Shirō Ishii: the greatest medical war criminal in history who was never tried

In the framework of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), and coinciding in part with the World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army developed an ambitious biological and chemical weapons research program, launching large-scale experiments with humans.

For this, a series of medical research units were created, planned by the microbiologist Shirō Ishii, later a lieutenant general of the Japanese Army. Thousands of crimes are attributed to them, as well as horrendous medical experiments.

The Organizing Brain: Shirō Ishii

The person in charge of the development of these research programs, initially focused on the development of chemical and biological weapons of war, was General Shirō Ishii.

Ishii was born in Shibayama, Sanbu district, in 1892 and studied medicine at the Imperial University of Kyoto. He quickly entered the Army and in 1922 he was assigned to the First Army Hospital and the Tokyo Military Medical School.

Two years later he specialized in microbiology, publishing numerous articles in scientific journals. In 1928, Ishii made a two-year trip to Europe to gather information on the effects of biological and chemical weapons during World War I.

In 1930 he was promoted to major and was appointed Professor of Immunology at the Army Medical School in Tokyo.

There, protected by Koizumi Chikahiko, a senior military officer in the Japanese Army very interested in chemical warfare, Ishii organized an Immunology department dedicated to biological warfare research.

In addition, he was also supported by important political and military figures from the Japanese ultra-nationalist circles, such as General Nagata Tetsuzan or the Minister of War, Araki Sadao.

The seizure of Manchuria by the Japanese Army gave Ishii the opportunity to use human beings in his research. In 1932, he began his preliminary experiments on biological warfare in occupied areas of China as part of a secret project.

Under the cover of a plan for the purification of water for the Japanese troops in China, since 1936, Ishii was organizing departments of Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply, which were, in reality, centers and units of medical research, highlighting the dark Unit 731.

In 1939, Ishii had under his command a large network of centers, such as those located in Harbin, Beijing, Nangjing, Guangzhou, Singapore and Tokyo, with more than 10,000 workers.

In 1940, Ishii was appointed Chief of the Biological Warfare Section of the Kwantung Army and, between 1942 and 1945, he served as Chief of the Medical Section of the First Army.

The experimentation centers

In 1936, Dr. Ishii moved to the Pingfang district, about 20 km from Harbin, to create a large research complex, with 6 km square and more than 150 buildings, built by 15,000 Chinese civil slaves, of which a third They passed away due to the harsh working conditions.

This was the epicenter of the infamous Unit 731, also known at times as the Togo or Boeki Bu Unit and technically as the “Squad for Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification”.

At its peak, 3,000 employees worked there, 10% of whom were doctors.

Squad 731, led by Ishii, carried out numerous experiments on prisoners in Pingfan, inflicting great suffering on them. It is estimated that between 3,000 and 6,000 people, including children, died of the same, in addition to many others who would die from the epidemics caused.

Remains of the complex where Unit 731 was operating undercover.

At the end of August 1942, Ishii moved from Pingfang to Nanking to participate in some campaigns and experiments. One of the objectives to be developed was to pollute all enemy water sources, leaving bottles with contaminated water on the roads or in the homes of nearby towns.

The experiments

In the experimentation centers, prisoners of war and political detainees accused of being spies or members of the resistance, mainly of Chinese origin, but also Soviets, Mongols and Koreans, as well as the mentally ill and the disabled, were used.

The Chinese forced prisoners were called “marutas”, which means “logs” or “logs”, since part of Unit 731 was camouflaged as a sawmill.

Ishii and his colleagues did research primarily on infectious diseases, by inoculating healthy subjects with the germs of cholera, typhus, diphtheria, botulism, anthrax, glanders, brucellosis, dysentery, syphilis, plague, etc., to analyze the development of diseases and test the effectiveness of certain vaccines.

The victims were forced to eat infected food or drink contaminated liquids, or were forced to carry contaminated objects or clothing.

Human guinea pigs were also used to test the effectiveness of conventional weapons and chemical and biological agents as weapons of war: human targets were used to test the effectiveness of grenades, flamethrowers or explosive bombs, they were forced to drink iperita or they were exposed to hydrocyanic acid and mustard gas.

In Harbin, northeast China, there is a museum displaying Unit 731’s human experiments (Getty Images).

Physiological experiments were also carried out, very similar to those carried out by Nazi doctors, such as the assessment of the time of suffocation after placing prisoners upside down and of embolism after the intravascular injection of air.

The effects of injection of horse urine and sea water, food, water or sleep deprivation, freezing, massive X-ray radiation, etc. were tested. Some prisoners were even placed inside centrifugal machines to determine survival time.

Hypothermia experiments were one of Ishii’s specialties. In them, prisoners were exposed to extreme temperatures during colder months of the year in different conditions (with wet clothes, with a normal diet, with a hypocaloric diet, etc.) and then different forms of resuscitation were studied.

Unit 731 conducted experiments by freezing the limbs of prisoners and then heating them with water, observing the temperature at which the skin and muscles were shed.

There is graphic evidence of the practice of vivisections and autopsies in dying prisoners, some carried out by Ishii himself, with the aim of obtaining the freshest samples possible.

I also know performed other surgical practices: appendectomies and tracheotomies, extraction of bullets previously fired at the prisoners, amputations of limbs and, finally, murder of the survivors.

These surgical practices were allegedly integrated into the Army’s surgeon training program, to teach them how to handle wounded soldiers at the front.

They were even published, after the war, various articles in medical journals that were based on these experiments.

Was never tried

Despite the fact that all the experiments were perfectly documented on paper or on film, most of the evidence was destroyed, although numerous photographs were saved.

Although Japan’s political and military leaders were tried by an international court, Ishii and members of Unit 731 managed to negotiate their immunity.

Even the experimentation centers were destroyed by explosives during the days near the end of the War, after killing all the prisoners, both infected and healthy, as well as Chinese civilian workers, by means of potassium cyanide injections.

It is estimated that, under these programs, up to 12,000 people could have been directly murdered, although some historians They put the deaths caused by Squad 731 at around 200,000.

However, if the deaths caused by the epidemics were estimated, the figure could rise to 580,000. In any case, the experiments carried out in these centers were classified by the United Nations as “war crimes”.

While the Nazi doctors were tried, within the framework of the Nuremberg Trials, by an International Military Tribunal, some of them being sentenced to death or long prison terms, there was no trial against the 731 Squad doctors.

Only 12 low-ranking Japanese officers were tried by the Soviet Union in Khabarovsk, Siberia, in 1949, and the sentences were very limited (between 2 and 25 years).

Ishii, who faked his own death and tried to flee, was arrested by the Americans in 1946.

He and other members of Squad 731 managed to negotiate their indictment and immunity in the Tokyo Trial (International Military Criminal Tribunal for the Far East, TIPLE), which began on April 27, 1946, in exchange for all the data on biological warfare. obtained from his experiments with human beings, and without any publicity.

In this way, Ishii was never prosecuted for war crimes.

Many of the scientists involved in the criminal activities of the experimentation units continued their investigative activity after the war, even being protected. Ishii opened a free care clinic and died in Tokyo of throat cancer after converting to Christianity in 1959. He was 67 years old.

A conspiracy of silence continues to surround these events. In the words of the perpetrators themselves, it was “the secret of secrets.”