What are shocking historical facts they don’t teach you in school?

 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said, “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

What follows is a true story of man’s inhumanity to man. I wish I could say it is the stuff of fiction, but it is not.

The horrors of Unit 731 aren’t something typically taught in school, yet it is vital that we understand what happened there. If we do not learn from history, we are destined to repeat it.

Unit 731 was a covert chemical and biological warfare research unit founded and operated by the Japanese during WWII. It was physically located in Northeast China during the war.

** Unit 731 personnel conduct a bacteriological trial upon a test subject in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

This “research facility” conducted medical experiments on human subjects that were as cruel and inhumane as those carried out in Nazi concentration camps.

Maruta was the code name given to medical experimentation done on living human beings. Test subjects were chosen mainly from the population of that region.

The Japanese used criminals, political prisoners, homeless persons, and the mentally disabled for their tests. Ages ran the gamut from infants to the elderly. Pregnant women were utilized as well.

Victims were essentially de-humanized. They were known as “logs” to those who operated the Unit. The official cover story of the facility was that it was merely a lumber mill. If management wanted to know how many people had died, they would ask, “How many logs fell today?”

** victim of frostbite testing.

Conditions were unspeakable. Some subjects were submitted to repeated instances of rape by their guards. Once the experiments had concluded, all of the corpses were incinerated.

Among the staff of Unit 731 were physicians and bacteriologists. A few of them published their findings in peer-reviewed journals as if the testing had been performed on non-human primates, which they referred to as Manchurian monkeys.

** A body is moved in Unit 731

The prisoners were injected with infectious diseases, which they were told were vaccinations. Disease agents included syphilis and gonorrhea. Doctors would not treat the subsequent infections that they caused.

Thousands of men, women, children, and babies were subjected to surgical procedures done without anesthesia, and more times than not, this ended with their death.

The Japanese would remove organs to gauge the effect on the human body. Limbs were amputated (again, without anesthesia) to see how long it took individuals to bleed to death. Sometimes subjects were saved only to have another limb removed later.

Occasionally, limbs were amputated, and doctors attempted to reattach them. Some had their stomachs removed, and their esophagus surgically attached to their intestines. Other procedures involved removing various portions of organs and brain matter and suturing up the subject. I can’t call them patients, because that’s not what they were.

Human beings were used as targets to test the efficacy of hand grenades. They were placed at multiple distances from the blast and in various poses. Flamethrowers were tested on humans. People were tied to stakes and used as targets for chemical weapons and high explosives, as well as small arms, bayonets, and knives.

There were tests involving depriving people of all food and water and seeing how long it took them to die. Other tests placed prisoners into high-pressure chambers until their eyes burst from their sockets.

** Vivisection of a conscious prisoner.

Some people were burnt to varying degrees to see how much it took to kill them. There were experiments that ran electrical currents through people until they died. Prisoners were spun on large centrifuges until it took their life.

The Japanese would also remove large amounts of blood from humans and replace it with animal blood from various species. People were injected with large volumes of seawater. Some unfortunate souls were simply burned alive.

It is estimated that up to 250,000 people fell victim to these cruel and inhumane experiments. At least 1,000 Japanese were involved in the testing.

Handling the fallout of what occurred at Unit 731 was not America’s finest hour. Many who carried out atrocities in the Unit were secretly given immunity from prosecution by the United States in exchange for data obtained by the experimentation.

Information obtained from bio-weapons testing on human subjects was co-opted into the U.S. biological warfare program.

In 1947, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, wrote to Washington, D.C., explaining that:

"Additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii (commander of Unit 731), can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence".

Later, rumors and victim accounts of what happened were primarily shrugged off by the west as communist propaganda.