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Japan’s WWII bioweapons still highly hazardous
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BIOLOGICAL weapons should never be applied anywhere, and the civilized world will not tolerate such crimes against humanity, said two Russian experts on the history of the World War II.
In 1949, 12 former members of the Japanese Kwantung Army were tried in the Russian Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk as war criminals for manufacturing and using bioweapons and doing inhuman medical experiments during WWII.
All accused were found guilty and sentenced to terms between two and 25 years to a labor camp. In 1956, those who were still serving the terms were released and repatriated to Japan.
The court found that Japanese military officers were especially inhumane and brutal during the war, causing tremendous damage to Chinese civilians.
“The Chinese partisans, Communists and civilians were taken to a secret facility near Harbin, northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, where Japanese military researchers infected the victims — whom they called ‘logs’ — with anthrax, plague, paratyphoid, cholera and other virus,’’ said Alexander Lavrentsov, a Russian military historian and retired lieutenant colonel.
The victims were left to die. “Then they dissected the bodies and examined the process of the organs’ infection. If a person survived the initial infections and tortures, they infected the person once again until the person’s body could not be used for further infections for their experiments. In the end, no one survived,’’ Lavrentsov said.
Japanese military doctors also experimented on victims during the frozen winter. The victims were first left to “froze solid.’’ Then the Japanese doctors tested on them their frostbite treatment, and “amputate the damaged part of the arm.’’ Around 500 to 600 people annually were brutally killed at the Japanese serect research facility, Lavrentsov said.
The aftermath of Japan’s germ warfare can still be felt among local people of the region, experts said, adding some areas in the Russian Far East have also become victims of Japan’s biological warfare.
“Containers of Japan’s toxic substances are hidden underground in some land of China. After the containers became rusted, the poison inside was washed into the Songhua River, and then into the border river of Amur. Now all these poisons come to Khabarovsk through the river,’’ said Alexandr Filonov, the other expert in military history.
The main task now, Filonov said, is to demand Japan to destroy the remnants of its wartime toxic substances in China. Negotiations on the issue were held before, but the problem still remains and are yet to be solved.
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