4. Unit 731
via.knowledgenuts.com
World War II was the scene of some of the most unimaginable horror that man has inflicted unto man, with much of it revolving around the treatment of prisoners by the Nazis, Soviets and Japanese. While the atrocities carried out in the name of scientific discovery by Josef Mengele are reasonably well known, less so are the experiments conducted by Japan on Chinese prisoners of war.
Japan had been at war with China long before the official start of World War II in 1939, and the two countries viewed each other’s citizens as being a sub-species. Though horror stories were carried back to the West about cannibalism, torture and cruelty being rife amongst Japanese prisoner camps, special treatment was reserved for Chinese captives. The Japanese cut off soldiers’ limbs to induce gangrene, conducted live vivisection and created ‘plague bombs’ to drop over Chinese cities and see if they could spread cholera and typhoid.
The division responsible for the development of such germ warfare was known as Unit 731, easily one of the most brutal in the army. To them, putting a man inside a pressure cooker to see if his eyeballs popped or planning to fill a sub with biological weapons and send it to California had as much scientific validity as a hearing test. What makes this especially creepy is that the US government pardoned the scientists responsible after the war and granted them safe passage to the States – in return for the findings to their experiments.
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