Scholars say Japan used germ warfare across China

BEIJING (Aug 11, 1995) - China's Xinhua news agency said on Fridy that Japanese invaders waged germ warfare not only in occupied Chinese Manchuria in the 1930s but also in other cities, spreading cholera and plague among the people.

Xinhua, quoting research findings by Chinese and Japanese scholars at a symposium in the northern city of Harbin, said Japan's infamous 731 unit served as headquarters for live experiments on people in other parts of China.

"The Japanese unit 731, stationed in Harbin, experimented with various kinds of germs on live human bodies," Xinhua quoted Xin Peilin, deputy head of the History Research Institute of the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, as saying.

"Its headquarters was finally developed into the world's biggest germ warfare base, with 3,000 staff members and advanced facilities."

The scholars said the Japanese carried out germ warfare in Beijing, the central city of Nanjing, Dalian in the northeast and some regions of Southeast Asia.

Japan's imperial army, acting on secret orders from Emperor Hirohito, set up germ warfare units codenamed 731 and 100 to conduct experimental surgey on prisoners and test biological agents on them.

Chinese historians have estimated that more than 3,000 Chinese, Korean, Mongolian and Soviet citizens died in the programmes.

But the researchers, citing findings at a psychiatric hospital in Singapore, said the number of people killed by 731 unit could surpass 10,000, Xinhua said.

Japan set up similar germ warfare units in Beijing, Nanjing and Guangzhou, Xin said. "I can definitely point out the names and numbers of these units," he said.

He said the units concentrated on cultivating bacteria and carrying out experiments on human guinea pigs.

Xinhua said one germ warfare unit in Beijing openly announced it possessed enough cholera germs to kill the whole world and sprayed cholera germs in Beijing in August 1938, killing more than 300 people.

It said the diaries of Japanese officers at the units showed they conducted various biological experiments to produce plague germs that they sprayed on people in northeast China.

It quoted an unidentified Japanese professor as saying: "Japan once planned to wage germ warfare in the Philippines, Australia, Hawaii and Burma from 1942 to 1944, and it sanctioned germ warfare on Saipan and Guam in 1944."

File provided by Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia

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