The Forgotten Atrocity

It is impossible to deny the that World War II changed the world. From Iwo Jima to Stalingrad, the men who fought on both sides shed blood for something they believed, for better or worse. Yet it is difficult to assign any amount of heroism to the acts that went unseen in the eyes of the post WWII world. There are elements of the war that seem to slip through the cracks of history books, moments that those who experienced them would rather forget. But in the interest of history, it is important that these stories be retold, paying to that elder notion of "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

Many of the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated through those dark days are still fresh in the conscience of the world, but one story that seems to never be told is that of a isolated location in Manchuria, disguised as a benign water purification facility, that led to the death of 500,000+ human beings: Unit 731.

According to Sheldon H. Harris' Factories of Death, Dr. Shiro Ishii (a physician with the Japanese Imperial Army) took control of a 150-building, six kilometer area outside the city of Harbin, Manchuria in order to conduct experiments on biological warfare. Japan had refused to sign the Geneva Convention's ban against germ warfare in the 1920s, giving Dr. Ishii free reign to try and perfect weapons and delivery systems for virulent plagues. In it's wake, Dr. Ishii allowed for nearly every conceivable manner of war crime to occur; vivisection of the camp's inmates were quite common, as well as experiments on the effects of hypothermia and amputation. In our more allegedly rational times, these sorts of experiments are grotesque and unnecessary.

But justice has, if nothing else, a perverse sense of humor. While most of the camps staff were put on trial and punished harshly, Dr. Ishii was granted immunity from the Tokyo Tribunal of 1948 in exchange for the information he gathered from his experiments. This is not surprising; despite the horrors of the "Final Solution" in Nazi-occupied Europe, scientific findings that came at the expense of the countless victims of the Holocaust has been gathered. It should also be noted for the record that Dr. Ishii would also go on to die in 1959 of throat cancer, after having served as a researcher of bioweapons in Maryland.

While it is human nature to attempt to find some sort of good in any dark time, this leaves us with a question: What is progress worth when measured against human life? Does the wrongful death of thousands of innocents become acceptable in the face of Scientific Knowledge, much of it invaluable for the lives it might save in the future? It is indeed difficult to look to the history of the world without finding a large amount of seemingly pointless destruction, and sadly science is not immune to this.

Author's Note: As a rule, I avoid any sort of serious ethical dilemmas here at The Obscuritan Journal. I don't feel that I have the sort of authority to dictate right or wrong in any sense; but it is impossible to write about such manners without these questions immediately coming to the fore-front of my work.
Further, in light of the gruesome subject matter, I have allowed for this work to be bereft of images out of respect to the victims of Unit 731 and out of respect for my more sensitive readers.