THE names of 3,607 members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s clandestine Unit 731, known for conducting heinous live germ and chemical warfare experiments on thousands of Chinese victims, have been disclosed by the National Archives of Japan, a research professor said yesterday.

“It is the first time that almost all the real names of the unit’s members have been unveiled. We will post them on the website so they can be utilized for research,” Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science, told a press briefing yesterday.

The names of those working at the headquarters of the notorious unit, as well as their ranks and other information, including their addresses and family members, are disclosed on the list, which is dated January 1, 1945.

The list covers 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat medics operating out of the headquarters of the unit, deceptively dubbed the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.

Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin in northeast China.

The unit was set up around 1936 and conducted vivisection experiments on live human beings to test germ-releasing bombs and chemical bombs among other criminal atrocities.

The unit became Japan’s top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base and operated as the nerve center of Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during World War II.

At least 3,000 people were used for human experimentation by Unit 731 along with a small percentage of Soviets, Mongolians, Koreans and soldiers of the Allied Forces taken captive. Some of those killed in ways unimaginable were just children.

More than 300,000 people across China were killed by Japan’s biological weapons during World War II.

The first list containing details of Unit 731’s war criminals was released in Japan after a request in 2015, but information on the unit’s participants was heavily redacted.

A declassified list released in January still obscured some of the information of the unit’s personnel.

Unit 731 managed to keep its atrocities largely concealed due to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East not prosecuting the unit’s commanders on condition they handed over germ warfare data to the United States.

A documentary released on August 13 by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, through testimonies of Unit 731 participants and authentic records of the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949, presented vividly the cruel truth to a Japanese public who knew little of the deplorable war crimes. </s> The names of 3,607 people who worked for Japan's notorious World War Two-era Unit 731 research group have been released, according to reports in The Japan Times.

Unit 731 conducted germ and chemical warfare experiments during World War Two, torturing and murdering thousands of civilians and prisoners of war.

The names of the people who committed its grisly crimes have long been concealed, and were hidden by U.S. prosecutors after the war in exchange for the unit's data and research. Its commander, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, was among those who received immunity from criminal charges. The U.S. decided to forgo prosecution to keep information about the experiments secret, and to stop the unit's research from falling into Soviet hands.

The names released are from a January 1, 1945 list of the people employed by the unit, which was officially called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. It details ranks, names and personal information—including family members—of 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat engineers who worked at the unit headquarters in the city of Harbin, in what is now northeastern China. During the war, Harbin was in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

Unit 731 was established in 1936 to develop biological weapons. Historians believe at least 3,000 people died at the Unit 731 facility between 1936 and 1945. The group infected prisoners with diseases including bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and more. This research allowed Japanese forces in China to launch biological attacks, dropping plague-infected bombs on on Chinese cities. It has been estimated that up to 300,000 people died as a result of Japanese biological warfare in this period.

Prisoners, including Allied POWs, were also subjected to vivisection without anesthetic. According to testimony used at post-war trials, American bomber pilots were among those experimented upon at the Harbin headquarters, with some having organs removed.

Surgeons also purposefully left prisoners in freezing conditions to induce frostbite and allow them to study its effects on humans. Prisoners were used for testing weapons, including grenades and flamethrowers, and were forcefully infected with syphilis to study the disease's progression.

The identities of the Unit 731 employees have been released at the request of a group led by Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science. The group first requested the disclosure in 2015, but the list was released with mostly redacted information. Another declassified list was released in January, but some personal information was still hidden.

Nishiyama hopes to use the list to ask Kyoto University to investigate the legitimacy of a university degree awarded to one of Unit 731's officers. He believes that some of the officer's experiments may have been conducted on humans, not animals, as the officer claimed.

"Kyoto University has not made independent efforts to verify or atone for its role in wartime research. We hope that our petition will precipitate further verification by Kyoto University to look into the legitimacy of the dissertation," Nishiyama told The Japan Times.

"Unit 731 has a collective responsibility to account for its war crimes, and that those crimes must be atoned for as a way of showing that those crimes will never be repeated," Nishiyama said. </s> Japan has disclosed the names of thousands of members of Unit 731, a notorious branch of the imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on Chinese civilians in the 1930s and 40s as it sought to develop chemical and biological weapons.

The country’s national archives passed on the names of 3,607 people in response to a request by Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science, in a move that could reignite the public debate over Japanese atrocities committed in occupied China before and during the second world war.

“This is the first time that an official document showing the real names of almost all members of Unit 731 has been disclosed,” Nishiyama told the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. “The list is important evidence that supports testimony by those involved. Its discovery will be a major step toward unveiling concealed facts.”

The document lists members of the Kwantung army’s Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department – the unit’s official name – and is dated 1 January 1945. It includes the names, ranks and contact details of more than 1,000 army medics, as well as dozens of doctors, surgeons, nurses and engineers.

Japan reluctantly acknowledged the unit’s existence in the late 1990s, but has refused to discuss its activities. Instead, accounts of the unit’s activities have been built around testimony from former members, photographs and documentary evidence.

In 2006, Toyo Ishii, a former nurse, said she had helped bury the remains of victims of Japan’s biological warfare programme at a site in Tokyo, as US forces moved into the Japanese capital at the end of the second word war. Ishii said she and her colleagues had been ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts following Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

Other accounts indicate that similar experiments took place in other parts of China. In 2006, Akira Makino, a former doctor, said he had been ordered to conduct experiments on condemned men while stationed on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.

Formed in the mid-1930s in Harbin, north-eastern China, Unit 731 conducted lethal experiments on an estimated 3,000 prisoners, who were mostly Chinese and Korean. 



According to historical accounts, male and female prisoners, named “logs” by their torturers, were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia after they had been deliberately infected with diseases such as typhus and cholera. Some had limbs amputated or organs removed.

As Japan headed towards defeat in the summer of 1945, the unit’s leader, Lt Gen Shiro Ishii, forbade researchers from discussing their work and ordered the demolition of the unit’s Harbin headquarters.



At the end of the war, US authorities secretly granted unit officials immunity from prosecution in return for access to their research. Several former Unit 731 officials went on to have successful careers in medicine, academia and business.

Nishiyama reportedly plans to publish the list online to encourage historians to conduct further studies into the unit. </s> It had the boring and bureaucratic name of the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department. But this secretive unit of the Japanese army during World War II—better known as Unit 731—conducted germ warfare and other lethal experiments on live prisoners of war, explains the Guardian.

Now, at the request of scholars, Japan has for the first time released the names of 3,607 of those in the unit, a list that includes 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses, and 1,117 combat medics.

The unit, developed in 1936 with the intent of developing biological weapons, conducted its experiments mostly in China on Chinese and Korean prisoners accused of espionage, reports the Japan Times.

Its existence remained a secret for decades after the war, in part because the US and its allies did not want the work made public. Among other things, doctors would inject the plague into victims, deliberately cause frostbite, and deprive prisoners of food and water to observe the effects, per the AFP.

Surgeons also would perform operations on live prisoners as if they were lab rats. "The list is important evidence that supports testimony by those involved," says Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science.

He said he hopes its publication will lead to more information about the unit, which conducted experiments with 20 different kinds of bacteria, including anthrax and smallpox.

By one estimate, 3,000 people died at the hands of the unit. One tangible result: Nishiyama will be pushing to have a university degree revoked from at least one medical officer whose dissertation is believed to have been based on the human experiments.

This article originally appeared on Newser: They Experimented on Live POWs. Now, Names Released </s> A group of Japanese scholars is set to reveal the names of the members of a Japanese World War II germ warfare unit that infected and starved Chinese and allied POWs in a series of gruesome experiments.

Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science in western Japan, has told local media his team is analysing a list of 3,607 members and plans to publish it online to encourage further historical study of the unit.

"This is the first time that we see a list of the names of nearly all its members being released in the form of an official document," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted Nishiyama as saying.

Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army was set up in Manchuria after Japan formed a puppet state in northeastern China in 1931.

Its members -- some of them physicians from Japan's top medical universities -- conducted human experiments, injecting plague and other germs into their victims, testing germ bombs, and artificially causing frostbite to victims while depriving them of sleep and food.

The Japanese government denied the existence of the unit until 1998, when the Supreme Court indirectly acknowledged it by ruling there was an academic consensus that Unit 731 existed.

The list, recently released by the National Archives of Japan to Nishiyama's team, includes the names, ranks and addresses of those who belonged to Unit 731, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.

"This piece of valuable evidence supports all the testimonies given by those who knew the unit. This is a big step forward for efforts to reveal the hidden truth," Nishiyama said.

The list includes 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat medics of the unit.

Nishiyama could not be reached for immediate comment.

Japan, unlike Germany, has been widely accused of failing fully to face up to its wartime atrocities.

The subject is not widely taught in schools, and comments by conservative politicians glossing over the issue regularly anger other Asian nations which were the victims of occupation. </s> The National Archives of Japan has disclosed the names of 3,607 members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious Unit 731 that conducted germ warfare experiments mainly on prisoners in China before and during the second world war, according to a researcher.

Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science, told reporters, “It is the first time that almost all the real names of the unit’s members have been unveiled. We will post them on the website so they can be utilised for research.”

The list dated January 1, 1945, includes the names and ranks as well as personal information such as addresses and family members of 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat medics, mainly those attached to the headquarters of the unit, officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.

The unit, established in 1936 for the purpose of developing biological weapons, conducted research mostly using Chinese and Koreans arrested on espionage charges.

The research included infecting prisoners with germs before performing vivisections on them and deliberately causing frostbite to observe the process of necrosis.

A request to disclose the list was first filed in 2015. Initially, the released list was mostly blacked out but almost all the names and ranks were declassified in January following negotiations, although the personal information of some people was still excluded.

A group led by Nishiyama plans to urge Kyoto University to determine the legitimacy of a university degree conferred on an army medical officer of the unit, arguing his dissertation may have been based on experiments on living people.

The group has been collecting signatures to back its request.

Unit 731 was involved in research into more than 20 types of bacteria including anthrax, smallpox and botulinum, and about 3,000 people worked at its headquarters in the suburbs of Harbin in Manchuria. Historians believe thousands died in the human experiments.

The history of the unit had long been concealed. The unit’s commander, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, and others received immunity from prosecution by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East after giving the United States the data collected by the unit on germ warfare.

The Kwantung Army was part of the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in northeastern China, which was under Japanese control. </s> A German nurse serving a life sentence for two murders has been charged with another 97 hospital murders, prosecutors said Monday. If found guilty, it would make him Germany's deadliest post-war serial killer.

The male nurse, identified only as Niels H. under reporting rules, is accused of intentionally bringing about cardiac crises to relieve boredom. The charges relate to two hospitals where he worked in Lower Saxony, Germany, over a seven year period.

Niels H. was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 on two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder and battery.

During the trial it was heard he confessed to the killings of 90 more people during his employment in Oldenburg and Delmenhorst hospitals, prompting investigators to carry out toxicological examinations on dozens of other patients who died at the hospitals.

Oldenburg public prosecutors office confirmed Monday that, following extensive investigations and toxicology analyses, Niels H. is being charged with an additional 97 murders.

62 of these murders allegedly happened while he worked as a nurse in Delmenhorst between 2003 and 2005 while the remainder occurred during his employment in Oldenburg between 1999 and 2002.

In three additional cases investigators deemed suspicious, tests didn't produce enough evidence to add them to the charge sheet.

READ MORE: German nurse suspected of killing at least 90 in bizarre game to test his skills

During his trial, the court heard the nurse was a, “thrill seeker,” trying to break up a boring routine by bringing people to the brink of cardiac arrest before attempting to resuscitate them.

A variety of drugs were used in his resuscitation attempts. He did this to present his resuscitation skills to colleagues and supervisors and to fight his boredom, the prosecutor's statement said. The prosecutor added that the nurse should have been aware that the drugs he used could cause life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, even ventricular fibrillation and hypotension.

Police said that earlier intervention from health officials could have stopped the male nurse. Investigations into the involvement of former staff at the facilities are ongoing. A date for a new trial has yet to be confirmed. </s> , Berlin, Germany, Jan 22 – A German male nurse serving a life term for killing six hospital patients with lethal drugs out of “boredom” will face trial for another 97 murders, prosecutors said Monday.

The third trial of Niels Hoegel, 41, accused of being the worst serial killer in German post-war history, is expected to start later this year, a court spokesman in the northern city of Oldenburg told AFP.

Hoegel has admitted to injecting patients with drugs that cause heart failure or circulatory collapse so he could then try to revive them and, when successful, shine as a saviour before his medical peers and superiors.

In a case police have called “unique in the history of the German republic,” he earlier testified that at times he acted out of “boredom”, feeling euphoric when he managed to bring a patient back to life.

He was found guilty of six killings in two earlier trials, but investigators have pushed on with toxicology tests on hundreds more exhumed bodies.

On Monday, Oldenburg prosecutors said they had charged him with 97 additional murders on top of the six he has been convicted of, while saying toxicology tests did not find conclusive proof in three more cases.

Of the newly discovered cases, 62 patients died in the Delmenhorst hospital near the northern city of Bremen and 35 in a clinic in Oldenburg.

The revelations date back to 2005, when a female nurse witnessed Hoegel trying to inject a patient at the Delmenhorst hospital.

The patient survived and Hoegel was arrested.

In 2008, he was sentenced to seven and a half years in jail for several cases of attempted murder.

Amid the media publicity, a woman then contacted police, voicing suspicion that her deceased mother had also fallen victim to the killer nurse.

Hoegel meanwhile told fellow inmates and then a psychiatrist that he had committed scores more killings.

He was jailed for life in 2015, but at the time it was clear he had murdered many more patients, with investigators admitting they may never know the true number as some remains had been cremated.

Separate investigations are looking at the clinics in Delmenhorst and Oldenburg and whether superiors there had cause to suspect foul play in the high number of patient deaths. </s> FRANKFURT, Aug 28 (Reuters) - A German nurse jailed for murdering two patients is suspected of killing at least 84 other people, police said on Monday.

The man, identified only as Niels H. under reporting rules, has "confessed in many of those cases", a police statement said, but could not remember all the details of his actions. If confirmed, the death toll would be among the worst ever compiled by a German serial killer.

In past hearings, Niels H. admitted deliberately injecting patients at two clinics in northern Germany with deadly drugs and then trying to revive them in order to play the hero, German broadcaster NDR said.

He was convicted of two charges of attempted murder and two counts of murder by an Oldenburg court in 2015.

Police said on Monday that they had investigated additional deaths at hospitals in the northern German cities of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst after exhuming the remains of 134 people with links to Niels H.

They said he had used five different drugs on the patients, including alkaloid ajmaline and arrhythmia drug sotalol, between 1999 and 2005.

Toxicological reports for 41 people have not been completed, which means the number of victims could rise, police said.

Prosecutors have also charged six people who worked with Niels H. at the Delmenhorst hospital on suspicion of failing to stop the killing even though they were aware of it.

Ten years ago, a German nurse was convicted of killing 28 elderly patients. He said he gave them lethal injections because he felt sorry for them. He was sentenced to life in prison.

In Britain, Dr. Harold Shipman was believed to have killed as many as 250 people, most of them elderly and middle-aged women who were his patients. Known as Dr. Death, Shipman was sentenced to 15 life terms in 2000; he died prison in 2004, apparently a suicide. (Reporting by Maria Sheahan; Editing by Larry King)
The names of 3,607 employees of Unit 731, a Japanese military medical experimentation unit associated with war crimes during World War II, are released. Prosecutors in the United States had kept their identities secret following the war in exchange for access to data gleaned from the project.