Unit 731: Firsthand Accounts of Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation Program

by Hal Gold

Some time later, however, a different version of events emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. In December 1949, in the city of Khabarovsk, on the railway line north of Vladivostok, twelve former members of Ishii’s organization were placed on trial for war crimes. Soviet press reports told the U.S. State Department of the first installment of the trial results, and included “confessions” by several Japanese that the Japanese General Staff and War Ministry had set up secret labs in Manchuria in 1935–1936, for preparation and execution of bacteriological warfare. During court testimony, these were said to have been established on direct order from Emperor Hirohito. The Soviet account goes on to state that the Soviet Union was one of the intended targets of Japan’s biological warfare efforts, that Soviet citizens were among the victims of experimental research, that bacteria were mass-produced for use in war, and that outposts along the Soviet border were established for the purpose of conducting biological warfare against the U.S.S.R.