Japanese Unit 731 [medical experiments upon live prisoners]
[see gallery at the end of this article]
New York Times interviewed a former member of Unit 731. Insisting on anonymity, the former Japanese medical assistant recounted his first experience in dissecting a live human being, who had been deliberately infected with the plague, for the purpose of developing “plague bombs” for war.
“The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down, but when I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”[33]
in other tests, subjects were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death; placed into low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped from the sockets; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; hung upside down until death; crushed with heavy objects; electrocuted; dehydrated with hot fans;[49] placed into centrifuges and spun until death; injected with animal blood, notably with horse blood; exposed to lethal doses of X-rays; subjected to various chemical weapons inside gas chambers; injected with seawater; and burned or buried alive.
A former Unit 731 medical worker stated that he once saw a white man cut length-wise and pickled in a six-foot-high jar of formaldehyde, a man the worker assumed was Russian.
A Russian who escaped his cell supposedly demanded to be shot by the guards.
“spiritually we were all lost in front of the ‘logs’ (name for human beings) who had no freedom and no weapons. At that time we understood in our hearts that justice was not on our side”
Members of Unit 731 were not immune from being subjects of experiments. Yoshio Tamura, an assistant in the Special Team, recalled that Yoshio Sudō, an employee of the first division at Unit 731, became infected with bubonic plague as a result of the production of plague bacteria. The Special Team was then ordered to vivisect (cut open while alive) Sudō
A Japanese vet of unit 731 who was interviewed in a 2003 documentary, said he would consider doing it again if he was younger, as it was ”interesting”.
Many escaped execution and received immunity after WW2.