Unit 731

[hongi]

Is it true that America gave immunity to members of Unit 731 in return for biological research?

[fgalkin]

In a word, yes.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[PainRack]

I think that as horrific their experiments and willingness to conduct biological warfare was, one should note the results.

Their biological weapons were stunningly useless during WW2. Whether this was due to Japanese ineptitude or just the nature of the biological weapons, the results just showed the plain........... worthlessness and complete inability to justify the actions taken by the Japanese military.



To make matters worse, research monies and funds were actually withdrawn from their excellent tropical medicine unit, supposedly the second best, if not the best in the world for this. To the extent that many Japanese soldiers going into Malaya and Phillipines were not issued with anti-malaria prophlayxsis, although whether this was a lapse of logistics or medicine, I have no idea.

By 1943, more Japanese soldiers were being struck from the combat rolls due to disease at a stunningly high rate. I need to go dig out the relevant texts, but in comparison with British and US forces, the rates were abysmal.

[Broomstick]

There are people who seek to justify such immunity with the idea that, as horrific as such experiments were it would be even worse to let any useful knowledge from them to go to waste, because maybe, just maybe, some small good could be salvaged from such evil.

There are, of course, problems with that viewpoint. There is another group of people concerned that doing such a thing might in some way be seen as redeeming the unredeemable. I've also heard that no useful knowledge was found during the medical experiments on prisoners (not just in Japan but also in Europe), that they were simply another form of torture and pointless death, and medical only in name.

Compare with Von Braun, whose knowledge was considered valuable enough to overlook his role in Nazi slave labor and prisoner deaths. At the end of the war the US was eager to scoop up anyone who looked like they had information that might be of any value, so eager they were willing to gloss over participation in mass murder. Not that other countries weren't happy to suck any form of valuable knowledge out of the defeated as well, but I'm not sure they went as far as the US did in overlooking the past atrocities of some of these people. My rather hazy knowledge of the Soviet actions were that they'd scoop these folks up, get what they could out of them, then these guys would just disappear, never to be seen again - von Braun specifically surrendered to the Americans because he believed he'd get a better deal from them than either the USSR or UK. And he was almost certainly correct. I imagine the guys in Unit 731 might have come to the same conclusion if they had had any choice. As it was, the US owned Japan at the time and did want they wanted. The US could have just as easily lined them up against a wall and had them shot.

[Teebs]

I've also heard that no useful knowledge was found during the medical experiments on prisoners (not just in Japan but also in Europe), that they were simply another form of torture and pointless death, and medical only in name.

I had heard that most knowledge about hypothermia and its treatments came from Nazi prisoner experiments. Whether that's true or not I don't know. Doesn't justify things either way.

[Gil Hamilton]

My understanding is that some valuable research did come out of the German Horrible Medical Experiments division. The effects of hypothermia on the human body and its treatment were studied and contributed to the body of medical knowledge. Like many Nazi experiments, it had a nutty Racial Purity Angle in it though, which resulted in alot of captured Russian soldiers being killed to see if Russian Genetics made them better at resisting cold weather than Germans, but my understanding is that human understanding of how the body reacts to being frozen and how to reverse that damage comes very heavily from those experiments.

I have no idea what Unit 731 actually produced though. The Japanese Horrible Medical Experiments division was even nuttier than the Nazi one.

[Zinegata]

Current scholarship seems to dimiss the idea that the German or Japanese "experiments" had any actual scientific value. The Allies apparently didn't even check their veracity and took the data as fact. Later testing with new technologies (without the need for killing off people) showed that the data gathered was actually wrong do to an appalling lack of controls during these "experiments".

In short, all of the people give immunity in exchange for scientific data got away with a crime.

[Skgoa]

My rather hazy knowledge of the Soviet actions were that they'd scoop these folks up, get what they could out of them, then these guys would just disappear, never to be seen again - von Braun specifically surrendered to the Americans because he believed he'd get a better deal from them than either the USSR or UK.

With the caviat that I am talking only about the rocket scientists and have no knowledge about how specialists in other fields were treated: They were treated well (for a prisoner of war in stalinist dictatorship) and were allowed to return to East Germany once they had outlived their usefulness.

edit: Although yes, Braun (and his group of engineers) get a much much better deal from the americans, than the other group got.

[K. A. Pital]

edit: Although yes, Braun (and his group of engineers) get a much much better deal from the americans, than the other group got.

He was also far more useful.

[Pelranius]

My rather hazy knowledge of the Soviet actions were that they'd scoop these folks up, get what they could out of them, then these guys would just disappear, never to be seen again - von Braun specifically surrendered to the Americans because he believed he'd get a better deal from them than either the USSR or UK.

With the caviat that I am talking only about the rocket scientists and have no knowledge about how specialists in other fields were treated: They were treated well (for a prisoner of war in stalinist dictatorship) and were allowed to return to East Germany once they had outlived their usefulness.

edit: Although yes, Braun (and his group of engineers) get a much much better deal from the americans, than the other group got.

Small arms designers also got treated fairly well, IIRC.

[Sea Skimmer]

My understanding is that some valuable research did come out of the German Horrible Medical Experiments division. The effects of hypothermia on the human body and its treatment were studied and contributed to the body of medical knowledge. Like many Nazi experiments, it had a nutty Racial Purity Angle in it though, which resulted in alot of captured Russian soldiers being killed to see if Russian Genetics made them better at resisting cold weather than Germans, but my understanding is that human understanding of how the body reacts to being frozen and how to reverse that damage comes very heavily from those experiments.

I have no idea what Unit 731 actually produced though. The Japanese Horrible Medical Experiments division was even nuttier than the Nazi one.

The experiments performed by the Germans and Japanese both could have had a fair bit of value; except that in most cases they didn’t keep proper records and generally used incredibly sloppy methods. Rather exactly what you would expect out of a human slaughterhouse run by psychopaths. The research was worthless in all real terms, and a lot of what they did collect which had value could have easily been gained by ethical means. Many execution-experiments did not have even a remotely serious pretext of testing anything.

The Unit 731 did several kinds of things. One was human experimentation and development of new surgical practices, and the results of that were almost entirely worthless and denounced by US experts ordered to examine the work. However they also did systematic lab trials of biological warfare agents and chemical warfare agents on live human subjects, and extensively tested both kinds of weapons in the field as early as 1940. That was the information the US really wanted, and supposedly a lot of it did have value and is still classified. The information on field use of bioweapons in particular simply couldn’t be gained any other way except murdering people (and being willing to actually disperse biowarfare agents over cities while you do it). But even that proved effectively useless because the US biological warfare program ended up favoring anti crop and anti livestock agents anyway, rather then agents that killed humans directly. Anti livestock agents were easily tested by slaughtering tens of thousands of cows, chickens and guinea pigs out in Nevada. We accidentally killed some civilian livestock in the process.

[Gil Hamilton]

That could be why the hypothermia experiments still had value; the Germans did have a practical goal there and that was figuring out how to better let their soldiers survive Russian winters, so they were conducted somewhat better than one of Mengele's things or anything produced by Unit 731.

As for nerve agents, the US, British, and Russians did walk off with Sarin and other G agents in the end and all of which started producing it as a chemical weapon (which had human "guinea pig" trials too, famously Porton Down in England where researchers murdered at least one RAF soldier with sarin and got caught).

[Hamstray]

Information on the development of chemical- and/or bioweapons wouldn't actually be an argument for the immunity against persecution as such information is actually worse than useless.

[Purple]

Why would you say that? Information about those kinds of weapons can be invaluable. Firstly, it lets you know what you can make and how it works. But more importantly it lets you know what the enemy can make and how to stop it. (In theory at least)

Now, if only those experiments had been done right.

[Darth Fanboy]

Now, if only those experiments had been done right.

Yes if only those experiments that were basically crimes against humanity had been done properly, THAT'S what we should be wishing was different.

[adam_grif]

Now, if only those experiments had been done right.

Yes if only those experiments that were basically crimes against humanity had been done properly, THAT'S what we should be wishing was different.

I think he was saying "If only they had been done ethically".