the goal of invading and occupying the USSR’s Far East. The Kantokuen Plan included a three-phase offensive to isolate and destroy the Red Army in six months, requiring the use of chemical weapons. However, the plan was never implemented.
One of the most brazen of Japan’s biowarfare plans was developed by General Ishii near the end of World War II. Known as Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, the plan involved a surprise attack on the West Coast of the U.S., specifically San Diego, California. The scheme involved deploying a submarine aircraft carrier to the California coast where seaplanes would launch to San Diego and release a payload of plague-riddled fleas onto the city.
Although the plan was approved and scheduled for September 1945, General Yoshijiro Umezu understood that such a bold strike would only provoke global repercussions and called off the operation. However, it was re-approved in early August, only to be conclusively tabled after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August of 1945, which were atrocious war crimes in their own right.
In fact, prior to the U.S. empire’s historic deployment of nuclear weapons, top military circles stateside viewed a Japanese surrender as imminent and it was recognized that the country was willing to admit defeat provided Emperor Hirohito was granted immunity from prosecution. The primary catalyst for Japan’s unconditional surrender was that, in the same month, the Soviet Union declared war against Japan and invaded occupied Manchuria.
Upon the Red Army’s offensive into Manchuria, General Ishii ordered the destruction of Unit 731 with dynamite, effectively obliterating the evidence of Japan’s bioweapons program. Like their Nazi counterparts, once defeat was imminent, the staff of the unit were instructed to destroy all documentation of the dubious research that occurred at the facility.
The remaining prisoners at Unit 731 were treated as part of the evidence and were disposed of like the derogatory term they were called, felled and incinerated like logs. Adding to the generalized destruction of the region, the lab’s supply of pathogen-infected rats and fleas were released into the surrounding countryside, free to spread their diseases where they wished.
The after-effects of Japanese militarism during World War II are still felt in China today in terms of long-lasting environmental damage and health repercussions for the local population. The most painful example of this is the existence of what is colloquially known as “decaying leg disease,” an ailment which has appeared in areas where bioweapons were deployed.
The flesh-eating disease is characterized by the development of raw, festering wounds on the legs which rarely heal, putting the victims at high risk of secondary infections and often impairing the livelihoods of those suffering from the condition.
In 2002, a team of American and Chinese academics concluded that the disease was linked to the biowarfare waged by the Imperial Japanese Army, based on the victims exhibiting symptoms of both anthrax and glanders, two pathogens which were non-existent in China prior to the Japanese occupation.
Another lingering disturbance from the occupation comes from Japan’s production and use of chemical weapons during World War II. Although the topic of Japan’s deployment of chemical weapons is underreported, in 2019, Japan’s Kyodo News agency reported that Japanese scholars had discovered records of the use of poison gas warfare by the Imperial Army during the invasion of Manchuria in 1939.
In fact, it is estimated that Japan used chemical weapons in its assault on China approximately 2,000 times between 1937 and 1945, although this violation of the Geneva Convention was also diligently covered up. Similar to the destruction of evidence at Unit 731, when the Empire of the Rising Sun realized its impending defeat in 1945, its chemical arsenal was surreptitiously eliminated.
The munitions were either buried underground or dumped into rivers and lakes, and have subsequently been uncovered in more than 120 locations spread over 18 provinces in China.
In 1999, Japan and China came to an agreement about the destruction of the abandoned chemical weapons left over from the Japanese occupation, a dark period which still haunts the relations of the two nations to this day. The Japanese and Chinese governments signed a document of diplomatic good faith entitled “Memorandum of Understanding between Japan and China on the Destruction of Abandoned Chemical Weapons in China” and, a year later, an excavation and removal of chemical weapons was undertaken in the city of Bei’an.
The collection of chemical weapons was performed three times in Nanjing, with tens of thousands of chemical warfare agents being retrieved from the city. Nanjing was a major site of Japanese war crimes during WWII and the veritable arsenal uncovered there was likely a painful reminder for the Chinese victims of Japan’s aggression.
Further, leftover munitions were uncovered at other locations, sometimes leading to injury and death. Such an incident occurred in August 2003 in the city of Qiqihar, Heilongjiang Province, when workers at a construction site excavated interred metal drums which leaked out a toxic liquid. Dozens of people were sent to the hospital due to chemical exposure, one fatally.
Japan dispatched a team to attempt to seal the drums as well as a team of medical professionals, and the Japanese and Chinese governments held a series of consultations to prevent similar occurrences. The respective countries agreed upon measures to facilitate the destruction of other abandoned chemical weapons and, in October of the same year, it was announced that Japan would pay the equivalent of nearly $2,000,000 to cover the expenses for the accident in Qiqihar.
Demonstrating the gross extent of Japan’s chemical weapon production in occupied China during the Second World War, the Vice President of the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences estimated in 2004 that the Imperial Army had abandoned around two million undetonated chemical bombs in the country. As time has passed, the environmental impact from the buried noxious agents has increased as the munitions’ casings have rusted, allowing their toxic contents to seep into the soil.
The abandoned poisonous armaments are still an issue to this day and, in March 2023, China submitted a document entitled “Position Paper on the Chemical Weapons Abandoned by Japan in China” to the Fifth Review Conference of the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international agreement signed in 1993 prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and usage of chemical weapons.
Japan consented to aid China in the destruction and removal of the remaining nerve agents; however, as recently as December of 2025, China urged Japan to expedite the process of disposing of its remaining chemical warfare agents and criticized Tokyo’s lack of proactive efforts. Certainly, the Japanese government owes China more than bureaucratic heel-dragging.
Were Tokyo to send sufficient aid for munition removal, weapons left over from Japan’s brutal occupation, it would likely improve relations between the two countries.
Historically, Japan has been reticent to acknowledge its war-time atrocities. While the use and disposal of chemical weapons have been acknowledged, it has only recently admitted its biowarfare activities.
The country first reluctantly conceded the existence of Unit 731 in the late 1990s, a confession prompted by a lawsuit against the Japanese government. Filed in 1997 by relatives of victims of the Empire of the Rising Sun’s bioweapons program, the 180 majority-Chinese plaintiffs asked the Japanese government to pay each litigant the equivalent of $83,000 in damages to their relatives.
The case lasted five years and the prosecution submitted hundreds of pieces of evidence to the Tokyo District Court which, in the end, rejected their compensatory requests. However, although no reparations were paid, the lawsuit did achieve an admission of the Imperial Japanese Army’s biowarfare activities.
Although Japan has never officially apologized for the atrocities committed at Unit 731, the Tokyo District Court ruled in 2002 that the Imperial Army had indeed conducted human experiments and that Japan had waged biowarfare.
The presiding judge at the time, Koji Iwata, affirmed: “The evidence shows that Japanese troops, including Unit 731 and others, used bacteriological weapons on the orders of the Imperial Army’s headquarters and that many local residents died.”
Contrary to the denialist attitude of the Japanese government that discussion of the country’s biowarfare crimes during the Second World War is motivated purely by xenophobia, in some cases the exposure of these atrocities has been aided by the outspokenness of some courageous Japanese individuals who participated in Unit 731 itself.
For example, a Japanese World War II veteran named Yoshio Shinozuka was just 15 years old when he was conscripted to join the bioweapons research facility. During his time at the unit he was involved in the vivisections of seven Chinese civilians but, in 1943, he was released from his duties at the unit and served with the Kwangtung Army until the end of the war.
After the conflict, Shinozuka remained in northeastern China on military duty until he was arrested by Chinese communist partisans in early 1946; years later, Shinozuka confessed that he was a former member of Japan’s bioweapons research unit. His honesty behooved him, and Shinozuka was eventually pardoned along with other cooperative Japanese POWs.
In fact, a number of those freed went on to establish the Association of Returnees from China, an organization whose purpose is to reveal the Imperial Japanese Army’s war crimes and to encourage friendly relations between the respective countries. Shinozuka himself was a permanent member of the Association and often attended its peace gatherings.
Ironically, in 1998, Shinozuka was scheduled to speak at a peace conference in North America, but was barred from entry at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport over his war criminal past, an absurdity given how the U.S. government protected Japanese war criminals from prosecution and Shinozuka himself had testified on behalf of the Chinese during the 1997 lawsuit against Japan.
As of 2026, few Unit 731 veterans are likely alive. However, in recent years, one decided to come forward. Nonagenarian veteran Hideo Shimizu, 95 years old as of 2025, who worked in the unit’s Youth Corps five months before the end of World War II at the tender age of fourteen.
Testifying to the mad-scientist atmosphere of the facility, Shimizu recalled becoming seriously ill after an older member of the bioweapons lab gave him a piece of bread, leading Shimizu to believe that the Unit 731 staff carried out experiments even on their own youth corps trainees.
In 2015, he revealed his past with the unit and subsequently traveled to China to make a public apology for his misdeeds. However, Shimizu’s willingness to confess sparked outrage in Japan, leading to his being slandered on Japanese social media as a senile old man.
The testimony of former Unit 731 guards is further memorialized in a crime exhibition hall in a museum and memorial complex located in Harbin, China, on the site where the Imperial Japanese Army conducted its covert biological and chemical warfare research and lethal human experiments. The museum’s walls are lined with photos and first-hand testimony from those employed by the unit who blew the whistle and exposed the atrocities.
The museum itself exists in the remnants of the abandoned research facility and, in the back of the complex, a smokestack remains from the human incinerator, preserving the recollection of the crimes that the Empire of the Rising Sun committed against the Chinese people.
Although it would certainly make for better diplomatic relations between the two countries, Japan has refused to offer China much deserved reparations for the war crimes committed against the latter, never so much as even issuing an official apology.
Meanwhile, in the Anglophone world, the atrocities of Unit 731 suffer from severe underexposure in comparison to the similarly horrific events of Auschwitz or Buchenwald.
The Western education system makes no mistake in proselytizing about the appalling outcomes of Nazi fascism (even though prominent Western industrialists and financiers were involved in promoting Hitler’s rise as a counter to communism and the CIA appropriated “former” Nazis after the war), but makes little mention of the atrocities of the Empire of the Rising Sun.
Make no mistake, Japan has not gone unaided in its efforts to conceal its bacteriological and chemical weapons program and ensuing war crimes during World War II. The U.S. played an instrumental role in the attempt to cover up what transpired at Unit 731, even engaging in what has since been dubbed as an “Operation Paperclip of the East.” (Operation Paperclip was the secret program whereby the U.S. government imported a host of high-ranking Nazi scientists into the country and installed them in prestigious scientific positions. For example, former SS member Kurt Debus, the first director of NASA’s Launch Operations Center, renamed the Kennedy Space Center, was a beneficiary of this program, not to mention Wernher von Braun who also worked at NASA.)
The U.S. helped the Japanese war criminals who were responsible for human experiments on a par with what happened under the Third Reich escape justice and, had the American government had its way, the crimes of Unit 731 would have remained hidden.
Aside from the confessions of individual Japanese, as well as Chinese efforts, the main reason for the exposure of Unit 731 was due to the Soviet Union’s Khabarovsk Trial, which was their effort to correct the inadequacies of the U.S.-controlled Tokyo War Crimes Trial.
The Khabarovsk Trial strengthened the USSR’s relationship with the newly born People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Soviet Union’s challenge to the U.S. empire’s propagandistic account of world-historical events concretely contributed to internationalism.
This article is the first part of a two-part series; the second part will examine in detail the U.S.’s cover-up of Japanese war crimes, as well as their exposure by the Soviets.
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About the Author
Shaenah Batterson is a polemicist and poet located in Eugene, Oregon.
She writes a Substack called The Red Letter and cohosts the podcast Captive Minds.
Shaenah can be reached at shaenahbatterson@icloud.com.
