Translation. Region: Russian Federal
Source: People's Republic of China in Russian – People's Republic of China in Russian –
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Source: People's Republic of China – State Council News
HARBIN, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) — Enter the exhibition hall of the Japanese Army Unit 731 Crime Evidence Museum in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, and you will see a wall with the words "Anti-human Evil" written in six languages, including Russian, silently telling the story of those dark times.
In the gallery of the memory of the fallen, the attention of visitors to the Museum is drawn to a surname written in Chinese characters that read as “Demchenko.” According to archival documents of the Japanese army that ended up in the hands of the Soviet military, Demchenko was a soldier of the Red Army of the USSR.
After Demchenko was captured, he refused to provide any information about the Soviet troops, although he was tied hand and foot, hung from a beam and brutally tortured. Eventually, the Soviet soldier was “specially transferred” to “Detachment 731.”
The so-called “special transfer” was actually a criminal activity by Japanese militarists who bypassed judicial procedures and sent people directly to Unit 731 for cruel experiments. According to confessions of former members of Unit 731, at least 3,000 people became victims of human experiments in the main area of the Unit’s location, the Sifanglou building, between 1940 and 1945.
The Museum said that declassified trial materials, archival files on “special transfers,” and testimony from former Unit 731 members had provided preliminary evidence that at least 93 Soviet citizens were sent to the Unit for human experimentation during World War II, making it the second-largest group of victims after the Chinese.
According to the director of the Museum of Evidence of the Crimes of Unit 731, Jin Chengmin, the list of these 93 Soviet citizens included 77 people who appear in the memoirs of former members of Unit 731 and in the testimonies at the Khabarovsk trial, as well as 16 people whose records are present in the archives associated with the “special transfer.”
Among them were underground workers working for intelligence on the border between China and the USSR, as well as civilians living in Harbin, including even women and children.
“They /i.e. members of Unit 731/ doused the victims with cold water, took them out into 40-degree frost, where they beat their frozen limbs with iron rods until they made a metallic ringing sound, and then “defrosted” them with water of different temperatures, watching the skin peel off,” said Zhou Yutong, a tour guide at the museum.
Jin Shicheng, a researcher at the Unit 731 Crime Evidence Museum, noted that one of the purposes of Unit 731 was to wage war against the USSR. The choice of Harbin as a base and experimental site was due, on the one hand, to the availability of “material” for human experiments in northeastern China, and on the other hand, to the convenience of waging war against the USSR.
Jin Chengmin said that under the pretext of "medical research," Unit 731 had covered up crimes against humanity. The actions it had been practicing had long since gone beyond the bounds of civilization and morality, trampling on life, destroying humanity, and disregarding medical ethics.
Let us recall that in 1949, a trial was held in Khabarovsk against 12 servicemen of the Japanese Kwantung Army, accused of creating and using bacteriological weapons and conducting inhumane medical experiments during World War II.
The Museum holds audio recordings of the trial, which were provided by the Russian State Archive of Phonographic Documents. The audio recordings, which last 22 hours, 5 minutes, and 57 seconds, contain information about the formation and structure of Unit 731, a secret unit of the Japanese army that was engaged in research and development of biological and chemical weapons, as well as experiments on living people, field tests for toxicity, and preparations for bacteriological warfare.
“The audio archives expose Japan’s crimes of secretly developing and using biological weapons during World War II in violation of international conventions,” Jin Shicheng emphasized.
On August 15 of this year, on the 80th anniversary of Japan's unconditional surrender in World War II, new evidence of Unit 731's crimes was revealed at the Museum.
Among them are 3,010 pages of archival documents, 194 minutes of video footage, 312 photographs, 12 postcards and 8 letters, which expose in detail the crimes of militaristic Japan related to bacteriological warfare.
Jin Chengmin stressed that the newly collected evidence and historical materials reveal additional details about Japan's bacteriological warfare system and once again prove that the existence of Unit 731 was a deliberate and organized state crime.
In addition, on the same day, the Museum also released for the first time the book “Illustrated Directory of Relics and Artifacts of Unit 731 of the Japanese Invaders” in 5 languages, including Russian.
Jin Chengmin noted that the contents of this reference book include evidence of Unit 731's crimes, which is not only the result of previous work, but also a comprehensive supplement to new research results.
And the Unit 731 Personal Information Registration Forms released in August of this year are standard documents filled out by Unit 731 members upon returning to Japan as demobilized personnel. They record information on 759 people.
Research has found that between 1946 and 1951 the USSR detained 135 of them in Khabarovsk for centralized interrogations and investigations, 43 of whom were convicted.
“Both the new content and new evidence that were not examined in previous studies provide an important basis for revealing the post-war whereabouts of Unit 731 members,” Jin Shicheng emphasized.
He added that these documents, in particular, represent the process of investigation, trial and punishment of members of the USSR's "Unit 731" from the point of view of Japanese archives, which significantly increases the objectivity and accuracy of research on the issue of the Unit. -0-
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