During world war 2 the Japanese army performed some brutal experiments on Chinese prisoners. Treating frostbite is something that came out if those experiments. If you want more Google Unit 731, but it's pretty harrowing stuff.
The tldr is they keept really good notes about human experimentation that ended up having practical applications. The experiments were painful and violent usually resulting in death
Actually no. U.S. pardoned all of the participants from Unit 731 in exchange for knowledge and turns out most of the information was just creative ways that they were mutilating bodies with little medical value attached to it.
I remember hearing sometging about one of the worst doctors the Germans had to offer that burned all of his research before the allies could get their hands on it
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele was not him that destroyed his research but the ss. Who destroyed does not change that fact that these people were some of the worst parts of humanity.
The Japanese experiments were worse, but we don't really talk about them because the Japanese scientists were given amnesty by the US in exchange for their research.
Also, the Germans were forced by the rest of the world to acknowledge what they did for decades to come (and as a result have had some of the strictest anti-Nazi laws), meanwhile Japanese schools just don't teach anything of the horrors they committed during the wars.
meanwhile Japanese schools just don't teach anything of the horrors they committed during the wars.
To be fair, most countries don't do that. The Americans and Soviets don't like talking about what their soldiers did to German, Polish and Japanese women and children during and after the war when covering WW2.
One of the things they learned was that warming too quickly actually caused more tissue damage. This Podcast Will Kill You did an episode on hypothermia and covered the exceptionally problematic way we know a lot of what we know about it, as well as what was learned if you want to learn more.
See this is where I get pissed off, every last bit of that is fucking horse shit.
Warmth was the standard untill Nepolean. During a retreat his lead surgeon noticed soldiers treating frost bite and hypothermia with hot water and camp fires. They then went gangreen and tissue broke down rapidly. THAT is where the concept of warming too fast came from. The standard was heat sources and warm water prior to this, and remained a normal use for civilians globally. What Napoleans surgeon didn't take into account was the water used was fucking BOILING hot. They were following extreme frost damage with burning water.
We have clear tracks on how modern medicine went back to warm, but not too hot water, and none of it involves 731.
You know what 731 gave the world? The ONLY data that was used?
Human Specific Lethality Data. The "Report of A". Biological pathogen effectiveness and how to weaponize it to spread most effectively.
Micro-Aerosol Behavior in Human Lungs
Shrapnel-Induced Infection Vectors. Specifically explosives they designed of porcelain to spread biological pathogens.
Anything else is still classified because those weapons are still being researched.
Every major brakethrough either directly credited to 731 or insinuated to have been a continuation of research from 731 has happened via researchers without the security clearance necessary to access the data with full public publications and entirely different methodologies built on prior work. And all of those breakthroughs happened before the collected data was released by the US. The data collected by the Soviets was released early, and done to make the horrible atrocities made public. They found no useful data in what they had. The west dismissed it as propaganda (while we used their work to make weapons for a possible war with the USSR)
People on the internet are VERY invested in telling the lie that these torture camps gave us tons of medical breakthroughs. They REALLY want you to think there was some point to the genocide.
They would rape the women (or have prisoners rape the women) to get them pregnant and do experiments on the fetus. A lot of it was to do with how diseases could be passed down from mother to child
The kid would either be aborted or kept for more experiments. All of them were killed one way or another
Yeah, when I read that SS scientists who visited wrote back to command protesting the experiments they'd seen it really drove home how fucked up it must have been for white supremacists to think the non-white people torturing other non-white people were taking it too far.
Mostly they thought they were being inefficient. The medical knowledge gained from the Nazis were substantial and boosted medical research over 100 years from what it would have taken but the Japanese thought it could have been so much more because of just how many subjects they had to work on at a time compared to how few were being actually experimented on or just straight up executed. In a numbers kinda fucked up way they weren't wrong but damn thats scary.
100 years over where it would have been is an incredible overstatement. They documented a few things in limited areas that were somewhat useful, medically (like what it looks like to die of hypothermia or dehydration) but a lot of their experimentation was duplicative of other work or ideologically driven attempts to provide their unscientific race theories. Due to their ideology it's also difficult to trust some of the data. They absolutely did not advance medical science by anything close to 100 years.
As the answer in the link states, the premises of many of the experiments were flawed due to being based in Nazi race science and the experimental design and analysis of the results were also flawed
This. There's this permeating myth that ethics shackle advancement, but in reality most unethical research is garbage information, has falsifications, gives already known info, or has shit methodology.
Almost as if a lack of ethics normally makes trive self interested researchers who love to sbuse the lack of oversight to advance their careers.
Edit: The amount of yapping to justify such fucked up things in the responses really tell a lot about why the world is so fucked right now. If you are about to tell me some ultra specific thing that somehow justify these horrors, or go into semantics: don't.
Go touch grass.
Correct. They were just horrendous crimes against humanity. At least one project wasn't entirely though and the ethical discussions around the use of their results is interesting: The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments (The New England Journal of Medicine)
Actually, it was Croatia the SS were distinctly concerned over.
Unlike the Nazi regime which PRIMARALLY focused on a detached, efficient, and..."humane" mass genocide via gas, the facist Croatia at the time preferred methods the SS referred to as; visceral, brutal, appalling, barbaric, and sadistic...
You know youre messed up when the most imfamous people in recorded history look at you and say "that's fucked up"...
Reminds me of an ethics professor I had that used to say "just because Hitler agrees with you doesn't make you wrong, and just because he disagrees doesn't mean you are right." This reminds me of that.
Halo effect. 1 trait used to define an entire persons identity. A lot of good things have been done by vehemently racist pieces of shit and good people have often paved the road to hell with their intentions.
If I asked who would make a better leader a vegetarian who is for the ethical humane slaughter of animals for food and a massive highway system, or a drunk womanizer who insults most people he meets who would you choose Hitler or, Churchill?
We already knew that though, just by weighing very fresh cadavers and then dying them out and weighing them again. They were just doing stuff as an excuse to torture people to death. As far as I know, the frostbite thing was the only new information to come out of it
Worse. The mitochondria was designed by Axis engineer Kraft von Cellman. Previously, cells used inefficient, wood-burning stoves typically made from cast iron.
Bones only serve two purposes: structural stability and making blood. Nerves are transmitters, and meat is what moves you. Meat is not armor, it's pretty terrible at protecting you considering all the precious blood that's inside of it. You need that blood! Bones can't make it that fast!
Skin is the armor, although mainly it's armor that keeps your blood and guts in rather than keeping much of anything out.
You're supposed to infer crazy conspiracy theories by aligning that fact with others.
We are 70% water. The Earth is 70% water. That clearly means we were born of the Earth and any fossils or ancient artifacts that have been found were planted by the ancient alien Illuminati lizard people. Flat earth confirmed you fucking sheep.
Any of their “science” would’ve inevitably been discovered without crimes against humanity. Remedy to frostbite is better when affected parts are immersed in water to at least body temp, as compared to thawing. An empiric observation that humanity was destined to uncover, as much as modern imaging would’ve naturally shown the composition of our body. This bunk is fetishism masquerading as advancement
That's a kinda flawed way to look at science development though. That's like saying well, the development of germ/disease theory, both failures and successes, were pointless because humans would eventually discover it when they discover the microscope. There is modern hindsight bias with modern conventional scientific knowledge when looking back at how science were being developed back then. Even outside of straight up war crimes, scientific experiments and studies didn't always match the ethical and procedural standard of today.
Most of their "research" wasn't even really usable anyway. They weren't exactly conducting double blind randomized controlled trials in a torture chamber.
As Hawkeye said in MASH, war is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is worse. At least the general idea of hell is that bad people are supposed to go there, war doesn’t care about innocents
This doesn't make either one right, but I think about the horrible suffering the U.S. caused Japan due to The Bomb, then I recall things like this and the 'Rape of Nanjing', and remember they were responsible for a LOT of uncalled suffering of civilians as well.
In case you didn't know, before the two atomic bombs they'd already been firebombing Japan's mostly wooden cities.
USAF pilots would apparently come back and complain about the smell.
Yeah, between the nukes and the firebombing, IIRC the firebombing killed a lot more. And they didn't even break out the bat bombs they worked on that would be even worse.
The nukes were honestly more "look what we can do" than military might in that context.
I think it’s also extremely psychological. The human mind can handle a conflagration. The human mind can’t really grasp an act of god like the atomic bomb.
Not really that a lie made to make them sound better than they were. After the defeat of Japan, America wanted to get their hands on this research and prevent it from getting in the hands of anyone else. It why Japan got off with a light punishment for their war crimes, the other reason was to make the leadership reliant on America.
When American scientists got their hands on it they were excited because someone broke the taboo of human experimentation it would help them advance years of knowledge. And when they got it they were incredibly disappointed. What Japan did wasn’t science but just torture, there was no control group, most subjects weren’t healthy and had other issues from their poor treatment. They weren’t given time to recover between experiments and often died from a mixture of experiments. To make it worse the American scientists were actually ahead of Japan despite never breaking the taboo because they used control groups well limited to animals. So to summarize America pardon war criminals for paper that only value was as fire starter, because the Japanese thought torture was a part of the scientific method.
That explicitly says that some of it was useful including the frostbite research and was published in mainstream Japanese medical journals post-war by the original testers.
Sure, but unit 731 was a medical torture unit who experimented on rebels and POWs. There's a difference between Kalishnikov inventing the AK so that his comrades had better weapons or the Manhattan Project developing the Bomb so that the Nazis didn't get there first and torturing people for funsies and accidentally discovering important scientific information on the side.
Didn't most of the shit they did not actually lead to any reasonable medical advancement? Like they were doing "how long can a human survive without their head" or "can a baby survive being ripped out of their pregnant mother and thrown into a pot of acid" type stuff. Not exactly questions that need to be answered.
Bro historically speaking, Japan has to be top 5 worst countries and somehow they get a pass bcs of anime. Every other major country has their crimes always mentioned but somehow Japan is exempt from that. Imperial Japan was literal hell
Yeah, reading about the decision especially Leahy and Eisenhower is very sobering. And then knowing MacArthur would later become so obsessed with nuking people he would get relieved for it.
Most of it wasn't good science, Nazi and IJA alike. A lot of the results weren't even written down and was mostly done out of pure cruelty and sadism. Any medical benefits attributed to these "experiments" were either accidental or previously discovered under more scientifically rigorous and humane conditions.
This is a pretty common myth that I feel needs to be addressed here. The cruel torture of unit 731 and the many medical "experiments" they performed on unwilling. Prisoners of war did not in themselves produce any breakthroughs in medicine. After the war. Doctors combing through their records were able to salvage some of the information in practical ways when combined with other information. To attribute these medical breakthroughs to Unit 731 is to rob credit from the hundreds of dedicated doctors and researchers who ACTUALLY developed the treatments.
As someone who has been to the Unit 731 museum in Harbin, it’s staggering just how evil the group was. They were testing balloon bombs to bring every possible pathogen to the US mainland (via fleas and rats) with the sole intention of exterminating the civilian population. No plans to occupy the territory. But they figured if the could fill the US with cholera, typhus, anthrax, bubonic plague etc etc, and kill 100 million civilians, the US would no longer be a functioning combatant and they could resume their focus on China and Russia.
The Chinese prisoners were “logs” to be cut up. But they fully intended to kill 100 million civilians as nothing more than a distraction.
And many of the doctors involved in Unit 731 were still administrators of major hospitals in Japan in the early 2000s.
"We had the theory that if you stab a little girl she dies, we experimented this on 100 girls, they were stabbed at least 20 times in different parts of their bodies with different objects, and then another group of 100 just to be sure, there was a control group that wasn't stabbed tho, instead they were raped"
I'm pretty sure very little if not nothing was taking from the data because they didn't want to ethically condone using it. The data and "experiments" were also incredibly sloppy that no one could realistically use it even if they wanted to. They were experiments in name only and was just torture.
This. Everyone subscribes to the idea that these experiments were scientifically rigorous and every scientist that has read the data has concluded it did not contribute to any actual medical breakthrough. The US military thought there was some value in biological warfare research but medically? Nah.
Except that part is also proven false. All the medical breakthroughs that happened exclusively after 731 was through sources without clearence to the materials. The scientists in the US put on going through the work were exclusively assigned to bio/chemical weapons.
There isn't a single medical breakthrough that can in anyway credit 731 even as inspiration or proof of concept. 731 was generally not tasked with medical research in aiding soldiers, but weapons. 731 DID come to the conclusion warm water should be used, but that was a standard untill napoleon. And even then it was only modern medical practice to use snow and ice for a slow thaw, civilians (including in japan) were still somewhat commonly using warm water and heat sources.
The point is that the data itself was bad and barely useful compared to other records. It was used, but it was never considered essential and giving any credit to these torture by calling them experiments and valuing their result is wrong. Also it was not really used for medical research but mostly to evaluate weapon's effect or soldier's endurance to cold, because that's what the data records were made for.
Unit 731 was beyond awful, but “made the Nazis look tame” is patently untrue. The Nazi medical experiments under mengele and clauberg were nothing short of abject horror. Pregnant women were vivisected without anesthesia to see how reproductive organs changed during pregnancy. After birth they would bind women’s breasts to calculate how long it took for the infant to starve to death. And that’s not to mention the Twin experiments…Also the Nazis performed hypothermia experiments too on a broader scale and from different sources ie being thrown into frozen ponds vs exposure (the idea being to test against what German pilots who get shot down but survive might experience). The Japanese experimented mostly with biological weapons and tracking the spread of disease and rates of death therein. They did a lot of bubonic plague and poisoning food aid that they distributed to rural Chinese villages, amongst their other atrocities too. The difference between Unit 731 and the Nazis is not the extreme or atrocious conditions they subjected their victims too, but the extent to which they were held accountable. The Nazi operation was much bigger than Unit 731 and more records survived the war plus the Nazis were under much more scrutiny on the world stage than the Japanese which were really only fighting against the US. This allowed the US a lot more leeway in hiding the Japanese war criminals in the US under different names on the condition they used their knowledge to contribute to the US war machine and bio/chemical research. Ishii himself (boss of 731) was granted immunity of his war crimes and brought to the US.
Yeah, when someone says that the war crimes of Imperial Japan are worse than the Nazis, that means they don't understand how bad the Nazis were. Don't get me wrong, if not for the Nazis, Imperial Japan would have their spot in the public consciousness. It was beyond almost any other state in history in the atrocities it committed. It just happened to have one of the few worse as an ally and contemporary.
Vivisection without anesthesia was a big part of Unit 731's experiments.
"Limbs removed were sometimes reattached to the opposite side of the victims' bodies. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and their esophagus reattached to the intestines." - Unit 731
Both the Nazis and the Japanese were doing unimaginably horrific things to human beings.
The difference between Unit 731 and the Nazis is not the extreme or atrocious conditions they subjected their victims too, but the extent to which they were held accountable.
Saved many lives ? Man if it did I would like sources because the methodology seemed bunk af, most of what they found out was already pretty well documented through much more ethical means.
To be fair, that's still most of the treatment for extreme frost bite. Even now the treatment for Stage 3 frostbite is to warm it up, give anti-coagulents medicine to increase blood flow and give pain killers, wait for a week then cut off dead tissue.
The biggest difference from pre-WW2 is that we went from a slow warm up to a rapid warm (thanks to studies by the Soviets, not Unit 731), we started using anti-coagulants (also not Unit 731), and we now wait longer before cutting off necrosis/amputating (only kinda tangentially related to Unit 731 if you really squint because the kind record keeping needed to show that was not employed by Unit)
Sure, plenty of documentation about the condition itself, but not on treating it, not until then. You should do a deep dive into wartime inventions, if you can stomach it.
Edit: Im super autistic, so if this came across rude, that was not my intention. I genuinely find these kinds of morbidly interesting stories fascinating, as long as I have a degree of separation.
No need to apologize your comment is really cordial, it's pretty late here but I found a paper that seems to be a good summary of what came out of it "A Scientific Method to the Madness of Unit 731’s Human Experimentation and Biological Warfare Program" by Johnson et al that I'll look up on scihub tomorrow !
Usually I would do a character... But not for this one...
During WW2, Pearl Harbor isn't even the tip of the iceberg of the horrible things Japan did. They were raiding, raping, and experimenting on South East Asians, Chinese, and Koreans. One of these was Unit 731, and they forced people to get frostbite and attempted many "cures".
Idk I feel like using Pearl Harbor as the "false pinnacle" of japan's crimes is very american centric. There were MUCH worse things done by japan that could have been used in this comparison imo.
Like yea I was confused. In the us is considered pearl harbor an horrible war crime?
Like yea I get it attacking without a warning is rude... But it's a military attack on a military target. Something quite expected in a war or the beginning of one... What's the unbearable war crime here? Having dared to attack the mighty us?
… is it bad I feel less bad about Hiroshima and Nagasaki now?
I’m gonna clarify for people because It really feels like people are misinterpreting what I’m saying. I don’t feel less bad about the civilians dying not at all. It’s terrible that’s civilians died. I feel less bad that it happened at all. If it was any other city that was purely civilian, I would not be saying this to begin with. However, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were evidently major players in the Japanese military. If the whole thing could’ve been avoided without the bombs needing to be dropped at all, I would’ve much preferred that, but I don’t really think the Japanese back then were the giving up type.
I mean we are talking about a Unit that created a literal plague bomb and dropped it on a Chinese City to see what would happen... Your your feelings are understandable...and let's not even begin to unravel the atrocities committed during what became known as: the Rape of Nanjing.
Funnily enough now, most Japanese people are chill in comparison to their WW2 counterparts.
Nah, that's an ice cold take. Germans were forced to watch their atrocities after the war ended and vowed never again. Even now their kids grow up watching what Adolf did, and they keep in it that way. The Japanese went denial for almost half a century, but kept trying to better themselves.
More of a semantic question than anything, how do you better yourself while being in denial? Seems counterproductive and would lead to future issues, or is that your point?
You can regret an action and still deeply desire no one find out about it. This you commit to never doing it again but you also deny it ever having happened. I might argue this is one of the more common ways people grow - avoid further mistakes but don’t admit to them.
Germans largely just turned their heads until the next generation forced stuff to happen. Many were ignoring the reality until their kids or people grew up and they dealt with it
The uncomfortable truth is that nobody tricked the German people into becoming Nazis. Hitler wasn't magic. He literally just stood in front of crowds and told them what they wanted to hear. You can see the same shit in the US today. Anyone that cares already knows what ICE is doing in their concentration camps. And when it's all over no one is actually going to be surprised to find out it's bad. The people who don't care now, won't care later. They're just going to be the same assholes. That's why education is so important.
At the Peace Park Museum in Hiroshima, they actually reference the Unit 731 atrocities. And what they expected to happen in retaliation for that.
There's a separate part of the museum that deals with first hand accounts of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, mostly in the form of diaries kept by civilians and the like. One in particular was taken from the diary of a nurse that worked at the military hospital in the city. She recounts how she was part of the staff that was treating the badly burned survivors in the weeks following the bombing when some Japanese soldiers showed up.
Specifically, they warned the female staff, like the nurses, that the Americans were going to arrive in the next couple of days and that they should evacuate to the hills above the city to hide. The reason was, as I remember it, "because we did terrible things in Manchuria."
The Japanese military was expecting the American military to roll in and take revenge, probably by raping the women and slaughtering the civilians. All because of what Unit 731 (and others) had done in the war. The fact that the Americans didn't do that was extremely surprising to them.
And this is a recurring theme at their various peace parks. The civilians had been told that they would be killed on sight by the American GI's. Instead, the soldiers gave them chocolate bars.
That… is GENUINELY fascinating. I really wish they would teach this kind of stuff in history class. Though I suppose I get why they don’t, kinda? I think it’s because they don’t want the children to think nuclear warfare is a good idea. But I feel like if they told this story and how they were expecting the Americans to violently retaliate because of their crimes then that kind of problem wouldn’t occur
The craziest example of this I know was at Okinawa. The Japanese military told the islanders that when the Americans took the island, they would rape, torture, and kill everyone. This news caused hundreds of Okinawan women to commit suicide by jumping from the island's cliffs, often along with their kids (or having mercy-killed their kids beforehand). Just unbelievably fucked up. The American troops were unsurprisingly appalled when they got there and found out.
two war crimes don't cancel each other out. nuking 2 civilian populations isn't less bad because of Nanking. the empire and its military did horrible things, that doesn't justify incinerating children imo. might just be a commie cuck though
The argument that's genuinely made about the nuking of two cities is how many lives did it save in the long run.
The war would have continued for YEARS against a population arming their women and children with spears. A population that had already notoriously blow them, and us soldiers up with grenades when confronted with capture. And in those instances I'm also talking women and children.
The fire bombing of Tokyo took more lives than the bomb on Hiroshima. Would actions like these have continued to end the war?
Bottom line is, war is fucking terrible but if you're in a terrible war and have the opportunity to end it promptly, do you take the opportunity despite the cost?
Who am I to say, I'm just glad I never have to make those decisions.
Not to mention that many times this topic gets limited to the casualties on the American and Japanese fronts. People easily forget the Japanese empire was killing tens of thousands of civilians in continental Asia *every single week*. Stopping the Empire meant a stop to those massacres
So basically what they'd do is take people outside in the dead of winter, get them soaking wet, and wait for various stages of exposure set in so they could treat them with everything from doing nothing to dropping them directly into boiling water. Previously the most widely accepted treatment was a hot bath. Turns out that slowly warming a person up resulted in far less tissue damage and reduced the need for amputations. That's still the standard treatment we use today almost a century later.
They also did similar experiments on how to treat decompression and chemical burns, along with various diseases and biological weapon exposure by intentionally exposing people to what were, at the time, injuries considered incompatible with life. They kept meticulous notes and advanced medical science leaps and bounds by developing novel therapies that sometimes actually helped significantly.
Most of what they did was just glorified execution by torture though.
Woah finally, the best comment out of all the 3 other top comments that finally gives me something new and different and informative rather than hate on the past!
Through pure torturous experiments, they did learn that warming extremities too quickly actually caused more tissue damage than slower warming. You can't save the tissue once it's dead, but you can mitigate the extent of damage. But in the case of until 731, if someone came through an experiment without much damage, they would be subjected to another one over and over again until they were "of no further use."
So yeah, during WWII Japan had this thing called "Unit 731", located in China. There, they conducted all kinds of "experiments", which was basically pure sadistic torture under a "scientific" premise. One of which, but not limited to, was watering people under below freezing temperatures to see how their bodies dealt with frostbite. Whether they actually got something from it or not, is debatable. But yeah, that happened and the meme jokes about the results of such "experiments". Peter's frozen finger, out!
A lot of what they did was pseudoscientific atrocities, but they actually did come up with a lot of information on the conditions a human being could survive and treatments to improve odds of survival and recovery. The three I'm most familiar with are on treating frostbite, decompression sickness, and chemical burns along with the importance of proper analgesia during recovery. Before their alarmingly cruel experiments the only real treatment for cold exposure, for example, was prophylactic amputation to prevent infection and gangrene from setting in. They discovered that using slower warming techniques significantly improved outcomes and often prevented the need for amputation.
It's supremely fucked up how they got the knowledge. Visiting Nazis even balked at their experiments and wrote back home to protest the cruelty of their methods. But it's definitely been extremely useful to medical science as a whole.
A lot of the information we have on hypothermia is cuz of these types of studies. The human body freezes 32x faster when submerged in frozen water than freezing air. That's fucking disgusting that we know these numbers.
Nonplussed Cleveland here. Oh boy. This is actually kind of a dark one.
So, you know how the Germans conducted some pretty fucked up human experiments at some of their concentration camps? Well, during WW2 the Japanese did similar things in a place called Unit 731.
On their prisoners, they performed things like: vivsections (live dissections), weapons testing, and the subject of this "joke" freezing and thawing experiments.
Their research contributed to our understanding of frostbite and hypothermia, although we probably could've made similar discoveries in time without causing incredible suffering.
Dont try to heat the affected tissue too fast you want water just above human body temp to slowly bring it to the proper temp otherwise you damage the tissue even more than it already is. Was this discovered in other places and put into practice before the horrors of unit 731? Yes it was but they did some very thorough note taking while they mutilated people so credit to them I guess.
Something that isn’t really talked about in history is just how genuinely evil the stuff Japan did was.
They did experiments on prisoners that made the Germans look tame in comparison. I am not speaking hyperbolically either. Look up “Unit 731”. I won’t go into detail here. Fair warning, it’s horrifying. I say that as someone who is very desensitized to a lot of the darker aspects of history.
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u/qualityvote2 18h ago edited 13h ago
u/reddugitive, your post does belong here!