I
believe what the people in Unit 731 did to the innocent prisoners in this camp was
horrible. Those people in Unit 731 should not have been treated, let alone die
for no reason. They were treated like they were animals and they died and
suffered for absolutely no reason. Reading that article made me want to cry,
knowing that innocent people died just for some stupid medical reason.
Unit
731 was a place where brutalities occurred and it was an undercover medical experimentation
unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. If the men that “worked” in Unit 731 thought
or did disobey they would be killed for not listening and following orders that
were given to them. The numbers of prisoners were lower. From 1936 to 1942 between
3,000 and 12,000 men, women, and even children were basically murdered in Unit
731. The prisoners that were used for experiments were nicknamed “logs” because
the cover story that was given to the local authorities about Unit 731 was that
it was a lumber mill.
The
men tortured innocent humans until they died. The men that were apart of Unit
731 were ordered by Shiro Ishii to “experiment” on ordinary Japanese citizens. What
some of these men had to do to the prisoners was very gruesome. Some of them
had to cut out internal organs such as the; kidneys, liver, heart, and even the
wombs of pregnant mothers. These actions were often viewed as educational to
improve the knowledge of human anatomy. These results were referred to as
biological warfare. The prisoners suffered for no reason and the men that did
that to them, had to live the rest of their life knowing what they did to them.
Unit
731 was worse than most concentration camps. The prisoners suffered more
severely in Unit 731 then they did in the Nazi death camps that Hitler had organized.
The prisoners suffered from amputation, gas chambers, frost bite, internal
organs that were cut out of there body, being electrically charged until they were
slowly roasted to death, and some prisoners were even decapitated to test the
sharpness of the soldiers swords. Many prisoners were chained by hand and foot,
they were often fed well and exercised regularly. “Unless you work with a
healthy body you can’t get results,” a member of the Unit had said this in the
article. I found it interesting they kept the prisoners fed well and exercised
them regularly just to murder them later for some experiment.
Why
was Shiro Ishii able to die at home of throat cancer at the age of 67 after a
prosperous and untroubled life? The answer to this question is that Japanese were
allowed to erase Unit 731 from the archives by the American Government, which
the government at the time wanted Ishii’s biological warfare findings for
itself.
In
conclusion, what happened to the prisoners in Unit 731 was absolutely terrible.
It should have never happened. Those people should have never been used as genie
pigs for experiments. I feel terrible about what happened to those innocent
people in Unit 731 and I think they should be memorized for what happened to
them.
